One of the most emblematic figures in the history of political comedy is that of the court jester openly speaking truth to power under the protection of a witty delivery. Comedy is presupposed to have that mystical charm. It can reveal truth in a way that a shedload of PowerPoint presentations cannot, and it disarms the target, who cannot be seen to react negatively for fear of appearing even more foolish. And when the jester holds the mirror up to the public, we can observe our own foolishness and laugh with no sense of resentment. I can’t get angry with Michael Macintyre, because I too have a man drawer, and I am just relieved to see that this appears to be one of those follies that I share with the rest of my gender. It’s funny because it’s true.

But let’s not get too dewy-eyed here, for comedy also has a long and dark history when it comes to making critical observations in a disarming manner. Whether it be as a tool of political subjugation or insurrection, humour can be a powerful force for both good and evil, and the targets are not necessarily in a position to defend themselves. In his essay, “Humour in Nazi Germany: Resistance and Propaganda? The Popular Desire for an All-Embracing Laughter”, author Patrick Merziger wryly observes:

The concept of humour as political agitation is to be found in Henri Bergson’s influential text Le Rire, where laughter is seen as a form that brings together one community in order to destroy the other.

In the hands of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the cartoons depicting Jews as rats or having improbably protruding noses were comic instruments that helped create a zeitgeist that ultimately led to the literal destruction of communities. But even in less extreme examples, the joke can be used to destroy a community’s credibility, which may be important when dealing with out-groups that seek to challenge an authorised narrative. Such jokes are not funny because they are true; they are funny because they are self-affirming for the in-group.

So what has any of this got to do with climate science? Well, science can be quite difficult to understand for the layperson, and so it is usual for only a simplified version of its findings to be offered for general consumption. The knack, however, is to simplify without becoming simplistic, because the simplistic can be highly misleading. Also, as the simplification increases, and the science is thereby diluted, it can be very hard to discern just how much of the result reflects the values of the translator rather than the essence of the science. Finally, science is not meant to be funny. There is no place in the scientific method for satire or mockery, so the simplified narrative shouldn’t come across as a ‘knock-knock’ joke. Science translated for the masses shouldn’t be an in-group’s self-affirming mockery of an out-group. But try telling that to the climate scientists.

Admittedly, when I say ‘the’ climate scientists, I commit the error of brushing them all with the same tar, since it is only four such scientists that appear to have latched onto the idea. In fact, the employment of humour as a tool to convey essential science to a joke-hungry public was actually the brainchild of a gentleman called Nick Oldridge, a climate campaigner who works in ‘ethical insurance’. Anxious to amplify his message, he joined forces with Utopia Bureau to set up Climate Science Breakthrough, with a vision “…to prototype different ways to communicate the climate science, and scale up those that work best to make a tangible and urgent difference.” His latest such urging involves the pairing up of prominent climate scientists with comedians so that the latter may translate the former’s exhortations into “very basic emotional ‘human’”. Hence, scientists Mark Maslin, Friederike Otto, Joanna Haig and Bill McGuire were paired up with Jo Brand, Nish Kumar, Jonathan Pie and Kiri Pritchard-McLean to produce a quartet of emotional climate science videos for your very basic human.

Of course, there is a profound arrogance to all of this, made explicit on the Climate Science Breakthrough’s website:

Scientists are brilliant and have absolutely delivered on diagnosing the climate crisis. But they aren’t trained to boil it down to absolute basics. Many are very good communicators. But science is inescapably complicated.

So this is all rather too complicated for the likes of you and I. But don’t worry because all we needed was for the forces of comedy to step forward, using their razor-sharp wit to penetrate the correspondingly dull-witted skulls of their complacent and cognitively challenged audience. In so doing they have launched a salvo of comic gems, expertly expressed in the patois of ‘human’, be it ever so basic and emotional. Here are some of their side-splitting and mind-expanding highlights:

Science speak: “We are destabilising our planet’s climate system, which is already leading to an increase in unpredictable weather events. Potentially everyone everywhere now faces a direct threat to their way of life.”

Translation into ‘human’: Your house is on fire, but don’t worry, the next flash flood should sort it out.

Science speak: Renewables are now much cheaper than oil and gas and much less polluting. Switching over will save us trillions and improve the quality of our lives in the process.

Translation into ‘human’: Wait, so you’re saying that we can avoid all of this? What in the renewable wind-powered fuck is stopping us?

Science speak: Over the last two hundred years the global average temperature has risen by roughly 1.3 degrees centigrade, which sounds relatively modest but is already leading to an explosion of extreme weather events.

Translation into ‘human’: 1.3 degrees may sound like fuck all but in practice half the world is flooded and the other half is a bonfire. And it’s still early days.

Hilarious stuff. But we are not here to discuss the quality of humour, which is after all a matter of personal taste. Instead, the thing that needs saying is that statements that are already simplistic and contentious are being ‘translated’ here into grotesque caricature that does not simplify anything, it merely amplifies the propaganda. Let me illustrate by offering another example in the same vein:

Science speak: Jews are genetically inferior to Arians and through their self-serving activities are responsible for the destabilisation of the German economy.

Translation into ‘human’: Jews are deceitful vermin with big noses and it is high time we did something about them.

The comparison I am making here is, of course, purely one of principle. I merely seek to demonstrate how cartoon representations work, and I use an obviously harmful example taken from history. I leave open the question as to whether any harm is being done by Brand et al. In fact, I am quite certain they believe themselves to be serving an unadulterated good. Be that as it may, they are engaging in a propaganda exercise and so should be seen as useful idiots rather than court jesters. “How did I do?” asks the comedian at the end of each video, to which the scientist replies, “You did good my precious one. You did very good.”

In reality, the process of science’s simplification, and hence the potential for the propagandizing of a scientific inaccuracy, starts well before the comedians are allowed to join in. Such inaccurate simplification can even be seen in the executive summaries of the IPCC Assessment Reports; in which case, errors have been introduced long before Jo Brand takes the stage. Take, for example, the statement made in AR6’s “Summary for Politicians”, opining that scientists are ninety five percent confident that more than half of the recent warming can be attributed to anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide. In fact, the technical body of the report had stated that if anthropogenic carbon dioxide was not deemed to be contributing to over half of recent warming, then the probability that the observed warming would have happened was only five percent – according to the models. The executive statement is therefore a transposed conditional (an example of the prosecutor’s fallacy if you will) that conveniently overlooks the uncertainties inherent in the models. This one is down to the scientists when they translated the science into ‘politician’. Feeding this to a comedian as if it were still accurate science would not help matters.

Similarly simplistic statements can be found in extreme weather event attributions that are based on causal analyses that emphasise necessity whilst omitting sufficiency. This penchant for a simplistic causal narrative can also be seen in the total absence of published papers that quantify non-climatic causation alongside the quantification of the climatic (reference Professor Patrick T. Brown’s disclosure). Then there is the scientific community’s obsession with the inappropriately aleatory handling of epistemic uncertainties, as in the portrayal of uncertainty in climate model ensembles by using a probability distribution. It has no statistical validity, but few of the climate scientists seem to care.

It wouldn’t be so bad that comedians are translating scientific narrative into ‘human’ had it not been that many of those narratives had already been translated into ‘wrong’. One can see the comedians are gleefully endorsing societally acceptable statements made by people they trust implicitly, but one cannot help wondering how things might have turned out if they had done more homework of their own. Unfortunately, such open-minded inquisitiveness is hardly ever found in a liberal intelligentsia that has confidently identified its cause in life. They have what they believe to be a narrative that is scientifically sound and all they need to do therefore is to make it so funny that you would have to be an idiot not to understand it.

Jo Brand put it well when she quipped in her introduction “If people like me have to get involved you know we are in deep shit“. Of course, by ‘being in deep shit’ she meant things climatic, but her statement makes more sense to me when it is interpreted as things political. The pushing of climate policy is indeed in trouble when it seeks the help of a comedienne who thought throwing battery acid in a politician’s face was an acceptable caricature of argument. But I’m afraid that’s what you get sometimes when you engage in comedic propaganda.