A recent article in The Guardian, “Change course now: humanity has missed 1.5C climate target, says UN head,” claims that the planet is in grave danger of passing climate “tipping points,” as it is now inevitable that 1.5°C warming will be breached. Although 1.5℃ of warming may be locked in if not already surpassed, the claim that it signifies a dangerous milestone is false. Not only is the tipping points narrative bunk, but there is no evidence that 1.5°C warming is any particular threat. The purported temperature threshhold was chosen arbitrarily and for political reasons rather than scientific ones.
The Guardian’s story focuses on comments made by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, who in advance of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, warned that it is “inevitable” that 1.5°C of warming will be breached, and it will result in “devastating consequences” for the planet. The Guardian says Guterres “urged the leaders who will gather in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém to realize that the longer they delay cutting emissions, the greater the danger of passing catastrophic “tipping points” in the Amazon, the Arctic, and the oceans.”
There is no scientific basis for any so-called tipping points, and claiming otherwise is just fearmongering for political gain.
Beginning with the Amazon rainforest, the location of the next climate summit in November, Guterres reportedly warned that it could become a “savannah,” or a dry grassland. There is no evidence for this absurd claim. Like Guterres’ previous “boiling oceans” comment, it is purely fanciful hyperbole lacking any basis in fact. Guterres is referencing a period of drought suffered by parts of the Amazon basin in recent years, but that drought has not been historically unusual, and the recent localized areas of drought have not been more severe than previous drought periods. As discussed in the Climate Realism post “Media Outlets Continue Spreading False Amazon “Record Drought” Claims,” the Amazon has experienced periods of heavy rain and extended drought in the past that were worse than those we see now. Historic records do not show any worsening of drought in the Amazon. The threat that impacts tree cover is deforestation and clear cutting, not climate change.
The Arctic is also not approaching any dangerous tipping point. Should warming continue, ice extent will likely shrink, but it has not been happening at nearly as fast a rate as alarmists claim. Arctic sea ice extent has been stable since about 2010, indicating a new ice extent regime, and there is no telling how long that will last. If the past is any guide, sea ice might begin expanding again, as it has waxed and waned historically.
Finally, the ocean tipping point Guterres is referring to is the claim that coral reefs will die out as a result of ocean pH changes and higher temperatures, but again, science and paleo-history shows that corals are resilient to changes that are much more extreme than the modest warming of recent decades. As discussed repeatedly at Climate Realism, the world’s oceans are not at risk of becoming acidic and coral reefs are expanding their range and setting records for growth.
It is true that the “1.5°C threshold” is likely to be passed. But that does not mean anything, certainly nothing catastrophic. The 1.5°C warming limit was already passed in 2024 because of the El Niño conditions—with no cataclysm. This should not be of concern to anyone, because that limit is not a scientifically established value. The Guardian fearmongered about it in the past, which Climate Realism addressed here, and seems to have learned nothing. The 1.5°C number was arbitrary; established by an 11 member German political advisory board containing only one meteorologist. It is not a hard scientific threshold the way the boiling point of water is, though alarmists inappropriately treat it that way.
Guterres’ comments are not based on science, data, or even history. He is simply attempting to worry the public, with The Guardian’s complicity, in order to gain political leverage for negotiations at COP 30 even as a growing number of countries are downplaying climate concerns in the realistic assessment that other issues are more pressing and fossil fuels, for now, remain vital to prosperity.
Multiple mainstream media outlets published stories this week uncritically publicizing the claims of a climate change interest group, Climate Central (CC). According to CC, climate change has caused higher weather disaster costs in the United States this year than ever in history – or at least since 1980, which is as far as the records CC uses go back. These claims are false. While the costs of extreme weather events and wildfires were high in early 2025, there are no trends that indicate climate change is responsible. Rather, higher populations, increased development in disaster prone areas, poor water management, and human evil in the form of arson, were the cause of the abnormally high disaster costs.
The tenor of The Guardian, NBC, and other outlets covering CC’s disaster cost report was nearly universal. Climate change resulted in worse weather disasters and higher costs in early 2025 than ever before, a fact that would have been missed absent CC’s work since President Donald Trump cut funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program, which has previously monitored such costs.
Per The Guardian :
The first half of 2025 was the costliest on record for major disasters in the US, driven by huge wildfires in Los Angeles and storms that battered much of the rest of the country, according to a climate non-profit that has resurrected work axed by Donald Trump’s administration that tracked the biggest disasters.
In the first six months of this year, 14 separate weather-related disasters that each caused at least $1bn in damage hit the US, the Climate Central group has calculated. In total, these events cost $101bn in damages – lost homes, businesses, highways and other infrastructure – a toll higher than any other first half of a year since records on this began in 1980.
As NBC News wrote:
The first half of this year was the costliest ever recorded for weather and climate disasters in the United States, according to an analysis published Wednesday by the nonprofit organization Climate Central.
It is information that the public might never have learned: This spring, the Trump administration cut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program that had tracked weather events that caused at least $1 billion in damage. The researcher who led that work, Adam Smith, left NOAA over the decision.
To be clear, Climate Central is not an objective authority on the causes and consequences of climate change, or a neutral party regarding proposed solutions. Rather, it was created and exists solely to produce and promote material blaming human activities for causing climate change resulting in catastrophic consequences that threaten human life, and to promote government enforced solutions that limit fossil fuel use.
Leaving aside the motives of the organization that produced the report, the news coverage of the report was inaccurate from the start. The stories ignore the history of natural disasters in the regions that have been impacted this year, the demographic changes that have resulted in the higher costs, and, most importantly, the lack of any long-term discernable changes in weather patterns and the incidences and severity of extreme weather events for the areas affected.
Looking at where the disasters occurred in the first half of this year, from CC’s own tracking we find the weather events were tornadoes that occurred during typical tornado season stretching from Texas through the plains to the upper mid-west. This area of the country is commonly referred to as “tornado alley” because such events are so common there during the spring and early summer. So, nothing unusual there. What critically undermines the CC report and the media’s suggestion that the rising cost of tornadoes is due to climate change is the fact, as explored in Climate Realism, here, here, and here, for example, that neither the number, frequency, nor severity of tornadoes has increased as the Earth has slightly warmed.
Other events include flooding in areas of the country historically known for spring flooding as a result of snowmelt and severe spring snowstorms – many of the areas are popular riverfront towns or communities. Climate Realism has repeatedly debunked media claims that flooding is getting worse – data show it isn’t. If flooding is not becoming more frequent or severe, climate change can’t be causing higher costs related to flooding.
Finally, more than 60 percent of the $101 billion disaster costs that CC says resulted from climate change altered weather events are attributable to just a single event: the January 2025 wildfires that decimated a large swath of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles fires were horrific, of a kind not experienced there in recent history, but not unusual historically. The huge damage was a result of a combination of factors, good seasonal rainfall in recent years creating lush natural growth combined with and regular lawn and tree watering in wealthy enclaves, followed by a severe drought, creating conditions for a wildfire, and strong Santa Anna winds to drive a fire quickly across the landscape once started (once again a natural feature of the area). With these conditions, all that was needed was a spark, which a perverse arsonist provided. Once the fire started, winds drove it quickly across a tinder dry landscape and firefighters found a shortage of water in reservoirs as a result of political decisions made by the state government.
Los Angeles is not warmer than is was in the 1950s and precipitation has actually increased slightly in the region since 1895. Despite climate alarmists and advantage seeking, virtue signaling Democratic politicians attempting to blame climate change for the fire and its severity, the evidence indicates it had nothing to do with it.
If climate conditions haven’t change appreciably across the United States, in the sense that the more extreme weather patterns are emerging, the question is, why have costs related to weather disasters gone up so much in nominal dollars? Keep in mind that in inflation adjusted dollars as a percentage of GDP, the costs of natural disasters have fallen over time. (see the figure, below)
As should be obvious to any honest observer exercising the least bit of common sense, the reason for rising disaster costs is clear, the expanding bullseye effect. As Climate Realism has explored in dozens of articles previously, with more people moving into ecologically/climatically desirable locations, locations prone to natural disasters, erecting more homes, businesses, and related structures and infrastructure, property has gone up dramatically in value overtime. When a disaster like a wildfire (in this case an arson started wildfire) strikes, more people and property is impacted and related costs are higher. Climate Realism discussed this very point in articles linked, here, here, and here, to take but a few examples. Quite simply, when a hurricane hits Miami or Galveston now, there are more buildings and structures to destroy at those locations than there was 100 years ago.
One can acknowledge that CC is right, natural disasters are imposing higher costs in nominal dollars now than they did in the past, without jumping to the completely unfounded claim that climate change is the cause. Legitimate journalists and honest news outlets, as NBC News and The Guardian purport to be, should check their facts before parroting the false rantings of a climate lobbing group as the truth. Misleading, false alarm stories like these are perhaps why trust in the media is low and falling.
Wildfire activity in southern Europe was below average last year, according to the latest data from the EU. The trend is clearly downwards since 1980, contrary to the disinformation spewed by the establishment media.
The BBC’s Matt McGrath, for instance, recently claimed that a warmer world increased the chances of devastating wildfires occurring, while the Guardian’s Damien Carrington also falsely stated that “globally, scientists agree that climate change is increasing the global risk of wildfires starting and spreading”.
Last summer the BBC went into full propaganda mode over some fires in Greece, even though the burnt area was actually below average:
And in December, a BBC World Service broadcast falsely claimed that a warmer earth was making “deadly fires in Spain and Greece increasingly common”.
Last month a small but powerful cyclone named Chido made landfall in Mayotte before sweeping into Mozambique, causing considerable damage and leading to the loss of around 100 lives. Days after the tragedy, the Green Blob-funded Carbon Brief noted that scientists have “long suggested” that climate change is making cyclones worse in the region, while Blob-funded World Weather Attribution (WWA) at Imperial College London made a near-instant and curiously precise estimate that a Chido-like cyclone was about 40% more likely to happen in 2024 than during the pre-industrial age. Not to be outdone, Green Blob-funded cheerleader the Guardian chipped in with the obligatory “cyclones are getting worse because of the climate emergency”. Almost unnoticed, it seems, among all the Net Zero dooming and grooming was a science paper published during December by Nature that found no increase in the destructive power of cyclones – the generic term for typhoons and hurricanes – in any ocean basin over the last 30 years. In the South Indian basin, the location of cyclone Chido, there was a dramatic decrease in both frequency and duration in recent times.
Reality rarely gets much of a look-in these days when fanatical Net Zero activism is afoot, but the paper, written by a group of Chinese meteorologists, makes its case by considering the facts and the data. The scientists apply a “power dissipation index” (PDI) which they consider superior to single measure indicators since it combines storm intensity, duration and frequency. The graphs below show the cumulative index for tropical cyclones across all ocean basins along with a global indication.
Downward trends in the cumulative PDI can be seen in a number of Pacific regions, while the trend holds steady in the North Atlantic. The southern Indian ocean downward trend is particularly pronounced while the overall global line is also heading in a similar direction.
So why does all this scientific twaddle get written by the green activists in mainstream media? Much of it arises from the new pseudoscience that claims it can tie individual weather events to human-caused climate change. Press releases peddling climate Armageddon are issued days after a natural disaster and are eagerly reprinted by activist journalists promoting the Net Zero fantasy. The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. is a fierce critic of this new pseudoscience, which he calls weather attribution alchemy. In a recent Substack post in the aftermath of Chido, he noted that the WWA at Imperial College simply assumes the conclusion that it seeks to prove by accepting that every storm is made stronger because of warmer oceans. Using this explanation, continues Pielke, it is straightforward to conclude that the storm was made more likely due to climate change. Or as Imperial states: “The difference in the storm intensity and likelihood of this storm intensity between the counterfactual climate and today’s climate can be attributed to climate change.”
As the new Chinese paper shows, the matter is not quite so simple. Pielke notes that tropical storms encounter numerous environmental influences such as vertical wind shear and storm-induced ocean surface cooling, even when they remain over warmer waters. “Such complexities mean that simple storyline attribution – warmer oceans predictably mean stronger storms – is inappropriate when used to characterise the behaviour of individual storms,” he argues. Pielke also comes down hard on the statistical evidence backing the WWA claims. Even if storms such as Chido were more likely in the future, it would take a very long time to detect a significant change using the threshold 90% confidence set down by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And by very long time, he means thousands of years.
“Perhaps that is why assumptions are favoured over evidence,” suggests Pielke.
There were plenty of assumptions on display in a now routine end-of-year weather report from the BBC headed: ‘A year of extreme weather that challenged billions.‘ Written by Esme Stallard, it claims that record-breaking heat brought extreme weather including hurricanes and month-long droughts. Pride of place is given to Dr. Friederike Otto, lead of WWA and Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at Imperial, who claimed: “We are living in a dangerous new era – extreme weather caused unrelenting suffering.” “The impacts of fossil fuel warming has never been clear or more devastating than in 2024,” she added.
The redoubtable Paul Homewood is unimpressed with Stallard’s opening line about increasing extreme weather and has filed a complaint with the BBC. Stallard goes on to list a handful of random events, “but fails to provide any evidence that these are anything other than natural events which happen all the time”, states Homewood. “Nor is any evidence provided that such events have been getting more frequent or extreme over time,” he adds.
The BBC story highlighted typhoons in the Philippines as well as hurricane Beryl and stated that such events may be increasing in intensity due to climate change. Official data do not show any evidence of them becoming more powerful over time, notes Homewood. Much play was made of a recent drought in the Amazon, but Homewood points out that the World Bank Climate Portal reveals that rainfall has increased in the area by 5% over the last 30 years. Throughout the report, observes Homewood, the BBC bases its claims on weather attribution computer models. “However, computer models are not evidence, and can be manipulated to provide whatever results are desired. That is why they are widely derided by the wider scientific community,” he states.
For Roger Pielke, extreme weather attributions are “puzzling”. The most charitable explanation for their proliferation is that there is a demand for them, including from many in the media. The demand will be filled by someone, he concludes. “A less charitable explanation is that there is a systematic effort underway to contest and undermine actual climate science, including the assessments of the IPCC, in order to present a picture of reality that is simply false in support of climate advocacy. We might call that pseudo-scientific gaslighting,” he suggests.
This is a small sample of what Palestinians have been called by commentators speaking to Western media outlets in the last month of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – examples of the bestiary of zoological terms natural to a coloniser’s view of the colonised.
Political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote during France’s colonial war in Algeria of “hordes of vital statistics”, “hysterical masses”, “faces bereft of all humanity”, and “children who seem to belong to nobody”.
These are all terms that could describe how western media covers the suffering of Palestinians — “a tide of humanity… a teeming mass of Gazans”, as the BBC put it (15 October). This is all sharply in focus since Hamas’ October offensive, and Israel’s genocidal razing of the Gaza strip.
We analysed the front page coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza by five major US and UK news media — the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, and the BBC (the news landing page at 7am daily) between 7-26 October.
Over these three weeks following Hamas’ offensive, the mechanics of the Western press’ dehumanisation of Palestinians in death and life are revealed as clinical and routine.
Israelis are murdered, Palestinians die
The dehumanisation process begins (or ends) with questioning who counts in death, and how the killer and the victim are portrayed.
In the UK-US mainstream media, Israelis die actively. They are either killed or murdered by Hamas, or “after a surprise Palestinian attack”. “The Palestinians” stands in for “Hamas” for sloppy or ideological editors, for example in the Guardian on 8 October.
Palestinian civilians, by contrast, die passively – and yet it is they who have done most of the dying since 7 October; over ten times the number of Israelis killed.
Gazans aren’t killed by Israeli forces or Israeli government policies. They “dehydrate to death as clean water runs out” (Guardian, 18 October) while Israeli airstrikes “continue to pound the Palestinian territory”.
On 9 October, the BBC ran with “700 people have been killed on the Israeli side with more than 400 also dead in Gaza”, presumably succumbing to shock or an act of God.
On 8 November, the Times of London noted: “Israelis marked a month since Hamas killed 1,400 people and kidnapped 240, starting a war in which 10,300 Palestinians are said to have died”, which is of course qualified.
Palestinian deaths are natural, undifferentiated. This is only possible because the media treat Israel’s blockade of Gaza as wholly logical, proportionate and even restrained.
Violations of international law
Collective punishment, which is essentially what Israel is doing by striking civilian “targets” and totally blockading the “open prison” (in former prime minister David Cameron’s words), is also illegal. This is the view of EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, UN human rights chief Volker Türkand Human Rights Watch, among others.
When UN chief António Guterres noted Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine and called for an end to the siege, Israel’s UN representative demanded he resign. At least one of Guterres’ colleagues, the head of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights, Craig Mokhiber, resigned of his own accord, protesting Israel’s “genocide unfolding before our eyes” in Palestine.
However, in none of the three weeks’ of front-page headlines and lead paragraphs for the five UK-US media analysed for this article are Israel’s serial violations of international law mentioned.
The exclusion of this important context on Israel’s crimes is important. As journalists we’re trained to account for the fact that most people don’t read beyond the headlines or first paragraphs.
Off the front page, some media published separate analysis pieces, such as the New York Times’ “Israel, Gaza and the laws of war” (12 October). This unsurprisingly goes nowhere near calling Israel’s crimes what they are: crimes.
Despite discussing at length how civilians cannot be targeted or disproportionately harmed for military purposes, the closest the New York Times gets to criticising the action of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is quoting the opinion of an expert on siege law.
This was that Israel’s siege is “an unusually clear-cut example of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, which is considered a violation of international humanitarian law, a crime against humanity and a war crime” (emphasis added).
A swift qualifier follows: “Jurisdiction over some war crimes would depend on whether the conflict is considered inter-state.” So some crimes are not a crime as long as Palestine or Palestinians don’t exist, as Israeli prime minister Golda Meir asserted over 50 years ago, repeated by current Israeli politicians.
By contrast, Hamas’ actions are, to the same cited expert, “not close calls”.
Preventable deaths
Moving on from, or ignoring completely, both the illegality of Israel’s total siege of Gaza, the UK-US media portray the starvation and preventable deaths resulting directly from it in almost entirely passive, naturalistic language.
For example, the Washington Post’s print version front page: “Civilian harm in Gaza looms over Biden’s visit; Rising human toll from attacks could threaten Israel’s global backing” (harm arising of course from Israel’s battering).
On 13 October, from the New York Times : “300,000 homeless in battered Gaza as food runs low” (because Israel is blocking food from entering Gaza). It continues: “Hospitals overwhelmed and fuel scarce” (because Israel is blocking medical supplies and fuel from reaching Gaza) “as Israel strikes back at Hamas.”
That’s fine then – the reader should feel at ease since Israel’s crushing of hospitals is merely an act of “self-defence”.
The Israeli military is not much a fan of Gazan hospitals – it regularly bombs them. It ordered 23 hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate on 13 October, and seems to have been picking them off, with patients inside, ever since.
When Israel might have gone too far, as it did in almost certainly bombing Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on 17 October, most outlets covered the strike by repeating both Israel’s and Hamas’ “he said-she said” accusations against the other.
Nevertheless, the New York Times gave the IDF’s denial more weight with “Hamas fails to make case that Israel struck hospital” (23 October, emphasis added), which is a catchier headline than “We don’t know, and don’t want to work it out ourselves”.
Meanwhile, the Times ran with “Strike kills up to 500 in Gaza”, swiftly adding that “Israel denies responsibility and blames jihadis”, with no comment from a Palestinian voice.
Mirroring the discrepancy between how Palestinians have died (passively, often with no mention of Israeli actions) and Israelis have died (actively, directly attributed to Hamas or “Palestinian” actions) is how the media describes child victims of both sides.
Discussing a prisoner exchange, a Washington Post columnist described Israel’s “children hostages” while referring to Palestinian children as “young people”. Under Military Order 1591, the Israeli government can hold minors as young as 12 without trial and potentially indefinitely in “administrative detention”, UNICEF reports.
When Gazan civilian deaths from siege and strikes against civilian infrastructure are shown as authorless natural disasters rather than as war crimes, any access Gazans get to essential goods becomes “aid” or “relief”, and every tiny amount allowed to reach them is an act of Israeli mercy.
Having reduced Palestinians to numbers, the work then becomes to cast doubt on these numbers.
When Israel’s flattening of Gaza began raising international alarm, Biden said he didn’t trust that “Palestinians” (or the Hamas government, since to him the distinction is irrelevant) “are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”
His statement was the latest in a time-honoured tradition of US administrations disputing the number of deaths wreaked by their allies abroad, from Suharto’s Indonesia, to Salvadoran death squads in the 1980s and Saudi Arabia today, as historian Bradely Simpson notes.
No one seriously disputes the Gazan Ministry of Health’s numbers as too high. If anything, they are likely a serious undercount given how many bodies are trapped under rubble.
Nevertheless, the attribution of figures to the “Gaza Ministry of Health” is now almost always prefaced by “Hamas-government” or followed by “controlled by Hamas”. This would seem an odd waste of words, considering that everyone from the UN to the US State Department cites Gazan health ministry casualty data, and Gaza’s government is run by Hamas.
Dead Palestinians are simply irrelevant for some media. The first mention of Palestinian deaths in Times headlines occurred 11 days after Hamas’ assault: “Strike kills up to 500 in Gaza”. It had by then run several front page pieces about specific, named Israeli victims, including an in-depth profile (with portrait) of a kibbutz family horrifically killed by the Hamas-led offensive [or not].
Unsurprisingly, on 12 October, the Telegraphpublished the number of Israelis killed in factors of “9/11s” in a striking infographic which didn’t even bother to include an estimate of Palestinian deaths.
Double standards
Once a people are truly dehumanised, it becomes logical – necessary, even – to apply a wholly different standard of (in)decency to them.
UK-US media report Palestinian deaths passively, as if through apparent acts of God, often couching the deaths in language suggesting that they were mostly Hamas or Hamas-adjacent, or at least that they inconveniently stood in missiles’ way.
For still-breathing Palestinians, it is not enough to have somehow escaped being killed by the almost 6,000 bombs Israel launched in its first six days punishing the densely populated territory. This is more than the US, not usually known for its restraint, deployed in any single year of its war in Afghanistan.
A living Palestinian must justify his or her continued aliveness by disavowing Hamas. A viral example of this can be seen in BBC Newsnight’s interview of the head of the Palestinian mission to the UK, Husam Zomlot.
Presenter Kirsty Wark barely flinched upon hearing Zomlot describe in detail how members of his family had been killed by Israeli strikes in the previous days before repeatedly demanding Zomlot condemn Hamas’ actions.
To reverse this, in other words, to ask every Israeli who had lost a family member in this conflict to first begin by condemning Israel’s murders and collective punishment of civilian Gazans would be rightly seen as outrageous. Unsurprisingly, we have not seen any examples of such in the Western press.
The UK-US press also tells us that to support Palestinians is to support Hamas, in case anyone doubted the conflation.
The BBC declared London’s peaceful pro-Palestine protesters as providing “backing for Hamas.” It later retracted its “poorly phrased” comments.
Sky News did no better in using images of peaceful protesters bearing Palestinian flags to accompany its discussion of efforts by the London Metropolitan Police to “tackle extremism”.
These “slips” pale in comparison with the virulently offensive terms guests on BBC programmes have called Palestinians, completely unchallenged by their hosts.
For example, BBC Arabic hosted former Israeli intelligence veteran-turned academic, Mordechai Kedar who refused to recognise popular Israeli racism towards Palestinians, claiming that bestial comparisons of Palestinians are “denigrating to animals.”
Tellingly, the BBC Arabic host neither ejected Kedar from the interview, nor did she admonish him and demand an apology. Instead, the host pivoted away from Kedar’s genocidal language with the comment “that’s your opinion”.
Platforming Israeli justifications
UK-US media have also taken to running pieces platforming Israeli justifications for the IDF’s actions when the staggering number of dead Gazan civilians was becoming harder to write around.
“How Israelis justify scale of airstrikes” ran the New York version front page of the New York Times on 26 October. It was later rewritten as “Israel’s strikes on Gaza are some of the most intense this century”.
It is unthinkable that a Western newspaper would carry a piece platforming in the same benign-to-neutral terms Palestinian rage, or worse, justifications for Hamas’ crimes.
Another trend is to normalise Israel’s actions by focusing not on its costs in Gazan lives, but its intentions which, of course, are shown as benign. (Note: intentions don’t matter in the laws of war.)
Three days into Israel’s illegal total blockade of Gaza, the BBC asked: “Could an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza meet its aims?” (14 October). Charitably characterising Netanyahu as “risk-averse” (for Israelis, not Palestinians), the New York Times ran with “All-out war is untried ground”, comforting readers that “limited strikes in past were safe politically”.
Dissenting voices: harder to hear
Journalists at the BBC and Agence France Presse (AFP) who have been critical of their agencies’ bias against Palestinian lives and minimisation of Israeli war crimes told Declassified that there is no space to discuss editorial concerns.
Palestinian commentators have seen their segments edited out of mainstream news programmes. Palestinian Americans report their events are being cancelled while they’re called Hamas supporters.
Meanwhile, a senior editor at US publication Newsweek called for Gaza to be flattened to resemble a parking lot, apparently without censure.
Elsewhere in the media ecosystem, an official of the UK’s communications regulator OFCOM, Fadzai Madzingira, was suspended for a social media post criticising UK support for “ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians” and “this vile colonial alliance”.
None of these points – that Israel may be committing genocide, that it continues to ethnically cleanse Palestinian land or that Israel was founded as a colonial project which still uses settler outposts to consolidate territorial control – is outside of reasonable analysis of historical facts.
It’s looking an awful lot like the beginning (or end, depending on your starting point) of a genocide.
The IDF has instructed all Palestinians to flee south of the Wadi Gaza area “for their safety” from Israeli strikes. Some were struck as they were evacuating, and Palestinians are still being shelled by the IDF in southern refuge areas.
That last bastion of dissent, gallows humour, is also at grave risk. Michael Eisen, editor of science journal eLife, was sacked for posting on Twitter an article from humour site the Onion, with the headline “Dying Gazans criticized for not using last words to condemn Hamas”.
The Guardian’s cartoonist Steve Bell’s contract was not renewed after his sketch of Netanyahu preparing to operate on his own stomach with an outline of Gaza was deemed too reminiscent of the “pound of flesh” anti-semitic trope.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post published a cartoon of a Hamas official with Gazan children and women strapped to him saying “How dare Israel attack civilians”. It’s since been deleted following racism complaints.
Yet the cartoonist is still drawing for mainstream media. Last week he published another cartoon in the Las Vegas Review showing a (fat, black) woman with a Black Lives Matter t-shirt holding up a sign saying “Terrorist Lives Matter: Blame Israel, Support Hamas”.
How dare Israel attack civilians indeed.
Claire Lauterbach is an independent investigative journalist and producer. She is the former Head of Investigations at Privacy International where she investigated the use and abuse of surveillance and military technologies, and a former Senior Investigator at Global Witness. Claire previously investigated war crimes in Goma, DR Congo for Human Rights Watch.
Namir Shabibi is an independent investigative journalist, visiting lecturer in Geopolitics at the University of Westminster, and PhD candidate researching covert paramilitary action in the ‘War on Terror’. He is a former International Committee of the Red Cross delegate investigating breaches of the Geneva Conventions in Darfur and Guantanamo Bay.
Climate alarmists love summer. It gives them an opportunity to exploit every heatwave, wildfire and hurricane. It is much harder to scare people in winter, when snow is supposed to be a thing of the past, and who doesn’t welcome a nice spring day or Indian summer?
So here are some of the silly scare stories which have appeared in the few weeks while we’ve been away.
1 Wildfires in Portugal
THE BBC went into full alarmist mode after some fires during a bit of hot weather in Portugal early last month. They reported: ‘Firefighters in Portugal are battling to contain wildfires engulfing thousands of hectares amid soaring temperatures. Around 800 personnel attended a fire near the southern town of Odemira overnight on Monday, with more than 1,400 people having to evacuate. At least nine firefighters have been injured tackling the fires. Temperatures in excess of 40C (104F) are expected to hit much of the Iberian peninsula this week.’
The BBC would like you to believe that hot weather is somehow unusual in Spain and Portugal!And as usual they provide no context at all. The big fire near Odemira burned 6,700 hectares (16,500 acres) but this is a tiny figure compared with the annual wildfire area in Portugal each year. And the data clearly shows there is no upward trend.
As for temperatures of 40C, what is so unusual about that? Temperatures of 39C in Cadiz are certainly not unheard of:
2 Wildfires in Hawaii
THE media quickly tried to link the wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui to global warming, with the BBC blaming a ‘dry summer’. The Guardianwent one step further saying the fires were made worse by the climate crisis.
Summers in Maui are always dry. But as local experts have been warning for years, the intensity and rapid spread of this fire was the direct result of the spread of savanna-type grasslands in the last couple of decades.
Clay Trauernicht, a professor of natural resources and environmental management at the University of Hawaii, said it would be misleading simply to blame weather and climate for the blazes. Millions of acres of Hawaii was cleared for plantation agriculture in the early 20th century, principally pineapple and sugar cane. Plantations were by and large fairly resistant to fire. However since 1980 they have shut one by one because of economic pressures, and now there are barely any left. In their place have come uncontrolled invasive species of savanna plants, such as Guinea grass which grows rapidly in the wet winters to a height of 10ft. In summer, these grasses quickly dry out, creating a tinderbox. All it needs is a spark and a strong wind to spread it, and the inevitable disaster will follow, just as it did last month.
Local fire and agricultural experts issued this very warning in a 2014 report, and recommended that the grasslands be properly managed and fire breaks be constructed. The authorities did nothing.
I doubt if you will read any of this in the Guardian.
3The heatwave that never was
CAN the Met Office become an even bigger laughing stock than they are already?
On Wednesday August 16, they and the clowns atthe UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) announced a Yellow Heat Alert for most of England, saying that temperatures would peak at 28C (82F) on Friday the 18th. This in itself was absurd as 28C is hardly life-threatening!
Friday arrived, and most of us were trying to keep warm under grey skies and rain. If you were lucky enough to find a bit of sunshine, you might have got temperatures of 23C.
How can the Met Office have got it so wrong? Maybe in future they might try getting their forecasts right instead of spending their time pumping out global warming propaganda.
4 The storm that never was
ON THE same day that the Met Office announced the Yellow Heat Alert, they also issued a Yellow Warning for Storm Betty, as the Irish Met Office were to name it, which was due to hit us on the day on Saturday August 19.
According to the Met Office forecast on Friday morning, we could expect up to 80mm (3in) of rain and winds in excess of 70mph in exposed places, and 50mph more widely, particularly in West Wales which would see the strongest winds.
The reality was much more mundane. Ballypatrick in the hills of Northern Ireland saw the most rain, 36mm (1.4in), and the extremes in England and Scotland were much less. As for winds, the Met Office managed to find a handful of extremely exposed sites. Capel Curig, for instance, at an altitude of 216m (708ft) in the middle of Snowdonia, recorded 66mph.
Down in the real world it was no more than a breezy day. Even on the West Wales coast, which was supposed to be worst affected, gusts reached only about 20mph, with sustained winds of about 10mph. According to the Beaufort Scale, that would be described as a ‘gentle breeze’.
But Gentle Breeze Betty does not have quite the same ring about it!
5 It does rain in Southern California
TROPICAL storms rarely hit California, but that does not mean they never do. The reason has nothing to do with climate, it is simply that Eastern Pacific hurricanes usually head west, away from the coast.
Last week, Hurricane Hilary headed north instead, and made landfall in California as a weaker tropical storm. Naturally the BBC went into full alarmist mode, blaming it on climate change in an article full of misinformation. They claimed that rainfall records had been broken across the state and in particular in Palm Springs, though why one solitary town should be of any consequence is a mystery to me.
To push home their message, they said that Los Angeles was in ‘recovery mode’ after 2.48 inches of rain, a record for August apparently.
In reality, Hilary was no wetter than other tropical storms to hit California, and 2in of rain in a day is not unusual at all in Los Angeles:
As for Palm Springs, even that record claim does not stand up to scrutiny, since it was wetter in 1922.
The September 1939 tropical storm, El Cordonazo, followed the same path as Hilary, and dropped twice as much rain on Los Angeles as Hilary, as well as larger amounts elsewhere. Hurricane Kathleen in 1976 is generally accepted as by far the wettest to hit California, with the 14.76 inches that fell on Mount San Gorgonia in a day still the official state record. Kathleen was described as a 1-in-160-year event, with hundreds of homes damaged and parts of California declared a disaster area. The highest rainfall recorded from Hilary was 11.74 inches, and the damage was considerably less than in 1976.
So once again we find that the BBC is playing fast and loose with the facts so that it can promote its political agenda. The same applies to the MSM and the Met Office.
“People who study conspiracy theories” are worried that joining gyms and trying to get healthy makes people descend into what these experts describe as fascism, explains author James Ball.
James has a peculiar idea of what fascism is, however:
According to James, only fascists question masks, lockdowns, or the BBC. Good people mysteriously become “fascists” when they join gyms or look after their wellness.
Some of the most dangerous people, believe it or not, are personal trainers!
Some people’s problems escalated when their personal trainer learned about their work. “I had three successive personal trainers who were anti-vax. One Belgian, two Swiss,” I was told by a British man who has spent most of the past decade working in Europe for the World Economic Forum, which organises the annual summit at Davos for politicians and the world’s elite.
The poor WEF chap above was even dropped by his personal trainer when his employment at the WEF was revealed:
When the trainer found out the man worked for the World Economic Forum, he was immediately cut off.
Most worryingly for the “conspiracy expert” Peter Knight, people of all political persuasions, right or left, end up in the same place when they realize that “everything is a lie”:
Peter Knight has the strangest explanation, by gender, as to why people “get sucked into conspiracy theories.”
He explains that men are drawn into conspiracies because of the “involuntary celibacy” movement.
It is not that difficult to imagine why young men hitting the gym might be susceptible to QAnon and its ilk. This group spends a lot of time online, there is a supposed crisis of masculinity manifesting in the “incel” (involuntary celibacy) movement and similar, and numerous rightwing influencers have been targeting this group.
Mind you, at the beginning of the article, James Ball discussed how personal trainers are the superspreaders of conspiracies. Have you ever seen an involuntarily celibate gym personal trainer?
His explanation of why women believe the same theories could not be more different! Women, it turns out, believe the same conspiracies as men because of the “female data gap”!
“Far too often, we blame women for turning to alternative medicine, painting them as credulous and even dangerous,” she says. “But the blame does not lie with the women – it lies with the gender data gap. Thanks to hundreds of years of treating the male body as the default in medicine, we simply do not know enough about how disease manifests in the female body.”
Are They Intentionally Blind?
There is a much simpler explanation as to why people believe the “Covid was lab-made” conspiracy theory, “Covid vaccine does not work” conspiracy theory, or “15-minute cities are promoted by the World Economic Forum” theory.
The explanation is that these theories are true. Both genders are capable of critical thinking, seeing the truth, and sharing it.
This simple explanation does not insult millions of thinking men by portraying them as “incels,” nor does it portray women as stupid creatures confused by the imaginary “gender data gap.”
Trying to find explanations for complicated but important events affecting us and not believing dishonest pressis not fascism. God gave us brains for a reason – to think for ourselves! Critical thinking is the opposite of fascism, which requires uncritical obedience to the state ideology.
The Most Important Social Network Needs No Computers
Despite its stupidity, the Guardian’s article exposes the most important social network that the press, fact-checkers, and the powers-to-be cannot control.
This social network is people physically and directly interacting with each other and sharing news and opinions.
It cannot be suppressed by means other than drastic lockdowns, which kept people at home in 2020. The gyms, far from being uniquely instrumental in developing critical thinking, are simply places where people congregate and share stuff while doing something pleasant. Thus, not surprisingly, gym-goers share explanations of current events with their peers without any censorship or any algorithmic intermediary.
The Guardian recognizes this:
Society’s discussion of QAnon, anti-vaxxers and other fringe conspiracies is heavily focused on what happens in digital spaces – perhaps too much so, to the exclusion of all else. The solution, though, is unlikely to be microphones in every gym and treatment room, monitoring what gets said to clients.
The conspiracy experts are baffled by this development and ironically blame “isolation,” even though the phenomenon they observe is rooted in physical interaction between people:
Jane has her own theory as to why her wellness group got radicalised and she did not – and it’s one that aligns with concerns from conspiracy experts, too. “I think it’s the isolation,” she concludes, citing lockdown as the catalyst, before noting the irony that conspiracies then kick off a cycle of increasing isolation by forcing believers to reject the wider world.
“It becomes very isolating because then their attitude is all: ‘Mainstream media … they lie about everything.’”
I do not think of myself and my dear subscribers as isolated: we congregate here, we read newspapers, although critically, and we interact with friends or relatives. Anyone can say anything they want in the comments. Am I wrong?
In the UK, we all know that this summer has been rubbish. We had a few weeks of glorious sunshine in June and since then it’s been bloody miserable. It’s been cold, wet and the dog has got trench-foot. Which isn’t great because he stinks at the best of times—bless him.
Yet, according to the UN Secretary General and blithering buffoon, António Guterres, we’ve entered the “era of global boiling.” Though not in the UK—or anywhere else for that matter
Just as we were during the pseudopandemic, we are once again invited to reject the evidence of our own senses and “trust” whatever we are told by the “experts,” although Guterres is not a meteorologist. Mind you, Bill Gates isn’t an epidemiologist and everyone “trusted” his “expert” opinion during the pseudopandemic, so who cares?
I know! I know! Weather isn’t climate change. While climate constantly changes, the process can only be understood through the accumulation of evidence revealing a highly complex system that is subject to radiative forcing.
It is safe to say that no one who seriously questions “climate change” alarm, denies that climate changes. What they question are the claims made by organisations like the UK Met Office:
The evidence is clear: the main cause of climate change is burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal. When burnt, fossil fuels release carbon dioxide into the air, causing the planet to heat up.
There isn’t one, published scientific paper, anywhere on Earth, that empirically proves that increased atmospheric CO2 precedes and causes global warming. The evidence is far from “clear.”
But let’s not let scientific facts get in the way of a good story. The planet is boiling I tells ye!
If CO2 is the problem then the solution seems pretty simple, not to mention quite pleasant: plant as many trees as we can, wherever we can, and don’t cut them down to burn in biomass power plants that emit more CO2 than brown-coal fired power stations. But that is not a “solution” that anyone in power is interested in.
If CO2 is the problem then the solution seems pretty simple, not to mention quite pleasant: plant as many trees as we can, wherever we can, and don’t cut them down to burn in biomass power plants that emit more CO2 than brown-coal fired power stations. But that is not a “solution” that anyone in power is interested in.
No, the proposed solution to supposed planetary vaporisation is Sustainable Development debt slavery. Which all raises a few questions about, for example, UK Met Office gibberish. It’s almost as if there’s some sort of agenda at play. Which, of course, there is.
But we’re not going rehash arguments about the climate change woo-woo Science™. There’s no point anyway. Climate change alarm is a death cult, not an exercise in intellectual honesty.
Instead, let’s look at just a few examples of obvious climate alarm tripe. As we do, we’ll also ponder why, if anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory is so sound, so-called “climate scientists” and the mainstream media—legacy media—feel the need to perpetually lie about its alleged effects.
In 2009, the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, which provides much of the HadCRUT data underpinning the IPCC’s climate change models, was caught fiddling the climate data in order to “prove” AGW theory.
Scientific fraud was evident and key “climate scientists” involved were subsequently unable to provide any data to support their misleading conclusions. Something that was later proven in court. Yet still the legacy media (LM), in this instance represented by the appalling propagandists at the Guardian, manage to deny the blatant scam.
This is all irrelevant because, irrespective of the fake science, all scientists agree that the planet is being cooked like a hard boiled egg. Except the Nobel laureate physicists who don’t. Oh, and all the other scientists who don’t either.
They are not “real” scientists and therefore must be cancelled and definitely barred from explaining to the IMF that the IPCC’s modelled predictions are drivel. Global financial institutions are set to profit from “da climate Science™” and are not interested in having their plans undermined by pesky, Nobel prize winning scientists.
Gutteres’ boiling planet yarn is based upon the recent LM alarm about the Cerberus and Charon heatwaves that supposedly plagued central and southern Europe. The LM used scary colours on their maps to make sure everyone soiled themselves. As if naming the summer after mythical devil-dogs and boatmen for the dead wasn’t enough.
Reuters said ambulances had been put on standby to rescue people from the sunshine; Sky warned that the fingerprints of climate change were forcing people to “shelter from the heat;” CNN reported that the heat was at “unbearable levels” and the constantly petrified Guardian, alleging that “human-caused climate crisis is supercharging extreme weather around the world,” added:
The European Space Agency (ESA) said the next week could bring the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe.
While the Guardian mentioned the ESA, they neglected to report its subsequent data clarification. The ESA made it clear that they were providing satellite readings of “land surface temperatures” not the “air temperatures” that are commonly given in weather reports.
On a hot day, land surface temperatures tend to be considerably higher than air temperatures. The degree of difference varies, depending on numerous factors such as the heat absorption and radiation properties of the surface material and so on. As pointed out by the pro-climate alarm website SkepticalScience:
[. . .] on a sunny day in a heatwave, many land surfaces become hotter than the air – that’s how tarmac can melt in a sunny spot.
Contradicting themselves, and ignoring the ESA clarification completely, SkepticalScience then said that the reported air temperature high of 48.8°C on July 17th “did happen.” However, as pointed out by the genuinely sceptical What’s-Up-With-That (WUWT), this claim presents us with a major conundrum.
The LM consistently reported“air temperatures” that were the same as the ESA’s reported “land surface temperature.” The air temperature should have been notably lower, but wasn’t reported to be so.
Quite simply, that just can not be true. It is all very odd, because the actual recorded air temperatures were lower than those reported by the LM, such as the Guardian and the BBC.
This is not to say that it wasn’t very hot in southern and some parts of central Europe and the US. But the ridiculous, exaggerated LM claims that July was the hottest month in 125,000 years were unmitigated claptrap. As Kit Knightly, writing for the OffGuardian, rightly observed, there is simply no way to know this.
The University of Alabama and Hunstsville (UAH) Global Temperature Record is also a key data set for the IPCC. The UAH measures temperature anomalies and, using this measure—which is not the same as a consistent average—confirmed that July 2023 was the hottest July and the hottest single month since 1979, when satellite records began. Given, for example, that an “air temperature” anomaly of 50°C was recorded in Paris in August 1930—before satellite records began—the “hottest ever” claims don’t remotely stack up, even from an anomaly perspective, and certainly don’t constitute any evidence of the “ravages” of CO2 driven climate change.
Reports from European holiday makers that they had to avoid the midday sun, as they mingled with the crowds enjoying the lovely weather, is hardly a sign of the end-times. Noel Coward wrote the song “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” advising people to avoid sweltering midday temperatures, in 1931. It went down well because it was funny and something people could relate to. Probably because the 1930s was the hottest decade of the 20th century.
SkepticalScience is among the climate alarm pushers who assert that the heatwave was obviously caused by climate change. As noted by James Corbett and James Even Pilato, that notion is speculative to say the least.
Both NASA and the ESA reported that the Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai underwater volcano eruption in January 2022 increased the amount of stratospheric water vapour by a minimum of 10%, possibly up to 30%. So vast was this expulsion of H2O that it is likely to increase average global temperatures for several years to come.
If you are looking for LM reports on the staggering global climate impact of this event, don’t bother. There aren’t any.
Instead, the BBC, for example, published an article on July 14th 2023 which spoke about the amazing expulsion of lava and ash and the spectacular associated volcanic lightening. They even linked to the NASA report which said the additional volume of atmospheric water vapour was enough to “fill the equivalent of 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.” But the BBC propagandists couldn’t bring themselves to report the rest of the quoted NASA statement, which read:
The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.
Just eleven days later—July 25th—BBC amnesiacs told the world that the European and US heatwaves would have been “near impossible” without climate change. Despite previously citing the NASA and ESA findings which clearly show this claim is totally groundless.
The BBC offered a ludicrous report from World Weather Attribution (WWA)—deceptively calling it a “study”—to supposedly “confirm” that “climate change” had increased the heatwaves by 2.5°C. Based upon nothing but LM reports and speculative computer models, the WWA report was scientifically illiterate dross that presented absolutely no evidence at all to support any of its wacky conclusions.
The Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption and the ESA spawned media “confusion,” over the difference between surface and air temperatures, was entirely ignored by the BBC as it pumped out its climate change propaganda. Rounding off its disinformation, the BBC wrote:
[. . .] increased temperatures from burning fossil fuels was the main driver in the more intense heatwaves.
A conclusion, it is worth reiterating, for which there is no evidence. The BBC’s role is to make you imagine that the evidence exists.
SkepticalScience, which isn’t sceptical enough to explore atmospheric science or check what its scientific sources really said, didn’t deem it necessary to mention any of this either. But it did ram home that anyone who questions climate alarm is a “climate denier”:
People who create and/or circulate such myths are denying plain reality. That reality is that it got extremely hot across southern Europe for a prolonged period in July 2023. Such prolonged heat is a serious health-hazard, never mind the appalling wildfires.
Aah, the wildfires!
Presumably ignited by the 40+°C heat. Or so the LM would have us believe.
Reporting the “end of the world,” the BBC were certain that the “heatwave spreading across Europe is fuelling wildfires in Portugal.” Someone should tell the Portuguese the end of the world is nigh, because comments from people in Portugal during the “catastrophic heatwave” don’t give rise to any cause for alarm.
This is all reminiscent of the climate alarm that spewed out of the LM during the Canadian wildfires in June that sent a pall of smoke across the US eastern seaboard. The New York Times said this provide us with a “grim climate lesson;” CBS said that the fires were started by lightening caused by dry hot weather as “climate change continues to warm the planet” and the always unreliable BBC wrote “climate change increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires.”
But the prize for most outstanding baloney must go to the Guardian for its unhinged piece, “Canada’s Wildfires are Part of a New Climate Reality.” Claiming that the fires were the “harbinger of our climate future” and that climate change could “double the acreage burned by wildfires each year,” the Guardian exposed itself when it revealed that its headline “new climate reality” was “sourced” from a tweet by US politician Bernie Sanders. Probably after he read a New York Times or other LM article that told him what to think.
None of these wildly inaccurate LM affirmations were remotely plausible. In a fully referenced article, weather forecaster Chris Martz, outlined the many reasons why there is no foundation for the claims that the Canadian boreal forest wildfires were, in any sense, attributable to CO2 caused “climate change:”
Headlines and armchair experts articulated with boastful confidence that the primary cause of the Canadian fires [. . .] was climate change. Despite the fact these claims are neither supported by the greater body of peer-reviewed work nor the observational record.
The actual reasons for the Canadian wildfires were the encroachment of human settlements into woodland areas—increasing the human ignition risk, decades of poor forestry management and inclement weather conditions that produced the lightening strikes which appeared to simultaneously ignite some of the fires.
Prior to the heat driven thunderstorms, Canada had been experiencing average or below average temperatures for the time of year. As Martz accurately observed:
This justifies the case that the fire weather conditions were a transient response to ongoing weather conditions which primed the environment, not a long-term pattern that could be altered by the climatic base state.
Martz reported the Canadian government’s forest burn area records from 1959 to date. Contrary to all the claims spewed out by LM disinformation agents, the records clearly show that total burn areas and fires peaked in the late 1980s. They have steadily decreased ever since. There is, once again, no correlation with increased CO2 levels nor any evidence linking the boreal wildfires to “climate change.”
Like most people who question climate alarm, Martz is concerned about the environment and recognises that the obsession with CO2 reduction does nothing to address the real environmental problems. He wrote:
Sitting on our hands and blaming climate change for every abnormal environmental event is a waste of time when our efforts would be better spent on addressing how to manage risk and mitigate vulnerabilities.
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 programme yesterday morning, some numpty—sorry, I didn’t catch her name—claimed that the seas were boiling. Because climate change … Duh! I’m sure she is a learned numpty, but seemingly clueless nonetheless.
This followed on from the usual BBC climate bunk highlighting that Florida seawater surface temperatures had achieved 37.8°C. This, we were authoritatively informed, was all caused by climate change. The Guardian piled in to ramp up the terror. That being said, Guardian columnists also think we should end farming to save the planet, so perhaps taking the Guardian’s word for anything isn’t the wisest course.
Both the BBC and the Guardian had simply parroted a story fed to them by the newswires. There was no more “journalism” than that. They investigated nothing, didn’t verify anything and just published whatever they were told to publish.
The high water temperature reading was taken from just one censor buoy in Manatee Bay, near Key Largo. Writing for WUWT, Jim Steele pointed out that the temperature reading of the same buoy had dropped to 29°C within a day. Other measurement buoys in the surrounding waters were consistently reporting much lower water temperatures. This was due to the fact that the Manatee Bay buoy floats in a sheltered, coastal “solar pond,” largely protected from cold water flows.
If CO2 propelled climate change caused the buoy reading to climb to 37.8°C, then it must have caused it to cool down again the next day. Equally, “climate change” must also be responsible for the much cooler waters surrounding Manatee Bay. This is, of course, an absurd contention. As Steele highlighted:
Clearly those water temperatures were being driven by dynamics other than rising CO2.
Clearly! So why couldn’t the LM figure that out? Are they all irretrievably stupid or is there something else going on?
As we noted earlier, weather is not climate change. Except when it’s really hot.
While it was scorching in Europe and the US, the LM regaled us with an slew of climate change fairy tales. However, as soon as the weather in the same European and US regions returned to at or below average temperatures they fell stony silent. According to LM propagandists like the Guardian, “climate change” always reverts back to weather when it is chuffin’ freezing.
Wherever we look, those who are pushing the idea that climate change threatens some sort of cataclysm just can’t stop misleading, manipulating, deceiving and propagandising. The question is why. If we accept that climate change is a concern, why do they feel the need to constantly lie about its alleged impacts?
It is never ending. Frankly, it has become infuriating. Maybe that’s the point.
Every nonsensical climate alarm story we have discussed deploys applied behavioural psychology to convince you to believe evident insanity. You are supposed to unquestioningly accept that the planet is “literally” on fire. Or, as the the UN Secretary General insists for no apparent reason, that the era of “global boiling” is upon us.
We are very close to climate lockdowns to “save the planet.” None of this has anything to do with climate change.
The only thing that is “literally” true is that the net-zero, sustainable development solution is “literal” population control. The mind-bending propaganda can only succeed if you ignore the view from your own window, which invariably reveals that it is actually pissing down.
When the farcical climate lockdowns arrive, may I suggest you dress for the weather, grab a bottle of water, and go out and enjoy yourself. What are they going to do? Lock us up in our own homes again?
There is no animal or plant in the natural world that cannot be used to promote climate Armageddon and its collectivist Net Zero political solution. On Sunday, the WWF, also known as the World Wildlife Fund, started running a series of Wild Isles co-produced propaganda films narrated by Sir David Attenborough on the BBC. These include finely-crafted messages of improbable extinctions culled from computer models.
From the absurd to the ridiculous, we had National Margarita Day recently hijacked by CNN running a story about the ‘climate crisis’ affecting tequila production – a story easily debunked by the news that since 1995, tequila production had increased six-fold, and in four years it had doubled. Now the increasingly unhinged Guardian is giving us its ‘Net Zero, or else the coffee gets it’ story.
According to the newspaper, new research suggests that climate conditions that reduce coffee yields have become more frequent over the past four decades, with rising temperatures from “global heating” likely to lead to ongoing systemic shocks to coffee production globally.
Note the use of the phrase “climate conditions” for what in effect is weather, and the suggestion that it reduces coffee yields. These climate conditions are said to have become more frequent over the last four decades. But one can only read the Guardian for so long. Let us look at actual coffee yields over the last four decades.
Far from declining due to all this weather, yields have shown dramatic improvement since at least 1960. Over this period, particularly between 1980-98, temperatures have risen, but there is no sign of “ongoing systemic shocks” to coffee production globally.
Global coffee yields have been a great agricultural success story, along with actual bean production. Like yields, tonnes produced have soared in the last 40 years.
The key Guardian get-out phrase of course is “new research suggests”. The Guardian story was taken from an academic study led by Dr. Doug Richardson, published in PLOS Climate. He told the newspaper that a shift from cool and wet to hot and dry conditions “we’re pretty confident is a result of climate change”.
In fact if the Richardson paper is read, a more nuanced view on coffee and weather over the last 40 years is discovered.
Our results suggest that ENSO [El Niño Southern Oscillation] is the primary mode in explaining annual compound event variability, both globally and regionally. El Niño-like sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean are associated with decreased precipitation and increased temperatures in most coffee regions, and with spatially compounding warm and dry events. This relationship is reversed for La Niña-like signatures.
As it happens, the last 40 years saw three very powerful El Niños occurring in 1982, 1998 and 2016. These pushed temperatures up around the planet, a natural weather oscillation that had nothing to do with any human-caused increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The current eight-year pause in the satellite temperature record is partly explained by three recent La Niña events.
The vast majority of the world’s coffee is grown with just two species – Arabica and Robusta. Arabica is more sensitive to growing conditions, and requires temperatures around 18-22°C. In the tropics, these are more common in higher elevations. Robusta is less highly prized, has a wider geographical spread and grows between 22°C and 28°C. Richardson claims that human-caused climate change is “expected” to alter the geographical suitability for growing coffee. The area of land suitable for coffee cultivation “may” be reduced by up to 50%.
This is unlikely. For a start, it assumes temperatures will rise significantly, but with global warming running out of steam over the last two decades, this seems unlikely. This is particularly so in the tropics. Historical records show that during periods of global warming, the tropics warm less and temperatures are more stable. In addition, coffee is a versatile crop, and selective breeding has produced varieties that can adapt to lowland conditions with temperatures outside normal growing ranges. If climate should change in any significant way, new coffee farming could switch to more propitious areas.
But where is the fun in explaining all that when Net Zero propagandising is afoot. MIT Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen is fond of noting that the current climate narrative is absurd, but trillions of dollars paid to many, including “grant-dependent” academics, says it is not absurd. This money pays for a constant drip, drip, nudge, nudge wave of climate scaremongering eagerly promoted by controlling elites seeking to take away personal and economic freedoms under cover of saving the planet.
With any credible evidence of alleged Russian mass kidnappings of children from former Ukraine sorely lacking, in order to justify this propaganda narrative, as well as give at least some ostensible “credence” to the recent ICC indictment against Russian President Vladimir Putin, the mainstream propaganda machine is mobilizing all of its forces. Supposed “horror stories” of the “ordeal” these kids and their parents “have to go through” are aiming to cause an emotional reaction and present Russia and its leadership as “monstrous” as they could possibly be. One such “horror story” was published by The Guardian on March 19, just two days after the Hague-based “court” issued an arrest warrant for Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights.
According to The Guardian, Yevhen Mezhevyi, a 40-year-old Ukrainian citizen now living in Riga (Latvia), claims his children were “abducted and forcibly transferred” to Russia last year. Mezhevyi’s children were apparently taken while he was serving prison time in the DNR (Donetsk People’s Republic) due to his three-year service in the Kiev regime forces (2016-2019), including in the notorious Yavoriv military base in the west of the country, infamous for the training of various openly Neo-Nazi units. According to his own admission, Yevhen Mezhevyi knew that the Russian military would be apprehending all former and current members of such Nazi-inspired cohorts, so he tried to hide his past and even threw away his uniforms in an attempt to leave no trace of his time in the Kiev regime forces.
However, despite his attempts to hide, Mezhevyi was caught and sent to a prison near the town of Olenovka, approximately 20 km southwest of Donetsk, where he remained for 45 days. He claims that after Russian forces entered the city, Mezhevyi, his son Matvii (13) and daughters Sviatoslava (9) and Oleksandra (7) were “taken” by Russian soldiers and evacuated to Vinogradnoye, a village to the south-east of Mariupol. There, humanitarian volunteers offered assistance to Mezhevyi and his family, so they “stayed there for a while” (Yevhen didn’t specify for how long). “… but then, one day, after we were taken to a checkpoint and searched, a Russian official saw something in my documents,” he lamented, obviously referring to the fact that the official found evidence of Mezhevyi’s time in the Neo-Nazi junta forces.
Despite the fact that he could have easily been sentenced to long-term prison time for this, Mezhevyi was released after 45 days. In the meantime, his children were evacuated to Russia, as the Kiev regime forces, in which he served for three years, never stopped shelling the Donbass republics and other areas. Mezhevyi claims to have tried to get a job, but gave up after his son Matvii called him, allegedly saying that “the camp” he and his sisters were in “was closing in five days” and that “we have to either go to a foster family or an orphanage”. Using the word “camp” for the facilities Mezhevyi’s children were housed in is quite intentional, as the obvious goal is to present Russia in the worst light possible. Apparently, the alternative was to leave the children completely alone in the DNR, where they would’ve been targeted by the Neo-Nazi junta forces, in the case of which Moscow would also be “guilty” for not evacuating them. It seems you can’t win if you’re Russian.
“I understood there was no time to look for a job. I needed to take the risk, travel to Russia and get them out of there, as soon as possible,” Mezhevyi claims, adding: “Thank God, there are volunteers who helped me get to Moscow. It was very hard to cross into Russia from the occupied territories and I was interrogated, again and again, even though I had already spent 45 days in their prison and I just wanted to get my children. But no one cared about that. Eventually, I crossed into Russia and got on a train to Moscow.”
It’s quite interesting how the apparent “Mordor of our time” let Mr. Mezhevyi cross the border and undertake the “risky journey” where the “Evil Empire” even lets “volunteers” help people find their children, “kidnapped” for whatever reason. After he arrived in Moscow, Mezhevyi was contacted by Alexey Gazaryan, an official working at a children’s ombudsman office, managed by Maria Lvova-Belova, for whom the ICC issued an arrest warrant, along with President Putin. Apparently, Gazaryan told Mezhevyi that “he didn’t mind him taking his children back, but that he needed to get a permit” from DNR social services.
The head of DNR social services, Elena Maiboroda, called Gazaryan and agreed, so on 20 June, around 11:00 PM, Mezhevyi arrived at “the camp” on the outskirts of Moscow. He claims he was “interrogated” by at least five people, including Gazaryan, a psychologist, a nurse and the head of “the camp”, who “made him” fill out dozens of papers. Mezhevyi “managed” to cross into Latvia with his children with the help of “volunteers”. The Guardian claims he “still struggles” to understand how, among the documents that the Russians “forced” his son to sign, there was also a certificate asking the child to transfer the custody of himself and his sister back to their father.
The wording is obviously a pitiful attempt to portray Russian officials as supposed “monsters” for following their own legal procedures, which, in fact, are less strict than in most Western countries. The article claims that Mezhevyi’s family has been reunited, “but only after he undertook a risky journey over the border to rescue them”. This implies that they had to be “rescued”, given his “ordeal”, including the “incredibly risky” task of “forced” signing of documents. It seems only in Russia “genocide” is conducted by getting the children safely evacuated from an active warzone to a summer camp and then helping the father, an enemy combatant, to pick them up and go wherever he pleases.
An increase in the pace at which sea levels are rising threatens “a mass exodus of entire populations on a biblical scale” and whole nations could be drowned under the waves, the UN Secretary General has warned. The Guardianhas more.
The climate crisis is causing sea levels to rise faster than for 3,000 years, bringing a “torrent of trouble” to almost a billion people, from London to Los Angeles and Bangkok to Buenos Aires, António Guterres said on Tuesday. Some nations could cease to exist, drowned under the waves, he said.
Addressing the UN Security Council, Guterres said slashing carbon emissions, addressing problems such as poverty that worsen the impact of the rising seas on communities and developing new international laws to protect those made homeless – and even stateless – were all needed. He said sea level rise was a threat-multiplier which, by damaging lives, economies and infrastructure, had “dramatic implications” for global peace and security.
Significant sea level rise is already inevitable with current levels of global heating, but the consequences of failing to tackle the problem are “unthinkable”. Guterres said: “Low-lying communities and entire countries could disappear for ever. We would witness a mass exodus of entire populations on a biblical scale. And we would see ever fiercer competition for fresh water, land and other resources. People’s human rights do not disappear because their homes do,” he said. “Yes, this means international refugee law.”
A new compilation of data from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) shows that sea levels are rising fast and the global ocean has warmed faster over the past century than at any time in the past 11,000 years. Sea levels rise as warmer water expands and ice caps and glaciers melt. …
In fact, sea levels are not accelerating and have continued rising at a modest 10-12 cm a century – not something that is going to give any nation an existential crisis any time soon. I somehow think that countries might be able to adapt to a one metre rise per millennium.
But why let facts get in the way of a good disaster narrative that justifies lots of Government intervention and control?
This piece may be studied as a Platonic Form. Nothing could more perfectly demonstrate the inability of the covid fear porn publishers to let go of the narrative. If the author didn’t have her own website, I would have attributed the piece to an instance of ChatGPT trained on every Guardian and New York Times article from the past three years.
The writer employs every single discredited covid trope at least once. I will list a few of the best, here. To cover them all I would have to quote the entire article and that would violate the Fair Use Doctrine. I have chosen a tabular form with a quote alongside the trope that it is derived from:
Quote
Trope
“In the fourth year of the pandemic.”
We are still in a pandemic. It will never end.
“This is one of the greatest surges of Covid cases in the entire pandemic, according to wastewater analyses of the virus.”
The current wave is the worst wave ever.
“Covid-19 is once again spreading across America and being driven by the recent holidays.”
Super-spreader events and family gatherings.
“The Omicron subvariants BQ.1.1 and BQ.1 as well as the quickly expanding XBB.1.5 make up the majority of cases.”
Just when you thought we were over it, a new variant has emerged.
“With XBB, there’s such a significant transmission advantage that exposure is really risky – it’s riskier now than it’s ever been” in terms of transmissibility, Sehgal said.”
The new variant is more dangerous than previous variants.
“And the more the virus spreads, the more opportunities it has to evolve, potentially picking up mutations that make it easier to overcome immunity.”
The variants only get worse over time, never more mild.
“the winter surge, which is once again putting pressure on health systems.”“Williams is worried that hospitals are reaching maximum capacity.”“Health workers have experienced three years of burnout, disability and death, and some have needed to exit the workforce.”
The health care system is under pressure. It will probably collapse. People will be dying in the streets, unable to obtain care.
“Despite the high rates of Covid spread, hospitalizations have not yet reached previous peaks seen earlier in the pandemic, probably due to immunity … but that protection should not be taken for granted, he said, particularly because immunity wanes.”
Natural immunity does not protect you. Even if you are immune, you should still get all the vaccines and boosters.
“The severe cases we are seeing are probably at least somewhat avoidable, if folks make sure that they stay updated on vaccination, because that’s still the safest way to gain immunity.”
Vaccination stops the spread.
“You’re just fighting a lot of misinformation.”
Everything that you have read contrary to this narrative consists of lies by malevolent misinformation spreaders.
When Joe Biden declared the pandemic was “over” in September, he said, it probably stalled public enthusiasm for the new booster.
Happy talk about the end of covid is dangerous.
“While vaccines are very important…”
All roads lead to vaccination.
“In New Hampshire, nursing homes will not admit those that they feel that they cannot staff to care for, which I think is admirable, but the consequence of that is that the hospitals are jammed up,” he said. Hospitals that might release patients to care facilities for transitional or long-term care will see beds filled for longer.”
“As Ray put it: ‘When we could be wearing a mask, why aren’t we?’”
Masks work to prevent respiratory viral transmission.
My favorite part of the piece is, “Yet because of poor messaging from officials, many people may not even realize the US is experiencing a surge.” I am one of those many people who did not know this. A surge of what? A normal seasonal flu that makes people feel a bit under the weather for a week? A bad cold-vid?
We can celebrate our return to the old normal when an outbreak of a seasonal virus is of concern to those who are infected or who care for a family member. All of society need not be thrust into a panic over such things. The more normal the world is, the more resources of those who are impacted will have to deal with their troubles. And the better will those who are not directly affected be able to support them.
As a software engineer I note with some amusement that the variant (or as I like to call them “scariant”) names now have two periods. In a software release version a version with double dot is used for a minor bug fix release, (e.g. 3.0.1). “Minor” means that the release is not important enough for users to upgrade immediately. Perhaps the same thinking should be applied to the way we handle the emergence of new viral variants.
When Biden said that the pandemic is over, followed by “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape,” that may have been his dementia inhibiting the filter that was supposed to kick in before he said something truthful. Biden only said the quiet part out loud: the public has put the panic phase in the rearview. Even Anthony Fauci made the incomprehensible statement that the pandemic isn’t over but we are out of the “pandemic phase.” Every statement like this is more toothpaste for the pandemic dead-enders to put back in the tube.
The article bemoans the low acceptance rate of the booster vaccinations. We are told that cases are avoidable if patients had sought additional injections. First thing: do we care about cases? Second thing: it is not true that the covid vaccines prevent infection. That could only be so if the failed claim of sterilizing immunity were valid.
Vaccine advocates have walked back the earlier claims that one or any number of shots would prevent the recipient from getting infected. It was let out late in 2022 that the clinical trials did not even test for the ability of the drugs to stop transmission. It’s hard to believe that anyone can still say that after so many multiply-vaccinated-and-boosted public figures have gotten covid.
My friend Kevin Duffy, a professional investor, after seeing the Guardian article, sent me this image. The graph shows the market psychology of a financial bubble and subsequent market crash. I have added the red oval highlighting where Kevin thinks we are now: in the denial phase, after the bubble has burst.
I am also reminded of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief that a patient or a loved one goes through when receiving a terminal diagnosis. The stage in her sequence is denial. The subsequent stages are anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
The same could be said of all of these tropes: Does anyone believe them anymore? This is not news. It is a last-gasp attempt to squeeze more juice out of a dehydrated lemon. These messages were potent fear generators two years ago. But with each use, the charge becomes weaker.
The script has worn itself out. These tropes are now tired and ineffective. The fear-pushers seem unaware that the message has lost its effect, but do not have anything else to offer. The tell is not that they publish articles like this. It is how much these pieces show that they don’t know that the game is over and they have lost.
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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It’s quite interesting how the apparent “Mordor of our time” let Mr. Mezhevyi cross the border and undertake the “risky journey” where the “Evil Empire” even lets “volunteers” help people find their children, “kidnapped” for whatever reason. After he arrived in Moscow, Mezhevyi was contacted by Alexey Gazaryan, an official working at a children’s ombudsman office, managed by Maria Lvova-Belova, for whom the ICC issued an arrest warrant, along with President Putin. Apparently, Gazaryan told Mezhevyi that “he didn’t mind him taking his children back, but that he needed to get a permit” from DNR social services.
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