Not only does the BBC have its brilliant Verify team with its world-leading fact-checking, but it can also understand why President Trump chooses to use the language that he does. In a sarcastic hit piece which was rushed out following the Donald’s criticism of “windmills” it told us that:

For clarity, there are no windmills in the North Sea.

Windmills mill grain into flour. What he’s seeing are wind turbines.

But making them sound like centuries old technology is a way to deride their worth.

As it happens, I share the BBC’s dislike of the mis-labelling of wind turbines as windmills, but for rather different reasons (although I agree that as they do not mill anything, they should not be called windmills). I am every bit as cynical as the BBC journalists who wrote that piece, but my cynicism sees things differently. I tend to assume that the people who refer to wind turbines as windmills are generally enthusiasts for the technology, and they prefer to describe them in this way because it makes them sound less industrial, more bucolic, and as though they fit in with the landscape. The reality, of course, is that they are getting ever taller, reaching heights of 250 metres, and before long they will probably be as tall as the Shard or the Eiffel Tower. And President Trump is correct – they do kill birds. In very large numbers. SSE’s own environmental impact assessment assumes that over the planned 35 year life of the newly-approved Berwick Bank offshore wind farm, it will kill 31,000 seabirds.

Speaking of Berwick Bank, here is Stephen Flynn MP declaring that the Berwick Bank approval is “Big news for all us windmill fanatics”. I suppose it’s possible that his use of the word windmills is a tongue-in-cheek pop at President Trump, or perhaps he thinks the use of the word makes the bird-mincers sound nicer?

When Andrew Kersley, a freelance journalist who writes, inter alia, for the Guardian, referred to “a new generation of floating windmills” in a 2020 article in Labour List, was he “deriding their worth”?

Similarly, when Boris Johnson (remember the “Saudi Arabia of Wind” claims?) said “...we will build windmills that float on the sea – enough to deliver one gigawatt of energy by 2030, 15 times as much as the rest of the world put together…” I suppose he was deriding the technology too.

When Ecotricity publicised exports by its Britwind subsidiary, it wrote:

Britain’s greenest energy company, Ecotricity, has sold more than £1 million of small windmills to Japan through its Britwind subsidiary, to become the country’s leading small wind exporter.

Britwind launched in November 2014, producing windmills that are designed and made in Britain and has now shipped 130 small 5kW wind turbines to Japan in the past 18 months, with a further 30 windmills set to be dispatched by the end of March – an order totalling more than £1.3 million.

This latest shipment will include the very first of Britwind’s new H15 windmills – a 15kW machine that can power the equivalent of 13 homes.

Deriding their worth?

A couple more, just to make the point – Lord Deben (he of the Climate Change Committee) on 23rd July 2013, during the 7th Day of the Committee stage of the Energy Bill, Lord Deben said: “Manifestly, in the long-distant future, it would be quite sensible to have a lot of windmills when there was wind and a lot of solar when there was sun.” Yes, that sounds like he’s denigrating turbines. Similarly Lord Rooker, speaking in a House of Lords debate on 18^th September 2023, said “I find the windmills magnificent, whether they are in the Lake District, Cornwall or anywhere else…”. And yes, he was referring to wind turbines, not to actual mills.

In other words, BBC, please don’t presume to read the mind of President Trump when you choose to question his motivation. I suggest you stick to reporting facts instead.

Postscript

While I’m being grumpy about the BBC, I thought I would mention that on the BBC Radio 4 weather forecast earlier this evening, I was told that the upcoming “Storm Floris” is what we get in winter, not in summer. I can’t read Tomasz Schafernaker’s mind any more than the BBC can read President Trump’s, but I was left with the distinct impression that I was supposed to assume that this is another terrible example of anthropogenic climate change in action. That is a view reinforced by the BBC website article whose headline told me that “Storm Floris [is] to bring ‘unseasonably disruptive’ rain and wind to UK”.

As it happens, I am currently reading Stephen Church’s excellent “King John – England, Magna Carta and the Making of a Tyrant”. Referring to what was a disastrous year for King John, he says this of the summer of 1205:

At the end end of July, England was battered by hurricane-force winds and huge thunderstorms; to many this presaged the Day of Judgement.”

Today, I have little doubt, they would rush out a weather attribution study and solemnly assure us that it’s all our fault – anthropogenic climate change and all that. I’m not entirely sure they would say it presaged the Day of Judgement, but give it time.

From ClimateREALISM

By H. Sterling Burnett

The Hill posted an opinion piece by William S. Becker titled, “Climate denial is tearing our nation apart — we can’t wait much longer to act,” in which Becker asserts climate change is leading to both worsening weather and worsening politics. Becker is wrong on both counts. Polling consistently shows that although most people believe climate change is happening, the number very worried about it hasn’t changed much over the past few decades, and very few people are willing to sacrifice much in an attempt to reduce future climate change – so there is no evidence whatsoever climate “denial” threatens to rend the political fabric of the nation. In addition, data clearly prove Becker is simply wrong about worsening extreme weather.

“We know from decades of scientific research, and now from brutal experience, that global climate change is real,” writes William S. Becker, former U.S. Department of Energy official who founded its Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development under then President Bill Clinton. “Few, if any, places in the U.S. are safe from its many consequences. They are as quick as flash floods and as slow as rising seas, but they are undeniably real and growing worse.”

“One result is personal and society-wide cognitive dissonance — the mental and emotional discomfort we feel when our actions clash with reality or beliefs. a recent Gallup poll shows that 63 percent of Americans believe global warming is underway, and that 48 percent — a record — believe it will seriously threaten their way of life,” Becker continues. “Yet more Americans are moving into places with high risks of climate-related disasters rather than out of them.”

Becker is wrong, there is no cognitive dissonance in peoples’ positions, but rather it reflects a rational assessment of the relative importance of climate change as a threat to their lives and well-being when compared to other issues, like the economy, jobs, health care, education, crime, and illegal immigration.

Polls cited in Climate Realism, here, here, and here, for example, and at Climate Change Weekly, here, here, and here, consistently show that although a plurality of people believe climate change is occurring and are worried about it to some degree, it ranks last or near last in their list of concerns, and they are unwilling to pay much to prevent or mitigate it. The same polls also show the vast majority of those concerned about climate change are not willing to change their lifestyles very much, such as by reducing travel, buying electric vehicles, or giving up meat, to fight climate change.

Indeed, as recently as early July CNN’s senior data reporter, Harry Enten, reported on a new Gallup poll on climate change and natural disasters which found that the percentage of Americans “greatly worried” about climate change had declined by six percentage points since 2020, down to just 40 percent. That’s the same percentage of people surveyed who expressed worry about climate change in Gallups 2000 survey asking the same question. Meaning that despite 25 years of mainstream media constantly warning of climate doom, the public is largely unmoved.

This would seem to suggest that the majority of people understand that to the extent climate change threatens harm, the threat it poses is distant, and would have far less impact on their lives and neighborhoods than ensuring low crime, high quality health care, and continued economic growth. They also seem to instinctively understand that fossil fuels are the foundation for the modern society they take for granted. That’s not evidence of cognitive dissonance, rather that’s hardheaded resistance to propaganda.

In short, polls don’t show that climate denial, whatever Becker means by that, is tearing America apart, and he provides no evidence, direct or indirect, that it is doing so, just pseudo-psychobabble about the public suffering from cognitive dissonance. In case you are wondering, Beker is neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist.

What about the instances of extreme weather and rising seas that Becker claims climate change is making worse or more severe?

To start, for a broad range of extreme weather, even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits to having low confidence that trends have changed or gotten worse, and for most classes of extreme weather events. The IPCC also does not forecast any such signal to arise by 2050 or 2100, either. Data provides no support for claims that during the recent period of modest warming floods, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, or drought, have become more frequent or severe, despite what misleading headlines and unresearched stories in the mainstream media might lead one to believe. Globally sea level rise is not uniform, and the best evidence from tide gauges and historical analyses suggest that the present rate of warming is not unusually rapid historically.

In the end, much of Becker’s career has been founded upon promoting climate alarm in an effort to push an energy transition. His reputation depends on people accepting him as an expert and taking his views on the matter as authoritative. His book sales and funding for the various organizations he is associated with depends upon no one derailing the climate change gravy train. While Becker has a right to his opinion, and The Hill has a right to publish it, neither have facts on their side.

Truth will out! And solid science, such as is contained in the Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports and the recent U.S. Department of Energy report assessing the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on U.S. climate, demonstrate that climate change, while undoubtedly real, poses no credible threat to human life or well-being. Real-world data also show that the fossil fuels Becker rails against in his Hill op-ed remain fundamental to growing economic prosperity and ongoing improvements in human health and longer lives.

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News. In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burnett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.