By Paul Homewood
In his Mail article this week, Ross Clark wrote about an outfit called Covering Climate Now (CCN):
This tougher tone in the media is partly down to an organisation called Covering Climate Now, an initiative by the Guardian and other outlets with Left-liberal leanings, to which some very high-profile news organisations, such as Bloomberg, Reuters, the Daily Mirror and Newsweek, have signed up.
It offers support to journalists to ‘forge a path towards an all-newsroom approach to climate reporting’. Its guidance includes: ‘Remember, an extreme weather story that doesn’t mention climate change is incomplete and potentially even inaccurate.’
For example, when reporting a hurricane, they were urged to add that ‘this comes at a time when human-caused climate change is consistently making storms more intense’.
So who are Covering Climate Now, who funds them and how do they operate?
This is how they describe themselves:
https://coveringclimatenow.org/about/
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It is bad enough that this propaganda is being spread so widely across the global media. But their Guide about how to bring climate change into every story makes it clear that “facts” have very little to do with the endeavour:
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https://coveringclimatenow.org/resource/your-guide-to-making-the-climate-connection/
There is no evidence whatsoever that climate change is supercharging anything, and the claptrap about communities of colour proves that this is purely a political spin operation. If CCN were really concerned with facts, they would spell out that poorer communities are much less vulnerable to weather events than they used to be because of economic development enabled by fossil fuels.
We have to look no further than the claim about hurricanes to know that the whole exercise is a fraud:
“This [hurricane] comes at a time when human-caused climate change is consistently making storms like it more intense.”
The IPCC however can find no evidence that this is the case, something which would be clear if what CCN say is true:
IPCC AR6
And NOAA are more explicit about Atlantic hurricanes, where there is more long term data available:
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
Which brings us to the question of who is funding this political campaign to brainwash the public?
It should come as no surprise to learn that the money comes from the usual load of far left, mostly American foundations, which we come across so often, like the Packards and Rockefellers.
https://coveringclimatenow.org/about/
The Park Foundation is an case in point. Their only real concern is for a “just, equitable and sustainable society”. As for being committed to an “independent media”, the last thing they want is that.
It is truly insidious that so much of our media seems to have sold out to this left wing agenda, and abandoned any commitment to actually checking the facts where climate is concerned. Remember that CCN say that Reuters, AFP and Bloomberg, who provide so much news content globally, are their partners.
I wonder who in these organisations originally agreed to giving up their editorial independence in this way?
FOOTNOTE
This whole story was brought to my attention by Neil Winton, who runs the Wintons World website. Neil was Reuters’ Science and Technology Correspondent in the 1990s, and as he says his reporting was always meticulously balanced, as Reuters then demanded.
His take on this scandal is here.
He has challenged Reuters to justify their abandonment of fact-based reporting through Reuters’ own in-house publication, The Baron, which keeps the retired informed of the latest news about the company. It will be interesting to see how Reuters respond.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
January 26, 2023 at 11:25AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 