From THE DAILY SKEPTIC
by Chris Morrison
An open letter to all political leaders currently contesting the UK General Election calling for an “ambitious” green policy program has been signed by 408 climate activists. The BBC shows “the country’s most famous” climate scientist; Bob Ward, who organized the petition through the billionaire-funded Grantham operation, tweeted, “so ambitious on climate, scientists are asking for a party”, while James ‘the climate clock is ticking’ Murray of Green business up a gear by mentioning “top scientist”. A scientist, you say? The first ‘scientist’ in the alphabetical list is an Associate Professor of Accountancy, the second is a geographer specializing in “disaster risk reduction”, while the third is an archaeologist.
The Grantham green stunt is certainly the latest in a long line of attempts to suggest that most ‘scientists’ believe humans control the climate. The letter refers to the “growing damage to lives and livelihoods” in the UK due to the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. This evidence-lite but everywhere claim is not even supported by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which found that there is no human involvement in most natural events such as floods, droughts, forest fires and hurricanes to date. Also there is no human involvement in the forecast until 2100.
There are a few academics who have signed letters that can fairly be described as scientists, but the majority would struggle to justify the title. The list is filled with lawyers, psychologists, philosophers, landscape designers, engineers and computer models. One interesting takeaway from the letter is that it notes several ways the university’s Geography Department could be renamed to take advantage of the climate zeitgeist. A similar stunt ‘scientist’ was pulled last month by Damian Carrington Guardian, who polled 400 called scientists and in a sea of emotional guff ended the world heading to a “semi dystopian” future. Signing up for both agitprop operations is Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, described as Director of the UK Center for Climate Change and Social Transformation. A more interesting CV might note that he is an “environmental psychologist” with a first degree in theology and religious studies with France.
Perhaps Marco Silva, the BBC’s Climate ‘disinformation’ specialist, can criticize Ward’s letter when he returns at the end of the month from another six-month educational sabbatical at the billionaire-funded Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN). One or two signature names may be familiar to him, including Saffron O’Neill, described as Professor of “Climate and Society”. He is a past speaker at OCJN and is noted for speculating on the need for “fines and jail time” for expressing skepticism about “well-supported” science.
Would any serious scientist sign up to such a policy knowing that it would undermine the ongoing scientific process? A process, it may be noted, that has served mankind well, certainly since the time of Pope Urban VIII played the ‘well-supported’ argument and destroyed Galileo and the heretical view that the Earth orbits the Sun.
Ward’s letters are a Grantham operation and are ultimately funded by green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham. The two Grantham Institutes are funded at the London School of Economics and Imperial, where computer model ‘attribution’ operations are used to get headlines with implausible claims that humans have caused individual weather events. Investigative science journalist Ben Pile has tracked some of the key contributions made by Grantham up to 2021.
As well as the significant sums paid to LSE and Imperial, there are major contributions distributed to other green foundations that continue at a time when the global Net Zero collectivization narrative is taking hold in the media, politics and academia. Jeremy Grantham has a long record of preaching about the coming apocalypse, asking the 2019 meeting in Copenhagen, “What shall I do, you say?” He meets the rhetorical question by suggesting:
You have to lobby Government officials – invest in elections and buy some politicians. I’m happy to say that we do that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate if it’s green.
Ward was employed by Grantham at LSE to “communicate” climate science, notes journalist Matt Ridley. For years, he complained to the newspaper industry’s independent regulator IPSO about climate articles that took a skeptical line. It was part of a “persistent and deliberate” campaign of pressure by editors to push the alarmist line, Ridley said. Ward involved journalists in a time-consuming process in the hope of preventing him and editors from writing and commissioning work. It works, observed Ridley, noting, “they have scared some journalists and editors from the important topic of climate change, leaving the catastrophists with a clear field to scare children to their hearts’ content”.
Chris Morrison is Everyday skeptics‘s Environment Editor.
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