Neil Winton worked as a journalist at Reuters for 32 years, including as global Science and Technology Correspondent. He writes at Winton’s World.
Winton: “When I became Reuters global Science and Technology Correspondent in the mid-1990s, the global warming story was top of my agenda. Already by then the BBC was scaring us saying we would all die unless humankind mended its selfish ways. Carbon dioxide (CO2) was the culprit and had to be tamed, then eliminated. I had no reason to think this wasn’t established fact. I was wrong.
My Reuters credentials meant that I had easy access to the world’s finest climate scientists. To my amazement, none of these would say categorically that the link between CO2 and global warming, now known as climate change, was a proven scientific fact. Some said human production of CO2 was a probable cause, others that it might make some contribution; some said CO2 had no role at all. Everybody agreed that the climate had warmed over the last 10,000 years as the ice age retreated, but most weren’t really sure why. The sun’s radiation, which changes over time, was a favoured culprit.”
By: Admin – Climate DepotFebruary 27, 2023 6:33 PM
From Neil Winton’s blog WintonsWorld: Climate Change; An Alternative View But Backed By Top Experts
Excerpt– Jan 23, 2023:
Winton: When I first started writing about human-induced climate change (or global warming as it was then known) as Reuters’ Science & Technology Correspondent back in the mid-90s, I turned to a subject I knew from headlines rather than research.
But I had expectations. After all, even then, the BBC was reporting as fact global warming was upon us, it was all our fault, and we’d all die soon if we didn’t listen to those that know best and act.
Imagine my amazement when I started talking to the world’s top climate scientists and found a completely different story. The science wasn’t even close to being proven, and I had great difficulty finding anyone to say the link between excessive human-made carbon dioxide (CO2) and a changing climate was clear. There were many assumptions, but no proof. Yet the BBC and the mainstream media (MSM) constantly reported a proven doom scenario.
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Neil Winton worked as a journalist at Reuters for 32 years, including as global Science and Technology Correspondent. He writes at Winton’s World.
Excerpt:
When I became Reuters global Science and Technology Correspondent in the mid-1990s, the global warming story was top of my agenda. Already by then the BBC was scaring us saying we would all die unless humankind mended its selfish ways. Carbon dioxide (CO2) was the culprit and had to be tamed, then eliminated. I had no reason to think this wasn’t established fact. I was wrong.
My Reuters credentials meant that I had easy access to the world’s finest climate scientists. To my amazement, none of these would say categorically that the link between CO2 and global warming, now known as climate change, was a proven scientific fact. Some said human production of CO2 was a probable cause, others that it might make some contribution; some said CO2 had no role at all. Everybody agreed that the climate had warmed over the last 10,000 years as the ice age retreated, but most weren’t really sure why. The sun’s radiation, which changes over time, was a favoured culprit.
My reporting reflected the wide range of views, with Reuters typical “on the one hand this, on the other, that” style. But even then, the mainstream media seem to have run out of the energy required, and often lazily went along with the BBC’s faulty, opinionated thesis. It was too much trouble to make the point that the BBC’s conclusion was challenged by many impressive scientists.
Fast forward 20 years and firm proof CO2 was warming the climate still hasn’t been established, but politics has taken over. Sure, there are plenty of computer models with their hidden assumptions ‘proving’ man is guilty as charged, and the assumption that we had the power and knowledge to change the climate became embedded.
The Left had lost all of the economic arguments by the 1990s, and its activists eagerly grabbed the chance to say free markets and small government couldn’t save us from climate change; only government intervention could do that. Letting capitalism run free was a certain way to ensure the end of the planet; smart Lefties should take charge and save us from ourselves.
The debate about climate change is far from over. I’m not a scientist so I don’t know enough to say it’s all man-made or not. But politicians and lobbyists have decided that we are all guilty. They are in the process of dismantling our way of life, ordering us to comply because it’s all for the future and our children. If we are going to give up our civilization, at the very least we ought to have an open debate. Journalists need to stand up and be counted. The trouble is that requires bravery and energy, and an urge to question conventional wisdom.
Reuters should be leading this movement. All it has to do is stand by its 10 Hallmarks. And maybe tell CCN thanks but no thanks; it needs to apply Reuters principles to its climate reporting.
Neil Winton worked as a journalist at Reuters for 32 years, including as global Science and Technology Correspondent. He writes at Winton’s World.
Journalists need to stand up and be counted. The trouble is that requires bravery and energy, and an urge to question conventional wisdom.
Yep but like you Neil they only do that when they’re retired and that’s the problem with the Groupthink. It’s all run by a noisy cult minority and after a while there’s a lot of investment and careers riding on the Emperor parading around in the nuddy.
The clever part by the shucksters is to hide the embedded costs of the scam rather than any direct and obvious hits to the hip pocket thereby not upsetting the punters. Either that or print money for their noble causes and do it sneakily via inflation. Let the deplorables eat vibe.
PS: Or you chuck in the inflationary handouts and subsidies for middle class welfare-
Electrifying Australian homes would cost $63billion according to costing done for David Pocock (msn.com)
Quite handy if the gas appliances are getting on and the joint is due for a reno.
They say there are 5 mill households in Australia using gas. So that’s $12k per household
Im not worried about the households , it’s the industry that uses Gas that’s the worry
Then there is the extra electricity generation, Australia being an island there is no interconnectors like Denmark or Ireland can use to push up wind generation to over 50-60%
Even little NZ which is ideal location, being long and narrow, plus the advantage of hydro distributed throughout the grid to maintain stability, is only 5% wind
wood heatings best for keeping the entire room(and a goodly part of the rest) warm, gas is next best(oils rare in aus for most) but the stupid electric reverse cycle or even fan/oil column heaters are costly and near useless turn them off and theres ZERO in the room that holds heat, the instant theyre off the rooms chill. even letting the woodfire die down overnight the house remains far warmer on a chill winter morning when you wake
When a sceptic or luke-warmer moves to the Forces of Darkness and Evil they are feted and welcomed like the Prodigal Son and made for the rest of their life. If a Warmist moves to sceptical they are cast into the Lion’s Den.
and it’ll be claimed they are now a fossil fuel shill
No, the Pit of Eternal Flame.
If journalists won’t ask the basic questions to the establishment and of the left’s activists’ assumptions and assertions, who will? When the media change from being inquisitors to gatekeepers, where do we go?
Fortunately there is a handy list of news organizations that are committed to publishing only CAGW propaganda at Covering Climate Now:
https://coveringclimatenow.org/partners/partner-list/
It seems fairly obvious that any so-called journalist working for any of these organizations would be immediately fired if they practiced objectivity. And the fact that this was organized largely by the Columbia School of Journalism indicates that objectivity is no longer a thing in the industry.
Columbia School of Journalism should be correctly renamed as the “Columbia School of Propaganda.”
The Columbia School of Journalism should be correctly renamed as ” J. Jonah Jameson school of Journalism”.
Reuters is right in the top partners list.
Huh? Right now they ARE gatekeepers, for the left. They need to be inquisitors of all.
What journalists?
The “writers” reprint slightly edited government press releases like trained parrots.
The coming climate change crisis is a prediction, not reality
A real journalist would be interested in how accurate predictions have been in the past.
A person with common sense would KNOW humans have a terrible track record with their predictions. So reporting prediction of climate doom is not journalism.
And changing your mind on CO2 is a sign of a coward or a person fooled l for many decades
Easier to fool a person than convince him he has been fooled… Twain?
better late than never I suppose
Yes, better late than never.
But saying:
“I had no reason to think this wasn’t established fact.”
is a lie and a rationalization.
Good observation. Masking, shutdowns, social distancing, etc. (same boat).
Every activist movement is driven by its most extreme members. The ones with the “fire in the belly”, who will not compromise anything. The Global Warming movement is a good example. It has taken over all of the media organizations and turned them into a 24/7 propaganda machine, dedicated to controlling people’s lives, and reducing the number of people on the planet significantly, as quickly as they can without triggering significant blowback.
They are “boiling the frog”, as Al Gore used to say.
“…and reducing the number of people on the planet significantly, as quickly as they can without triggering significant blowback.”
I hope someone is counting the casualties because they are mounting as we speak. Google the situation in Sri Lanka and you will find the ‘media-professor meme protectors’ have layered over the real story of Climate Policy-Caused Disaster with ‘corruption’ as the cause of Sri Lanka problems. Of course, Google does their bidding.
This truck driver figured it out long ago! Before the EPA ruled CO2 a pollutant. Before Mann and his Hockey Stick.
Good for you, Rah. I, as a scientist, have long asserted that learning the issues and grasping the truth are well within the grasp of anyone having a bit of real life experience, an open and inquisitive mind, and a shred of honesty. This goes for exposing the fraud in all of the current crusades by the lunatic fringe, woke crowd.
A high school student, for instance, armed with a spreadsheet, basic math, the Internet, and the right set of questions, could quickly uncover the biofuels/biomass fraud, for himself and anyone who might listen.
It was when they first started claiming a “scientific consensus” that I really started paying attention. In my experience it would be impossible to get 99% of the people to agree that the grass is green and the sky is blue! Let alone agree on something as complex as the future climate.
Agreed.
Further I argue that ONE reason any 99% (or 97%) is suspect is that few people will misunderstand the question and a few will intentionally give a wrong answer.
thanks to the state of Wokachusetts suing the EPA over this triggering that ruling
Never lose sight of the famous quote from then Rep. Ed Markey that will be played again and again: “Who could have known?”
Or the equally famous quote from then Sen. Tim Wirth: “It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong.”
Contamination By Invisible Agents
The new machines–type foundry and printing press–ministered to this devouring curiosity by a flood of broadsheets, news letters, almanacs, libellea, pasquils, pamphlets, and books. They spread the news at a hitherto unknown speed, increased the range of human communication, broke down isolation. The broadsheets and brochures were not necessarily read by all the people on whom they exercised their influence; rather each printed word of information acted like a pebble dropped into a pond, spreading its ripples of rumour and hearsay. The printing press was only the ultimate source of the dissemination of knowledge and culture; the process itself was complex and indirect, a process of dilution and diffusion and distortion, which affected ever increasing numbers, including the backward and illiterate. Even three or four centuries later, the teachings of Marx and Darwin, the discoveries of Einstein and Freud, did not reach the vast majority of people in their original, printed text, but through second- and third- hand sources, through hearsay and echo. The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through textbooks–they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied form of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.
Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers,
ARKANA, Penguin Books, London, 1989, pg. 150
Copyright, Arthur Koestler, 1959
I’m not sure it is wise to give this man a pass because he found–after 30 years–that a narrative he supported is not true; all he had to do was look at some data and learn a bit of physics, was that impossible? It wasn’t for many of us here; what we had to learn to understand from what a planet might warm and from what it would not, was one semester of a 3 class-hour per week physics course, and one semester of similar immersion in historical geology. It should not have been that hard for him to look only a decade back and see that the same ‘experts’ had the warming inverted only a decade before.
In that one ‘fast forward 20 years’ gap this journalist had ample opportunity to learn some basics of subjects on which he reported; he did not. Instead he did a lot of damage in his journalistic career that it may not be possible to undo, even if he only wrote neutral articles.
If one is going to be one of the mouthpieces, I will admire the ones that feed the brain first. Such admissions of 30 years of peddling misinformation just remind me of Herb Tarlick–‘He did that to me 10 times…..then I got smart.’ (a 9 second video sums up this journalist)
From what he is quoted as saying, it appears to me that he figured it out early on but was fearful to speak out, suppressed his own doubts, or was shouted down. Then he retired, so he speaks out now that they can’t touch him.
That is the same tough ethical dilemma in which many academics and government officials find themselves. They somehow rationalize that they must compromise the truth to get along or get ahead amidst a climate of fear. As for journalists today? Most are just the walking dead, almost beyond redemption.
Proud of their catchy “step in and stand up” slogans and DIE training, academia across the board punishes those who exercise their free speech rights to “step in and stand up” about the harm and violence being done to our culture by the lunatic fringe wokesters and climate hustlers on campus. Plus, the federal government has their financial claws on most universities, so they kowtow to every demand or edict to keep those dollars flowing.
“From what he is quoted as saying, it appears to me that he figured it out early on but was fearful to speak out, suppressed his own doubts, or was shouted down. Then he retired, so he speaks out now that they can’t touch him.”
And that is what he should be saying, instead of:
“I had no reason to think this wasn’t established fact.”
“That is the same tough ethical dilemma…”
I think it’s just plain and simple cowardice.
You are not alone. I hope others recognize that your hesitance to express the idea here is ironic.
Righters – never knowingly off narrative
Have to do your own research here but very recently, as reported by the grauniad but I came upon on the front page of MSN UK …….
……Rupert Murdoch admitted that Fox News lied about something-or-the-other, that everyone inside Fox knew this and in fact he knew about the lies being told in whichever story.
But he let it go.
He allowed Fox to broadcast out and out fabrications and lies
As it was on MSN, I pitched via their comments pop-up, saying that Modern Media is now entirely One Huge Pack Of Lies
Especially, that the MSM lies via exaggeration (making stuff up is lying) and also they lie by omission. i.e. Only tell/report a very select and biassed view. or, quote and report ‘out of context’
Somehow I managed to get it past the auto-bot censor they have there but next day I found that (as far as I could see from my MSN account) – I was banned entirely from commenting on anything. The option to comment on any story completely gone.
(48 hours later it is now back. Admittedly, they’ve been having some Technical Issues in there recently)
There is the trainwreck. There is what’s wrong here. There is The End of the World
It exists in closed, intolerant and misanthropic minds, and the interweb plus The Main Stream Media, has given those dysfunctional minds the power to make that dysfunction real
Whoever said about children, energy and machine guns were right EXCEPT that, the machine gun is: Main Stream Media
Rather than “Exxon knew!” it should be “MSM knew!” (they were lying)
And the deluded wh believe what the main steam media feeds them.
“I’m not a scientist so I don’t know enough to say it’s all man-made or not.”
The favorite media-amplified persuasion channel is all about “SCIENTISTS” because they know most folks are easily intimidated. What to do? There are literally millions of technically-trained, numerate, honest folks out there who are capable of grasping the core problem. It is that the attribution of reported warming to CO2 and other GHGs is unsound by the numbers.
So the challenge is to expose this attribution error in ways that more folks can understand for themselves and overcome the social pressure to conform to the so-called consensus of “scientists.”
I have been using one example in comments here at WUWT – “Watch from space in what NOAA calls the CO2 band of infrared wavelengths. See for yourself that it’s not a radiative “trap” as an end result. It’s a huge array of highly variable emitters, and there is no way any scientist can reliably establish that heat energy must be expected to accumulate on land and in the oceans from what GHGs do in the atmosphere.”
https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk_band.php?sat=G16&band=16&length=12
This directly confronts the “heat-trapping” narrative. But it’s just one of many ways to make the point that attribution of warming to the non-condensing GHGs makes no sense by the numbers.
P.S. Please do not take my comment as being against the concept of science, the scientific method, or the idea of a person being a scientist. Far from it. The problem is the misuse of these concepts and terms for mass persuasion in the wrong direction.
He should have done his job. He didn’t.
I view the climate alarm as having four phases.
“”Won’t end well for them.””
I doubt it will end well for us….
Good summary. Let’s hope that Alex Epstein and others exposing the insane push into wind and solar can gain traction with the pro-human and pro-energy arguments.
Unfortunately, most of that means precisely nothing to the ordinary non-scientific people I meet. I have been prepared to mock their views in normal conversation, with the result that I am looked upon as a poorly-educated maverick. As, I am sure, are most WUWT contributors by non-WUWT readers. Their views on me and that poor old Carbon Dioxide seem to be similar, both beyond reason!
Play with their stupidity be telling them the world is going to end from climate change in 49.75 years unless drastic action is taken. They will admire your science “knowledge”, thanks to their confirmation bias.
Trying to change the mind of an anti-CO2 believer is like trying to change the mind of a born-again Christian about th existence of god.
I had the misfortune to watch this panic stricken piece last night.
Svalbard: The remote Arctic island warming seven times faster than the global average
There is less sea ice on the planet than at any time since records began.
Summer in Antarctica has seen the ice retreat further than ever before, while winter in the Arctic has not been cold enough to produce the ice that once filled the seas around Svalbard.
The polar regions act as air-conditioning units for the planet. Reduce their size and inevitably the earth gets warmer.
Svalbard is approximately 650 miles from the North Pole. In the main town Longyearbyen the sun still hasn’t risen above the horizon.
It’s -12 degrees outside but by historic standards on this archipelago it’s too warm,especially in the sea.
Isfjorden translates as the Ice Fjord and there’s little or no ice in it. Science is only just starting to understand why.
The reporters emphasis on “seven times!” should be enough to ring warning bells without any half awake viewer
Well, as I have posted many times, the coalport at Spitsbergen (Svalbaard) was ice free for 3 months of the year before 1920 but over 7 months of the year by the late 1930s. So a lot of warming in the Arctic over that period. Hubert Lamb reckoned the Arctic ice retreated by 10-20 percent over those 20 years.
I doubt the reporter knew anything about that.
The world on average was warming seven times slower than some remote island in Arctic. To anybody, who thinks that warming is a problem, that should have been a good news…
You forgot Professor J Houghton and his scam role in the Thatcher government.
Thatcher wrote her memoirs saying much the same thing as this Reuter’s guy.
No suprise, like him she was already out of power and couldn’t do F A about it.
Houghton never relented on his vast ego-parade unscientific nonsense to his grave.
The damage caused by him and the bollox brigade in British universities is probably going to cost the UK in the long run, more than the entire north sea oil and gas bonanz of the 80s and 90s.
Worst still there’s not a single MP as far as we know in Westminster is prepared to call out the wonderful British energy suicide pact called “net zero”, while they ship woodchips around the world to feed DRAX!
After a decade you’d think the IPCC predictions of climate doom would get reported as WRONG predictions
From the article”…none of these would say categorically that the link between CO2 and global warming, now known as climate change, was a proven scientific fact.“
This article will put Mr. Greene on the “warpath”.
“Mr. Greene is perpetually on the warpath, so wears a steel helmet when posting online, to prevent injury.” Mrs. Greene
I can’t stand people who claim CO2 does “everything”, based on dismissing all natural causes of climate change as “noise”, which the IPCC did in 1995.
I also can’t stand people who claim CO2 does nothing because there is no precise measurement of what CO2 has actually done since humans began burning fossil fuels. That is based on the false belief that something can not be happening unless there is definitive scientific proof that it is happening, peer reviewed and published in a well known scientific journal.
CO2 is proven to be a greenhouse gas and more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere impede Earth’s ability to cool itself by some unknown amount, that so far has been harmless. What’s so hard about believingt hat?
The IPCC used to claim half the warming since 1950 was caused by manmade greenhouse gases. A middle of the road guess. The actual percentage was between zero and 100%, so 50% is a compromise. I’d rather hear the right answer: “We don’t know”, but authorities never say: “We don’t know”. If a Ph.D, ever said “I don’t know that” he’d get treated like a Ph.Dumb.
But the IPC claimed natural causes of climate change are “noise” is 1995, so what else is left but manmade causes of climate change? That’s not science, that’s claptrap.
Richard, please provide a counter to this argument that CO2 has ZERO demonstrated effect on climate:
5000 years ago, there was the Egyptian 1st Unified Kingdom warm period
4400 years ago, there was the Egyptian old kingdom warm period.
3000 years ago, there was the Minoan Warm period. It was warmer than now WITHOUT fossil fuels.
Then 1000 years later, there was the Roman warm period. It was warmer than now WITHOUT fossil fuels.
Then 1000 years later, there was the Medieval warm period. It was warmer than now WITHOUT fossil fuels.
1000 years later, came our current warm period.
Climate alarmists are claiming that whatever caused those earlier warm periods suddenly quit causing warm periods, only to be replaced by man’s CO2, perfectly in time for the cycle of warmth every 1000 years to stay on schedule. Not very believable.
The entire climate scam crumbles on this one observation because it shows that there is nothing unusual about today’s temperature and thus CO2 is not causing warming or any unusual climate effects that are frequently blamed on warming.
Evidence that those warm periods actually occurred:
http://www.debunkingclimate.com/climatehistory.html
Evidence that the Roman & Medieval warm periods were global:
http://www.debunkingclimate.com/warm_periods.html
http://www.debunkingclimate.com/page216.html
All he had to do was read WUWT for the past dozen or so years.
If he’d done that he could at least have asked difficult questions
Obviously it takes a brave soul to admit they have been championing the wrong side of an argument all their working life.
The only redress for such blind acceptance of the preferred but totally wrong story line, is to work for as long as possible actively trying to repair the long term damage done by your own naivete.
I wish Neil Winton well and hope he enjoys a long and influential retirement. We need all the repentant sinners we can muster, if we are to convey the scale of their false beliefs to the rest of the ‘Mann made, climate change believers’.
“it takes a brave soul to admit they have been championing the wrong side of an argument all their working life”
does it?
I believe it does, if you posses the normal range of human emotions. Those who are in the sociopath or psychopath group, would not have any such sense of guilt or fault, so not everybody, Kevin.
“Obviously it takes a brave soul to admit they have been championing the wrong side of an argument all their working life.”
Well, if it was true. But this is just another of those “I was led astray but I saw the light” articles by old warriors in WUWT. You only have to look at his well-organised Climate Folder to see that he has been saying the same things for 27 years, starting with his 1995 article
“Global Warming Theory Just Hot Air, Some Experts Say”
By 1997 we have progressed to
“Climate Said Warming Because Of Sun, Not Man.”
And by 2010 to
“Brown’s flat-earth climate lies matched only by Tory party’s surrender”
Read the article a bit more carefully, Nick. Neil Winton clearly started his scepticism in the mid-1990s, ie. about 27 years ago. So unsurprisingly he has been saying the same thing for 27 years. You incorrectly assumed that he had only recently changed his mind.
“You incorrectly assumed that he had only recently changed his mind.”
Most commenters on this thread assume that, as did Mr Evans, to whom I responded:
“Obviously it takes a brave soul to admit they have been championing the wrong side of an argument all their working life.”
As well they might, when the article is headed:
“”32-year Reuters veteran reporter comes clean on ‘climate change’: ‘I had no reason to think this wasn’t established fact. I was wrong’”|
Even the featured image emphasises that view.
And if the headline is wrong, what is the point of the article
“Bloke who has ranted for 27 years against climate policy rants against climate policy”?
WOW, Nick shows that Neil Winton is a real reporter.
Despite not realising just how WRONG the whole AGW facade was, and while still actually “believing”, he still reported on what real scientists were saying.
Then eventually, he realised that those real scientists were correct, and that the AGW scam was built on lies and mal-science.
Just maybe, instead of just attacking the man, you could point you where he is wrong???
The whole point of the article (as headlined) is about the supposed late conversion of Neil Winton, after 33 years believing in the conventional AGW while working for Reuters. And I just point out that the truth is nothing like that. Neil Winton has been, for at least 27 years, a strident partisan against AGW. Nothing has changed.
He is entitled to be. But the truth is nothing like the narrative presented here.
So??? Is he wrong???
The trouble is that requires bravery and energy, and an urge to question conventional wisdom.
Bravery… YES, but there is no conventional wisdom when it comes to the ideology of Man Made Climate Change.
con·ven·tion·al wis·dom noun
Conventional Ideology is more like it.
Religion.
Having a healthy scepticism to being told what to think, I like to review multiple sources and form my own opinions. Being a retired Engineer helps to spot BS. My conclusion is that if the climate is changing (it’s not changing much) then it’s likely to be no more than an ice age returning to normal that we’ve experienced 9 times over the last 10,000 years. There is no evidence that CO2 is responsible. None.
Net Zero is therefore dangerous nonsense. Google CO2 Cradle Of Life on Planet Earth for more info and let’s start putting the interests of the British people before untested/ uncosted theories.
“Net Zero is therefore dangerous nonsense.”
Yep.
Next, we will have a newly-retired reporter raising questions about that. Or maybe not. Or at least not until someone’s ecomomy goes bust.
I can understand his pain after a career being guided by the Reuters Trust Principles, codified in 1941:
That Reuters shall at no time pass into the hands of any one interest, group, or faction;
That the integrity, independence, and freedom from bias of Thomson Reuters shall at all times be fully preserved;
That Reuters shall supply unbiased and reliable news services to newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters, and other media subscribers and to businesses, governments, institutions, individuals, and others with whom Reuters has or may have contracts;
That Thomson Reuters shall pay due regard to the many interests which it serves in addition to those of the media; and
That no effort shall be spared to expand, develop, and adapt the news and other services and products of Thomson Reuters so as to maintain its leading position in the international news and information business
Those have been steadily undermined since the merger with Thomson.
Comparing that list of “principles” with what has been coming out of Reuters on “climate” is like comparing the vows of a smoking, drinking, drug using, whore mongering priest with the vows of his profession.
I suspect that like most, this guy was just a coward. He wrote what his bosses wanted him to write to preserve his job, even if he strongly suspected that he was pushing a false narrative,
He says he wrote in this “on one hand this, but on the other hand that” style. If the scientists telling him the science wasn’t clear was one hand, what was the other hand? That “BBC declares we’re doomed!”?
And that’s why it’s called the “Cancel Culture”.
A little late, but better late than never.
“I’m not a scientist so I don’t know enough to say it’s all man-made or not.”
Really?
In 2023 for a journalist to be good at his job, is to lose it…
Using the Stefan-Boltzmann Law we can determine that the addition of an atmosphere to the planet raised the surface temperature by about 33 K requiring an increase in absorbed thermal energy of 62%. I fail to see how one can claim that one of the two major LWR active gasses has no contribution to that very significant warming.
Perhaps the argument is that the GHE is now totally saturated so there will be no further downwelling of energy regardless of concentration increases. Satellite measurement of the OLR show that of the about 35 w/m2 that would be radiated in the CO2 band without CO2, about 12 w/m2 is still being radiated. Are we certain that level can not be further reduced?
It is certain that whatever GHE there is from CO2 it is small but I am not ready to claim it is zero.
No. Addition of atmosphere reduces incoming energy reaching the surface by the amount of albedo.
So please show your work.
Your statement is correct. There is less solar energy reaching the surface with an atmosphere. But since the surface is warmer with an atmosphere there must be non solar energy heating the surface. The 150 w/m2 additional energy is provided primarily through the GHE.
“32-year Reuters veteran reporter comes clean on ‘climate change’:”Bunch of lies. He has always been a warrior against science. Check out his Climate Change archive. A few titles
1995 “Global Warming Theory Just Hot Air, Some Experts Say”
1997 “Climate Said Warming Because Of Sun, Not Man”
1997 ” Futile Climate Action Would Also Hurt Poor“
2009 “U.N.’s IPCC fiddled climate change data – Christopher Booker”
2010 “Brown’s flat-earth climate lies matched only by Tory party’s surrender”
2018 “Global Warming Myths, Lies Shot Down By Marc Morano|
Robert the Bruce applies?
Trying and trying again to come clean?
You mean, that despite “believing” the AGW scam…..
… he was still prepared to report on what other real scientists were saying.
So, a reporter, rather than the usual rabid activist !
Actually I don’t think he was a reporter – mostly free-lancing. But no, these were just partisan rants, which I don’t think ever made it in to Reuters. Some more headlines:
1997 “Politicians Outstrip Science In Race To Be Green”
2009 “Latest BBC climate scare story will be wrong, and go uncorrected”
2009 “BBC climate report is balderdash; where is the balance and fairness?”
2009 “Human Production Of CO2 Isn’t Warming The Planet”
2010 “Will the U.S. Congress finally nail climate alarmists?”
2011 “Britain’s Climate Policy Madness Won’t Change The Weather But Threatens Mass Unemployment”
But whatever, it clearly doesn’t fit the WUWT “veteran reporter comes clean on ‘climate change’” narrative.
“Everybody agreed that the climate had warmed over the last 10,000 years “
Say what. !
It warmed at the start of the Holocene, and has been cooling for the last 4000 or so years (neoglaciation), apart for warmer periods through the RWP, MWP and, thankfully, the current slightly warm period.
This underscores that (dated in terms of media, but otherwise on point) quote from Mark Twain –
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”
He assumed “climate change” was true because it was convenient to. He still made an ass out of u and me. Oh, and that “I’m not a scientist” cop-out is classic. You have a brain, don’t you?
aren’t reuters reporters all funded now by climate change evangelists , like the way AP is ?
Oh well, only a few million U.S. families will be displaced in the misunderstanding of the ages.
story tip
Here’s how the $7,500 EV tax credit factors into Tesla’s Mexico plan (dallasnews.com)
Back in the 1970’s, Human-caused Global Cooling was all the rage.
At that time I didn’t know whether these claims were valid or not, but I assumed that shortly evidence proving these claims would be presented by the various climate scientists involved.
And over the years, I scoured each article pertaining to Human-caused Global Cooling looking for the evidence of confirmation of the claim, but there wasn’t any evidence provided, just more claims and assumptions and assertions. Which became extremely irritating as the years passed and no evidence was ever presented.
And that is the way it has been all these years since, whether it was Human-caused Global Cooling or Human-caused Global Warming, the people making these claims have *never* produced any evidence to back up their claims. All they do is make additonal claims. That’s about 50 years worth of unsubstantiated claims about the Earth’s climate.
I think I have seen just about every claim made about human emissions affecting the Earth’s climate, and not one of them has the evidence to substantiate the claims they make.
You don’t really have to spend 50 years studying the subject. All you really have to do is be capable of distinguishing between evidence and what is not evidence, and then look at the climate change claims. None of the claims provide any real evidence. None of them.
This isn’t that hard to figure out. The Climate Change Alarmists have never made their case. Never.
It’s happening. The door has opened just a crack, we need to put our foot in and keep it open. This needs wide distribution. People need to be informed that their political leaders, administrators, bureaucrats, academics, experts, professionals, mainstream media and no nothing activists have been lying to and cheating them for decades. It must stop.
All those that have outed themselves as warmists need to live by their words when the power supplies become limited. AND not be allowed to use generators to keep themselves in power supply, oh what ignore their own diesel or petrol is a pollutant when it suits them.
We have cyclic water heating in australia, must be possible to write a program that blocks water heating to selected homes. Oh dear cold showers will not kill you.
Watch the squealing then.
Husband has a heart condition that he forgets to breathe when asleep, he has a cpap machine, a pacemaker defibulator and latitude that downloads his pacemaker memory to the heart hospital every 24 hours.
I really don’t like to idea of a battery backup in our bedroom, oh well a lot more visits to the heart hospital on the govt’s purse, but at what point does he collapse in a regular power outage because he is afraid to sleep and when he does his defibulator fires off and saves his life again, already has fired off a number of times before severe sleep aponea identified.
We are pensioners living on a govt pension, how in the hell are we going to afford a battery system big enough to power our house.
No!
Politicians and lobbyists see their chances for their highest income levels, luxury and travel to exotic locations through pushing the “
Anthropogenic Global Warming,AGW“, “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming,CAGW“, “Global Warming“, “Climate Weirding“, “Climate Change”, scam.It’s known as riding the climate change green funding trough scam for personal benefit and glory.
Of course, one would think that during 32 years of Reuters science reporting, an alleged journalist would notice alarmists constantly changing their scare porn titles in an effort to keep/increase the continuing scare and demonization of CO₂, carbon dioxide.
If the alleged journalist is serious, then they should be naming names and citing their words/actions pushing the faux climate change messaging.
” I had no reason to think this wasn’t established fact.”
You could have looked at the evidence!!
There NEVER was any beyond coincidence
If Mr. Winton had decided to come forward, say, 15 years ago (before retiring) and published his skepticism on climate change (if he interviewed some skeptical scientists for technical support), he probably would have been fired from Reuters and lost out on years of a lucrative career. That would have been the mark of true courage.
The global warming/”climate change” scaremongers are trying to instill so much fear that people will voluntarily give up relatively cheap and abundant energy for unproven technology in the name of “saving the planet”, and those in government and “green” energy industries will reap tremendous profits while ordinary people shiver and starve. They are willing to pay journalists, many of whom do not have the scientific training to argue the facts, high salaries to repeat the “party line” and label the skeptics as stooges of fossil fuel industries.
It’s probably relatively easy to delude young people into thinking that their elders are “cooking the earth” by emitting CO2 from fossil fuels, because they don’t have long memories. But the debate about CO2 causing global warming was started in the 1980’s, and those of us who were alive back then have noticed that none of their dire predictions have come true, and the actual warming rate is much less than predicted by their models over the past 40 years. Contrary to Al Gore, the Arctic still freezes every winter, Florida is not flooded (lots of people live near the beaches), polar bears are thriving, and world crop yields have been increasing (CO2 is actually helpful for crop yields).
So it’s time for everyone who remembers the 1980’s to tell the younger generation to chill out, the world won’t end in 12 years, and there’s no reason for the USA and Europe (or any other country) to cut back on fossil fuels, because everyone knows that China will keep right on burning coal, so why should we deprive ourselves of cheap energy?
I originally read this story on February 23 at the Daily Skeptic, a most interesting UK website that I look at every day.
When I Covered Climate Change for Reuters I Thought CO2 Was Certainly to Blame for Rising Temperatures. I Was Wrong – The Daily Sceptic
Then I looked at the guy’s own blog
Neil Winton’s Blog, dedicated to the truth about politicsWintonsblog
I’m not convinced he has learned much about climate science.
He has learned about journalism, although too late
He had not looked for alternate opinions as a journalist
Concerning climate science, he apparently moved away from the consensus view that CO2 is evil, to the almost as wrong view that CO2 is not proven to be doing anything. So he has moved from dumb to dumber.
He seems to think that something can not be happening unless proven to be happening by science. That is false.
He does not recognize that the huge range of beliefs about CO2 only means that scientists are not sure exactly what CO2 does. But I estimate that 99.9% of scientists recognize CO2 as a greenhouse gas and more greenhouse gases can affect the climate. Unfortunately, 59% of scientists also believe in CAGW, and that is pure fantasy.
I believe I had an advantage in 1997 when I first investigated climate change. I was working in product development driving a company muscle car burning lots of gas. A leftist friend claimed I was hurting the planet by burning so much gasoline. So I decided to research climate change online in 1997.
I started with early training by the parents not to believe predictions.
Good advice.
I was a libertarian since 1973, so did not trust governments.
I quickly found out that climate always changed, and the coming global warming crisis was just a prediction by government bureaucrat scientists. That was strike one and strike two in my first hour of reading.
I thought the climate predictions were for the next 100 years at the time, not realizing ECS was for 200 to 400 years in the future, which is even less likely to be true.
Then I discovered the ECS prediction was from +1.5 to +4.5 degrees C. per CO2 doubling. A huge range that obviously meant no one really knew the right answer. That was strike three for me.
The coming climate change crisis prediction stuck out in my mind after one hour of study.
And then i developed my fist climate prediction: “The climate will get warmer unless it gets colder”. I have since added that “Winters will be cold and summers will be hot”. I’m not sure anything else needs to be predicted about the future climate.
What the former Reuters reporter has not seemed to have learned yet is that our planet’s plants benefit from more CO2 in the atmosphere, and the side effect of mild global warming has been a net positive too: Most affecting winter nights in higher latitude nations in the Northen Hemisphere.
As a RESULT of climate change in the past 325 years, since the very cold 1690s during the coldest Maunder Minimum decade, the climate of our planet has improved.
What the Reuters journalist still needs to learn is we live in the best climate is about 5,000 years, thanks to climate change. And we should be celebrating today’s milder climate … which is good news, even compared with the colder 1970’s, just 50 years ago.
The Ice Age retreated? We’re in the middle of a two-and-a-half-million-year-old ice age. Guess that was another point they never clarified for him…
Anybody else notice the operative word “worked”? As in past tense?
the mid-1990s, the global warming story was top of my agenda. Already by then the BBC was scaring us saying we would all die unless humankind mended its selfish ways. Carbon dioxide (CO2) was the culprit and had to be tamed, then eliminated. I had no reason to think this wasn’t established fact
Well I’m one paragraph in and it’s not looking good for you.
Why did you have no reason to think that wasn’t fact?
You had no reason to question why CO2 was bad you don’t need to be a scientist to know that plant food isn’t bad.
You said this was your top story did you not do any research did you not listen to any experts?
It took you 32 years to figure this out…LMAO.
That’s not saying much about your critical thinking ability
Neil I don’t have any Illusions or any doubts climate change caused by man is fake 100% contrived CO2 is not a poison it’s plant food we’re actually in a CO2 starved environment it’s only 400 parts per million it used to be 4,000 parts per million and the Earth was a lot more Lush.
Is the earth warming yeah of course it is because we’re still coming out of the little ice age that ended at about 1700 1800.
The sun controls 99% of the weather that is a scientific fact let’s stop dancing around the edges here the New World Order has come up with this hoax to enslave the planet
Nice to see the truth from someone in the centre of the media storm on climate change. Doesn’t happen nearly often enough. Real journalists care about the truth, not the politics.