How the Climate Agenda is Being Pushed into Our TV Shows

 A new BBC drama with Net Zero-sceptics as the baddies, a TV game show with a heavy-handed "Environment Week" – the climate agenda is being pushed into our TV programmes to ‘educate’ us, warns Charlotte Gill.

This week, The Great British Sewing Bee managed to push the climate agenda into its otherwise harmless show in what was termed “Reduce, Re-use, Recycle Week”.

Sewers were given three tasks “focused on the environment and sustainability”: first to create underpants from old t-shirts; second to transform material intended for landfill into “a garment with drama at the back”; and third to make outfits with an environmental message.

The third challenge was by far the most ideologically heavy-handed. “Throughout history, fashion has been used as a tool for protest, a statement for resistance and a spark for social change,” began presenter Sophie Willan, introducing the task to contestants. “So the judges want you to create an outfit with an environmental message that’s close to your heart.”

When quizzed later about the impetus for the challenge, Sewing Bee judge Patrick Grant told Willan: “Fashion designers have always been people that are kind of very socially engaged, and a big part of that is them having strong views on all sorts of things, and they want to put those forward through the clothes that they make.”

Luckily the designers didn’t seem to mind having their “strong views” decided for them by the judges and programme creators. “It is incredibly important to be environmentally conscious. Because we’re killing the planet,” one sewer was filmed saying. Another making a “Save Our Seas” protest dress was asked by Grant: “Why is the plastic thing so important to you?” She replied: “It’s so detrimental to the animals and the beauty of the sea.”...<<<Read More>>>...

Climate Change Catastrophism is a Leftist Weapon

What we drive, how we heat our homes, what we eat, how much water we use: every modern activity increases industrial CO2 emissions in a manner not dissimilar to air conditioning. Do all such intimate, local decisions therefore necessitate governmental oversight and regulation? And if so, what freedoms can possibly remain?

The roots of such worrisome totalising can be traced in the more academic realm to the 1960s and 1970s, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich’s the Population Bomb and the Club of Rome’s the Limits to Growth. More distal influences, such as Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, also merit consideration, as we shall see.

There is another source, however, unmatched in its combination of scientific pretension, charged emotional tone, policy impact and mass appeal: former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which this year marks its 20th anniversary.

More than any other single work, this glossy, visually dramatic production translated the abstractions of climate modelling into a compelling, emotionally charged narrative – one that struck fear into the hearts of tens of millions. It did so by framing mankind’s industrial activity and consequent increase in CO2 production as the driver of a truly dangerous increase in global temperature. It did so by warning of severe and impending ecological devastation and economic disruption. It did so by arguing for the necessity of emergency response, while casting dissent as the most serious of modern sins....<<<Read More>>>...

The Climate Cult

 Many people with inadequate scientific knowledge are convinced that Planet Earth is in mortal danger from global warming due to humans. If Planet Earth were really in great danger from humans, any means to protect it would be justified. Some extremists propose reducing Earth’s eight billion population of people to no more than one billion. How this is to be done has always been a bit vague. Genghis Khan made a good start by slaughtering some 40 million people in the 13th century. In our day, Prince Philip, father of King Charles III of the United Kingdom, opined that: “If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”

The climate alarmism of our time is a malignant alliance of ignorant fanaticism, like that mentioned above, and opportunism: the lust for power, fame and wealth. Like all fanatical movements, climate alarmism is doing great collateral damage, most notably to the reputation of my own profession of science. Generous research grants from governments and private foundations have created a new discipline of ‘climate science’. Traditional, rigorous disciplines like atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, meteorology or palaeontology were quick to cash in by renaming themselves with some variant of ‘Centre for Saving the Planet’. They were generously rewarded with research grants, new laboratories, professorships, elections to learned societies, prizes and other tokens of gratitude....<<<Read More>>>...

The Jevons Paradox Explains Why Net Zero is an Exercise in Futility

 Peter Cook and Rowan Atkinson’s ‘End of the World’ sketch from The Secret Policemen’s Ball is a timeless piece of comedy because, like with all great comedy, we instantly recognise the target of the joke. Every generation throws up its own cultists, convinced that they alone can anticipate and possibly avert the ‘end times’.

If the bloke who stood, with sandwich boards proclaiming “the end of the world is nigh” in my childhood town had had access to social media, who knows, he may have become the Greta Thunberg of his day, with millions hanging on his every word.

Greta always puts me in mind of two characters: one fictional, Violet Elizabeth Bott of Just William fame, the spoilt brat from next-door who would yell, “I’ll thcream and thcream till I’m thick!” (translation: I’ll scream and scream until I’m sick); and, Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, who almost brought down Henry VIII, so popular were her visions and prophecies.

While Greta chucked in school when she was about 12, Barton never went. Despite this, and again, like Greta, Barton met repeatedly with Henry’s senior ministers, though her meetings ended rather less well for her than did Greta’s. It was Thomas Cromwell who, worried that the Barton cult was getting out of hand, had her executed on trumped up charges and a number of her followers hung, drawn and quartered.

Perhaps humans are pre-programmed to adopt apocalyptic cults. After all, the Abrahamic religions all anticipate the end of the world as we know it. Christian breakaway sects, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christadelphians, appear to expect Judgement Day any time soon, but perhaps no sooner than those ‘green’ zealots who set up a trestle table each Saturday in our town square, cover it with baize and pamphlets and, literally, try and frighten the children. Ironically, their pitch is immediately opposite the Jehovah’s Kingdom Hall! Take your pick, they’re all selling the same thing....<<<Read More>>>...

Cap-and-invest: A US programme to ration energy and then tax the rations

 Several US states have implemented or are developing Cap-and-Invest programmes, including California, Washington State and New York State.

Climate change catastrophists will say that these programmes are to save the planet from global warming. But as with all things related to the climate change agenda, it has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with money and control.

Carbon taxes and cap-and-invest systems have much in common. Both are market-based policies to make “carbon emitters” pay for their “emissions.”

Using climate change jargon: Cap-and-Invest is a tool designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by setting a declining cap on total emissions from covered sources, such as large industrial facilities, fuel distributors and utilities. Each covered entity must hold an allowance for every tonne of emissions it produces, with the total number of allowances equal to the annual emissions cap, which decreases over time to achieve long-term climate goals. This system creates a financial incentive for businesses to reduce emissions, as they can either cut their own pollution or purchase allowances from others, with the price of allowances determined by supply and demand....<<<Read More>>>...

IPCC Likely to Start Blaming Humans For Weather as Friederike Otto Takes Key Role

 Last December the Daily Sceptic published an article reporting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) could be preparing to start blaming humans for individual bad weather events. Straws-in-the-wind stuff, based on an IPCC press release claiming a century of burning hydrocarbons had resulted in “more frequent and intense extreme weather events”.

To date, the IPCC has failed to detect that humans using hydrocarbons have led to worse bad weather on the simple scientific ground that it is impossible, with current data sources, to remove the overwhelming role of natural variation. Our story was prescient. It’s all change at the IPCC, with the appointment of Attribution Queen Friederike Otto and a troop of fellow attributionists to take charge of writing a new chapter on extreme weather for its forthcoming seventh climate science assessment report. 

With the foxes now in charge of the chicken coop, political order can be restored, with the IPCC science more closely aligned with current Net Zero political requirements. Dr Otto, who runs the Green Blob-funded World Weather Attribution (WWA) operation out of Imperial College, has been appointed the co-leader of the extreme weather chapter. “It will be a lot of work, but it also gives a lot of opportunity to shape the structure and focus of the chapter”, she notes. WWA paymasters who include the Grantham, European Climate and Bezos Earth foundations will no doubt be delighted with this news....<<<Read More>>>...