The media controls the narrative on climate. What they communicate is accepted as fact without critical examination.
Utilizing this advantage, the media has sold a story of climate doom, an apocalypse which they attribute to fossil fuel emissions.
The Misplaced Trust and the Exploitation
We all have our go-to news and information sources. Some tune into established mainstream media, while others try out relatively newer independent sources.
It is quite difficult to be certain that those news mediums that we subscribe to are giving us the right information, from the right sources, and with the right perspective.
I, for example, cross-check the news from multiple sources-some mainstream media and sometimes spend hours verifying a single news source. The task of cross-checking is particularly straight-forward and easy in the internet era.
But it is not practical to expect every news consumer to go through the lengthy process of fact-checking and many resort to believing the information provided to them by a certain news medium they subscribe to.
Mainstream media has exploited this royalty they enjoy among the masses, and perpetrated claims and theories about the future state of climate which cannot be proved by any available climate model.
Unelected politicians from international political bodies like the United Nations, the European Commission, and even some climate scientists have in turn used these mainstream media as vehicles to deliver their climate hysteria to the masses. As a culmination of their hysteria propaganda, they are now in a phase where people are made to accept that greenhouse gas emission reductions are the only way to save the planet.
Endless List of False Claims: Subtle Art of Climate Persuasion
The lies about climate change are endless. However, the mainstream media has adopted a systematic approach to make the lies appear as expert prediction. They bank on the fact that a news reader will trust the predictions from the scientists as facts, regardless of how a certain scientific theory or claim is.
A classic example of this is the claims about the temperature levels in the future. The media claims that the world will become dangerously hot and they come to this conclusion based on computer climate models used by scientists.
But in reality, even the latest of computer models (like CMIP6) fail to accurately reflect real world temperatures. Most of them exaggerate the assumed impact of greenhouse gases on temperature increase, thereby failing miserably. Despite this, the very same models are used as the guideline for policymakers in United Nation’s official documents.
The Paris climate agreement is one such policy initiative that is completely dependent on these model assumptions. The inaccurate, and undependable, model results will be used in the upcoming Sixth Assessment Report of UN IPCC, the authoritative body on climate change according to media pundits and political class.
The mainstream media does not reveal this information to their readers, and neither do they help readers understand the impact of false predictions on public policy, especially those renewable energy policy measures that are being blindly incorporated into energy systems worldwide.
Further, the media makes sure that none of its past mistakes are revisited, thereby deceiving the masses and gaining their trust as trustworthy news sources.
In 2019, USA today ran an article which justified the position of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who claimed that the, “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” In 2030, if her claims do not come true. it is likely that no one will question Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
How do we know that? We have seen similar claims by politicians before, and when their predictions failed to materialize, the media simply ignored the matter.
The most well known case is that of former Vice President Al Gore, who got away with the extraordinarily false claims that he made during the mid-2000s. His claims about dwindling Polar bear populations, Arctic being summer Ice-free by 2015, and many other claims turned out to be mere prophecy, not science.
Today, popular biologists like David Attenborough have joined the likes of Gore in the climate doomsday bandwagon, and are given extensive coverage in the mainstream media. With each passing day, people are bombarded with more and more news on the climate apocalypse.
These examples are just a tiny drop in the ocean of climate falsehood. The list of false predictions includes more extreme weather events, dangerous sea-level rise, global food insecurity, and many more.
The following link is a collection of such false predictions “showing that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science. Such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines but the failures are typically not revisited.”
https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/
The mistake, again, is not with the average news consumer, but with the media agencies who unashamedly continue to perpetrate climate lies.
Regardless of our differences regarding the finer details of climate change, we must make a pledge to inspect climate news that comes our way, and critically evaluate the interpretations of the journalists, and even that of some scientists.