From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

No green activist operation makes clearer why they need to ban free speech and cancel scientific debate to achieve Net Zero hegemony than the Guardian newspaper. Last Saturday, we learnt from its Environment Editor Damian Carrington that campaigners had said the UK’s TV and radio regulator Ofcom was allowing GB News and others to ‘flout” accuracy rules and broadcast “climate change denial”, whatever that last phrase means. Carrington noted in response to frequent suggestions of inaccuracy in UN climate models going back to 1979, that, “in fact, UN climate models have been remarkably accurate”. How Carrington, one of three journalists of the year in 2023 at the Green Blob-funded Covering Climate Now, can write this with a straight face is anyone’s guess.

Net Zero is dead in the United States and there has been a welcome revival of the scientific process that has killed off the ridiculous notion that a science opinion can somehow be ‘settled’. The recent official climate report from the US Department of Energy noted that climate models are the primary tool used to project future change in response to higher levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. “Of great concern is the fact that after several decades of the climate modelling enterprise… the range of future warming they produce in response to a hypothetical doubling of CO₂ extends over a factor three.” This range of disagreement has not decreased for decades, the five eminent science authors add.

Tittle-tattling Reliable Media is behind the GB News campaign and, egged on by Guardian Central, the anti-science desperation is clear. One GB News contributor described climate change as “rubbish’. Another described it as a “scam”, an opinion recently expressed at the United Nation’s General Assembly by the elected President of the US Government. It might be thought that the scientific process can withstand a few harsh words, but Reliable Media is outraged. It charges that Ofcom has “effectively suspended its accuracy rules on this life-and-death issue”.

Carrington finds room for reporting the fine of £17,000 levied recently by the French equivalent state broadcast regulator Arcom on the centre-Right TV channel CNews. In this case a  contributor had dared to air the opinion that climate change was “a lie, a scam”.

The French complaint was made by the activist Eva Morel from QuotaClimat. She stated that:

When the media blur the line between facts and opinions, it doesn’t lead people to trust in alternative truths; it leads them to trust in nothing at all. Sowing doubt about climate science serves to obstruct climate action and it endangers lives.

In an excellent article in Watts Up With That?, Eric Worrall pointed out that the problem with enforced agreement on the ‘facts’ is that in science, “there is no such thing as a fact which cannot be challenged”.

Ofcom rules specifically note that an example of an issue which it considers to be broadly settled is the “scientific principles behind the theory of anthropogenic global warming”. This is plainly anti-science. For a start, the scale of human-caused global warming is a scientific hypothesis (opinion), not a validated theory. Ofcom’s claim is a political notion concocted by state bureaucrats who obviously have little understanding of the language of science and the way it actually works. In fact, Ofcom seems vaguely aware of the stupidity that lies behind its fashionable claim. Carrington reports that it has received 1,221 complaints related to the ‘climate crisis’ since January 2020 and none had resulted in a ruling that the broadcasting code had been breached.

Worrall is withering in his concluding assessment of the shenanigans of activists seeking to quash dissenting scientific voices in public spaces.

My point is, to declare some facts are beyond challenges, especially ‘facts’ produced by artefacts as flimsy as climate models, is to strike at the foundations of freedom of expression and scientific inquiry. Forcing broadcasters to embrace a uniform, government-approved version of unassailable facts, then claiming they somehow have freedom of expression, is utter nonsense.

Reliable Media is a grubby little hard-Left operation. Few details of its finances and funding are available since it was formed as a limited-by-guarantee company to take forward the ‘Just Stop Hate’ and ‘Just Stop Heat’ campaigns. It claims that it is making “climate change denial unprofitable”, and it does this by seeking to destroy the ability of free speech media operations such as the increasingly successful GB News to attract advertisers. If this is its aim, it presumably has good legal advice, although its latest filed accounts to June 2024 suggest money might be tight. A sum of £107,940 is said to be held as cash at bank, but an identical sum is set aside for creditors due within one year. Whatever its financial position, its activities resemble those of the class sneak, running off to teacher to blub about the bigger boys, those who are more confident and entrepreneurial, better at sports and more successful with the girls. As the brilliant comedy song writer Dominic Frisby sang, maybe jokingly, in his composition about ways to stop freaks like Ed Miliband: “We need to bring back school bullying.” Science, he adds, is only discovering the value of it now.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.