Former Reuters Science Writer Slams Climate Hysteria Promoted by Today’s Media
Reuters “seems to have sold out to the hysterics and axe grinders.”
As Southern Californians brace for blizzards, many are reevaluating the narrative ‘science’ pushed in the media for the past several decades.
One of those reconsidering former beliefs is Neil Winton, a former science-tech reporter and editor at Reuters for 32 years. He slammed the trends in “climate crisis” coverage in a brutal analysis published at The Daily Sceptic.
The BBC and the mainstream media regularly frighten everyone with the latest climate disaster news with pictures of floods, fires and hurricanes, always followed by scary predictions that things will only get worse unless mankind mends its irresponsible ways.
My alma mater Reuters, the global news agency, used to be above all this hysteria and would relentlessly apply its traditional standards of fairness and balance, but even this mainstream outfit seems to have sold out to the hysterics and axe grinders.
Winton also opines about the current scientific media environment on his own website, Wintonsworld. Early in his reporting career, Winton says he bought into global warming assertions. However, in his quest to achieve balanced reporting based on facts, he became increasingly skeptical that a trace gas would have the enormous impact on global climate that was being presented as unquestionable fact.
Imagine my amazement when I started talking to the world’s top climate scientists and found a completely different story. The science wasn’t even close to being proven, and I had great difficulty finding anyone to say the link between excessive human-made carbon dioxide (CO2) and a changing climate was clear. There were many assumptions, but no proof. Yet the BBC and the mainstream media (MSM) constantly reported a proven doom scenario.
But complying with Reuters standards of balance and fairness, I produced many stories summing up the fact that nobody really knew –
a) did CO2 impact climate?
b) if so, how much was down to human influence?I still don’t understand why the BBC was (and is) adamant the science was settled, or why the Main Stream Media (with some honourable exceptions) went along with it. I’m sure it was more laziness than any kind of conspiracy.
Since the mid-90s, climate science hasn’t progressed much, but now the politicians are relying on computer modelling for the ever more hysterical climate predictions and panicky plans. These models are notorious for predicting unreliable scenarios, not least because they are loaded with assumptions that are often highly speculative and politically motivated.
I recently noted the hot new idea to make climate drama even more dramatic, by adding “feedback loops” to climate models.
Winton also has a few thoughts about those who would dismiss those demanding to look at alternative explanations for climate shifts as “deniers.”
These zealots, and there are some very high-profile ones in politics and academia, say the science is decided and indisputable. This is untrue. Those opposing the warmists don’t doubt the climate is changing. Everybody knows the global climate has been gradually, and occasionally erractically, warming since the last ice age 10,000 years ago.
So the ugly “denier” label makes no sense. It’s just abuse, designed to shut down argument…”.
Winton points out that Reuters and other news outlets have farmed out their climate coverage to an activist group called Covering Climate Now (CCN).
Reuters and some of the biggest names in the news like Bloomberg, Agence France Presse, CBS News, and ABC News have signed up to support CCN, which brags that it is an unbiased seeker after the truth. But this claim won’t last long if you peer behind the façade. CCN may claim to be fair and balanced, but it not only won’t tolerate criticism, it brandishes the unethical ‘denier’ weapon with its nasty holocaust denier echoes. This seeks to demonise those who disagree with it by savaging personalities and denying a hearing, rather than using debate to establish its case.
CCN advises journalists to routinely add to stories about bad weather and flooding to suggest climate change is making these events more intense. This is not an established fact, as a simple routine check would show.
As I have noted in my posts on the ideological capture of science, today’s writers do not have strong backgrounds in science, there is an interest in getting “clicks and exposure,” and social media throttles articles that go against the current political narratives.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air makes an important point in his review of Winton’s post, and one with which I concur: The complete failure of “experts” during the pandemic have people questioning the realities of other science . . . including climate science.
This corruption of news reporting into narrative journalism has been apparent for years to climate-hysteria skeptics. Until recently, however, that revolution-by-evolution process hadn’t become apparent to most of the rest of the populace. Now, however, with all sorts of new data coming out about masks and natural immunity in the COVID pandemic, many more people have seen The Science® exposed as based entirely on political agenda.
The mainstream-media refusal to cover new and conclusive meta-analyses of scientific studies that refute their three-year narratives in support of government emergency rule now demonstrates that corruption on a much broader scale.
I will wrap this up with a quote from Glenn Reynolds:
MUT's Science Tweet of Day https://t.co/hS0KFyDSbM #Science pic.twitter.com/VwEstswU1l
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) February 23, 2023
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Comments
We are in what is called an Interglacial Period. It is not as hot, today, as it was 120,000 years ago, the prior Interglacial Period. Interglacial periods last for about 10,000 years.
The Earth’s climate varies +/- 12C-to-15C over a period of approximately 120,000 year cycle of which, we’re at peak (Interglacial). We are, in fact, based on the EPICA studies, toward the very end of the Interglacial Period.
Within 10,000 years, regardless of what we do, Canada will be scraped off the face of the planet as the glaciers come back. This is how it’s been for the PAST ONE MILLION YEARS despite, in the past, having CO2 levels, at times, FOUR TIMES GREATER THAN TODAY.
There is reason that every climate model fails. Simply put, they ignore the 120,000 year Milankovitch Cycles that have been the primary driver of earth’s climate over the past million years.
And Canada was such a nie neighbor, too…
“was” is the operative word there
Will the glacier be bilingual as required by Canadian law?
Quebec will be hardest hit… after women and children. As for the First Nations…. chill out.
Ooooo. New photo.
But, money-laundering is such fun. We pass laws giving you tons of Climate Change money and grants and you give us big campaign donations. and votes.
This has very little to do about the climate and quite a bit to do about power.
Of course, a couple more degrees would help with the excess deaths from the cold versus from heat. More CO2, plant food, would help with starvation and supermarket prices. Finally, blocking nuclear power with regulation will mean that EVs never deliver much in carbon savings – the excess fossil fuels need to make the cars/batteries will not be recovered if fossil fuels are needed for the power plants to power the EV charging stations. Windmills just won’t do it.
Don’t try to confuse them with actual science.
“Ed Morrissey at Hot Air makes an important point in his review of Winton’s post, and one with which I concur: The complete failure of ‘experts’ during the pandemic have people questioning the realities of other science . . . including climate science.”
I wrote this to friends in May2022:
“One of the reasons governments don’t want to give up on any of the COVID scams is that they used the same tactics as they have been using in the ‘climate change’ scare. They’re afraid if one unravels, the other may also unravel.”
From Winston:
“I still don’t understand why the BBC was (and is) adamant the science was settled…”
The next time you hear someone use this phrase, remind them that the only “settled” science are those theories that have been falsified. Even if considered factual, science is always subject to testing and falsification. A theory only need be falsified once for it to be proven false. It’s been more than 100 years since Einstein formulated his theory of general relativity, but it’s still being tested regularly. Einstein’s work isn’t considered “settled” science, not because it’s correct, but because it hasn’t yet been proven wrong.
(Interestingly, I wrote this about COVID, the pandemic, and the vaccines. So you can see here an example of a parallel between the official narratives on COVID and climate change, with both employing the bogus “settled science” nonsense.)
Politics injected in science is not just a media problem. I’ve seen it in the sciences myself. It needs to stop and we need to get back to an ideal that remains apolitical. One way to draw a line in the sand is to stop calling “social science” a scientific discipline. Correlations and regressions are not the same degree of evidence as experimentally-controlled double-blind analyses.
Lots of folks choose to believe things that simply are not so. They reject evidence that contradicts their views b/c they have adopted their positions as a matter of faith and or profit/grift. When your future research grant or govt funding depends upon a certain sort of answer the researchers in question tend to produce the answers those who fund them want to hear.
The two conflicting camps of Never Trump and Only Trump are in may ways just as representative of this phenomenon as the unscientific foolishness of mask and jab mandates. Each camp has its paid advocates, writers and other surrogates who are rewarded directly or indirectly by expressing exactly what their audience wants to hear.
I’m pretty sure nearly all policy makers and climate journalists have known for at least the past decade (since at least the Climate-gate emails) that they’re peddling a fraud. The noble lie.
It’s always been about stoking fear about climate as the means to redistribute global resources and create a global governance system.
I think they could have pulled it off prior to the internet. Fear is a powerful motivator as we saw with the Wuhan virus. They may still pull it off. But with the internet we all know it’s a fraud.
the politicians are relying on computer modelling for the ever more hysterical climate predictions
Climate models, in the scientific method, are properly named Untested Hypotheses. Their nearness to truth will not be known until we’ve lived through all the years encompassed by their predictions.
You’d think that all the smart college-educated editors who publish the predictions and express the anguish for the assumed results would have learned this in their high school science classes.
Well, maybe their glamorous University degrees resulted from the dominance of dogma which arises from political knowitalls doing the teaching, having learned to use the word ‘science’ as the cigarette companies used to say ‘99% of all doctors agree that our smokes are best for your health!’