Guest Essay by Kip Hansen – 12 July 2020
The New York Times’ Climate section is a source of continuing amusement for me. This one made me laugh out loud.
In an exhibition of astounding audacity, the New York Times’ Editor of the Climate Desk, Hannah Fairfield, stages what is billed as a “debate” about moving forward with solutions to climate change.
Let me be perfectly clear, this is a fake debate – no debate takes place. Having given up the standards of professional journalism almost entirely, the Climate desk has moved on from misinformation, disinformation and fake news to . . . . Fake Debates.
If you have one and a half hours to utterly waste, you can watch the whole thing here.
Not only does the Times falsely claim that this represents some kind of debate, they can’t even count to ten – there are only six guest speakers and Hannah….and when I attended elementary school in the 1950s, six plus one made seven (it may be the “new math”, similar to that being used to count “New Covid Cases”). Oh well, almost nothing else in the video is true either.
We do get good insight into why the New York Times publishes so many Climate stories that are absolutely nutty [my psychiatrist friend assures me that this is a perfectly acceptable term in the mental health field] . Hannah Fairfield, the Editor of the Climate Desk, states in her introduction:
“Our mission is help readers understand their world and how Climate Change touches all parts of it. Like the science of Corona-virus, the science of Climate Change is very clear…the world is warming dangerously, humans are the cause of it, and a failure to act today will deeply affect the future of the Earth.”
“The devastation of Covid-19 has forced change for all of us. Much of it has been swift and startling. To combat corona-virus, governments poured money into rescue. Companies adapted their goals and production; central banks permitted exceptional stimulus packages, and societies mobilized to shield the most vulnerable. Have these dramatic actions given us a blueprint for mobilizing action against Climate Change? Is this an opportunity for a new path forward that puts accelerating Climate Change solutions squarely in the middle?
We know that Climate Change requires exponential solutions and that’s what we’ll focus on today. The global response to corona-virus can be the beginning of the economic, technological and society [sic] transition that will allow us to dramatically reduce carbon emissions in the next 30 years, helping us to avoid the worst effects of Climate Change, and limiting the global temperature rise in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement.”
This introduction informs us that the Times’ Climate desk thinks its mission is to produce propaganda supporting just one side of the real climate debate and a rather radical version at that, one which goes beyond even IPCC memes. The latest version of an acceptable editorial narrative on climate change is that “the governments of the world took over ordering individual people’s lives and destroying the economy for their own purposes – presented to the public as protecting them from Covid-19 – and so governments could, should and must do the same to “save us from Climate Change”. The apparent theory is that as government actions regarding Covid have already wrecked so much of the world economy – wrecking it even more in the battle against (mostly imaginary) future climate change is a “no brainer” (well, it is, for those with no brain or suffering a total lack of Critical Thinking Skills and/or those whose own personas have been overwhelmed by GroupThink – h/t Judith Curry).
Hannah Fairfield seemingly went to great lengths to make sure that her panel consisted of radical Climate Change Warriors who would all agree with her stated purposes. The panel consists of:
Nigel Topping – “UK climate action Champion”
Christiana Figueres — Introduced as the Co-Founder of Global Optimism Better known as the Former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
“I’ve never been asked why I it [the Climate Change issue] is important to me. …because, isn’t this the most important thing that every single human being should be focused on? …. is the future of the human race? …. we’re talking about human survival.”
Bertrand Piccard — of the Solar Impulse Foundation and the World Alliance for Clean Technologies
(if you’ve watched any episodes of the Netflix series “Space Force”, you might be able to identify this guy)
Alexandra Palt — L’oreal Group — Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer — included, as the PR wonk of a beauty products company, I suppose, because appearances are so very important.
Dayna Cunningham – Executive Director of CoLab, MIT
“The Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) is a center for planning and development within the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning “. They apparently focus a lot on painting murals on buildings….. “promoting democratic engagement and urban sustainability in communities facing disruptive moments, we strive to produce shared wealth and collective well-being.”
Johan Rockström — Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Those familiar with some of these names might guess that this massively stacked panel recommends that governments take over private industry and private lives and Save The World From the Humans.
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Author’s Comment:
Hannah Fairfield’s introduction is so full of nonsense that I could have written a whole essay on it alone:
- The Science of Corona-virus is anything but “very clear” – the medical world barely understands what it is, where it came from, how it spreads, why it infects some without symptoms and kills others, and is at an impasse on treatment. Early and preventative treatments have been politicized out of use in some countries while being front-line successful treatments in others.
- Climate Science is likewise not “very clear” – “dangerously warming”??? “humans are the cause of it”???
- “…societies mobilized to shield the most vulnerable.”??? King Cuomo (governor of the State of New York) sent sick elderly patients to die by the hundreds in death-filled nursing homes while keeping kids, who are the safest group, out of schools and confined at home.
- “We know that Climate Change requires exponential solutions….”??? What, in heaven’s name, might “exponential solutions” be?
Enough, what the world does not need is destructive Covid Madness Solutions to be added on to what are already societally-suicidal Climate Change Madness proposals.
I can only hope that sanity to returns to our local, regional, state, national and international leaders before they do permanent damage to the great enterprise of human civilization.
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It’s very simple. ‘Activism’ means reducing CO2 in the atmosphere. That’s all. We’ve done that. No we haven’t. We’ve significantly reduced emissions. Moans Loa says it’s still increasing. Something wrong here?
The BBC brainwash the public almost daily with record high temperatures in the UK
But this is not always the case.
The Central England Temperatures, which go back to the mid 1600 s and give mean max and min temperatures as well as seasonal means.
The warmest summer in England was 1976 with a mean average temperature of 17.7 C
the second and third warmest were 1826 ( 17.6 C ) & 1995 ( 17.3 C)
The warmest June was 1846 (18.2 ) & the warmest May was 1833 15.1 C )
With regard to one of the coldest months of recent times December 2010 holds the record
for the coldest minimum mean temperature since records began.
But the UK is not the world…obviously everywhere else it is blazing hot 😉
It’s blazing hot here according to some, but hey, it is summer time.
Blazing heat, as we know, leads to Blazing Saddles.
For some reason we are failing to transmit a sense of humour to the next humans.
We’re rapidly becoming a fearful kindred, cowering instead of laughing, sullen instead of joyous, subservient and not masters of our souls.
Are we dancers or are we humans? To be continued.
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I wonder where the times keeps their Pulitzer Prize for the coverage of Russia Cooolusion?
It seems only massive power grid failures will reverse this sort of “thinking” — oh no, my iphone has died, I’m sorreeee!! Those grid failures will become inevitable as the technical infrastructure is undermined by these people, the only question is when.
“I can only hope that sanity to returns to our local, regional, state, national and international leaders before they do permanent damage to the great enterprise of human civilization.”
I second that motion.
“Climate Change” people are no different than flat earthers or people who believe one can choose to switch genders!
Propaganda for vested interests, platitudes and trivia, that is the sum of the modern MSM, not even worthy to be classified as the adult comics they have been for decades anymore. Nor is just in terms of climate change, it extends across the entire spectrum of ‘news’.
At least the NYT in this episode is not as bad as the BBC often was. Before any kind of ‘climate denialism’ was utterly banned from the airways by them they too staged so-called debates on climate issues. They would sneakily pair an arch alarmist with a moderate alarmist and call it hearing both sides of the argument. And once again, this method was not restricted to climate issues, they still do it relentlessly in every other area.
The web of deceit is vast……….
https://www.climatecentral.org/
Partnerships Journalism- https://www.climatecentral.org/partnerships-journalism
Guided by data and science, our journalists collaborate with local newsrooms on compelling climate change coverage.
“Collaborate”? That sounds so admirable.
Re Debating. Here’s a comment I posted on WUWT a month ago (6/8):
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Christopher Monckton wrote here, early in June, in “Big Oil must fight on the science or die”:
“By the very nature of that disciplined and generally even-handed forum, both sides must be fully and fairly heard, and each can cross-examine the other. There is virtually no other forum where such a debate between the skeptics and the cultists can take place. For the latter, having lost just about every face-to-face debate that has been held on the climate question, go to elaborate lengths to avoid debate with the former. They know their shoddy case cannot withstand examination.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/06/08/climate-litigation-big-oil-must-fight-on-the-science-or-die/#comment-3013114
This made me think of a suggestion for Big Oil. Fund debate-sponsoring institutions like the Oxford Union (and/or establish such institutions) to hold a series of annual climate-change debates. For instance, to hold twelve debates over the course of a week, one-third on attribution, one-third on impacts, and one-third on responses, paralleling the structure of the IPCC reports.
Some topics in each sector would be new each year, and some would be oldies about which new evidence, claims, and arguments had accumulated. Each year’s agenda would be set by a seven-member (say) Board of Respectables, with the assistance of a similar number of staffers, some working part-time while otherwise employed.
“Respectable” representatives of both “sides” in the debate would be consulted regularly. Both sides would need to agree on the choice of moderators (who would not be the same for all debates)—and/or, if a panel of “judges” is involved, each side would choose one, and the Board would choose a third.
Participating debaters would be given $100,000 [or maybe just half that], to overcome the reluctance warmists supposedly feel about arguing for a position that’s already settled against the supposedly motivated reasoning of opponents. (This reluctance led to the demise of the Dutch-government-funded Climate Dialogue site.)
At a minimum these events would clear the air of the worst excesses of both sides (e.g., the recently disavowed unrepresentative “path” much alarmism has been based on). They would tend, over time, to clarify the points of agreement and disagreement and their relative importance. They would draw attention to areas where uncertainties exist and more research is needed. They would bring risk/reward thinking to the fore.
At a maximum, shoddy and deceptive claims and claimants would be exposed, and low-quality courses of action or inaction avoided.
Provided that a crew of unimpeachable Respectables could be recruited to oversee this endeavor, which should not be impossible, the sponsors would be spared 90% of the flak they’d draw from taking a skeptical position themselves, especially after a few rounds of well-conducted events. And they’d by spared 90% or more of the expense of becoming belligerently involved.
Twenty or thirty years ago it would have been far easier to set this in motion. But now the conventional wisdom is that the matter has been settled in the warmists’ favor and that only cranks dispute them. It will therefore take some bravery to volunteer to serve on the Board, or to back its mission, or to fund it.
But it could still be done. A grant of a mere $20 million would suffice to fund a debate-holding organization’s activities for 10 years, which should be sufficient. There must be a thousand foundations that could afford such a sum, and a thousand academic or professional organizations that could, collectively, do the same.
The funder should not have much if anything to do with that organization after funding it—especially not if it’s Big Oil!
At any rate, advocating the establishment of an institution to hold impartial structured debates on scientific matters of public interest is one that would or should evoke a generally favorable reaction. Opposing it would look bad to the public and to reasonable opinion leaders.
But many warmists would feel a need to do so, knowing the weaknesses of their case and the simplistic, propagandistic methods used to “sell” it. This would awkwardly position them: they’d then be confronted by the question, “What are you afraid of?” and by Tom Paine’s saying, “It is not truth, but error only, that shrinks from examination.”
Even if our side’s pro-debate advocacy gets blocked by the Consensus, we will have some compensation. We will have positioned ourselves to exact implacable justice on its members and supporters for their willful obstruction of the truth, in the aftermath of a non-warming world and a “wasted” global economy. A cold but enjoyable dish to contemplate.
There is a terrible irony working here. It may well be that the only cure for this fever of the Alarmists, this destructive madness of the herd, is global cooling.
That is a tenuous thread upon which to hang our hopes, and of course that would be destructive to the whole biome and human society.
To add poignancy to the irony, we may already be cooling. The deep oceans hide the truth. We pretend to command but do these secrets come when we ask?
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I’ll have what they’re having.
The New York Times is pure propaganda – they PROUDLY jettisoned their journalistic ethic, and did so high-profile.
In case somebody reading WUWT comments isn’t paying attention to events, the 2020 Nov. 3rd elections have become an extinction level event. If the Democrats take the White House and the Senate, the country will undergo changes that will substantially extinguish the American way of life… first here then worldwide.
The Democrats will turn 11 million illegal immigrants into voters…forever cementing total control of our already mostly Globalist Government via the Deep State. The Republican Party will exist as a ghost.
The borders will be thrown open and all comers will receive free education and free healthcare.
Energy costs will skyrocket with the GND and a dependency on the Mideast will return. The stock market will crash. China will become the ultimate superpower. Jobs will remain in China. The debt will spiral even more than the epidemic mismanagement has forced upon us. The Cancel Culture will rule business and commerce and education and science and pretty much every other institution.
Police will quit or retire by the 100,000’s. Crime will skyrocket. Education will collapse under total teacher’s union control.
The managed decline of America that Obama was so fond of will spiral into an uncontrolled steep decline.
Mistreatment in the courts of conservatives will become common everywhere and evlove into a system of re-education centers…and some impossible to remediate conservatives may require special treatment for the good of the country.
This election has become the extinction event that it is because the left has pulled out all the stops…the Media is full bore propaganda now with no pretense to actually performing journalism. The coordination of the lies is obvious now…all the national networks put out the exact same anti-American stories using the exact same talking point words and phrases. The NYT quit even pretending to do any news fit to print…it’s all far left propaganda…financed by billionaires looking for power…and by us taxpayers.
We need a big victory in November or America could be ground into dust by the foreign power that lives amongst us. It will never be the same.
Even if we win, there will be decades of strife ahead of us. The nation is split with neither side sharing any core principles with the other. It’s raw State Power vs. Individual Rights.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and the tree of liberty is often best nourished with blood.
H/t some people I read once upon a time.
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Thomas Jefferson, “the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Been saying this for a long time. Progressivism is a mechanic of extinction.
Twilight,
Star bright,
Dystopic night,
In a bight,
I see light
In the fight;
In a mite
It’ll be right.
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