Global warming is dead. Long live, er, 'Global climate disruption'

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: September 17th, 2010

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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100054012/global-warming-is-dead-long-live-er-global-climate-disruption/

Holdren: yep, a total AAAS
President Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren is worried about global warming. Having noticed that there hasn’t actually been any global warming since 1998, he feels it ought to be called “global climate disruption” instead. That way whether it gets warmer or colder, wetter or drier, less climatically eventful or more climatically eventful, the result will be the same: it can all be put down to “global climate disruption.”

And that will be good, because it will give Holdren the excuse to introduce all the draconian measures he has long believed necessary if “global climate disruption” is to be averted: viz, state-enforced population control; a rewriting of the legal code so that trees are able to sue people; and the wholesale destruction of the US economy (“de-development” as he put it in the 1973 eco-fascist textbook he co-wrote Paul and Anne Ehrlich Human Ecology: Global Problems And Solutions).

Holdren is not the only person having problems with the “world not warming and everyone growing increasingly sceptical” issue. So too is Dave “Grocer” Cameron’s excuse for a government. Its solution? Work out ways of brainwashing the populace with state-funded propaganda.

One solution, proposed by some bright spark at Bristol Poly – whoops, the “University of the West of England” as it now grandiosely refers to itself – is to have all climate sceptics classed as delusional freaks. His name is Professor Paul Hoggett and, as Dennis Ambler recalls in an excellent new report for the SPPI, last year he organised a whole conference on this theme:

Conference – Facing Climate Change, Climate Change Denial
University of the West of England, 7 March 2009
“Man-made climate change poses an unprecedented threat to the global ecosystem and yet the response, from national policy makers right through to individual consumers, remains tragically inadequate. The Centre for Psycho-Social Studies at the University of the West of England is organising a major interdisciplinary event Facing Climate Change on this topic at UWE on 7 March 2009.

Facing Climate Change is the first national conference to specifically explore ‘climate change denial’.

This conference aims to strengthen our awareness of the challenge facing us and to enhance our capacity for effective decision-making and action. It will do this by bringing together a group of people – climate change activists, eco-psychologists, psychotherapists and social researchers – who are uniquely qualified to assess the human dimensions of this human-made problem.

Professor Paul Hoggett is helping to organise the conference, he said, “We will examine denial from a variety of different perspectives – as the product of addiction to consumption, as the outcome of diffusion of responsibility and the idea that someone else will sort it out and as the consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency, irresponsibility.”

Scarier still, though, is this new report from the Climate Change Communication Advisory Group – an “independent” body part financed by the government’s Economic and Social Research Council – called Communicating Climate Change To Mass Public Audiences.


Essentially, it is a propaganda advisory document designed to help the government correct its populace’s false consciousness. Dr Goebbels, I’m sure, would have been full of admiration for sections like this:

Encourage public demonstrations of frustration at the limited pace of government action….Climate change communication could (and should) be used to encourage people to demonstrate (for example through public demonstrations) about how they would like structural barriers to behavioural/societal change to be removed.

Can this be for real? Here the government is being advised by one of its own think tanks how to railroad through its climate policies by encouraging mobs of activists to stage ’spontaneous’ protests demanding action which the majority of the electorate don’t actually want. I know this sort of thing happens all the time in Pyongyang, Teheran and Caracas. But in Britain