Back in April 2019, on the eve of the launch of the Environmental Justice Commission, one of its co-chairs could be found on the Today Programme passionately stating his case. It matters that we should look back on this exchange, because the same gentleman ultimately became the UK’s current Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Yes, we are talking of none other than the Rt Hon Edward Miliband.

With much animated flaying of arms and bulging of eyes, Ed ran through the full range of arguments for plunging the UK headlong down the road to Net Zero: it will improve our lives; we must show ‘moral authority’ to China; we must not go down in history as the generation that failed, etc. When challenged upon the need to mobilise support for his crusade, he replied with this:

“No, but that’s the point about the emergency. Look, if this was genuinely a war, and we were on a war footing — and it is a war against climate change…”

Miliband was interrupted mid-flow at that point by an interviewer who was not coy at calling out his Churchillian tone. But Miliband didn’t seem to care. He had got his message out there: this is a war against climate change.

This is not the first or indeed last time that someone has invoked the metaphor of war to justify actions to be taken on climate change. For example, we had it at COP26 from King Charles. Then there is the proselytising of The Guardian’s George Monbiot. Way back in 2008, UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiroa claimed that achieving the Millennium Development Goals would require a ‘war footing’ to tackle climate change. Like Miliband, they all talk about a war footing, and like Miliband they do so even though they know perfectly well that we are not genuinely at war. Ah, but if we were…

Should that matter? Is it a problem that prominent people are proposing measures that are only appropriate in times of actual war, simply because they feel justified in using the term ‘war’ metaphorically? Should we really accept poetic analogy as a legitimate substitute for facts?

One might also ask how Miliband can talk of a war footing (and the imposed hardships implied) at the same time as claiming that the actions required will be inherently beneficial to us all. If it were so obvious that Net Zero measures really did promise an improvement in everyone’s lives, and if it were the only way of saving our moral souls, then surely it should be easy for him to win the support he desires. There would be no need to wave an arm or bulge an eye. People would be rushing to the barricades, because the war on climate is such good fun and it shows moral authority. One certainly shouldn’t require the undemocratic instigation of a war economy, nor any imposed sacrifice. Because, mark my words, that’s what these folk are deeming necessary; that’s what a war footing is – a restructuring of society designed to mobilise resources and create the ‘right decision architecture’ without the need to worry about punishment at the ballot box. That is ultimately what these people are asking for: more power to protect us from ourselves.

We use the term ‘war’ very loosely when we talk of war on crime or war on drugs. Even ‘war on terrorism’ is incorrect because war is a state of conflict between two or more states. It is declared (though not so much for recent conflicts) in order that international laws such as the Geneva Convention may be applied. The declaration of a war also matters because a wartime government can then invoke additional domestic powers. For example, in the UK the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 can be used to declare a state of emergency, with a concomitant curtailment of civil liberties. But, of course, with climate change there is no real war, so there cannot be a wartime state of emergency. But that’s not a problem if you can declare a phony war and use it as a pretext to invoke a phoney state of emergency. And boy, have we seen plenty of those! As far as local councils are concerned, not declaring a state of emergency over climate change has become a badge of dishonour akin to wartime treason or cowardice in the face of the enemy.

According to Miliband, tackling climate change is a war in the very real sense of it not being a genuine war. But this mental gymnastics doesn’t really seem to be holding him back. The war may be metaphorical but the pain of his war footing is most certainly real. Nor, it has to be said, have previous governments been terribly troubled by the double-speak required to justify their political ‘war’ mongering. As I commented here recently, the Climate Change Committee was set up to establish a legally founded cross-party consensus on climate change, in response to a report that leant heavily on the war metaphor for its justification. In the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group report that led to the instigation of the Climate Change Act 2008, it was stated that “One need not necessarily invoke a wartime metaphor to appreciate the advantages of a joined up approach to climate change policy across government.” Nevertheless, the use of that metaphor featured prominently. For example:

We have noted above the way a number of contributors referred to World War II, when there was a coalition government.  Comments in this area, some of which are reproduced in Box 5 below, extended to the immediate post-war period. The country “pulled together” and people accepted rationing “for the public good”.  The seriousness of the threat posed by climate change would, many argued, justify a wartime-like approach to tackling it, although not everyone felt that people would easily accept the austerity associated with rationing.

Amongst the comments in Box 5 was this gem from the Carbon Disclosure Project:

The global deaths from climate change over the next decades will quite completely dwarf the 50 million killed in World War II.  The sooner an all-party cabinet committee is formed, the more chance we will have to stem this hideous projected loss of life.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we currently find Russia on a real war footing in preparation for a real war. They are doing this because Putin sees a military expansion towards the West as the only means of tackling an existential threat to Russia. Over 7% of its GDP is dedicated to building up the military strength to prosecute that war, and NATO countries must now respond with their own war footing. How the UK intends doing its bit whilst being fully invested in the austerities and economic shock demanded by Ed Miliband’s ‘war’ against climate change is anyone’s guess.

The war metaphor can only get you so far. Try as they may to persuade the British people that severe weather events are akin to Hitler’s bombing campaign during World War II, the advocates for a war footing will always struggle. World War II was a real war with real bombs, and the tribulations accepted by the public were endured in the context of a formal declaration of war. Miliband and Monbiot et al can wax lyrically about war as much as they like, but the poetry isn’t going to create a reality. Not that it matters all that much. If we continue with Miliband’s grand plans we will all be suffering the hardships of war soon enough

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Ben Pile

On Tuesday, slow news website Tortoise – which recently acquired the Observer – launched an “interactive database and visualisation tool highlighting the volume of online misinformation surrounding climate change” called ‘Hot Air’. Over the ensuing 48 hours, and after more than 13,000 views, a whopping 26 people liked the project’s inaugural Tweet, and a further seven shared it. But despite such seismic impact, Hot Air is neither the first of its kind and it probably won’t be the last either. And that’s because, no matter how facile an idea is, there is so much Green Blob cash available to fake news and fake research outfits that the movement and its adherents have lost any capacity for reason.

Tortoise boast that Hot Air has been developed with an outfit called “C3DS” based at the University of Exeter – which is also home to the ‘Greenpeace Research Laboratories’, or ‘science unit’, the origin of much fake news. The Centre for Climate Communication and Data Science, or C3DS, claims to “improve strategic communications to deliver meaningful action on climate change”, which it supports with “AI and social science research”.

One of the observations I’ve made of such outfits that now litter UK campuses is that their ideology, and often their corporate benefactors’ names, are written on their doors, and that is manifestly a problem for ‘knowledge producers’ and so-called ‘scholarship’. One of the conceits of academia, perhaps now outmoded, is that the academy was a forum for open debate. But such exclusionary statements aren’t merely barriers to objectivity. An organisation that intends to work to “improve strategic communications” is a communications outfit, not an academic research outfit.

Go to any university’s politics department, for example, and you will find the inevitable surfeit of self-identifying Marxists. But you will often also find their quieter colleagues. Some will be on the social democratic Left. Some will be adherents to the ideas of liberal theorists, such as John Rawls. And there will even be a few conservatives. But a School of Marxism at the University of Wokeshire – that would exclude the social democrats, the Rawlsians and the conservatives, who will not be invited to participate, even if they ever thought to apply. The sign on the door says ‘not welcome’.

And so it is with ‘research’ organisations whose missions statements are so clearly aligned to policy agendas and grounded in particular ideological perspectives. But what if academics wanted to research the rights and wrongs of using universities to develop “strategic communications” for political agendas, especially the climate agenda objectively? Well, you might say that they would be free to pursue their research interests from some other part of the campus. But that would assume that the campus is set up for free inquiry. And it isn’t.

C3DS’s co-founder, Dr Saffron O’Neill, for example, was the grantee of £1,654,675 from anonymous ‘philanthropic’ funders in 2023-25. In 2021, she was co-beneficiary of a £6,249,934 “ESRC Climate and Environment Leadership Grant” – public money funnelled through universities to service a political agenda. Between them, O’Neill’s 14 colleagues boast many millions of pounds in funding from green philanthropists and the British taxpayer. And of course, from Octopus Energy. Well, nobody’s going to save the planet with “strategic communications” for free, are they?

But how effective are these strategic communications? It would appear that the data and the technology have been provided by the Exeter researchers to Tortoise, and at least 26 people think it’s a great idea. But what did they get out of it? I headed over to the “tool” (the preferred term for searchable online databases of this kind) to find out.

The academics appear to have scraped thousands of tweets and articles since 2021 by authors such as yours truly, each of which has been categorised as “deny”, “delay” or “control”. An example  of “deny” is the statement “climate change is not happening”. An example of “delay” is “climate change might be real, but we need to slow down rollout of green policies”. And “control” means statements such as “climate change policies are more about controlling the public than addressing global warming”. You can search for all these statements by author.

The Daily Sceptic’s climate offerings are included. For example, my article from December, ‘Ed Miliband Triples Down on Energy Suicide’, is categorised as “delay”. In the article, I criticised the Government’s “Clean Power Action Plan”. I argued that the plan is “a rushed policy agenda that clashes with the reality emerging throughout Europe and the UK, in complete defiance of the facts and utterly indifferent to the experience of the country’s industries, businesses and households”.

I can see why someone – perhaps a fan of Miliband and his extremely expensive policy agenda – might want to object to it. But what’s less clear is how a database of tweets and articles, which merely designate each offending text as “deny”, “delay” or “control”, answers any argument in my article or in the thousands of other tweets and articles that C3DS’s AI-bots have scanned.

The point of such lists seems to be to encourage the kind of midwit that requires his thoughts to be pre-chewed by a higher authority that feels itself to have been traduced by the enumerated miscreants. And Tortoise, which is on that Guardian-Byline Times axis, caters precisely for such an audience.

Very far from “strategic communications” of any consequence, making lists of people you don’t like and filing their work under pejorative categories such as ‘pooh-pooh head’ or ‘smelly bum’ is simply lame. Yet it has become the modus operandi of (fake) news media organisations, (fake) civil society organisations and (fake) research organisations, using public money. Despite the many millions of pounds, and despite their capture of centres of learning, establishment entities apparently have no capacity to hire anyone capable of engaging with critics of their favoured policy agendas.

And that’s why the Hot Air project, which will inform nobody of anything, which will change not one single mind, and which stands as a failure of “strategic communication”, is nonetheless worth commenting on. It is a very useful demonstration of how they think. (If thinking is what they do.)

You can file it under “control”, if you wish – and hello to you, if you came to this article from Hot Air – but doing so does not answer the fact that such half-baked attempts to use technology to classify and monitor critics’ conversations demonstrate the establishment’s total intellectual exhaustion in the face of growing public resentment of governmental intransigence and its inevitable failures.

In January last year, I reported on a similar project that pro-censorship activists at the Centre for Countering Digital Hate had put together – again, on Green Blob billionaires’ coins. The report, ‘The New Climate Denial‘, had trained an AI to scan the transcripts of YouTube videos published by evil climate deniers (such as yours truly, again). The AI then categorised the transcripts according to a taxonomy of “techniques of climate denial” – larger, perhaps, but ultimately no more sophisticated than C3DS’s, developed by academic-activist psychologist John Cook. “Testing indicates the model is 78% accurate in categorising claims in our dataset,” the report boasted.

Not even a single human had been involved in the slander of 96 climate commentators who stood accused by the AI and its taxonomy of ‘denial’. And it is no surprise to me that the people that populate such institutions have no confidence in themselves to take on our ideas. Because, after 20 years of trying to engage them in critical debate about their secular religion, I have yet to meet a single one of them with anything of consequence between the ears. If you have to get ChatGPT to do your homework, you’re not a student, you’re not a researcher and you’re not an academic. And the same goes for the lame journalism of the Tortoises. Slow indeed it is.

Stop Press: Guido reports that Tortoise readership has almost halved in the three months since January. “Analysis of internet traffic on SimilarWeb shows a massive drop in Tortoise readership from 465,560 in January to 242,328 in March. A 48% decline.” And it’s already a loss-making outfit, reporting a loss of £3.8 million for 2023, down only a bit from £4.6 million in 2022. Clearly, the Observer is in safe hands… Perhaps fanatical climatism and witch-hunts of dissenters aren’t what the punters are looking for.

Stop Press 2: David Turver tweets that the list actually serves as a handy guide to who’s who in the sceptical world. “A new ‘misinformation’ database produced by Tortoise Media, C3DS and sponsored by Octopus Energy turns into showcase for Net Zero scepticism. Helpfully, you can filter the database by author. Yours truly is the highest ranked UK individual, with US creators like Tom Nelson, Steve Milloy and Alex Epstein topping the list.”