[First published on 24 August 2017].
The following headline at the Independent news website caught my eye:
“Britain’s global warming denial hotspots revealed.”
Right, so the demonisation of those who deny the official story has taken a step forward, I thought. It’s as if the media and the usually unnamed “experts” who seem to be referred to in most articles in the British media nowadays are telling our neighbours where we live, warning residents in areas where we are concentrated to watch out for us – as if we were a poison, as if were were antisocial criminal elements, akin to child abusers or terrorists.
Perhaps next the Daily Mail will run stories saying things like “I didn’t know I was living next to a global warming denier. He seemed like a normal bloke.”
Yet the official propaganda asserting that humans cause climate change is obviously rubbish and it is also put out for reasons that are similarly obviously rubbish, namely to push the line that “we’re all in the same boat, so you’ve got to tighten your belt, or else you’re antisocial”.
It is patently evidently not the case that the idea that the climate is changing (which is true) is identical to, equivalent to, similar to, or even the same type of idea as, the idea that human action caused the climate to change (which is false). Anyone who tries to make you swallow the second idea by offering you the first, for example by pretending that denial of the second equals denial of the first, is lying to you. And nowadays that’s most of the big businesses and governments in the world, loyally obeyed by their opinion-channelling scribes and hangers-on.
The article itself, written in the degenerate language that passes for “journalism” today, is here.
Ian Johnston, the “Environment Correspondent”, the cut-and-paste man who beavers away for Russian “oligarch” Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the Independent and Evening Standard and a friend of Tory liar Boris Johnson, has put his name to this ludicrous piece in which the following concepts are all conflated:
● global warming
● climate change
● the “science of climate change”
● the “widespread evidence of global warming”
● what “every major scientific organisation in the world” says
● “scientists’ evidence”
● the idea that “the temperature is rising and that greenhouse gas emissions are to blame”
Wa-a-ait there!! In the last line, aren’t those two ideas?
The article is puff for a poll conducted by a company called Censuswide for another company called GoCompare.com. The question they asked was this:
“Do you believe in Global Warming?”
Note that not only is the question couched in terms of a “belief in” something, but the concept in which one can apparently believe or not believe in is capitalised, as if it were a deity.
It’s a fact that the climate is changing. In Britain, some trees now blossom in February or sometimes January or even in some cases December that previously didn’t blossom before April. But why do you think most governments and paid-for “experts” are conflating the idea of the existence of climate change with the totally different idea that human activity has caused climate change, on which they build the crazy third idea that humans can stop climate change if only we do what governments and big business tell us?
That’s the question that people whose minds are alive will ask, however much they get sneered at by morons who believe whatever those who stand above them in the opinion chain tell them, especially if it’s smeared all over with modern propaganda-era holy words like “science”.
Here’s a fact that will get you a long way: there used to be ice fairs on the River Thames in London. The ice was often thick enough. Nowadays it never is. It became impossible to hold ice fairs because the temperature rose a lot. The climate changed. And don’t say that was because of human activity. It wasn’t. Thames ice fairs came to an end long before the industrial revolution.
The climate has always changed, and it always will. The idea that humans can stop it changing is anti-nature, anti-human, anti-historical, and reminiscent of the nutcase mobilisation that took place during the “Great Leap Forward” in China in 1958-62. The German Nazis may have introduced the term “Thousand Year Reich”, but even they didn’t declare that human beings could control the climate. The idea that the largest part of climate change is caused by humans is psychotic.
But consider the sheer weight of the totalitarian propaganda that encourages us to believe otherwise – and shiver. “Scientists” are so scared to break ranks. Doubtless by now most have internalised the craziness. But they are still scared, just as schoolteachers and tour guides in North Korea are scared when they praise the great leadership of Kim Jong-Il. No subeditor will get sacked for writing a headline like the one with which I began this post. Until, of course, it’s determined that his phrasing was insufficiently zealous. It is impossible to analyse the propaganda here without the notion of social psychopathology.