From The Daily Sceptic
The U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is calling for evidence to show that climate change is causing “mental health” problems. The agency notes that climate change can have psychological implications through growing awareness of the issue, “leading to psychological distress”. Of course it might help if the UKHSA was not itself a major promoter of fake climate alarm. Last December it claimed that London could suffer endemic dengue fever by 2060 based on, among a number of implausible assumptions, the idea that the temperature would rise by 4°C in less than 80 years. Professor Paul Reiter, retired Professor of Insects and Infectious Diseases at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, branded the dengue and other mosquito-borne diseases claims as “entirely fictional” and “shameless”.
The activities of Government bodies such as the UKHSA have made it difficult to distinguish between genuine psychological anguish and young spoilt adults with unchallenged luxury death-cult beliefs who just don’t appear to fancy a lifetime of striving and work. Some of them don’t even seem to want to have sex and procreate, so perhaps they are a bit doolally after all! For those worried about the weather, as less-informed populations have been through the ages, a better solution might be a course in critical thinking. This would enable them to understand the science and become less reliant on Net Zero-promoting fanatics like the UKHSA.
What an appalling waste of public money this proposed UKHSA make-work report will be. Submissions of “case studies” are invited, “which demonstrate provision of mental health interventions in relation to climate change and extreme weather events”. Climate change is said to be having a “substantial impact on both physical and mental health and will continue to do so in the future as increased frequency and intensity of climate related events (such as heatwaves, flooding and droughts) occur”.
Rather than peddling this activist wish-list nonsense, British taxpayer money would be better spent noting that climate data going back 100 years show little or no evidence of ‘extreme’ weather events increasing, an opinion largely backed up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Instead, the UKHSA is pandering to the hysterical antics of over-indulged kidults reacting to the “join the weather dots, jail the deniers” hokum spread by figures such as Jim Dale and Dale Vince. Of course one must not entirely blame the two Dales. BBC Verify/Vilify Climate Correspondent Marco Silva recently returning from a Green Blob-funded six-month course where one of the past tasks has been to take a mango and write a story about how it is less tasty than last year due to climate change.
The “call for evidence” by the UKHSA is framed by claiming: “It is vital that the evidence and guidance produced addresses the needs of stakeholders and is presented in a way that is usable to inform action.” In other words, the UKHSA is repeating the formula from the dengue scare and causing alarm that feeds into demands that we stop the climate changing by going to Net Zero.
Which is a shame, since Net Zero is dead – killed off on November 5th by the return of President Trump. The upcoming COP will be a wake – developing countries will demand free money or “climate reparations” as they call it, China and India will pay lip service. But without the backing and money of the most powerful country in the world, the idea that you can run stuff without hydrocarbon energy and processes is a lost cause. It will not die easily, particularly in the European countries. The U.K. will suffer egregiously if fanatics in the new Labour Government continue to hold sway. Net Zero promotion and the agitprop that underpins its survival are deeply embedded within political and bureaucratic elites, as the latest stunt from the UKHSA demonstrates.
Net Zero may be dying but its propensity to cause heavy economic and societal damage will linger. For too long activists have managed to spread the lie that the science around the opinion that humans are causing most climate change was ‘settled’. In the interests of promoting the authoritarian green agenda, the long established scientific process of rigorous questioning and inquiry was trashed and discarded. To not much surprise, both the Dales are in favour of jailing people they call “deniers”. One of the speakers on Marco Silva’s course, run by the Reuters Institute, has also considered such drastic penalties. On the heels of ‘settled’ science comes emotion, a far more effective political weapon when command and control is the order of the day.
Few weaponise climate emotion better than the Guardian newspaper. Last May, Damian Carrington said he had polled 400 “scientists” and the conclusion was that the world was heading towards a “semi-dystopian” future. Sadly, some of the “scientists involved”, while no doubt academic bigwigs in their own right, turned out to be a little light on scientific qualifications. Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, for instance, is an “environmental psychologist” whose first degree was in theology and religious studies with French. A few disobliging comments followed, no doubt there were a few hurty tweets on X, and now Carrington has struck back on their behalf. The ‘gaslighted’ researchers claim that “embracing their emotions was necessary to do good science”. Those dismissing their fears as doom-laden and alarmist, “were speaking frequently from a position of privilege in Western countries”.
These days emotion reigns supreme and happily everyone can identify as a climate scientist. Ahead of the recent U.K. General Election, Green Blob-funded Bob Ward from the Grantham stable organised a petition signed by 408 “scientists” calling for an ambitious programme of green policies. The BBC referred to “the most distinguished” of the country’s climate scientists, while Bob Ward tweeted, “be ambitious on climate, scientists urge”.
Scientists you say? The first claimed scientist in the alphabetical list was an Associate Professor of Accounting, the second was a geographer specialising in “disaster risk reduction”, while the third was an archaeologist.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
You must be logged in to post a comment.