November 18, 2009
Today I’m off on the Eurostar to Brussels (”a carbon neutral journey” it boasts on my ticket – which rather makes me wish I were flying instead) to speak at the European Parliament on Climate Change.
No, don’t worry. The Goreistas haven’t got to me. It’s a sceptics’ conference – Have Humans Changed Climate? – being staged tomorrow by Tory MEP Roger Helmer. Many of my science and eco-heroes will be there, including Patrick Moore (the co-founder of Greenpeace who subsequently bailed when the charity turned far too red), Prof Fred Singer (who’ll be talking on Can We Trust The IPCC?) and Professor Ross McKitrick (who famously helped expose the notorious Hockey Stick curve).
I’ll be there to provide comedy value and also to talk about the irresponsibility of the mainstream media in spreading climate-change fear and largely suppressing any counter-argument in the great AGW debate.
There’s a good example of this from the latest Newsweek, which recently ran a cover story on Al Gore billing him as The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man. The majority of letters it received in response – 74 per cent – were critical, says Tim Graham at Newsbusters. But Newsweek didn’t run one of them; only letters in support of Gore.
The worst was from war veteran Lee Bidgood Jr of Gainesville, Florida:
Propaganda by global-warming skeptics and deniers reminds me of 1944, when as an Army officer I saw living skeletons in striped pajamas. Horror stories about Nazi concentration camps suddenly rang true. I wondered how intelligent people could commit such atrocities. History records the effectiveness of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda. I hope Al Gore and others can prevail over today’s anti–science propaganda.
Gosh I do hope they got their fact checkers onto that one. Otherwise, I’d suspect that this was the concoction of some young eco-freak who wasn’t even born in ‘44 using the Holocaust and the respect we grant war veterans to make a cheap political point.
Newsweek’s censorship doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Its what the MSM generally does with anti-AGW stories – despite the fact that the majority of the public is now sceptical. Problem is, there are lot of people out there – media owners, environmental correspondents, carbon traders, big businessmen – who for a range of reasons from the emotional to the financial simply cannot afford to abandon their blind faith in ManBearPig no matter how compelling the evidence to the contrary.
We climate change sceptics would have lost the battle long ago had it not been for the happy advent of the internet. It’s in the Blogosphere (and a few odd MSM strongholds such as The Wall Street Journal and Christopher Booker’s Sunday Telegraph column) where all the counterarguments are being disseminated.
And despite what Professor Ian Plimer said in his Spectator lecture last week, this is a war we’re fighting. Plimer was talking about how the language of war had no place in science because it is simply a process of discovery, with one hypothesis being replaced by another. I’d agree with this if I thought science was the only factor in the global warming debate, but sadly it ain’t. It’s at least as much about politics, money, economics, horse-trading, personalities and perhaps above all about propaganda, ranging from responsible reporting to cheap shots about the enormous, badger-esque vastness of The Hon. Sir Jonathan Porritt’s rear end. That’s where scumbags like me come in. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it. For the children, you understand.
Related posts:
- Meet the man who has exposed the great climate change con trick
- On Plimer, climate change and the ineffable barkingness of George Moonbat
- Climategate: five Aussie MPs lead the way by resigning in disgust over carbon tax
- Freeman Dyson v the ‘Independent’
