Is The Telegraph Turning Sceptical?

By Paul Homewood

 

Is the Telegraph becoming more sceptical?

Following on from Charles Moore’s recent forays against climate alarmism, last week we had Sherrelle Jacobs having a pop at St Greta:

Jeremy Corbyn, the wintry and discontented Ghost of Seventies Christmases Past, may have spent the past weeks rattling around the political margins. But the rapper Stormzy, the blingtastic Ghost of Christmas Present, has more than made up for this in a manner most befitting of the mass media age. His viral diatribe against our “one hundred per cent racist” nation flashed on millions of smartphones as households settled into holiday hibernation. Generating almost as much hype was a ghoulish visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future, Greta Thunberg, who lamented mass apathy towards our impending climate doom as a guest editor on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Stormzy and Thunberg are the eerie pin-ups of an anti-rational age. They remind us that, though the working-class heartlands are reeling from populist revolt, an intolerant and lazy metrollectual elite continues to dominate our culture and media…

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But if Stormzy abuses logic, Thunberg is rewriting truth. Her potency lies in the fact that she is both the fake news messenger and the fake news: imminent human-caused extinction-level global warming is a scientific fact so beyond dispute that even a child can grasp it. This is a lie so fundamental that the failure of the BBC and other liberal media outlets to tackle it is a disgraceful dereliction of duty. The “consensus” on climate change – based on the statistic that 97 per cent of scientists agree – is not only groupthinkishly unscientific in spirit, but also invalid. It is traceable back to a paper by an Australian researcher, which a later paper showed was not only unsubstantiated but outright contradicted by its own data. Still, Greta does not want us to think but to “act”. The child oracle is yanking us by the hand, not out of the eco-apocalypse’s jaws but into the jowls of vegetable-brained oblivion.

 

And just a few days before, Ross Clark also weighed in :

 

In the past year climate-related disasters have cost over £100 billion in damage. Or maybe it was 82 pence.

Okay, I made up the latter figure, but it will be no worse a guess than the former, which is implied in a report “Counting the Cost. 2019: a year of climate breakdown” published by Christian Aid. The charity has compiled estimates for damage caused by 15 severe weather incidents last year and blamed everything on climate change – disregarding the fact that we have always had storms, floods and wildfires.

Even if rising global temperatures and sea levels do exacerbate heatwaves and add to sea flooding it would be ludicrous to bung the whole bill for every adverse weather event on climate change. And what about the other side of the ledger: the damage that would have been done by snow and freezing temperatures but hasn’t been done as a result of a slightly warmer Earth?

I don’t expect a lot else from Christian Aid, a left-leaning charity which seemingly likes to paint a pictures of climatic Armageddon to obscure the significant success of global capitalism, combined with emergency aid, in reducing the number of hungry people in the world. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation it has fallen from 1 million in 1990 to 800,000 today, in spite of an extra 1.9 billion people in the world.

But what really bothers me is how ‘grey’ literature like Christian Aid’s hyperbole gets reported more than genuine science. The report attributes Hurricane Dorian to man-made climate change. Yet an analysis by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published last August concluded that it was ‘premature’ to make such an attribution. While its models project that rising temperatures will, by the late 21st century, slightly increase the intensity of hurricanes it also predicts that there will be fewer such storms.

Christian Aid blames wildfires in California on climate change. Yet long-term data by National Interagency Fire Center shows a dramatic fall in the acreage burned annually by wildfires in the US. In the worst year, 1930, 52.3 million acres burned. Last year, it was 8.8 million acres. Although the methodology changed in 1983, and so the two figures might not be directly comparable, the data shows a dramatic fall in the 1940s and 1950s as fire services became better at fighting fires.

Indeed, that is now the problem: the natural cycle of burning followed by regeneration has been broken, leading to a build-up of dead wood and to bigger fires when they do occur. Globally, Nasa satellite data shows that the amount of land burned in wildfires fell by a quarter between 1998 and 2015 – not that you would know from hysterical reporting and the lazy assertion, made by Greta Thunberg and others, that the “Earth is on fire”.

There are, of course, financial implications associated with climate change. Rising sea levels mean we will need to rethink sea defences, possibly eventually relocating some low-lying cities. But it serves no one to exaggerate and blame everything on man-made climate change as if we never used to have storms, floods and fires. We did, all the time, and they have always cost us a fortune in damage.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/29/christian-aid-should-drop-climate-rubbish/

 

 

We still have to put up with the nonsense spouted by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Jeremy Warner and some of the more woke reporters. But there are encouraging signs that maybe, just maybe, the Telegraph has started paying attention to what so many of its readers have been saying for so long.