The 'misinformation' misinformation campaign which misinforms
A well-paid bunch of green-blob weirdos, with connections to the BBC has been appointed as our censor, and has decided what we can and cannot say on the Internet
Look how panicked this strange £5million/year outfit is by people having a different opinion.
They don't seek to counter what they call 'misinformation' through debate -- nor even *dialogue* -- but by smear-mongering and intrigue.
It's a strategic blunder.
They're adamant that "Tactics have pivoted from outright climate denial to attempts to frame climate change through a culture wars lens". But sceptics have been consistent in arguing that the issues are the costs of policies: jobs, money, freedoms &c &c... NOT culture war stuff.
It is the likes of ISDglobal’s framing that has shifted to 'culture wars', because it's a convenient peg on which to hang the issue, and by which to belittle dissenting opinion as a skirmish in a broader social phenomenon, that resonates with their analysis and remit.
I.e., if you can say that people who object to wind farms are just the expression of the 'far right', then you can smear them with impunity rather than answering their material claims about the problems of interruptible and non-dispatchable forms of power.
In this way, you see, clever climate sceptics can "prey on existing divisions or conspiracies".
It's a conspiracy.
Because nobody can have a *genuine* reason for objecting to any part of the climate agenda, from The Science through to the policy...
See for yourself... The ISDglobal's own analysis is a conspiracy theory...
According to Jennie King from the think tank ISD Global, this discrediting of renewable energies is a "key line of attack for those keen to preserve reliance on, and subsidies for, oil and gas".
The notion that anyone might have a genuine objection is ruled out... by the ISD's and the BBC journalists' *own* bad faith.
According to researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank that researches global disinformation trends, some anti-lockdown groups have become polluted by misleading posts about climate change being overplayed, or even a so-called "hoax" designed to control people.
"Increasingly, terminology around Covid-19 measures is being used to stoke fear and mobilise against climate action," says the ISD's Jennie King.
She says this isn't really about climate as a policy issue.
"It's the fact that these are really neat vectors to get themes like power, personal freedom, agency, citizen against state, loss of traditional lifestyles - to get all of those ideas to a much broader audience."
If the nature of the debate *has* changed in recent years, as the ISD resident idiots claim, then it might have less to do with a 'pivot' to the culture wars than the development of climate policy...
Since #NetZero, the government and the CCC have been forced to put more flesh on the bones, so to speak, of what had until then been only targets.
It is only since the most recent government that policies such as the abolition of ICE cars and the gas boiler have been announced.
That is to say that the climate debate (such as it was) until 2019, was almost entirely abstract, apart from somewhat geeky discussions about the energy market.
No government had explained to the public what the climate agenda would require from them.
That is what has changed.
The government and the broader political establishment and blobs became both frustrated with the slow pace of climate policy, but were acutely aware that they had not brought the public with them on their own journey to ecological utopianism. A democratic deficit was now obvious.
Coincidentally (or not), the Brexit referendum and the election of Trump caused a shock to cosy political consensuses that had developed in the categorically post political, post-democratic era.
And that is why the ISD et al want to claim meat-and-potatoes political issues are mere skirmishes in 'culture wars'.
They are categorically anti-democratic.
If you believe otherwise, check out my author archive at Spiked. Tell me that you can detect a "pivot" in the themes in my writing. I have argued from the outset that politics hides behind "science".
And check out my blog. I have argued the same there: that green ideology needs to be interrogated, rather than 'the science' taken at face value.
Organisations such as the ISDglobal have very little to say for themselves in *actual* debate. They are terrified of it. But there are very many of them, and they have vast funds and resources. Shame on the BBC.
Put brutally simply... The ISD is how we can know that climate change is bullshit, even if it's real.
And this is just one of the many consequences of Strategically Avoiding Dialogue...
The BBC and ISDglobal, using cash from cabinetofficeuk and billionaires, try desperately to make equivalents of jihadi terrorists and people who think that wind turbines are a bad idea. But such obvious propaganda falls on its face. Me in spikedonline.
Here's one BBC article, which uncritically reproduces the ISD's claims, as though it was an authority to be deferred to, not a political campaigning organisation.
According to researchers at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank that researches global disinformation trends, some anti-lockdown groups have become polluted by misleading posts about climate change being overplayed, or even a so-called "hoax" designed to control people.
Here's the ISD's "analysis", which claims that "climate lockdown" was nothing more than an "innocuous phrase", which has been twisted beyond recognition, by "far right" anti-vax conspiracy theorists who are "pivoting" from covid denial to climate denial.
The ISD's report explicitly refers to an article by UCL researcher, Mariana Mazzucato as an example of this "innocuous" use of the term "climate lockdown". But what did she actually say? She explicitly argued for *radical* political changes..
The ISD claim that this "is ‘a case study in how any message can be seized upon by reactionary media and adapted to serve an existing political framework".
But Mazzucato's argument was not "innocuous" was not just "any message".
She used the term "radical" herself.
And "radical" in the sense here was, by implication and context precisely as *radical* as lockdowns -- arguably one of the most radical peacetime policy innovations in the world's history.
It was not 'deniers' or the 'far right' that were 'pivoting' from covid to climate...
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue admits to funding from a constellation of state actors and private interests. Yet it also claims to be "fiercely independent".
That cannot be the case.
And its claims to be "powering solutions to extremism, hate and disinformation" seems equally tenuous... Here, ISD admit to "partnerships" with the European Climate Foundation, Greenpeace and Desmog -- arguably *the most* conflicted green organisations...
In case you don't know, the ECF is the funder of the vast majority of climate lobbying in the UK. It channels tens of £millions per year from conflicted hedge fund managers, billionaires and corporations into green organisations. There would be no green movement without them.
And in case you don't know, Desmog is the green PR outfit established by a convicted money launderer, to smear any critics of climate policies. It's low-rent stuff.
The BBC should be *investigating* the ISD and its weirdo 'partners', not reproducing their work without question.
So why is the BBC uncritically reproducing such absolute bullshit as "news"? Well, the answer is that the BBC is not one single entity, but a number of organisations.
The BBC World Service receives hundreds of £millions from the UK government to project "soft power" globally. That's *propaganda* to you and I.
There is also the "charity" arm of the BBC, BBC Media Action. Both of these arms, since the events of 2016, have put "countering misinformation" in their mission statements.
Put simply, the BBC's understanding of the problem is that since "False and misleading information divides societies", all that needs to happen to make a harmonious society is for one story to prevail, whether or not it is right. So it uses its power to dominate the narrative.
The BBC's 'Reality Check' 'BBC Trending' and 'Misinformation' strands are produced by the World Service and Media Action. And that's how it can get away with producing such obvious BS with zero regard for normal standards of 'journalism'. This is simple propaganda.
The BBC, its arms and its defacto partners such as the ISD and its government and private backers do not believe that the public should be free and able to take part in debates and decision making about the management and direction of society.
Might is right.
They believe that they, and they alone have the monopoly on truth, and that it is not for you, I, or anyone outside their sphere to challenge official narratives.
And so journalism dies.
"Fact checking" and "countering misinformation" are to journalism as a baseball bat is to epistemology. Discovering truth is often an adversarial process. In science, in law, and in democracy, and in academe, people disagree. But disagreement has become politically inconvenient.
So, many £millions -- likely £billions -- have been pumped into aligning institutional muscle against disagreements with a political agenda. The BBC is using its muscle against debate, democracy and actual journalism.
The BBC's arms claim to uncover and expose conspiracy theories. But on their journey, they invent conspiracy theories.
They claim to counter 'misinformation', but in their desperation, they create, reproduce and transmit it.
This BBC article yesterday added to the litany of terrible things that are happening because of global warming.
Climate change causing albatross divorce, says study
When relationships end it might be because the spark has disappeared, or maybe you just can't make time for one another.
But can climate change cause break-ups?
It might do, according to a new study which suggests albatrosses - some of the world's most loyal creatures - are "divorcing" more.
Man-made climate change is killing off the birds, right?
The BBC claimed
The research comes as many international albatross populations are in trouble.
Some data from 2017 suggests the number of breeding pairs of the species are a little more than half of what they were in the 1980s.
How awful, right?
The BBC article was based on this research published in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "Environmental variability directly affects the prevalence of divorce in monogamous albatrosses" - as the sea gets warmer because of us, more birds suffer.
Here's their data... On the left you can see the divorce rate over time. And on the right you can see how well temperature correlates with sea surface temperature. But what *can't* you see?
You can't see this, which is a chart that shows sea surface temperature anomaly over time.
It shows that the seas were getting colder, not warmer, if they were changing temperature at all.
Albatross monogamy may be sensitive to sea temperatures, but not to "climate change".
Shame on the BBC, RSPB and royalsociety for such obvious bullshit.
If they had showed the chart that showed sea surface temperatures around the population study, then they would not have been able to make the link that created the headline. That's shoddy science, shoddy journalism, shoddy conservationism.
For clarity - I had to assemble the chart from their data - it's NOT included in either the BBC article nor the article in the journal.
I'm also not wholly convinced by this test of 'correlation', which is used to imply causation.
It seems much denser in the centre and sparse at the sides, which may be the natural way of things, but might be coincidence. Notice that the warmer years 04-06 are on the right.
This sort of thing has been a constant throughout the climate wars. Here's an old post on the subject of population decline, from the archive...
And here's another one, again featuring the RSPB and BBC, working together to weave a false climate narrative.
Some commentators have recently demonstrated their total confusion about what motivates these responses to the policy agenda, NGOs, the BBC and institutional science, including it seems, NGO policy wonks and BBC staffers...
They have drawn complex maps of interactions between people who have unauthorised opinions. They have developed detailed conspiracy theories about who may be behind such rude failures to defer to authority. And they have proposed complex theories about psychological motivations.
Let me offer a much more simple explanation to those people. I make no claim about my work being the final word on any subject. But what I can see is that your work is absolute dogshit, that it drives a political agenda, and indeed is driven by a vast fund from special interests.
In other words... Physician, heal thyself. If you don't like your work being criticised, stop producing such easily debunked bullshit -- propaganda passed off as 'science' and 'research'.
As to what I get out of it... Less than nothing. It has cost me.