The most brilliant propaganda technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success. - Adolf Hitler
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it - Mark Twain
Well, now it's official. Global Warming is a lie, and the Hot Air Brigade are determined to tell it regardless. To reconstruct an old quotation, there are lies, damned lies, and to hell with the statistics.
A document published in August this year by the Institute of Public Policy Research is entitled "Warm Words - how are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better?" It was written to advise pressure groups and environmental campaign organisations on how to mould and influence public attitudes to climate change.
The following paragraphs, with only minor changes of wording, appear twice in the document and form the overall conclusion drawn from what the authors call "research". The underlining is mine.
"Treating climate change as beyond argument
Much of the noise in the climate change discourse comes from argument and counter-argument, and it is our recommendation that, at least for popular communications, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. This must be done by stepping away form the "advocates debate" described earlier, rather than by stating and re-stating these things as fact.
The "facts" need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken. The certainty of the Government's new climate-change slogan - "together this generation will tackle climate change" (Defra 2006) - gives an example of this approach. It constructs, rather than claims, its own factuality."
In other words, don't bother to argue the case, or examine the facts, or convince people by logic and common-sense. Just lie repeatedly, and everyone will believe you.
And calling it a lie is no exaggeration. The fact is that the climate change debate is by no means concluded or conclusive. While it would be foolish to dispute that the weather has changed and is changing, many of the claims by early campaigners have been shown to be mistaken or based on flawed science; observations of weather, animals, wild plants and crops show that things are actually improving in many areas; measurements of ice decay and ice growth show that growth currently outstrips decay; sea-level measurements show that in some places levels are rising slowly, in others they aren't; the hole in the ozone layer is getting smaller, and overall temperatures haven't risen for the last eight years. So while the weather has certainly changed, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is not proven, and to claim that it is proven, and to try and shape government policy on that basis, is a lie of major proportions.
If you think about recent media coverage of the issue, you can see that already the "interested parties" have taken the advice very thoroughly to heart. People like Christopher Monckton and Nigel Lawson who attempt to inject a little sense and a few facts into the debate seem like lone voices crying in the wilderness, and at the drop of a hat the average man in the street will trot out the party line of climate chaos / the heat-death of the universe / kill 4x4 drivers because it's all their fault. It's almost as good as the war - the average man in the street feels much better when he knows who to hate.
The report's authors are Gill Ereaut, a market researcher, and Nat Segnit, a playwright and satirist (oh, perhaps this report is satirical?). I suppose they'd say that they were just doing their job. They'd been asked to prepare a report on how to best put across the environmental lobby's skewed agenda, and that's what they did. At the risk of suffering the same fate as Foxy Ken Livingstone, we have to say that the "just doing my job" defence ought to have been thoroughly discredited by now - it certainly didn't do war criminals much good after WW2. If your job requires you to be shabby and dishonest, get another one.
Strangely the Institute claims that "deepening democracy underpins all of IPPR's work". Can't quite see how that works, after reading this report. You can download the full IPPR document here.
Our thanks to Philip Blair of The Association of British Drivers for bringing this to our attention.
The GOS says: Then there was this from the Guardian recently ...
The government often hides behind a figleaf of scientific respectability when spinning unpalatable or controversial policies to make them acceptable to voters, according to a report by MPs critical of the way science is used in policy.
The parliamentary science and technology select committee said that scientific evidence was often misused or distorted to justify policy decisions which were really based on ideological or social grounds.
The report, the culmination of a nine-month inquiry, calls for a "radical re-engineering" of the way the government uses science. "Abuse of the term 'evidence based' ... is a form of fraud which corrupts the whole use of science in government," said Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrats' science spokesman and a member of the committee. "It's critical that the currency of an evidence base is not devalued by false claims."
P.S. And Andrew Bolt writes today (19th November) in the Herald Sun:
"Remember how the polar caps were supposed to be melting so fast thanks to man-made gobal warming that we'd drown in the rising seas?
Well, first we find that Antarctica is actually getting so much icier that it should be lowering sea levels.
Then we find that the melting Arctic is now "fighting back".
Now I learn that a little reported peer-reviewed Danish study this year found that Greenland is in fact colder than it was 70 years ago. At present, continuous instrumental temperature records for Greenland reach back to the late nineteenth century at a few sites. Combining early observational records from locations along the south and west coasts, it has been possible to extend the overall record back to the year 1784. The warmest year in the extended Greenland temperature record is 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the warmest decades.
Ever feel that you're the victim of mass hysteria, and that reason no longer works?"
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
This site created and maintained by PlainSite