Yes, global warming “is just propaganda”

Worldwide interest in my quite run-of-the-mill comment, on the need to debate the manmade global warming hypothesis, is pleasing but not surprising. It confirms that my fellow science writers have miscalculated badly. Most readers don’t want endless scare stories about climatic doom, accompanied by authoritarian lectures about their carbon footprints. They’re hungry for a variety of opinions.

Unfortunately only 1% of the huge number of articles on climate change in the posh London newspapers deviate from the official line of the Intergovernmental Panel. That’s not my reckoning. It comes from researchers at Oxford University who complain about the more balanced reporting in the not-so-posh papers, with a deviancy rate of 23%. They say it has ’skewed public understanding of human contributions to climate change’. In other words, kindly abandon the journalistic principle that different points of views should be heard on controversial matters, or else a lot of dreadful people out there (you or me) may not truly believe that climate change is their fault.

Yes, you’ve got it. Man-made global warming is just propaganda. My father Ritchie Calder was a science writer too, but during the Second World War he played a leading part in Allied propaganda against Nazi Germany. He told me quite a lot about the tricks, employed in what was then a good cause. Now I watch them being used every day by the global wamers.

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For example: exaggerate small facts. A brilliant wartime example came when someone in occupied Belgium was chalking V on public walls. He meant V for Vrijheid, or freedom. But London announced that in occupied Europe people were writing V for Victory everywhere. So people listening secretly to the BBC went out and did just that, to annoy the Germans and hearten their neighbours.

The polar bears qualify as a similarly astute exaggeration from the global warming camp. Some years ago, a small family of bears was caught in a violent storm, and drowned. That could have happened a hundred or a thousand years ago. But no, the Disneyesque sob story is put about, by Al Gore and others, that bears are drowning because the Arctic ice is melting. Total rubbish, because the polar bears are thriving. But it’s dazzling propaganda.

Another technique is to hush up unfavourable news. In wartime that can mean not informing even the bereaved relatives if an important warship has sunk without the enemy knowing. Again the polar ice provides a modern parallel. Last year you were told – shock, horror! — that Arctic sea ice was at its lowest extent since satellite measurements began. What went unreported was that Antarctic sea ice was simultaneously at a record high. The collusion of my fellow journalists in the deception is disturbing. Although the big freeze in Antarctica was plainly announced in a press release from the US weather bureau, NOAA, not a single newspaper in North America or Europe carried this unfavourable story.

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