Mainstream media must be held accountable for promoting climate alarmism
As cynical media members wring their hands and clutch their pearls over the real-world harms that can come from reckless rhetoric, they themselves should be held accountable for the damaging hyperbole they traffic.
Last week, the Irish state-funded media outlet RTE interviewed an unhinged climate alarmist who made the ludicrous assertion that eating animal products is simply a luxury we can’t afford because our climate is apparently at the breaking point.
It’s a ridiculous, harmful type of misinformation the climate-obsessed mainstream media loves to promote.
George Monbiot (pictured), a British writer and environmental activist, told the RTE interviewer last week that agriculture ‘destroys habitats’, and that is one of the leading causes of ‘climate breakdown’, polluting the air and water among other ‘terrible’ (unspecified) things.
But ‘the biggest issue of all’ according to Monbiot, is that it uses up land that might otherwise be left for ‘wild ecosystems’.
Agriculture, Monbiot says, must be strictly curtailed if we are to save the planet from imminent destruction.
In order to prevent this sky-is-falling catastrophe that he so glibly predicts, Monbiot says we must “act as drastically within that sector as in any other sector to prevent the collapse of our life-support systems.”
What drastic action should we take, one might ask? Don’t worry, he has the answer: Shut down all livestock farming. All of it. And while you’re at it, shut down all the other farms too.
“We need to switch toward other sources of food,” Monbiot says, advocating a hard shift from eating fortifying steaks and delicious cheeseburgers to consuming “plant-based diets” and synthetic foods generated in labs.
I bet he doesn’t indulge in those culinary delights.
Without switching to this full dependence on plant-based and artificial food sources, along with annihilating traditional farming, and (presumably) allowing the government seizure of farmland (to return it, apparently, to the local wildlife), he claims the planet will simply become “uninhabitable.”
“Eating meat and milk and eggs is an indulgence we cannot afford,” Monbiot declares. He has previously said “Beef is like a loaded gun, pointed at the living world.”
Of course, the nutty activist isn’t alone in his apocalyptic predictions and bizarre, extreme, anti-human demands.
Monbiot joins Bill Gates, the World Health Organization, Pope Francis, and other climate doomsdayers who likewise promote radical agenda items like the obliteration of private property, a disgusting dietary shift to insects and lab-grown meat, and a forced end to fossil fuel use, to save the allegedly dying planet.
Climate ‘misinformation’
The claims of imminent planetary demise from which these admonitions spring is a particularly virulent form of “misinformation” to which the media is purposefully blind.
It could be argued the climate is “changing” — but the climate is not and has never been static.
But attempts to pin down the climate’s latest moves, prevent its alterations, or attribute wildfires and floods to hyped up first-world climate sins, takes on a decidedly superstitious, rather than coldly scientific, flavor.
Similar predictions of imminent destruction have been made (and have failed to materialize) for decades.
In the 1970s, “experts” said we would be frozen in a new ice age by now.
In the late 2000s, failed presidential candidate Al Gore picked up the mantle as the narrative shifted from global cooling to global warming, misstating data by suggesting the Arctic would be ice-less by 2013 (spoiler alert, it’s not).
Today, we have Greta Thunberg and her ilk to thank for a moral panic over generalized “climate change,” which is rapidly being rebranded as the “climate crisis.”
The nonprofit libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute has put together an amusing compilation of many failed environmental doomsday predictions beginning in the 1960s.
You’d think the media would take notice.
And yet, while media pundits, politicians of a certain political leaning, and activists endlessly rattle on about the dangers of “harmful misinformation,” media outlets happily give a platform to the cacophony of voices that saturate the internet and airwaves with endless predictions of a future rife with famine and general misfortune unless we relinquish our vehicles, our homes, our meals, and any other freedoms we might still have lying around.
If the media wants to deliver a hefty blow to weaponized “misinformation,” “fake news,” and “harmful” rhetoric, its pressing priority should be to give climate fanatics the boot.
Instead, adherents of the climate cult are freely permitted to indulge in hyperbolic propaganda that has contributed to fear and anxiety among teens, precipitated a major drop-off in birth-rates in the developed world, and led to liberty-crushing political policies that are depriving people of their livelihoods in real time.
Young people are opting in large numbers not to place any hope in the future because they beileve the planet is in grave danger from human-caused “climate change”.
The media has been responsible for the shameless promotion of climate looneys whose obsession with ecological utopia, clear anti-human bias, and desire to reshape the world in their own image is driving a collective hysteria on par with the Salem witch trials and that one time we shut down the world over a cold virus.
As cynical media members wring their hands and clutch their pearls over the real-world harms that can come from reckless rhetoric, they themselves should be held accountable for the damaging fearmongering hyperbole they produce, encourage and promote.
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richard
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Tornadoes-
“With increased National Doppler radar coverage, increasing population, and greater attention to tornado reporting, there has been an increase in the number of tornado reports over the past several decades. This can create a misleading appearance of an increasing trend in tornado frequency. To better understand the variability and trend in tornado frequency in the United States, the total number of EF-1 and stronger, as well as strong to violent tornadoes (EF-3 to EF-5 category on the Enhanced Fujita scale) can be analyzed. These tornadoes would have likely been reported even during the decades before Doppler radar use became widespread and practices resulted in increasing tornado reports. The bar charts below indicate there has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years”
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-information/extreme-events/us-tornado-climatology/trends
Hurricanes-
“NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dyamics Laboratory (GFDL): “Leaders in Climate Model Development and Research.”
For about a decade (or even longer), GFDL has annually updated their statement on hurricanes and climate change. This excerpt from their 15 August 2019 update lists some of their negative findings about current hurricane activity.
“We find that, after adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there remains just a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is not significantly distinguishable from zero. In addition, Landsea et al. (2010) note that the rising trend in Atlantic tropical storm counts is almost entirely due to increases in short-duration (<2 day) storms alone. Such short does not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced long-term increase.“-lived storms were particularly likely to have been overlooked in the earlier parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic. …
“The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s. …
“While major hurricanes show more evidence of a rising trend from the late 1800s, the major hurricane data are considered even less reliable than the other two records in the early parts of the record. …
“In short, the historical Atlantic hurricane frequency record does not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced long-term increase.“
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John Doran
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The Moonbat farts from his face yet again.
& does more damage than all the cowfarts in the country.
Sometimes you just have to laugh, really, at this ridiculous little man & his unhinged pronouncements & at the corrupted institutions that provide him a platform.
& yes, BBC & The Guardian, this means you.
Greetings to all the cnuts at 77 Brigade.
JD.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi PSI Readers,
This is a relatively long comment because we have to review history.
An earlier Problem: “The ultraviolet catastrophe, also called the Rayleigh–Jeans catastrophe, was the prediction of late 19th century/early 20th century classical physics that an ideal black body at thermal equilibrium would emit an unbounded quantity of energy as wavelength decreased into the ultraviolet range.”
“According to classical electromagnetism, the number of electromagnetic modes in a 3-dimensional cavity, per unit frequency, is proportional to the square of the frequency. This therefore implies that the radiated power per unit frequency should be proportional to frequency squared. Thus, both the power at a given frequency and the total radiated power is unlimited as higher and higher frequencies are considered: this is clearly unphysical as the total radiated power of a cavity is not observed to be infinite, a point that was made independently by Einstein and by Lord Rayleigh and Sir James Jeans in 1905.”
The Solution: “In 1900, Max Planck derived the correct form for the intensity spectral distribution function by making some strange (for the time) assumptions. In particular, Planck assumed that electromagnetic radiation can be emitted or absorbed only in discrete packets, called quanta, of energy:” I cannot copy the equation which is between the above and the quote which follows. A reader can go to the link and see it.
“Albert Einstein (in 1905) solved the problem by postulating that Planck’s quanta were real physical particles – what we now call photons, not just a mathematical fiction. They modified statistical mechanics in the style of Boltzmann to an ensemble of photons. Einstein’s photon had an energy proportional to its frequency and also explained an unpublished law of Stokes and the photoelectric effect.[5] This published postulate was specifically cited by the Nobel Prize in Physics committee in their decision to award the prize for 1921 to Einstein.[6]”. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrophe)
In the beginning of SCIENCE, the publication of Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, the publisher, Louis Elzevir, wrote a preface to a reader of the book. In the midst of this preface, he wrote: “Intuitive knowledge keeps pace with accurate definition.” (as translated by Crew and de Salvio (1914)
Which, historical accurate definition, we have just reviewed. However, in two popular introductory meteorology textbooks (2009, 2012) a student reads: “Radiation is energy transferred in the form of waves that have electrical and magnetic properties.” And does not read that radiation is energy transferred in the form of photons—discrete packets of energy.
The Result: A great deal of confusion and no intuitive knowledge.
Have a good day, Jerry
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T. C. Clark
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Is Monbiot an expert on nutrition? There are nutritionists who claim that in general there is too much grains and sugars in the diets of Europe and the US and not enough protein and fats. There are a few people who are carnivores but they almost all have some unusual health history. I have no confidence that nutritionists (all nutritionists do not agree) could recommend the best diet for the majority. I would eat that diet if it was known but what happens inside the human body is a very complex process.
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