There are just a handful of books which I can say truly revolutionised my thinking, like an electric bolt of enlightenment. One of those is Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Sure, the book has its minor inaccuracies, maybe (the attacks on it are almost entirely either pure whinging, or extremely minor pettifogging on one or two points), but its central thesis is strong — and shocking to the Establisment narrative.
That thesis is simple and easily demonstrated: contrary to the Establishment narrative (Lomborg calls it “the Litany”), the state of the environment is not catastrophic collapse. The reality is that, while certainly not perfect, the state of the global environment is really pretty good — and getting better, not worse.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t areas of concern. Consider deforestation. Deforestation in Borneo and other Indonesian islands is a pressing issue. But, overall, global forest cover has increased over the last half-century.
Why don’t we hear any of this from the legacy media?
Whether on climate change, energy generation, violence in Indigenous communities or even the role of gender in sport, journalists at some news organisations are so tied to their activist sources they are prepared to betray professional standards and their audience by ignoring inconvenient truths.
It’s called “lying by omission”.
For example, in all the ABC’s extensive report on Sri Lanka’s collapse, the root cause — the forced turn to “organic” agriculture — is almost never mentioned. Except, of course, in the very last paragraphs, which they know that almost no-one will read. Or just 20 seconds in the last minute of a 6:20 story.
Compare that with the hysterical coverage across most media about a single 40-degree day in London last week and the deliberate linking by many journalists of a European heatwave in midsummer to climate change. Reporters should by now know the UN has specifically said for years that no individual weather event can be directly linked to man-made warming.
The simple fact is that the legacy media are like pushers, who’ve hooked their readers on a steady diet of fear porn. All they’re doing now is feeding the addiction and counting the cash.
Consider the “heat apocalypse” narrative. The legacy media clutch their pearls and shriek that there were 13 deaths in England’s brief heatwave (all from drowning). What the media don’t say is that the yearly average of 40 excess deaths in Britain linked to heat are grossly outweighed by the 325 linked to cold.
The other simple fact is that the legacy media are pandering to a narrower and narrower segment of the populace: the left-voting bourgeoisie who still bother with the likes of the New York Times, the Guardian, or the BBC. For most people, climate change is an issue that barely makes it into their top ten issues of concern.
Even the activist New York Times was forced to concede concern about climate is trumped by voter fears about prices, energy reliability and support of US allies. It reported on July 17: “News that even a stripped-down compromise to address a warming planet appeared to be dead was greeted in Washington by brutal condemnations from environmentalists accusing Senator Joe Manchin III of dooming human life on Earth. But an electorate already struggling with inflation, exhausted by Covid and adjusting to tectonic changes like the end of constitutionally protected abortions may give … a resigned shrug. And that may be why climate change remains an issue with little political power.”
Even in Australia, the rise of the Greens and the Teal “independents” is very much an inner-city, upper-middle-class phenomenon. The voter base of both is concentrated almost entirely in the richest suburbs of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Climate change is the ultimate First World Problem. Climate catastrophism is also almost entirely a lie, perpetrated by cherry-picking the heavily politicised IPCC Summary for Policymakers.
Add to that the deliberate pumping up in much of the media of the discredited RCP 8.5 climate scenario used to claim, falsely, that the world faces a climate catastrophe in 2030. That scenario deliberately assumes several worst-case courses, to come up with a result the British royal family and Greta Thunberg seem to like quoting regularly.
On the few occasions I’ve been suckered into debating climate cultists, one of the first things I ask them is: how much have temperatures risen, in the last century. They are never able to answer.
On actual temperature rises, most media consumers seem unaware discussion about limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees already incorporates 1.1 degrees of warming to date. That is, we are spending trillions of dollars to prevent a further warming of 0.4 degrees. Remember the baseline date for this scenario is 1880, the end of a little ice age that was much colder than, say, the Medieval Warming. Remember too that scientists can point to previous eras with high CO2 concentrations: 400 parts per million in the Pliocene Epoch 2.6 million years ago, compared with 416 ppm today, as high as 3000 ppm 150 million years ago, and 6000 ppm 400 million years ago.
The Australian
It’s the ultimate in what Noam Chomsky dubbed “manufacturing consent”. It’s been so successful that even Chomsky himself has fallen for it.
Now, that’s how to tell a lie and get away with it.
