Dr. Tim Ball: Seven Ways To Spot Climate Change Propaganda

Written by Dr Tim Ball (Climatologist) on February 19, 2020. Posted in Current News

his is an update of an earlier effort to counter the propaganda war that is going on to promote the falsehoods about the environment and climate. An update is required because skills improved with practice and as they lose the war desperation demands greater deceptions. Technocrats are at the center of this development.

They achieve control in various ways, so it is invaluable to read the signs and avoid the deception.  The most reliable tool is simple skepticism. Ironically, fake news is now so pervasive that it is much easier to assume everything is fake. The global warming deception is the oldest deeply entrenched fake news story because it is the product of government and deep state bureaucrats. Maurice Strong established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). This is a UN agency run by bureaucrats in Geneva but made up of bureaucrats from the national weather offices of every UN member nation. They work every day using your tax dollars to deceive you.

Here’s what will cause alarm bells to ring on a properly tuned global warming detector:

One. Everything that is going on with weather and climate is normal and not outside historic records as they constantly claim. Therefore, every claim or story about weather or climate is a deception. One way they do this is what climatologists call cherry-picking. You can pick any part of a record to show the trend to support your story. The WMO claims a 30-year long record is statistically significant. They call it the 30-year Normal when it is anything but normal. It was adopted because statisticians claim a sample size (n) of 30 is representative of any size population (N). The problem is that climate cycles are anywhere from 2 years to 100,000 years.

For example, a 2017 BBC headline said “Hottest June day since summer of 1976 in heatwave.” That is 41 years, which is statistically significant but not climatologically significant. A Youtube story reports “Sydney has wettest November day since 1984.” CBS Pittsburgh reported “NWS: 2018 is the 2^nd Wettest Year on Record in Pittsburgh.” The record began in 1871 or 147 years ago, but even that is not climatologically significant. The ones I like are this one from North Carolina, that says, “A Look Back at the Coldest day Ever in North Carolina.” “Ever” even in North Carolina is approximately 4.5 billion years.

Other stories focus on a pattern or change in a pattern again with the idea that it is new or abnormal. Headlines like this one from 2012, “Why have there been more tornadoes than usual this year?” Often, they are suggestive such as this 2017 New York Times story. “The 2017 Hurricane Season Really Is More Intense Than Normal.” When you read the story, you find, as is usually the case, that the caveats at the end indicate it is not unusual at all. This is irrelevant to the authors who know the only thing the reader will remember is the headline. Notice that headlines are always in the Active Voice unlike the Conditional Voice words like “could,” “maybe,” or “possibly” in the body of the story.

Two. In 2004 the perpetrators and perpetuators of the Global Warming deception at the University of East Anglia realized the CO2 level continued to rise, but temperatures stopped increasing. It was what Thomas Huxley described as the great tragedy of science the slaying of a lovely hypothesis by an ugly fact. The climate deceivers didn’t skip a beat, they changed the issue from global warming to climate change. This gave them a greater range and made the problem more threatening. Now you see headlines identifying that it was, variably the warmest, coldest, wettest, driest, calmest, and windiest, in the official record, which for most of the world is less than 50 years. In reality, the issue is still only about warming because that is the only part of the weather affected by CO2.

Three. Exploitation of natural fear is central to any attempt to control people. It is no coincidence that the original fear story was Chicken Little and the sky is falling. As H. L. Mencken said, 

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Science writer Michael Crichton wrote about the entire sequence as it relates to the climate in his book State of Fear. It is fiction. Here is the comment in Wikipedia

State of Fear is a 2004 techno-thriller novel by Michael Crichton, in which eco-terrorists plot mass murder to publicize the danger of global warming.

However, the science is accurate because Crichton was a roommate at Harvard with Richard Lindzen, a top climate scientist. Crichton was a medical doctor with post-graduate degrees from Oxford.

Four. Mistrust a story the minute it attempts to play on your guilt or emotions. Invariably, it makes you guilty because the children are going to die, some element of the planetary system is collapsing, animals are going extinct, forests are in decline, and coral reefs are dying. Of course, they always distort the animal extinction issue. I would explain to audiences that many animals are thriving because of human activity, pigeons, snakes, coyotes, rats. I then pause and ask if I have mentioned any they like yet? The bias is to furry, round-eyed, creatures like polar bears and koala bears. More new species are found every day than go extinct in 50 years.

Five. Originators of environmental and climate change propaganda stories know the public is ill-informed about science. They take advantage of this by using terms that people don’t understand or mislabeling things to make them more menacing.  For example, they interchangeably and incorrectly call CO2, which is a gas, Carbon, which is a solid. They incorrectly label carbon dioxide, a pollutant. They make meaningless assertions like “Climate change is real,” or “The science is settled.” One way to put the last comment in perspective is to challenge. Say, “fine, then we should cancel all funding for climate research.”

Six. A change of keywords is a sure sign that at least one aspect of their deception was exposed. The classic change discussed earlier was from global warming to climate change. Another change is underway because people are starting to say, hang on a minute, climate changes all the time. There are three contenders for replacement now, “climate chaos,” “climate catastrophe,” and “climate disruptions.” The term “Polar Vortex” was the invention of John Holdren when he was Obama‘s science advisor. It is not a scientific term, but its appearance implied that it was new and due to human activity. In fact, it was popularly referred to as an outbreak of cold air from Canada called an “Alberta Clipper.”

Seven. Another sign of propaganda is a constant raising of the threat. Here is a good example.

And humankind does not have long to act, according to a study in the journal Nature Geoscience. British and Australian scientists report that they calculated the pattern of temperature rises if immediate action is not taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The propaganda war was made necessary from the start because there was no scientific evidence for the claims of environmental collapse and human-caused global warming. Start with a lie, and you admit it when evidence exposes it, or continue the lie with ever increasing deceptions. As Sir Walter Scott said, “What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

Dr Tim Ball is co-founder and inaugural Chairman of Principia Scientific International

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