Marco Silva is taking time out from his role as a senior reporter for BBC Verify specialising in ‘climate disinformation’ to enrol on a six-month course at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN), a green activist operation funded by billionaire foundations promoting the collectivist Net Zero project. Past direct funders of this course include the Laudes Foundation and the European Climate Fund, the latter heavily supported by Extinction Rebellion funder Sir Christopher Hohn. Also signed up for the course is Mora Morrison, a BBC World Service producer.
I guess the cat’s out of the bag…
In January, I’ll be joining the Oxford Climate Journalism Network🌍 Super excited about it! https://t.co/yTLNmM00YE— Marco Silva 🌍 (@BBCMarcoSilva) December 7, 2023
The OCJN runs what is described as an intensive programme for about 100 journalists/activists around the world. Participants can expect to be immersed in the correct political narrative surrounding climate collapse, the so-called ‘settled science’ and the need for extreme Net Zero measures, whatever the economic and societal cost. A flavour of the echo-chamber discussions can be gleaned from past essays produced by ‘alumni’, which include titles such as ‘Journalists should help audiences understand extreme weather – even when they lack climate data’, ‘To report fully on climate change, journalists need to integrate indigenous knowledge into their coverage’, and ‘Newsrooms should develop a mental health strategy to help climate journalists cope’.
Marco Silva should enjoy his time confirming his climate science priors. He has a keen nose for what he calls ‘disinformation’, basing his work on what he deems to be the authority of 99.9% of scientists who say humans are primarily responsible for the current warming of the climate. This is provided as a reason for not hearing from the “other side”. The ongoing scientific process, alas, seems to play little part in the BBC’s Net Zero agitprop. Alas, again, Silva seems unaware that the 99.9% consensus claim that he holds to be true is the creative work of cream pie thrower and green activist Mark Lynas. This work was demolished recently in a paper led by the chemistry and physics professor Yonatan Dubi. He found that massive flaws and biases riddled Lynas’s work, implying the conclusions of the study do not follow from the data. In fact, looking at the data presented by Lynas, Dubi concludes that the actual number of scientists agreeing with human-caused warming may be on the “low side”. A previous 97% consensus claim has also been widely debunked, with former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) author Professor Richard Tol saying that the climate community still has a long way to go in weeding out bad research and behaviour.
None of these issues need bother the hundreds of journalists now passing through the hands of the OCJN. Started last year, it is part of the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford. The Reuters Institute is backed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and numerous green billionaire funders including the Laudes Foundation, the European Climate Foundation (backed by Sir Christopher Hohn’s Children’s Investment Fund Foundation) and the Knight Foundation. During 2022-23, funding of “over £1 million” was received from the Google News Initiative and Meta Journalism Project.
At the OCJN, the Advisory Board is dedicated to “improving the quality and impact of climate change journalism worldwide”. Again, careful curation is evident in its goal to “establish connections between the Network and leading organisations and ideas in the world of climate journalism, climate science and climate policy”. Members include OCJN co-founder Wolfgang Blau, who’s also an adviser to the United Nations Climate Change Division and a trustee of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation; Dr Fatima Denton, a co-ordinating author for the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report; Aldine Furio, the Strategic Communications Director, Europe, at the European Climate Foundation; Leo Hickman, the Editor of Carbon Brief, an activist blog funded by the European Climate Foundation; Dr Radhika Khosla, contributing author to the IPCC; and Catrin Thomas, who helps the Laudes Foundation to “catalyse broad impacts through the development of external relations”.
Marco Silva claims that he is investigating and debunking bad information about global warming. “Not everything is what it seems,” he tells us. “Bad actors can be incredibly clever in the way they try to manipulate our knowledge and perception of climate change. Don’t rush, take your time to dig deeper, and dare to ask: why is this narrative being shared? Where does it come from? Who stands to benefit from it?”
Perhaps he might care to put those last three questions to the well-funded organisers of his sabbatical over the next six months.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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So, Big Green Billionaires are teaching BBC reporters the fine art of spreading disinformation. I thought the Beeb had already known how to spread disinformation. I guess a paid junket with Big Green Billionaires is hard to pass up though. Might get to visit Epstein’s Island
From the BBC Conflict of Interest Guidelines:
“15.3.7 People involved in making or presenting content for the BBC risk compromising the integrity of their BBC output – and damaging their own reputation – by off-air involvement in inappropriate commercial interests.”
Do you think all of Mr. Silva’s future climate reporting will include a disclosure that he has been wined, dined, and “educated” by the Big Green Billionaires?
The first question a legitimate reporter / journalist should ask themselves when considering this course is –
“Am I signing up for a group-think session where nobody dares ask searching questions?”
As the result of WUWT guest poster Eric Worrall’s May 2022 piece featuring the BBC’s Marco Silva (“Claim: ‘Climate Doomism’ Sweeping the Climate Activist Community“), I emailed Silva directly to ask him if he’s ever polled the ‘doomer’ mob to find out if they have the first clue that skeptic climate scientists exist. Silva does answer his emails, I can vouch for that firsthand. I can also confirm that he does not answer questions on the opportunity to find out just how well-informed the doomer mob is, and he completely sidesteps answering if it’s plausible that the BBC will fire him if he dares to do such polling or if he brings up any aspect of the skeptic side of the issue at all in his articles.
He is absolutely right that the BBC will fire him if he acts in that way, the BBC has been told by the Goverment that the science is settled and the sceptic arguments are not allowed.
“So, Big Green Billionaires are teaching BBC reporters the fine art of spreading disinformation.”
Exactly. And the Leftwing billionaires are paying the reporters handsomely to write things the billionaires want them to write.
The Leftwing Billionaires are promoting and paying for the human-caused climate change narrative, that leads to more power, influence, and money for themselves.
Nah! The Eurotoff got them that little island off the French coast. you know, the one where the inmates from the reform school reported the Police Chief hosting parties with politicians, diplomats, young boys…
I’ll put good money that the curriculum will have zero exposure to any dissenting research. This reporter is headed to a Stalinesque youth camp to learn about the virtues of communism.
After every speaker- everyone in the audience will clap in unison, as happens in the phony parliaments in Russia and China and North Korea.
and the US Congress.
Not exactly – this Congress can’t do anything in unison.
I hope Mr. Silva is not the first person to QUIT clapping.
I doubt he would fare very well in the work camps.
Greetings from Goebbels, founder of the Reich Press School
Joey Biden would say that they are being taught how to report the right way…..the right way is the Left way.
I do think that our enemies are starting to get desperate about their scams being exposed.
Trouble is they’re not our enemies – if they were they’d likely be easier to identify. These delusional and easily-manipulated idjits are much the same as us, aside from the delusions and being manipulated of course. Our ‘enemies’ are the ones taking advantage of the idjits selusions and are the ones doing the manipulating.
I can’t agree with “These delusional and easily-manipulated idjits are much the same as us,”.
Those of us here actually do research, probably on about everything we hear that sounds even a little off.
What search engine do you use, because Google has shown duck-duck-go the road to hell, and now everything is as propagandist as Google. (try ddg to look for Soros’ sins. Nothing!)
Besides, after many arguments here, overwhelming evidence shows that the results of our research somehow always confirms our own bias. Or at least that bias our betters say we should have.
“Our ‘enemies’ are the ones taking advantage of the idjits selusions and are the ones doing the manipulating.”
That would be the radical leftwing billionaires.
They want to be in charge of running the world the way they see fit, and human-caused climate change is a perfect vehicle for attaining their goals. So they spend a lot of their money on it, subjecting the rest of us to climate change hysteria on a monumental scale.
The radical leftwing billionaires want to control the rest of us and this is how they try to do it. They pose a great danger to the personal freedoms of those who are not radical leftwing billionaires.
While I think you’re right they have Plan B scare campaigns-
Humanity is facing a freshwater crisis but it can be stopped if we act now (msn.com)
and Plan C-
Sand shortage: The world is running out of a crucial commodity (cnbc.com)
etc to fall back on
From the above article:
“The OCJN runs what is described as an intensive programme for about 100 journalists/activists around the world. Participants can expect to be immersed in the correct political narrative surrounding climate collapse, the so-called ‘settled science’ and the need for extreme Net Zero measures, whatever the economic and societal cost.”
Other, more rational observers rightfully conclude this “programme” is nothing more that an a CAGW alarmist cluster f**k.
Personally, I would NOT welcome be immersed in a “correct political narrative” . . . but that’s just me.
I wish Alex Epstein would crash the party- wearing his shirt that says “I love fossil fuels”. I consider him a hero.
You’d want Alex but the Left wants Jeffery
Was that Jeffery Dahmer?
Well, yesssss.
I don’t ‘buy’ that this is some sort of happy holiday jollification he’s going on.
i.e. He’s not been pulling his alarmist weight at BBC and, the real killer, they’re now finding it difficult to replace him with folks who will.
He’s being recycled or ‘re-purposed’
He’s been with the BBC for 2 years and 4 months and is now a ‘Senior Journalist’ – I don’t think he’d be so very difficult to replace.
Are you implying the worthy gentleman is being sent to Corrections Camp?
How quaint and Sovietish, eh what?
” immersed in “
Reminds me of the Smothers Bros song: Chocolate
A humorous song about a man who fell into a vat of chocolate and how he reacted.
Tom Smothers died Tuesday at the age of 86.
R.I.P.
“… Whatever the economic or societal cost.”
Personally, I would NOT welcome be immersed in a “correct political narrative”
That’s because you have a serious conflict of interest. You’ve been irrevocably corrupted by science and the scientific method.
Just so.
“Participants can expect to be immersed in the correct political narrative surrounding climate collapse, the so-called ‘settled science’ and the need for extreme Net Zero measures, whatever the economic and societal cost.”
wow, a super intense brain washing session!
somebody should spike the refreshments with some LSD- then they’ll find other things to focus on 🙂
What was that song by Simon & Garfunkel?
“The Big Green Pleasure Machine”
Heck, I am still waiting for the Big Green Blob to start emulating a different Simon & Garfunkel masterpiece … The Sound of Silence.
I can think of a few more: “Bridge over boiling water”, “A hazy shade of warming”, “Hellfire bound”, “The only living boy in New York.”
😄😄😄😄 very clever Richard
The perceived need for this is another sign that alarmists are losing and skeptics are slowly but surely winning.
The alarmists have committed several unforced errors recently.
All pain for no gain (because China and India won’t play) is not a viable strategy.
“All pain for no gain (because China and India won’t play) is not a viable strategy.”
It certainly seems like a viable strategy to me … for China AND those receiving under the table payments from China!
China’s and India’s (and many others) refusal to embrace Net Zero means New Zero is not going to happen.
Yet Western Democracies hang on to this failed policy with a Death Grip.
So the Western Democracies continue to destroy their economies trying to attain the impossible: the elimination of oil, coal and natural gas.
The Climate Change Alarmists must continue this charade for various personal reasons. The momentum is huge. It won’t be easy turning this alarmist climate change ship. The only thing climate alarmists can do now is continue heading for the Net Zero rocks. To do otherwise and to change course now is to lose their credibility, their worldview, and the view they have of themselves.
We may have to hit those rocks. We will hit those rocks if we keep going this way.
One must remember the BBC is government funded. Cases such as Missouri v Biden, AKA Missouri v Murthy, show how much parts of the government “encourage” the party line on several subjects.
One must remember the BBC is
governmenttaxpayer funded.One must remember the BBC is funded by extortion.
Fixed!
The UK’s government-funded “news” network is clowing itself, as usual.
Verified Propaganda. !!!
“Marco Silva claims that he is investigating and debunking bad information about global warming. “Not everything is what it seems,” he tells us. “Bad actors can be incredibly clever in the way they try to manipulate our knowledge and perception of climate change. Don’t rush, take your time to dig deeper, and dare to ask: why is this narrative being shared? Where does it come from? Who stands to benefit from it?”
“Perhaps he might care to put those last three questions to the well-funded organisers of his sabbatical over the next six months.”
I would add a forth question, “Just what did Michael Mann mean by ‘The Cause’?”
“The Cause”
Good question!
And they should discuss the “hide the decline” Climategate conversation. What were these temperature data mannipulators conspiring to hide from fellow scientists and the public?
And, “what about the blip?”.
We’re having fun with this, but this group funded by radical leftwing billionaires wouldn’t touch Climategate, or the questions posed, with a ten-foot pole. Propagandists are not about the truth.
Has Marianna Spring been unverified?
Now that is funny
Yet another Climate Crisis Propaganda News Cabal….terrific — just what we needed.
You would think that if it was a matter of journalism, journalists would simply gather data and report it — who what when where (and how).
They wouldn’t need special coaching on how to report the issue.
Can you imagine how should react to something like “Oxford Anti-Conservative Journalism Network” offering training to “what are supposed to be neutral” journalists on how to attack any and all things Conservative. (or reverse it: attacking progressives, republicans,democrats, or any other entity).
Are journalists supposed to be neutral? Are members of any vocation supposed to be neutral?
Yes, journalists are supposed to be neutral when reporting:
Sadly, this is no longer the case at the BBC
It’s no longer the case with most journalism.
Most journalists today are leftwing propagandists.
I heard a report yesterday on Fox News saying only three percent of journalists identify as conservatives.
The rest are leftwing loons, some who don’t know better, and parrot the radical leftwing narrative, and some who do know better, but parrot the radical leftwing narrative anyway.
Radical leftwing ideology is the problem and that goes for the entirety of the Western Democracies. The radical left is in the process of undermining all our societies and are using an unreasonable, unwarranted fear of CO2 as their vehicle to destroy what we hold dear.
I guess this course is pretty light on partial differential equations.
Hey! No fair. I was eating and nearly choked on this.
Probably not going to get into the relationships between radiation, energy, power, temperature, heat, and entropy, either, I’d bet!
Or convection or affection. Thermodynamics is right out.
Affection ???? . climate science is all about “feelings”.
NIL on any actual science or real data.
I took more than one course on partial differential equations then graduated with an engineering defgree and never used one again.
Don’t rush, take your time to dig deeper, and dare to ask: why is this narrative being shared? Where does it come from? Who stands to benefit from it?”
_______________________________________________________________
U.S. Global Change Research Program Budgets 2021 – 2023 LINK
Who stands to benefit? The people receiving the billions in government funds, see the link above. The government’s budget has increased since Biden took office:
In billions of dollars:
let’s see if I can correct that:
Billions of dollars:
And all that money is taken from taxpayers, either now or in the future.
No, most of it is borrowed. If the US government were required to balance a budget now then it would fall.
Why would journalists need activist training? Gathering information to write articles of interest. has no such requirement. Only writing propaganda does.
Needs six months to acquire more disinformation.
I see this as an opportunity. We need a select panel of good debaters from our side to publicly challenge the graduating class to a CAGW debate.
Lesson one on the course will be how to avoid a debate and answering questions from sceptics
That’s fine force them to say no.
They don’t debate. It would be like challenging the Pope to a debate on whether a god exists. He’d just say “the evidence is all around us and is obvious.”
Today’s young people aren’t being taught critical thinking in school. They graduate high school barely able to read. To governments like the UK’s, that’s a good thing – ignorant 20-somethings are easily controlled.
That’s fine force them to say no.
“Today’s young people aren’t being taught …” Were yesterday’s young taught more? A lot of what I was taught in the 80s and 90s turns out to be nonsense.
In the ’80s and ’90s, high schools taught the basis of critical thinking, which should have given you the skills to assess what you were taught.
Since you now know that much of it was nonsense, apparently you learned those skills. Today’s children are fed propaganda, and according to the green religion, critical thinking is a lot like trying to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. That’s the difference.
To counteract Green Mass Debaters?
This is the sort of REAL SCIENCE information that the BBC-junta will try to block.
Paleoclimate Reconstructions Continue To Document A Much Warmer-Than-Today Holocene (notrickszone.com)
The BBC “disinformation bureau” will be all about putting forward massive amounts of disinformation.
Living in the UK, I find this so sad.
Living in the UK, I find this typical of the BBC.
What’s the “settled science”? The climate is a chaotic system so it can’t be sensibly predicted very far into the future, especially not more than a week or two. Maybe that’s why all the predictions of catastrophic cluimate change going back to Erlich and Co in the 70’s have proven to be so wrong.It’s worse than that, even non-climate predictions about the consequences of climate change have proven wrong eg death of the coral reefs which now fluorish. They have got nothing right. The modelled temperature predictions are overblown massively. Disappearance of Arctic ice was wrong, there are lists of prediction failures everywhere. Climate deaths have fallen 99% in the past 100 years. Theplanet is greening. What we’ve been drip fed for 50 years is pure climate catastrophy propaganda, It’s clearly a narative at best to scare folk with an objective of creating a flat, no growth society with a few hyper rich global leaders and at worse a global death cult. And my BBC licence fee is paying fo the 6 month crapology course. Pathetic.
son of m
A small whine from me, followed by digression into matters not mentioned by yourself.
Climate is NOT the chaotic system. Weather patterns are what is chaotic and change over a week or two. By averaging over 30 years we are attempting to turn the “chaos” into an “average”. This basically is going to result in some reasonable accuracy on a seasonal basis, some accuracy on a monthly basis….really no accuracy on a daily basis….discussion of “climate temperature change” of our approximate 1 degree since the Little Ice Age or beginning of industrialization is ridiculous.
4 degrees in a century WOULD NOT be ridiculous and WOULD BE a cause for alarm.
But where are we really ? We would need roughly about 4 x 400 ppm for a 4 C temp increase (assuming ECS is 2 as several papers recently contend)….present human emissions result in 2 ppm per year increase, so about 600 years from now we would be at 4 degrees…by which time the finding costs of hydrocarbon fuels will have caused humanity to move on to something else….just like they had to move on from flint arrows and bows for alternatives that resulted in better outcomes for the “human effort”, aka “cost”, involved.
But here we are stuck with a bunch of do-gooders trying to accomplish the impossible and the unnecessary by 2100, only 76 years from now, or worse trying to panic the public into believing a 2035 date…..
Yes to all of it.
For example you know something like electrons exist and you know where they might be, but you can’t say exactly where they will be.
I might debate whether NZ is possible by 2100 because, who knows, maybe AI will figure out fusion power in a few decades.
“…maybe AI will figure out fusion power in a few decades.” I doubt that very much – I see statements like ‘AI will figure… all the time attached to problems that people have become too lazy to figure out for themselves. AI is the ultimate in GIGO and is being fed utter garbage – it won’t even be able to figure out what is a male or a female let alone anything complex – it’s a ridiculous and expensive toy that is a complete waste of time.
AI is very good at coming up with reasonable-sounding solutions to anything. It’s a good tool to have around when you’re spit-balling ideas to look into.
It’s when you get locked into the “authority” of an AI-crafted (AI-crafted syntax is almost recognizable on its own) answer that you get into trouble. AI can confidently restate all sorts of garbage. It is programmed to be curated for knowledge, and that curation is low-paid, often young and indoctrinated.
As governments step in to mandate certain specifics (like you can change your 23rd chromosomal pair if you feel it strongly enough – maybe like seeing those Magic Eye pictures back in the ’80s), this will get a lot worse.
DMac, you’re assuming that there is some sort of periodicity or underlying pattern in climate that can be averaged. Take a simple example, the 3 body problem with a fixed point mass and 2 masses moving under gravity. Apart from the centre of gravity which doesn’t move there is no cyclical average behaviour. Taking climate as how weather behaves on average in a particular place, some behaviours will be bounded by conservation laws and a degree of periodicity will occur based on orbital behaviour but local storms,cloud and temperature will be chaotic on a long term basis even if global average temperature rises. Will snow counter polar ice loss? How know? Will sea level rise catastrophically quickly? How know? Will storm damage grow? How know? Measuring helps understand the past but not the future evolution of a chaotic system locally or globally.
From the article: “Participants can expect to be immersed in the correct political narrative surrounding climate collapse”
Yes, that sounds like brainwashing to me.
From the article: “To report fully on climate change, journalists need to integrate indigenous knowledge into their coverage’”
Why?
Because then they can tick another box on the minority/ethnic checklist and then ignore it completely.
I burn to answer, by reminding you that an official (Oxford?) course in Climate Anxiety Psychology, contains a module called ” Archetypal Cosmology”. Are you reaching for a thesaurus yet?
It teaches how the movements and positions of the various planetary bodies influence our emotions…
I bet you now wish it stopped at healing crystals …
Most of us are being bombarded by climate and socialist propaganda against our will. A few are so ignorant of reality as to seek it out.