For three of four years I’ve been keeping tabs on the news headlines by regularly using a search engine to highlight the days news. Even a year ago, that would daily harvest a couple of really juicy stories on global warming. So what is the headline news today?
- World’s most iconic buildings switch off lights to highlight …
- ‘Fat blokes stand up for global warming!’
- Global warming: A British Noah’s Ark
- The mystery of the 1993 global warming TV ad
- Contrails warm the world more than aviation emissions
- How to tackle windy cattle: beefier diet could reduce flatulence …
Where have all the good headlines gone like: “killer floods could engulf UK” and “children won’t know what snow is? I remember the good old days, when a global warming story was really capable of scaring the pants of Scotsman in a Kilt. Where are they now? The second “major” news story isn’t even an article but a cartoon. Switching off lights might be news in Japan where that might also mean a major nuclear disaster but it doesn’t make news to a generation that lived through the three day week. As for “Britain a Noah’s Ark”. Britain has always been an ecological niche since the last ice age cut us off from the continent – which makes that story around 10,000 years too late. As for contrails: their warming effects have been well known in the sceptic community after the US cooled around a degree when all the planes were grounded after 911 … and then there’s the good old: “let’s combine farting and something topical because there’s no other news” fall back, which has only one big problem:
Global warming is no longer topical!
Come on! The news of global warming is about as interesting these days as watching windmills standing still. They churn out the same tired stories by the same tired and out of date reporters. They have nothing new to say as each and every bit of the doomsday scare from rising sea level to Queensland floods has been debunked.
The gentle turning of the tide or the eye of the storm?
There’s that point in the middle of the tornado or the turning of the tide when everything goes quiet. The sound of fury of the wind, or the rushing of the tide, ceases and a completely new behaviour begins to set in. With the tide you first notice it as the flotsam and jetsam is left high and dry. With a tornado, the wind starts coming from an entirely new direction.
Looking back, it is obvious to everyone (except our dear politicians) that the swine flu pandemic was a manufactured scare. Not forgetting that there were deaths, the overall rate was no worse than the normal death toll due to cold and flu. But whilst the media were all over this story as they stoked up the fear of worldwide imminent annihilation unless we all bought flu vaccines from those nice vaccine companies who had nothing to do with stoking up the fear of the pandemic, where were they when the truth came out that this was nothing more than normal winter flu?
By my reckoning, global warming is now at the stage when we turned on the news to hear:
“and now that that we’ve covered the serious news, let’s return to flu pandemic to see if anyone who didn’t have an underlying medical condition has died yet … nope … time for football”.
And then it went out with a whimper. Where was the news when the swine flu pandemic turned out to be simple winter flu?
So will it be the same as the global warming scare turns out to be a few warmer summers and a lot of temperature gauges on new hot tarmac? By and large swine flu hit us so quickly and with so little information that there wasn’t time to fully consider the story, and you could forgive the poor quality reporting by the pressure and lack of real information. But global warming isn’t like that. The true state of the “science” has been known about for years and for any who couldn’t or wouldn’t see, it has now been publicly humiliated by the climategate emails. There has been plenty of time to digest the truth, to research the facts, and almost daily, and certainly weekly another piece of research comes out debunking yet another mainstay of the global warming house of cards.
What is worse, unlike swine flu which came upon so quickly all that anyone could do was react, on global warming Politicians haven’t just followed the news, they have made the news! They have been the main force creating the scare on global warming, they have deliberately manipulated the news and public debate by costly adverts, indoctrination in schools and blatant attempts to use their positions of power to squash all dissent from the global warming doctrine.
Global warming wasn’t a storm in the media’s teacup, with politicians dragged along behind them. Global warming was largely manufactured by the politicians over a great deal of time, with a great deal of public resources and when the story finally broke, it was not the media, but the politicians in both parliament and the Scientific societies who flagrantly led the investigations away from the real evidence of scientific fraud.
By and large, the media, like the public have been manipulated by the political elite and not visa versa. The media did not manufacture the public “science is settled”. The media did not allocate the funding so as to squash any research contrary to the gospel of truth. The media did not run the whitewash inquiries that laughingly vindicated the most appalling scientific practices and wrecked the good name of the majority of decent scientists in the UK.
There is now a substantial body of evidence of corruption, malpractice and inflated egos reaching right into the heart of government such that any decent journalistic paper could have a field day running headline after headline, but only if they choose. Only if they choose will this become the “eye of the storm” as the media machine yet again get their teeth into the story, but only this time to tear it apart.
Who knows? Have they even bothered to investigate? Are they waiting for the mythical oil-funded sceptic machine to feed them the story? If so, they will have a long long wait.
Does the public really care if global warming is a con?
The real sad truth is that I don’t think the public really care if global warming is true. They read scare stories like this, like they go to horror films. The fun is in being scared, not having some nerd pointing out that vampires couldn’t fly.
So, unless the media can be convinced that there is something just as scary about the manipulation of the public and media, corruption of science and misuse of power then barring a few half hearted articles on the next warm summer, there will be no “other side” of the storm, it will just fizzle out like swine flu: the media will not turn on their political masters, and instead having eaten the carcass of the doomsday story to the dry bone, they will just fly off to the next story
Unfortunately, I don’t think this story can totally fizzle, because we seem hell bent on letting our lights go out! Ideally, this might happen first in London over the period of the Olympics – then perhaps politicians will be galvanised into some useful action.
David, that’s a very shrewd point. Unlike swine flu where “doing nothing” was cost free, as you imply we’re rapidly running out of conventional power as they are being shut down – and if anyone thinks wind will replace conventional …LOL.
As Lady Macbeth would say: “They are stepped in so far that should they wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” They have committed so much to renewables that they cannot easily return to conventional, but having done the easy bit of renewables they lack the political support to do the hard stuff and provide pump-storage backup to keep the lights on.
Is this a dagger I see before me … no! It’s another windmill with motionless blades!
I liked the connections in your last post. Making the links to the green religion and daily doses of tradgedy tsunami, meteorites, plagues, gruesome ends has make me sometimes think we are too informed, not well informed, too doused in catastrophe. Given that only until 50-60 years ago the only comprehension we had of ‘reality’ (as seen by others) was weeks if not months old. Now our news is a deluge, and picking our way through what would be natural disasters with all the sorrow and helplessness we end up with misery photographs and an inability to do much. That is, except a conscience enactment which is swallowed in the high powered charities’ income and diluted to such miniscule effect by the creaming off process. No wonder we are disenfranchised, a human can only take on so much. Windfarms are a cop out, an easy conscience booster, like buying a red poppy doesn’t stop wars but it says to others we remember.
Using carbon as a fear tax is as natural as hanging or drowning witches was. To speak out against is against the softie green images of cooling towers that are showing nothing more than steam in reality.
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