From THE DAILY SCEPTIC
by Chris Morrison
The British Government is one of the main financial backers of a new international campaign designed to suppress online climate science scepticism ahead of next year’s ‘make-or-break’ COP30 in Brazil. Run by the United Nations and UNESCO, the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change was signed off at the recent G20 Summit in Brazil. Part of its remit will fund non-profit outfits rooting out so-called disinformation and promoting ‘public awareness campaigns’. Commenting on the campaign, the UN’s global communications flack Melissa Fleming noted that a growing number of people are waking up to the harms caused by climate disinformation and “toxic information ecosystems in general”. She suggested that a global movement for “information integrity is gaining momentum”.
In fact this initiative is a desperate throw of the dice to further trash the scientific process and curb free speech and commentary. Fed by decades of failed doomsday climate predictions, fake, cherry-picked and massaged statistics, farcical weather ‘attribution’ claims and an increasingly obvious politicised ‘ban’ on sceptical discussion of the actual science, the ‘momentum’ is turning towards a demand for genuine debate. This terrifies global elites faced with a loss of credibility – as evidenced by popular votes in numerous recent elections – who thus launch yet more crackdowns in increasingly desperate attempts to cancel their critics.
This was always likely to happen as deindustrialisation and the need for radical life-changing (and life-threatening) economic and societal changes started to become obvious under the Net Zero fantasy. Removing hydrocarbons from a modern industrial economy is impossible. But taking a different view has offered countless opportunities for command-and-control nuts from the Left of the political spectrum. To fuel their dreams over the last 40 years, the traditional scientific process of debate and inquiry has been cast aside and replaced with a climate-modelled pseudoscience ‘consensus’ and global campaigns to induce mass psychosis over an invented climate emergency.
Fleming and her UN employers have always been aware of the need to control the global narrative. At a recent World Economic Forum ‘disinformation’ seminar, she noted that the UN had partnered with Google to ensure that only UN-approved climate search results appeared at the top. In chilling tones, she explained: “We are becoming more proactive, we own the science and the world should know it.”
Few details about the initiative are available but it is noted that it will strengthen existing campaigns on climate change “to mitigate and counter climate disinformation particularly in advance of COP30”. After the unmitigated disaster that was COP29 where, to comment realistically, nothing was agreed, there are concerns that next year’s meeting in Rio de Janeiro will make or break the crumbling international boondoggle. Matters will not be helped over the next four years by the contempt for the entire climate circus that is likely to be shown by the Trump administration in the United States. Perhaps, already, the U.S. is going missing when the climate plate is handed around. Funding this latest UN-inspired free speech assault, the country is notable for its absence, unlike the U.K. (of course), Chile, Denmark, France, Morocco and Sweden.
Needless to say, when science needs to be trashed and free speech quashed, the big money suspects are never far from the action. Fleming noted that a “wide network of civil society partners” was joining the work of the initiative.
One of these partners has been identified as the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE). Some might see the speech frequently expressed in robust terms on social media as a natural and welcome development of the free speech ideals of the European Enlightenment. IPIE seems to take a difference view. It notes the creation of a “global information environment crisis” and an existential threat to humanity. “The cost is billions of dollars, millions of lives and an erosion of trust in science, our institutions and each other,” observes this convocation of cheery souls. Amusingly, IPIE claims to provide “neutral assessments on the condition of the information environment”. One of the main funders of IPIE is the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the main vehicle for money distributed by Sir Christopher Hohn, an early paymaster of Extinction Rebellion. Other foundation cash comes from Oak, Ford and Heising-Simons.
Another partner signed up to the “landmark initiative” is the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). The goal, notes the WMO, is to protect the integrity of information in the public sphere, ensuring that decisions on climate action are based on “accurate, reliable and science-based data”. Of course it could be noted that a start on supplying accurate data might be made within constituent WMO operations such as the U.S. weather service NOAA and the U.K. Met Office. Both operations supply temperature readings corrupted by massive urban heat and invent local temperatures from non-existent stations. Despite nearly 80% of its stations being sited in WMO Class 4 and 5 locations with ‘uncertainties’ of 2°C and 5°C respectively, the Met Office publishes figures claiming accuracy down to one hundredth of a degree centigrade. The world has warmed a little over 200 years since the ending of the Little Ice Age, but an accurate rate cannot be taken from these obviously inaccurate figures.
Celeste Saulo, WMO Secretary-General, emphasised the importance of fighting “disinformation” in the battle against climate change. “In this age of disinformation, stating the facts is not only a moral imperative but a critical tool for survival,” she noted. A less charitable view of the WMO participation is that it is about trade protection for on-message scientists. To date, the growing scientific scandal around global temperature figures has been largely kept out of the mainstream media.
It is far too early to call the death of Net Zero. Powerful interests to keep the show on the road are embedded throughout controlling elites. Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen of Harvard and MIT has spent decades pondering how the fraud and corruption works. What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries, states Lindzen, is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. “It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison,” he added.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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