From ClimateREALISM

By Linnea Lueken

A recent post at the BBC, titled “Seven proven ways to help the planet in 2025,” claims that the planet is threatened by global climate change due to human activity, and lists seven changes people can make in their lives save the planet by curbing emissions. The suggestions include: giving up meat; stopping flying; buying fewer clothes; reducing the carbon footprint of keeping a pet, if you keep one at all; using alternative home heating technologies; supporting fossil fuel divestment; and reducing plastic use. While none of these suggestions are novel, they are also not going to accomplish what the BBC claims, both because human activity is not threatening the planet via carbon dioxide emissions, and because many of these suggestions actually do not reduce emissions or are targeting areas that won’t have any measurable impact even if emissions reductions were desirable. For reasons of brevity, this post will only a address a few of the BBC’s suggestions in detail.

Right out of the gate, the BBC fearmongers with the claim that 2024 saw the first ever time that the “critical 1.5°C threshold was breached for a full year,” which according to the writers reinforces an “urgent need to rapidly cut global emissions.” As Climate Realism has discussed several times, including here, here, and here, the 1.5°C threshold is arbitrary and meaningless as a scientific measurement, it is merely a political tool. The planet has been much warmer in the past, and parts of the world have surpassed that measure for decades already with no catastrophic results. Now that the global threshold has been passed, when the media previously promised catastrophic events would follow, nothing has happened. There was no increase in extreme weather, and other forecasted tipping points have not materialized.

Even with the political threshold surpassed, the BBC says it is not too late, insisting there is still time to make the rapid emissions reductions necessary to save the planet. BBC admits that most of the high-level emissions reductions they want to see happen are beyond the scope of individuals, consigned to the realm of big-government policymaking, but says individual efforts still matter.

First on the list of suggestions is one Climate Realism has covered extensively before: “Eat a plant-based diet.” The BBC claims that “it’s widely agreed among the scientific community that to rescue the global climate from ever-warming temperatures, one of the most impactful ways our species can change its behaviour is to eat less meat.” They claim that vegetarian diets produce less carbon dioxide. Available real-world data refutes this claim.

For instance, regarding the emissions claims, Environmental Protection Agency data indicate that livestock actually represent just 3.9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, compared to crop agriculture’s 10.2 percent. (See graphic below)

Notice also that agriculture in general make up a very low percentage overall of Americans’ contributions to greenhouse gas emissions.

Next, the BBC recommends people take public transportation, trains, and cars, instead of flying when they go on trips. As an added bonus, according to alarmists, “reducing flying will also likely mean you travel closer to home, reducing carbon even further.” If that wasn’t presumptuous enough, suggesting that people should not go on trips far from home, the BBC highlights an individual who biked from London to Sweden, which BBC acknowledges “cost more and took far longer than the plane would have,” as an exemplar for the rest of us. This is, again, totally impossible for most people who need to take a business trip or want to take a well-earned vacation. Most people do not have the luxury of time or funds to take extended trips.

The BBC also recommends buying fewer clothes, reducing plastic use, and reducing one’s carbon footprint of owning a pet by either eschewing pet ownership entirely or, hilariously, feeding them “sustainable” foods like fish and insects. With many global fish stocks being overfished, putting more pressure on global fisheries to feed pets seems environmentally questionable, at the very least. Concerning the suggestion to feed pets insects, Climate Realism has previously discussed the possible dangers of insect-based diets that climate alarmists have proposed.

Changing the way people heat their homes is the next recommendation from the BBC, but most of their suggestions are either expensive, or something that requires major civil infrastructure changes like using heat generated by sewers to warm homes. Obviously, that is not something the average person can actually do on his or her own, despite this allegedly being an article about individual efforts to reduce emissions. Heat pumps, predictably, are among the suggested replacements for traditional boilers, but heat pumps do not work well everywhere at all times. They lose efficiency and effectiveness in colder weather and some companies ironically recommend installing a gas furnace as backup to avoid spiking electricity bills. They are also an expensive option, once again pricing out people who are not well off.

The sixth suggestion from the BBC is leaning into the Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) and fossil fuel divestment schemes for pensions and investment. The BBC points out that banks invest in fossil fuel companies, “and while the money you put in the bank doesn’t directly go towards this, experts say that it can make a difference to their social license.” The BBC is effectively saying that people should pressure banks and other institutions to quit supporting fossil fuel companies. All this would achieve is raising the cost of necessary fuels, which will greatly increase costs across the board, accomplishing nothing more than hurting average folks in the process. Countries that don’t care about emissions, meanwhile, like China, will continue to produce just as much and the benefit in the end will be nil, as discussed in the guest post “The SEC’s Risky Plan to Decarbonize the U.S. Financial Markets.”

Finally, the last suggestion is to reduce plastic use. While reducing waste in general is a good thing, single-use plastics have undoubtedly been a benefit for sanitation. In healthcare settings, single use plastics reduce the risk of contamination and help hospitals stay sterile environments. Plastic films used in grocery stores for food packaging reduce food waste by preventing spoilage of meats in particular. The BBC does not make much of an argument related to emissions in this section but rather trash and oil use in general, so we will not dig in too deep.

The bulk of the BBC’s arguments lean on emissions reductions, calling for actions that are unnecessary and more painful than helpful; human emissions of carbon dioxide are not endangering the planet or making Earth unlivable. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased and decreased over the millennia, and human contributions today account for just 3.4 percent of annual emissions. The rest comes from natural sources. Crunching the numbers finds that human emissions of carbon dioxide may produce about 0.28 percent of the atmospheric gas related warming effect on Earth. That is hardly alarming. Since the alleged catastrophic impacts have not come to pass despite more than a hundred years of modest warming, accompanied by a steady increase in carbon dioxide, all of the efforts promoted by the BBC article –where they pertain to emissions—are more likely to reduce humans enjoyment of life, comfort, and freedom, than benefit them or the planet.

Looking at how many of the most prominent and elite climate scolds actually live their lives as opposed to what they preach for others, one suspects that they will keep eating their meat heavy four star meals, filling their room-sized walk-in closets with expensive haute couture clothes and shoes seasonally. They will continue to drive powerful fossil fuel cars while keeping an electric vehicle as a backup status symbol to trot out at green virtue signaling publicity events, and take their private jets to luxurious locations around the world, while paying pet sitters to feed their pure bred “animal companions” the most expensive, trendy pet food or even human cuisine. They will do all this while advising average working folk to buy second hand clothes, eat bugs, live in densely packed locations near rail lines, and not take vacation. After all, the elites know what’s best, the hoi polloi must sacrifice to save the planet.

On 30th April 2014 a German meteorologist caused shock waves to reverberate across the international community of climate scientists. This was not because he had made a major discovery, nor had he been involved in a scientific scandal. But what he had done was to commit the cardinal sin of joining the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The reason why to some this was so shocking was because he wasn’t just any old German meteorologist; he was Professor Lennart Bengtsson, the former head of research at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts before becoming its director until 1990. He had then moved on to become director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. Amongst his many accolades he had been awarded the Milutin Milankovic Medal in 1996, the René Descartes Prize for Collaborative Research in 2005, and the 51st International Meteorological Organization Prize of the World Meteorological Organization in 2006. In 2009 he was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society in recognition of his contribution to meteorology.

Only a fortnight later the same German meteorologist caused an aftershock by resigning from the same foundation. The self-appointed guardians of scientific truth at DeSmog will tell you that it was because he hadn’t quite realised what a shower of reprobates he had joined and so he quickly learned to regret his actions. However, this is what Bengtsson said in his resignation letter:

I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. I see therefore no other way out therefore than resigning from GWPF…Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy. I would never have expecting anything similar in such an original peaceful community as meteorology. Apparently it has been transformed in recent years.

Bengtsson’s censorious colleagues seemed quick to prove his point by denouncing his accusation that they had denounced him. Gavin Schmidt, for example, dismissed his reference to McCarthyism as being “ridiculous”, suggesting instead that it was the brave scientists such as himself who were the real victims of a witch hunt.

Appalling though it may seem that Professor Bengtsson should have been treated this way, he cannot claim to have not seen it coming. Earlier that same year a paper, in which he had the temerity to suggest that the projected warming was unlikely to be anywhere near as bad as others had maintained, was rejected by the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters on the basis that his findings were “less than helpful“. By way of clarification, the peer reviewer concerned added the reproof, “actually it [the paper] is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of ‘errors’ and worse from the climate-skeptic media side“. When Bengtsson and others, such as meteorologist Hans von Storch, condemned the rejection as scandalous, the journal’s publisher was eager to play down the comments made by the peer reviewer, claiming instead that the paper simply did not meet the journal’s high standards. Yes, that old chestnut.

What Bengtsson had in fact been subjected to is a phenomenon referred to as ‘prosocial censorship’. It is a form of censorship in which work is rejected, and individuals cancelled, not because the work is substandard or flawed, but because it threatens to undermine a cherished ideology or someone else’s concept of societal safety and harmony. Such censorship is never portrayed as such, of course; the reason given is always that the individual(s) concerned were peddling substandard work leading to harmful misinformation.

For example, if you were to be an Emeritus Professor of Risk with an international reputation for expertise in forensic statistics, but you then produced work that called into question government figures that seemed to be misrepresenting the severity of a pandemic or the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, you could expect your career to be cancelled on the basis that you are peddling harmful misinformation.

If, for example, you were to be a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist with more than fifteen years of experience pioneering psychotherapy for patients with gender dysphoria, but you then dared to say that everything in your professional experience had led you to the inescapable conclusion that transgender activists were guilty of promoting inappropriate physical interventions to deal with a basically psychological problem, then you could expect to be denounced as “the most evil dangerous Nazi Psychiatrist in the world” — and a transphobe for good measure.

If, for example, you were a physicist at CERN with a bright future ahead of you, but were then to suggest that the unbalanced gender representation within your field had nothing to do with patriarchy and everything to do with inherent gender traits, then you could expect to be vilified as a misogynist and ostracised by your fellow scientists.

And if, for example, you were to be a prominent climate scientist who had pointed out that self-censorship was rife within your field and that it was responsible for the absence of papers published in prominent journals that quantify both the climatic and non-climatic causations of wildfires, then you could expect the likes of the Grantham Institute’s Bob Ward to bleat that “Unfortunately, his bogus narrative has predictably been seized upon by the opponents of action to tackle climate change“. Worse still, none other than Professor Ken Rice (think poor man’s Sabine Hossenfelder) would be moved to refer to you as if you are now dead to them:

Given that there can be preferred narratives within scientific communities, it is always good for there to be people who are regarded as credible and who push back against them. Even if you don’t agree with them, they can still present views that are worth thinking about. In my view, Patrick used to be one of those people. [His emphasis]

Oh the shame of it all!

In the above examples, the common narrative is one of a previously respected expert who had sadly fallen from grace because they couldn’t help themselves and had allowed their toxic opinions to compromise their ability to stick to the truth. As a consequence, they instantaneously transform into incompetent bad actors who are a danger to society, heartily deserving of prompt and emphatic prosocial censorship.

To be clear, these are not isolated examples. A recent research paper published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argued that both self-censorship and the prosocial censorship of colleagues are commonplace within the sciences — and the problem is only getting worse. Some of the figures make for grim reading:

A recent national survey of US faculty at four-year colleges and universities found the following: 1) 4 to 11% had been disciplined or threatened with discipline for teaching or research; 2) 6 to 36% supported soft punishment (condemnation, investigations) for peers who make controversial claims, with higher support among younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty; 3) 34% had been pressured by peers to avoid controversial research; 4) 25% reported being “very” or “extremely” likely to self-censor in academic publications; and 5) 91% reported being at least somewhat likely to self-censor in publications, meetings, presentations, or on social media.

There are, however, trends to be observed. Censorship is more of a problem in the social sciences than within STEM faculties. Women are keener to censor than are their male colleagues. And whilst right-leaning academics are more likely to engage in self-censorship, the left-leaning are far more likely to approve of the prosocial censorship of a colleague. Since prosocial censorship biases both the selection and promotion of staff members, it follows that the system is currently structured in such a way as to entrench the preponderance of left-leaning academics in senior positions. Worse still, the appetite for prosocial censorship is greater within the ranks of the PhDs than it is within faculty staff, suggesting that – to borrow a turn of phrase favoured by climate scientists – the problem is baked in for the future.

As the terminology suggests, those who advocate prosocial censorship will often do so for what they perceive to be the best of possible motives. Most commonly, the intention is to prevent research from being appropriated by “malevolent actors to support harmful policies and attitudes”. Sometimes the research is considered too dangerous to pursue, and in many other cases the censorship is aimed at protecting vulnerable groups. However, no matter how well-intended, the censorship comes with many obvious risks, the clearest of which is the possible suppression of the truth in the cause of a ‘greater good’.

At its most petty, all that may be at stake is one person’s reputation at the expense of a competitor. At its most extreme, prosocial censorship could involve a “wilful blindness of authorities” covering up a heinous crime for fear of offending a section of society, or for fear of giving encouragement to a right-wing that is assumed to be looking for any excuse to destabilise. Somewhere in the middle are the concerns harboured by the climate sceptic. Whilst we understand that science is not supposed to operate by consensus, we would, nevertheless, like to believe that an emergent consensus is the result of a developing common knowledge, rather than the result of social engineering enabled by prosocial censorship. Unfortunately, knowing that Professor Bengtsson’s experiences are far from unique does nothing to encourage such a belief. And, when all is said and done, that is the greatest shame of all. Prosocial censorship may seem a good idea, but it isn’t in the least bit desirable when it undermines the integrity of a discipline and causes widespread distrust amongst the wider community. That is the point, I suggest, at which we should all start giving a fig.