From THE DAILY SCEPTIC
by Chris Morrison
408 climate activists have signed an open letter to all political leaders currently campaigning for the UK general election, calling for an “ambitious” programme of green policies. The BBC refers to “the country's most respected climate scientists”; Bob Ward, who organised the petition through the billionaire-funded Grantham Operation, tweeted: “Be ambitious on climate, scientists urge parties”, while “the climate clock is ticking” Business Green's James Murray shifted gears, referring to “top scientists”. Scientists, you say? The first “scientist” in the alphabetical list is an associate professor of accounting, the second is a geographer specialising in “disaster risk reduction”, while the third is an archaeologist.
The Grantham green stunt is, of course, the latest in a long line of attempts to suggest that most “scientists” believe humans control the climate. The letter speaks of “increasing damage to lives and livelihoods” in the UK caused by the increasing frequency and intensity of many extreme weather events. This flimsy but pervasive claim is not even supported by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which notes that most natural events such as floods, droughts, wildfires and cyclones have so far been without human involvement. Nor is human involvement evident in projections up to the year 2100.
Some of the letter's signatories could be described as scientists, but the vast majority would struggle to justify such a title. The list is full of lawyers, psychologists, philosophers, landscape architects, engineers and computer modellers. It is interesting to see how many ways there are to rename a university geography department to capitalise on the climate change zeitgeist. A similar “scientist” stunt was pulled last month by Damian Carrington in the Guardian, who surveyed 400 so-called scientists and concluded, in a sea of emotional outpourings, that the world was heading for a “semi-dystopian” future. Signing up for both agitprop stunts is Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, described as the director of the UK Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation. A more revealing CV might note that she is an “environmental psychologist” who did her first degree in theology and religious studies with French.
Perhaps Marco Silva, BBC Verify's climate “disinformation” specialist, could take a critical look at Ward's letter when he returns later this month from his six-month retraining leave at the billionaire-funded Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN). One or two of the names that signed it might sound familiar, including Saffron O'Neill, described as a professor of “climate and society.” She is a former speaker at the OCJN and is known for speculating about the need for “fines and prison sentences” for expressing scepticism about “well-established” science.
Would any scientist seriously support such a policy if they knew it would destroy the ongoing scientific process? A process that has served humanity so well, at least since Pope Urban VIII made the “well-supported” argument and savagely condemned Galileo and his heretical view that the Earth orbits the Sun.
The Ward letter is a Grantham operation and is ultimately funded by green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham. It also funds two Grantham Institutes at the London School of Economics and Imperial College, where a computer model “attribution” operation is used to make headlines with implausible claims that humans are responsible for individual weather events. Investigate science journalist Ben Pile has tracked some of Grantham's key contributions through 2021.
In addition to the significant sums paid to LSE and Imperial, there are also large donations to other green foundations that crop up whenever narratives of global net-zero collectivization are spun in the media, politics and academia. Jeremy Grantham has a long track record of preaching about the coming apocalypse and asked at a meeting in Copenhagen in 2019: “What do you say I should do?” He responded to this rhetorical question with the advice:
You should lobby your government officials – invest in elections and buy politicians. I'm happy to say that we do this quite often at the Grantham Foundation – any candidate, as long as they're green.
Ward is employed by Grantham at LSE to “communicate” climate science, notes journalist Matt Ridley. For years he complained to the newspaper industry's self-regulatory body IPSO about climate articles that took a sceptical line. This was part of a campaign of “sustained and targeted” pressure on editors to join the alarmist line, Ridley said. Ward tied up journalists in a time-consuming process in the hope that it would stop them and their editors writing and commissioning work. It worked, Ridley noted, noting: “He scared some journalists and editors away from the important issue of climate change and gave disaster theorists free rein to scare children to their heart's content.”
Chris Morrison is the environment editor of the Daily Sceptic.
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