On September 14th the Daily Sceptic published an article reporting that four leading Italian scientists had undertaken a major review of historical climate trends and concluded that declaring a ‘climate emergency’ was not supported by the data. They suggested that children should not be burdened with anxiety about the climate. The Daily Sceptic story was retweeted around 9,000 times, read by at least 24,000 people and was widely seen across social media. It was picked up by print media such as the Australian and broadcast on a widely-distributed Sky News Australia clip. Mention was made of the impressive credentials of the authors, who included two physics professors, an adjunct professor of physics and an agricultural meteorologist, and the wide variety of sources they had referenced.
The story sent shockwaves through the ranks of the ‘settled’ climate science community that takes a more alarmist approach to the prospects of humanity and the Earth’s climate. As always with heretical stories like this, the mere suggestion that the climate is not breaking down runs the risk of destroying the need for a command-and-control Net Zero solution. Something had to be done.
State-owned Agence France-Presse (AFP) is rapidly becoming the ‘fact-checker’ of choice for those seeking to enforce the strict ‘settled’ science narrative. On Monday, the Daily Sceptic published details of a rather muddled ‘fact-check’ written by Roland Lloyd Parry in which it was stated that we had misled over the recent growth in Arctic summer ice. To present his case, Lloyd Parry compared one fact – summer sea ice in 2022 – to a 30-year average ending 12 years ago. Now Lloyd Parry is joined on an AFP fact-check of the Italian scientists by senior editor Marlowe Hood, who was recently given €100,000 (£88,000) by the Foundation arm of a large Spanish bank heavily involved in financing green technology. Hood describes himself as the Herald of the Anthropocene, the latter a political renaming of the current Holocene era that puts the alleged dominant role of human activity on the climate at the centre.
The claim that there is no evidence of a climate emergency is said to be “misleading”. AFP reports that “top climate experts” say the paper “cherry-picked” data. Of course scientists often debate each other’s findings in a robust fashion, but what they don’t – or shouldn’t – do is call for the other side to be cancelled.
