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No rise in temps or rainfall in Bangladesh for 100 years, despite alarmists pointing to it as ‘canary in the coalmine’

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 28, 2022

The country of Bangladesh is mostly a floodplain. Over 80% of the territory is classified as such, while 75% of the land is less than 10 metres above sea level. Heavy monsoons and widespread flooding are common. In an average year, 18% of the landmass is inundated, a figure that rose to 75% in 1988. What better place for western guilt-trippers to highlight and claim that all the natural tribulations are down to humans changing the climate? And what better ‘poster child’ for grant-hungry activists and local politicians to highlight when demanding large amounts of ‘compensation’ from developed nations to assuage the sins of industrialisation?

Earlier this year, Bangladesh was hit by the regular monsoon rains and flooding. Sky News reported that “experts say that climate change is increasing the frequency, ferocity and unpredictability of floods in Bangladesh”. Needless to say, the BBC made the same point, adding that “experts say that climate change is increasing the likelihood of events like this happening around the world”.

Presumably, when they talk about climate change, Sky and the BBC are worried about flooding being caused by rising temperatures and increased rainfall. It might therefore be considered curious that these climate changes do not seem to have affected Bangladesh.

According to figures compiled for the World Bank, the average temperature in Bangladesh is the same today as it was 100 years ago. There are the usual cyclical changes, but global warming is not much in evidence around the Bay of Bengal.

Let’s try rainfall.

Again according to the World Bank, we see little change in the overall trend going back 100 years. If anything, rainfall has slightly decreased, and there‘s certainly nothing unusual in the recent past. The graph shows that rainfall can vary widely between years. Severe monsoons in the past have caused enormous damage and heavy loss of life. Six catastrophic floods were recorded in the 19th century and 18 in the 20th. These days, hundreds of people can die in the flooding; in the past the figures could run into hundreds of thousands.

In a recent article in Climate Home News, it was said that Bangladeshis were dealing with wave after wave of climate chaos. The article “sponsored” by the international ngo Helvetas told its Western audience that one of the impacts of these disasters is “forced migration”. Of course, this plays into another common climate scare, suggesting, without any discernible evidence, that huge numbers of people will become ‘climate refugees’ in the future, mostly from tropical areas, and inevitably seeking to move northwards to ‘safety’.

Making Bangladesh a poster country for Western Armageddonites spreading the pseudoscientific notion that humans are causing the climate to radically change, does the country few favours. It is sited in many geographically fragile areas, and is prone to tropical cyclones. But over 160 million people are sustained by good agriculture, increased manufacturing development, and economic growth of around 6% per annum.

As countries become more prosperous, they can become more resilient in the face of what nature has always thrown at them. This appears to have happened in the case of Bangladesh, where the number of fatalities from flooding has significantly declined over the last 50 years. Surely, this is the good news story that should be spread in mainstream media, and probably would be if the climate change narrative was not embedded in every part of the discourse.

As we have reported throughout the year, it has been a disastrous period for climate alarmists preaching their gospel of doom to inflict a controlling Net Zero political agenda across the world. Global warming ran out of steam years ago, and no amount of ‘adjusting’ of surface temperature databases can hide that fact. Weather events are cyclical, and attributing any one event to human activity is model-driven junk science. Summer Arctic sea ice stopped declining over a decade ago, but David Attenborough still says it could all be gone by 2035. Polar bears, penguins and coral – all doing nicely thank you. More prosperous and healthier societies are learning to protect themselves against the ravages of Mother Nature. Small increases in carbon dioxide, otherwise known as plant food, continue to green up the planet, leading to higher food yields, reduced famine and healthier eco systems.

December 28, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 1 Comment

Daily Mail Promotes ‘Sixth Mass Extinction’ Scare that Experts Call “Junk Science”

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 24, 2022

The Daily Mail recently published a story claiming the world could face a mass extinction of plants and animals within less than 80 years, with more than a quarter of species dying by 2100. It was an eye-catching headline, timed of course to appear at the same time as the UN’s biodiversity conference. But curiously missing from the article, based on a recent science paper, was a note that most of the data underpinning the eco-scare were created by the authors of the report, while assumptions were made that global temperatures would rise by up to 5°C. Given that global temperatures have risen only 1.1°C over the last two centuries, and over the last two decades probably no more than 0.1°C, this looks a tad on the high side.

The report authors give considerable weight to the view that food chains are fragile in nature, and one extinction leads to another. This may be true in some cases, although most animals in the wild are resilient in adapting their diets to changing conditions. But building a media ‘mass death’ headline surely needs a few actual facts. The authors admit: “Apart from the obvious modelling and computational challenges to incorporate interactions among species, the main reason why there are few studies accounting for interactions is that obtaining sufficient data in most communities is intractable.” They add that an important caveat is that “while our virtual species are functionally realistic, they do not have taxonomic or phylogenetic meaning.” According to the Mail, the scientists aimed to build an “ecologically plausible Earth”.

Modelled results were obtained via a supercomputer assuming temperatures suddenly leap by between 4-5°C in just 80 years. The so-called ‘pathways’ feeding in these huge temperature rises are themselves the product of computers. But reality has started to bite in climate model circles with the realisation that their mock-ups are running far too hot. Four decades of wrong forecasts and the knowledge that global warming went off the boil two decades ago has led to a slight lowering of the various projections. But claiming that a quarter of species could disappear within 80 years as temperatures rise five times more than they have done for the last 200 is just fanciful speculation.

The Mail reported that the scientists’ tool can map extinctions everywhere on earth. It is said to confirm “beyond doubt” that the world is in the throes of its sixth mass extinction.

The sixth mass extinction scare is becoming very popular in climate Armageddon circles. Heavily promoted by the World Wildlife Fund, it has a lot going for it on the propaganda front, although some may quibble that it is notably short on actual proof. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists 823 animals and plant species (mostly animals) that have gone extinct since 1500. If we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, as the Mail reports, we might have expected to be able to name more than 823 extinct species in 522 years.

Five years ago, the eminent Smithsonian paleontologist Doug Erwin dismissed sixth mass extinction talk as “junk science“. He went on to state that “many of those making facile comparisons between the current situation and past mass extinctions don’t have a clue about the difference in the nature of the data, much less how truly awful the mass extinctions recorded in the marine fossil record actually were”.

The Australian science blogger Jo Nova had an interesting take on the latest mass extinction science paper. “So a supercomputer adds up 15,000 webs of low level data on sloths, bark and butterflies, with error bars larger than trends, in systems we don’t understand, and a million lines of code, and extrapolates data up the kazoo – what could possibly go wrong?”

She goes on to quote Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, who has noted that most of the species going extinct, “never existed in the first place”. Moore is another who is underwhelmed by extinction work produced by computers. He is unimpressed by estimates from the biologist Edward Wilson that 50,000 species go extinct every year. This estimate is based on computer models of the number of potential but as yet undiscovered species in the world.

“There’s no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson’s computer at Harvard University. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species,” he wrote.

Finally, let us remember the Bramble Cay melomys, the first animal said to have become extinct due to human-caused climate change. Until recently, this little brown rat lived on a small sandy island off the coast of Australia. How it got there nobody knows, but rats are very resourceful and it probably hopped on a passing branch, said goodbye to a billion of its close relatives, and set sail. It liked its new home since there were plenty of blue turtle and birds eggs to eat. But, alas, its home was only three metres above sea level and the area prone to cyclones (your fault), so one day it got washed away. The Guardian was particularly taken with its sad end since it called for a “moment of silence”, and said it would “continue to fight for the things you believe in” – although presumably not eating blue turtle eggs.

December 25, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | 1 Comment

How Billionaires Fill the Media With Climate Fear and Panic

BY CHRIS MORRISON| THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 20, 2022

The popular prints are flooded with climate and weather misinformation. Net Zero, seen by increasing numbers of people as a looming disaster, is lauded to the skies. Few journalists investigate the ‘unsettled’ science behind unproven claims that humans cause most, if not all, changes in the climate. To point out that there are not enough minerals in the ground to make batteries to power humanity’s basic transportation needs, let alone store the energy required to keep us all alive in the cold when renewables go on strike, is simply not allowed. Needless to say, as we have seen in a number of recent Daily Sceptic articles, this absurd state of affairs is partly the product of a carefully-curated public discourse targeting cash-strapped news rooms and funded by a vast supply of dark, green money.

Recently I reported that the Mirror had run a nonsense story about much of London disappearing beneath the waves within 80 years. I noted that this was not the handiwork of a crack team of investigative reporters, but rather the placed work of a U.S. green activist group called Climate Central. This operation specialises in ready-to-publish climate change material highlighting local landmarks allegedly due to disappear beneath the waves. Similar tactics are used by another activist group spreading fear and alarm called Covering Climate Now (CC Now). This operation is run out of the Columbia Journalism Review in New York, and is backed by the Nation and the U.K. Guardian. Both operations rely heavily on large gifts from Left-leaning U.S. foundations.

CC Now was started in 2019 and claims to feed over 500 media operations with written stories and climate narratives. Its “partners” include some of the biggest names in news publishing such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Agence France-Presse (AFP), CBS News, ABC News and MSNBC News. Leading journals are said to include Rolling Stone, Huff Post and Teen Vogue. The founders seek a “reframing” of the way journalists cover climate change. What this means in practice is amplifying an invented ‘climate emergency’ by constant story catastrophisation, while denying any inconvenient science. The political aim is the promotion of the command-and-control Net Zero agenda.

There is plenty of advice for tame journalists aiming to ramp up climate hysteria. “The fastest way to catch up is to emulate outlets that are already covering climate change well. You can’t do better than the Guardian,” CC Now suggests. But what to do about the problem that paying readers tend to disappear when fed a diet of spun political messages? “Foundations like Knight, Ford, McCormick and Emerson Collective are rightly increasing their support for local news organisations,” it adds.

Relentless catastrophising of individual weather events is the favoured weapon to spread climate fear among the wider population. Using the recent experience of the Covid pandemic, activists have been emboldened to spread panic and alarm in controllable media to achieve their wider political aims. Despite oft-made claims, it is impossible to use models to ‘attribute’ single weather events to long term changes in the climate. CC Now skirts this obvious problem by providing a number of helpful explanations for gullible journalists to copy-and-paste. “Climate change isn’t solely to blame for extreme weather, but… it stacks the deck against us… it’s baked in with our weather and often a key ingredient in the outcome… it supercharges normal weather patterns, like steroids.” Journalists are told to emphasise the human impacts of extreme weather, noting that it affects “the poor, communities of colour, and indigenous groups first and foremost”.

All this sterling work, of course, deserves prizes. The 2022 CC Now Journalism Awards “honoured” writers producing the “strongest coverage of the onrushing climate emergency and its abundant solutions”. Winners are said to have come from the Guardian, AFP, Al Jazeera, PBS NewsHour and the Los Angeles Times. Journalist of the Year was Time Senior Correspondent Justin Worland. The judges singled out for particular praise an article he wrote ahead of COP26 titled, “The Energy Transition in Full Swing. It’s Not Happening Fast Enough“.

Billionaire-run foundations are spending enormous sums promoting junk alarmist science, in addition to funding on-side academic institutions and other influential bodies. Both Climate Central and CC Now are funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, while Climate Central takes support from the Grantham fund. This latter foundation is connected with the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham, and also partly funds three U.K. university institutes. At the LSE, this operation provides material that supports the Net Zero initiatives.

Jeremy Grantham is a long-time promoter of Net Zero and a future based on renewables. But it is not only journalists he has in his sights. Speaking in 2019 to a group of business people in Copenhagen about the approaching apocalypse, he asked rhetorically, “What should I do, you say”? His suggestion: “You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians. I am happy to say we do quite a bit of that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate as long as they are green.”

The science writer and climatologist Dr. Judith Curry has become increasingly concerned about the effect of all this propaganda on children. In a recent essay, she wrote that it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that children are being used as tools in adults’ political agenda surrounding climate change. This is having adverse impacts on the mental health of children, she warned. The apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the climate ‘crisis’ has numerous victims, she added. “Children and young adults rank among the victims of greatest concern.”

Children and young adults are being used as tools in national and international political  campaigns, continued Dr. Curry. “Blaming this unfortunate situation of psychological stress on a changing climate is incorrect, and the use of the situation to achieve political goals is reprehensible behaviour that is acting to reinforce the children’s psychological injuries,” she charged.

Your correspondent’s advice: When you next see an identikit climate Armageddon story in the mainstream media, just laugh. You will be the sanest person in the room.

December 23, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | 1 Comment

Will nuclear fusion power save us?

By Dr David Whitehouse | Net Zero Watch | December 14, 2022

“Nuclear fusion breakthrough,” are the world’s headlines today. Eventually we will have free, pollution-free energy. No CO2 emissions, we will be saved. I have lived with the promise of nuclear fusion all my life and it has always been decades away. It’s become something of a bad joke amongst the science community that fusion is always decades away.

Nuclear fusion liberates energy by combining light atoms – isotopes of hydrogen – rather than by using the radioactive decay of large atoms such as uranium and plutonium – nuclear fission. It could have many advantages; the reaction can be switched off (not possible with fission), it uses water as a fuel and produces very little waste. The question is how do you fuse atoms?

Obviously it isn’t easy. Every star in the Universe generates its energy this way but stars are big and places of great pressure and temperature, unlike the Earth. One way is to generate a hot gas of hydrogen isotopes – 100 million degrees or so – and confine it so that the hydrogen nuclei (for it will be ionised) fuse. The heating is done by microwaves and the confinement by a magnetic field, for anything physical would melt. The problem is that the plasma is unstable and so far the reactions are fleeting.

This is the basis of the major multi-national project to develop fusion, the $22 billion International Thermal Experimental Reactor (ITER)project (China, India, Japan, Korea, Europe, US) which is under construction in France and hopes to start tests in 2035 as part of developing the expertise to build a commercial fusion reactor presumably in the unspecified following decades.

Flash and Burn

Yesterday’s announcement involves a different technique. The US National Ignition Facility focuses a burst from a multitude of high-powered lasers on a grain-sized target that compresses to initiate fusion. The announcement by US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was hailed by the world’s media as a great breakthrough in the developing technique of fusing atoms together, limitless, cheap, green were the adjectives used.

The announcement itself is a puzzle and had the feeling of being some much needed good news to announce. In reality although the experiments referred to took place a few months ago the “breakthrough” results were reported a year ago with the major advance being published in the Journal Nature in 2014. By one analysis 2.05 MJ of energy pumped into the pellet produced 3.15 MJ of energy. This does not include the 322 MJ needed to run the 192 lasers. So the story wasn’t a real breakthrough, just an advance. In any commercial development of this laser technique millions of fuel pellets would be needed for each reactor a year. At present they are tailor-made and cost almost $1 million each.

So why did the story lead some news bulletins? Given the announcement by Granholm it was clearly a story and in the main its coverage was good though some specialist correspondents clearly didn’t know the background and one science editor’s analysis of the event was puerile. I’ll leave it for an exercise for the reader to decide who I refer to.

Green Energy

But should nuclear fusion be part of the green energy debate? It is certainly not going to rescue us anytime soon. But I suppose linking fusion to green energy and the climate debate will help funds flowing.

Some would disagree with me and point to the many small, private companies that want to develop smaller-scale fusion reactors much sooner. They have acquired significant investment, some 30 firms have raised a total of $2.4 billion and General Fusion of Canada says it hopes for a viable reactor in the 2030s. CEOs of such companies see a payoff within a decade but to me it sounds like a sales pitch to attract further investment. Experts will privately say this is very wishful thinking.

In the mid-1990s I gave an after-dinner speech to a society of nuclear fusion scientists. I wondered out loud if the arrival of the first commercial fusion power would be as far in the future as the first hits of the Beatles were in the past. It took 50 years from the steam engine to trains and the same time between the internal combustion engine and cars. Nuclear fusion is a lot more difficult than such simple thermodynamic engines. Perhaps the desire for this energy coupled with advances in artificial intelligence analysis and control systems will speed up its development and the equations of history will be superseded.

A modern society needs high energy density power production systems. Without energy storage renewables are limited. We need fusion energy which has been promised for so long but I think humans will have walked on Mars long before we get commercial fusion power.

Commenter Rick Will says:

They spent $3.5 billion to produce the heating power of 10 grams of coal

They have spent USD3.5bn on the reactor to get a gain of 0.4MJ. Enough to vaporise 100 grams of water. Or equivalent to 10 grams of coal. Baby steps comes to mind. Power was impressive though. It appears the laser is rated at 1PW. Civilisation’s entire electrical generation averages 0.003PW. So the laser would not need to fire often to get a decent power output. But then it only produced a gain [of] 20%. So it would need 5 times the internal generation to that sent out.

I guess they say that these reactions can make big gains once the conditions are right but USD3.5bn to produce what you get out of half a cents worth of coal suggests it is still a big mountain to climb. Maybe within 30 years. Just as the last of the die-hard CO2 demonisers shuffle off.

December 19, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Fake News, Nuclear Power | | Leave a comment

Putin and Modi deepen “privileged strategic partnership” despite Western pressure

By Ahmed Adel | December 19, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently discussed cooperation in investment, energy, agriculture, and transport and logistics. Yet, despite this positive step in relations building, the CIA is attempting to disrupt Russian-Indian relations by implanting fake news, something it has done for the entirety of 2022.

According to a Kremlin statement, Putin and Modi expressed in a phone conversation on December 16 their “satisfaction with the high level of bilateral cooperation that has been developing on the basis of the Russian-Indian privileged strategic partnership.” They also noted the importance of maintaining close coordination on international platforms, including the G20 and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

At Modi’s own request, Putin briefed him on Russia’s policy regarding Ukraine. The Indian leader reiterated his call for dialogue and diplomacy as the only way forward regarding the Ukraine crisis, according to a statement on his official website.

Western media and officials are attempting to link Modi’s call for diplomacy as a potential rift in relations with Putin, but official statements from the Russian and Indian sides make it clear that bilateral relations dominated the conversation and not the war in Ukraine. Despite the facts, it did not stop CIA Chief William Burns from claiming only days later that Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping had impacted the Russian decision on whether to use nuclear weapons or not.

“I think it has also been very useful that Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Modi in India have also raised their concerns about the use of nuclear weapons as well. I think that’s also having an impact on the Russians,” William Burns said during an interview with PBS, adding that he does not see any clear evidence today of Russia’s plans to use tactical nuclear weapons and that it was only intimidation through sabre-rattling.

This comes as Putin acknowledged that the war in Ukraine could continue for a while and said that Moscow will not “brandish” nuclear weapons “like a razor.”

Speaking at a meeting of Russia’s Human Rights Council at the Kremlin, the Russian president said: “With regard to the protracted nature of the special military operation and its results, of course, it’s going to take a while, perhaps.”

He also alleged that the US placed a large number of its nuclear weapons on European soil, while Russia had no such plan to transfer nuclear weapons outside of its territory. Putin also stressed that Russia “will protect its allies with all the means at its disposal, if necessary.”

The Russian president added that his country possesses more modern and advanced weapons compared to other nuclear nations, but emphasised that Russia will only strike with nuclear weapons in response, “That is, when we are struck, we strike in response. But we are not going to brandish these weapons like a razor, running around the world.”

Although it has long been established that Russia never planned to use nuclear weapons on the Ukrainian battlefield, except in cases of retaliation and existential threats, the Western disinformation apparatus, including the CIA, are naively believing that conjuring fake news and attributing them to India can change the facts and reality on the ground – Moscow and New Delhi are seeing a revitalisation in their already strong relations.

None-the-less, there is a medium- and long-term view for the Russian-Indian relationship that obviously goes far beyond the current conflict in Ukraine. For this reason, New Delhi’s long-standing ties with Moscow will not be derailed by Western sanctions and pressure.

Russia has been forced to reorientate its economy towards the Asian region because of Western sanctions, and this presents huge opportunities for India. It was never expected in 2021 that Russia would overtake Iraq and Saudi Arabia to become the largest supplier of oil to India, but as said, Western sanctions have created opportunities for India as Russian crude is now at advantageous prices and terms.

Reuters reported that India purchased about 40% of all export volumes of Russian Urals grade oil transported by sea in November – European countries accounted for 25%, Turkey 15% and China 5%. In November, Russia supplied 909,000.4 barrels of crude oil to India per day, Iraq supplied 861,000.4 barrels and Saudi Arabia supplied 570,000.9 barrels.

Russia has also emerged as India’s seventh largest trading partner, rising from a paltry 25th place. This means that the imbalance in bilateral trade is widening. However, to alleviate this, Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar recently visited Moscow to discuss a list of 500 items that Russia would be keen to source from India. Given the supply chain challenges Russian industry has faced since the imposition of sanctions, Jaishankar reportedly stressed India’s readiness to supply spare parts for airplanes, cars and trains.

In this way, Russia and India work collectively to develop their economies and provide the best opportunities and deals for their citizens. This was once again demonstrated by Modi’s recent conversation with Putin. However, it also shows the desperation the West has in dismantling this relationship, with the CIA chief being the latest protagonist to disseminate fake news, this time by claiming that Modi discouraged Putin from plans to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, plans that the Russian president never had to begin with.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

December 19, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Melting ice brings Chinese threat closer, warns Armed Forces chief

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 15, 2022

image

Melting ice caps will enable China’s military forces to “reach into the Atlantic”, the Chief of the Defence Staff has warned.

At an address on Wednesday, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin urged people to consider what effect climate change would have on the security of the nation.

In his annual Royal United Services Institute address, Sir Tony said: “We also need to consider the melting of the ice caps in the coming decades, which will: unleash a difficult new competition for minerals and resources; halve the time it takes for shipping to travel between Asia and Europe; and surely China’s military forces will start to reach into the Atlantic?”

The High North becoming more open and accessible due to melting ice caps has been worrying military figures for some time.

As the former first sea lord, Sir Tony previously warned that, as the transit time between Europe and Asia inevitably shortens, so too can the West expect to see China sailing its “growing navy” through the shorter route.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/14/chinas-military-could-reach-atlantic-ice-caps-melt-warns-armed/

Chinese ships may be able to sail through the Northeast Passage for a couple of weeks weeks in summer, but would have a job getting back home again through two meter ice:

https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/thk.uk.php

In fact this year the Passage was still blocked as late as mid August, and was blocked again by October.

And none of this is going to change for one very good reason. By autumn the sun in the Arctic is already going down over the horizon. And without the sun, the sea quickly refreezes.

It is absurd to believe that China or any other country would send its navy out into the Arctic Ocean in these circumstances.

Which leads to the question why Tony Radakin is making a fool of himself. The only conclusion I can come to is that he is under orders to play the climate card, so as to scare the public.

December 16, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | 6 Comments

UK admits it sent troops to Ukraine

RT | December 13, 2022

British Royal Marines conducted high-risk operations in Ukraine in April, Lieutenant General Robert Magowan wrote in the force’s official journal. Before Magowan’s admission, Russia’s claims that NATO troops were active in Ukraine had been dismissed by Western analysts and media.

Members of 45 Commando Group of the Royal Marines left Ukraine in January after evacuating the British embassy in Kiev to Poland. However, some 300 members of the elite unit were sent back into the country in April to reestablish the British mission in Kiev, before going on to conduct “other discreet operations,” Magowan wrote in the force’s magazine, according to a report by The Times on Tuesday.

These operations took place “in a hugely sensitive environment and with a high level of political and military risk,” Magowan, who formerly served as commandant general of the Royal Marines and is now deputy chief of Defense Staff at the Ministry of Defense, stated.

While Magowan did not elaborate on what kind of missions the commandos carried out, his statement marks the first time that the UK has admitted its troops conducted special operations in Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense refused to confirm earlier accounts of British special forces training Ukrainian troops in Kiev in April.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has described the conflict in Ukraine as one between Russia and the “entire Western military machine,” and claimed in September that there are entire military units in Ukraine “under the de-facto command of Western advisers.”

Putin’s words were rejected by Western media outlets. “There is no evidence of NATO ground forces participating in Ukraine,” Edward Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute think tank told the BBC at the time. “Nor of NATO commanders directing Ukrainian units on the battlefield. There is also a very low likelihood of this happening in the future as Nato seeks to mitigate escalation risks.”

Magowan’s admission proves Arnold incorrect, but the UK is not the only NATO country to acknowledge the presence of its forces in Ukraine. An unnamed Pentagon official told reporters in October that an unspecified number of US troops were inspecting American arms shipments somewhere within Ukraine.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , | 1 Comment

No evidence of Russia using Iranian drones – Tehran

RT | December 12, 2022

Ukrainian officials have failed to present any evidence suggesting Iranian drones have been used by Russia in the ongoing conflict between Kiev and Moscow, Iranian Defense Minister, Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Ashtiani said on Monday. His words came following a meeting between Ukrainian and Iranian specialists.

“The Ukrainian side did not present any evidence of Russia’s use of Iranian drones in the war with this nation at the technical meeting,” the minister told several Iranian news agencies. According to Ashtiani, the Ukrainian officials then vowed to present such evidence at the next meeting.

According to the general, claims about Russian forces supposedly employing Iranian-made unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in their campaign in Ukraine are based on “baseless statements and rumors.” Ashtiani admitted that Moscow and Tehran had a long history of military cooperation but it was in no way linked to the alleged use of Iranian drones in the conflict.

His words came as the EU was considering a fresh sanctions batch against Tehran, both over its response to mass protests inside Iran and over alleged weapons supplies to Russia.

Speculation that Tehran has been supplying UAVs to Moscow surfaced in recent months after Russia started to actively use kamikaze drones during its military offensive in Ukraine. Kiev and the Western media outlets have claimed that Russia’s Geran-2 drones are actually Iranian-made Shahed-136 UAVs.

Both Moscow and Tehran repeatedly denied that Iranian drones are used in the conflict in Ukraine. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian has confirmed, though, that Tehran did supply a “small number of drones” to Moscow months before the conflict in Ukraine broke out.

December 12, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Russia categorically rejects UK foreign secretary’s claim of military deal with Iran

Press TV – December 12, 2022

The Russian embassy in London has roundly dismissed the “inappropriate statements” of British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, who spuriously claimed Iran was sending armament and munitions to Russia for its military campaign in neighboring Ukraine.

“We categorically reject recent comments by Cleverly, who followed in the footsteps of US authorities and accused the Russian Federation and Iran of some ‘sordid’ deals concerning the Ukraine crisis. The United Kingdom is well aware of the fact that the allegations about Iran’s military supplies to Russia lack any factual basis,” the diplomatic mission said in a statement released on Monday.

“Russia, unlike certain Western governments, is invariably committed to compliance with national legislations as well as international principles as regards its cooperation with third countries,” it added.

The Russian embassy also emphasized that the top British diplomat should be reminded of London’s and its Western allies’ massive military, technical, financial and propaganda assistance to Ukraine when talking about “sordid” transactions between Moscow and Tehran.

The embassy underlined that supplying Ukraine with Western weapons, which is taking place in clear breach of fundamental norms of export control, only led to prolongation of hostilities and an increase in civilian casualties as Ukrainian army forces used the military equipment to launch “de-facto terrorist strikes against civilian targets” on Russian territory.

“We are carefully recording all cases of London’s and its Western allies’ financial and military supplies to the Kiev regime, as well as planned military operations against Russian facilities and military personnel. Such criminal acts will naturally have specific legal consequences for all those involved,” the statement said.

The embassy also drew attention to Cleverly’s “utterly unfounded speculations” that Tehran violated UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorses the 2015 Iran nuclear deal – officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

“If London is really concerned about implementation of the resolution, British authorities should pay meticulous attention to its true violator, the United States, whose unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear deal [in May 2018] has created serious challenges for global security,” the statement added.

Earlier this month, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian rejected claims about the Islamic Republic’s arms sales to Russia to be used in the ongoing war against Ukraine, saying such allegations are aimed at legitimizing the West’s military assistance to Kiev.

In a phone conversation with Secretary General of the United Nations Antonio Guterres on December 2, Amir-Abdollahian said the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine is rooted in the wrong policies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), namely its expansion toward the east.

The top diplomat reiterated Iran’s opposition to the dispatch of weapons to the parties involved in the war which he said would only increase human losses and financial costs for both sides.

He said Tehran would continue its efforts to stop the war and promote lasting peace in Europe.

Both Iran and Russia have repeatedly denied claims that Tehran has provided Moscow with drones to be used in the war in Ukraine.

The anti-Iran claims first emerged in July, with US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan alleging that Washington had received “information” indicating that the Islamic Republic was preparing to provide Russia with “up to several hundred drones, including weapons-capable UAVs on an expedited timeline” for use in the war.

December 12, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | 5 Comments

India denies Western fake news that Modi cancelled meeting with Putin over nuclear warning

By Ahmed Adel | December 12, 2022

According to “people with knowledge of the matter”, Bloomberg reported that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will not be holding an annual in-person summit with Vladimir Putin after the Russian president allegedly threatened to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine. The same article was shared on Twitter by Professor Derek J. Grossman, national security and Indo-Pacific analyst at RAND Corporation, who disingenuously wrote: “India isn’t pleased with Russia.”

But what is the actual truth?

“The relationship between India and Russia remains strong but trumpeting the friendship at this point may not be beneficial for Modi, said a senior official with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue,” Bloomberg claimed on December 9, before adding that Russia’s nuclear warning was a tipping point for India.

However, an Indian government source clarified on the same day to Reuters that the annual in-person meeting between Modi and Putin took place on the sidelines of an international event in September.

In addition, New Delhi-based WION reported that “sources pointed out that plans to hold the annual summit could not materialise in November and December because of the elections in the [Indian] states of Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh.”

“Sources also deny western media reports that the Russian President’s nuclear threat had any role to play in India-Russia Summit not happening…” the report added.

For his part, former Indian Ambassador to Moscow Kanwal Sibal tweeted a response to Grossman, saying: “Article tailored to suit a narrative. India was treating Modi’s bilateral meeting with Putin at the SCO meeting at Samarkand as the annual summit between the two leaders in view of elections in Gujarat in December preventing Modi from visiting Moscow.”

This is not the first case of fake news attributed to India’s position on Russia concocted by Western media. In fact, the majority of 2022 has been defined by Western governments and media making fake claims on India’s relations with Russia, something borne mostly out of the frustration that the world’s second most populous country has deepened its relations with the Eurasian country instead, particularly in the energy sector.

Russia has even offered India help in overcoming the oil price cap being imposed by western countries.

“In order not to depend on the ban on insurance services and tanker chartering in the European Union and Britain, the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Alexander Novak has offered India cooperation on leasing and building large-capacity ships,” the Russian embassy in New Delhi said in a statement on December 9. “In the first eight months of 2022, Russian oil exports to India grew to 16.35 million tonnes; in the summer, Russia ranked second in terms of oil shipments to India.”

Although India calls for peace negotiations over Ukraine, it still has to stand firm in the face of endless Western pressure to end its purchase of Russian oil. New Delhi has not capitulated to Western pressure and continues to stress that it will keep buying oil from wherever it gets the best deal, something that Russia, and not the West, is offering.

“We do not ask our companies to buy Russian oil. We ask our companies to buy oil, what is the best option that they can get. Now it depends on what the market throws up… Again, please do understand, it’s not just that we buy oil from one country. We buy oil from multiple sources, but it is a sensible policy to go where we get the best deal in the interests of the Indian people and that is exactly what we are trying to do,” Jaishankar told parliament on December 7.

It is the very fact that India pursues policies that it perceives to be best for its citizens that frustrates the West and leads them to fake news campaigns in a vain attempt to disrupt Russian-Indian relations. However, this fake news campaign does not change the reality on the ground, such as the fact that three top Indian ministers and officials have visited Russia since the war in Ukraine began —Heath Minister Mansukh Mandaviya, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Foreign Affairs Minister Jaishankar, or that bilateral ties have deepened in the energy sector.

Meanwhile, The Independent reported that Russia in December is on course to become India’s top oil supplier, a move “that will likely undermine the impact of a price cap imposed by G7 countries and their Western allies.”

“Russian crude oil loadings bound for India climbed to the highest level in November as refiners purchased more than 1 million barrels per day (bpd), according to data provided to The Independent by commodities tracking firm Kpler,” the British outlet reported.

Indian-Russian ties continue to deepen despite the West’s immense frustration.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

December 12, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Billionaire-Funded Green ‘Churnalism’

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 11, 2022

Last Tuesday, I reported on the Mirror story that much of London could disappear beneath the water within 80 years. One might suppose that a crack team of investigative reporters had sifted through hundreds of years of meteorological records and consulted numerous scientific authorities to come up with a eureka revelation that Nelson’s Column will disappear beneath the waves before the century is out. Of course, that didn’t happen. The newspaper was simply publishing custom-produced catastrophe copy from a heavily-funded green agitprop operation called Climate Central. Similar climate catastrophe stories are ubiquitous throughout mainstream media, and there are of course serious doubts about many of them, not least because they are designed to promote the Net Zero political agenda.

New Jersey-based Climate Central is open about its mission. Starting in 2008, it notes that it has grown from working with just a handful of media organisations “to collaborating with hundreds and making a mark on thousands”. It boasts of creating “fully produced” stories that “support” countless storytellers and stake holders in media, social media, government, business and NGOs. It specialises in targeting both national and local media with the pictures to tell a climate disaster story – “all for free”. Although it seems to operate mainly in the U.S., a number of local U.K. newspapers have run improbable flood stories suggesting area landmarks will soon vanish.

The operation is well funded and is supported by numerous left-wing foundations, including the Schmidt Family, the Grantham Foundation (active in the U.K. with three university Institutes) and the Hewlett Fund. (A fuller list can be found here.) Eric Schmidt ran Google until recently, and Wendy Schmidt is listed as a founding board member.

It is not just legacy media that’s being targeted. Climate Central runs a unit called Climate Matters that has established close links with American TV weather presenters over the last decade. It is now common for American weather forecasts to include references to climate change. In the U.K., of course, the Met Office needs little help in ramping up fear by directly linking single weather events and trends to long term changes in the climate. But America has many local broadcasting stations all supplying weather information. Climate Matters aims to bring climate change into weathercasting “via local voices highly trusted by Americans everywhere”.

A recent article in the Washingtonian highlighted the work of Professor Ed Maibach in creating a propaganda strategy aimed at U.S. weathercasters. Over a decade, it is reported, he has produced a “weather underground” said to be “a coast-to-coast network of TV weathercasters who believe that educating their audiences about global warming is as crucial as telling them when to bring an umbrella”.

The magazine notes that local news consumers across the country don’t know that behind that telegenic meteorologist is a social scientist and a team of academic researchers, data crunchers and ex-weathercasters, i.e., the staff of Climate Matters. “To a lot of our viewers, it’s lost on them how much Climate [Matters] really is doing,” says Kaitlyn McGrath, a meteorologist at WUSA9. “But it is so far from lost on us.”

Of course, we could ask why newspapers and American TV stations are employing lazy people who just sub the press release, and spout on air pre-prepared green agitiprop (the green equivalent of churnalism). Communicators who fail to investigate the science behind climate change and just accept the unproven hypothesis that humans are solely responsible for any recent warming of the atmosphere are making a very easy living.

The Westminster University economist Dr. Deborah Ancell noted recently in the Conservative Woman that national broadcasters are staffed with journalist advocates, whose exhortations lead to money being wasted “chasing rainbows, pixies and unicorns in fairy dells”. In Dr. Ancell’s opinion, the impact of lazy journalism has contributed to wrecking economies. “The damage includes reducing energy capacity; over-hyping electric vehicles; restricting agricultural production; taxing aviation emissions; operating fraudulent CO2 offset schemes; abandoning fossil fuels and pursuing unachievable Net Zero,” she explained.

Many legacy media brands are dying on their feet, a fate that in time might affect complacent state broadcasters such as the BBC. Needless to say, this state of affairs has not escaped the attention of billionaires looking for suitable recipients of vast quantities of free cash. Just one source, the Gates Foundation, has provided hundreds of millions of dollars to media operations over the last decade.

Last year, the investigative publication Mint Press News (whose account has been closed by PayPal), put the Gates spend on media projects at around $300 million, but noted the amount could be much higher once sub-grants are taken into account. Among the broadcasters receiving money were the BBC ($3.67 million), CNN ($3.6m) and NBC Universal ($4.37m). In the U.K., the Guardian collected $12.95m, while the less well known green, woke blog The Conversation was granted $6.66m. The Telegraph collected £3.45m, but that doesn’t include a recent $2.43m grant for “global policy and advocacy”. In Europe, Der Spiegel ($5.44m), El Pais ($3.97m) and Le Monde ($4m) all received money. Gates has also given money to charities run by media operations, with a massive $53m provided for BBC Media Action. Large grants are also provided for journalistic training purposes. The full list is available here.

Mint Press News looked at 30,000 individual grants and concluded that the Gates Foundation was underwriting a “significant chunk” of the media eco-system. It argued that this caused serious problems with objectivity when it comes to covering subjects close to Bill Gates’s heart, adding that the money spent by billionaires “allows them to set the public agenda, giving them enormous power over society”.

For some inexplicable reason, the Daily Sceptic is not on the Gates handout list. Curiously, the large bung from Big Oil, which many of our social media commentators routinely accuse us of taking, is also notable for its absence.

December 11, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | 1 Comment

Get it Right, Washington Post, Climate Change Isn’t Causing a Decline in Coral Reefs

By H. Sterling Burnett | Climate Realism |November 21, 2022

The Washington Post (WP) published a story detailing how the efforts by a Malaysian “coral gardener,” Anuar Abdulla, to restore coral reefs near his home have resulted in him being consulted on coral restoration efforts globally. Unfortunately, rather than simply delivering well earned praise to Abdullah for his worthwhile efforts, the WP had to turn the story into another in its on-going “Climate Solutions” series, blaming coral decline on climate change. This is false. Some corals have declined in recent years, others have expanded, and new colonies have been discovered. Of those that have declined, there is little support for any link to climate change, and a great deal of evidence pointing to other factors being behind local coral declines.

In the story, titled “One man’s lonely quest to save the world’s corals draws a following,” reporter Rebecca Tan writes:

For nearly four decades, the coral gardener [Anuar Abdullah] worked alone.Abdullah has spent his entire adult life restoring coral reefs, until recently working in obscurity — and at times, in poverty.

In a world rapidly losing its reefs to climate change and to environmental damage, he is now emerging as an increasingly influential expert on how to revive them. Governments and resorts have come calling, asking whether he can help with reefs lost to natural disasters and overtourism.

Tan acknowledges factors besides climate change are contributing to coral decline. She should have explored those in greater detail and left off her misplaced climate change harangue because there is no data to support the claim that long term climate change is causing coral decline.

As discussed at Climate Realism, here, for example, corals are hardy and resilient. The first corals arose during the Cambrian Period about 535 million years ago and the number and type corals increased dramatically more than 400 million years ago, coming into existence when global temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations were much higher than at present. Coral have proved adaptable, expanding their range, evolving, and thriving through periods of higher and lower temperatures than the Earth is either currently experiencing or can be reasonably expected to experience in the foreseeable future.

As discussed in Climate at a Glance: Coral Reefs, coral thrive in warm water, not cold water, and recent warming has allowed coral to expand their range poleward, while still thriving near the equator. Despite bleaching events, coral have expanded their range, and new coral reefs are discovered all the time. Science also shows that scientists have woefully undercounted the number or coral reefs and colonies in existence.

Nor, climate alarmists claims to the contrary, is there any evidence rising carbon dioxide levels are making Earth’s oceans and seas acidic. Since the oceans and seas are not becoming acidic, it is impossible for “ocean acidification” to be harming coral colonies.

If not warmer waters or ocean acidification, what factors are likely to have driven coral bleaching events in recent years. Tan named two of the culprits: natural disasters and overtourism. As explained in multiple Climate Realism posts other factors that have caused temporary or permanent damage to some coral colonies in various locations include: fishing and coral harvesting; coastal development and associated siltation and pollution; agricultural runoff; and pollution tied to sun block used by swimmers. While rapid influxes of warmer waters from natural shifts in ocean currents have caused temporary bleaching events on occasion, experience shows most coral recover from such events and multiple studies show corals can and do adapt to the gradual long-term pace of global warming.

Coral reefs are critical to ocean biodiversity. The world should be grateful for Anuar Abdulla’s efforts to restore coral reefs. He deserves all the praise he receives for this work. However, looking at coral reefs more broadly, in order to help coral reefs recover or make them more resilient to harmful impacts, one must first accurately identify the causes of their decline. The Washington Post, for the most part failed here. Because climate change isn’t harming coral reefs, trying to protect coral health by fighting global warming is a misplaced effort. Resources spent there, could be better applied to reducing or mitigating the true causes of coral losses—which, of course, is precisely what Abdulla is doing on a case by case basis.

December 5, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

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