https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/07/12/ny-times-fakes-a-climate-change-debate/
by Kip Hansen
The New York Times’ Climate section is a source of continuing amusement for me. This one made me laugh out loud.
In an exhibition of astounding audacity, the New York Times’ Editor of the Climate Desk, Hannah Fairfield, stages what is billed as a “debate” about moving forward with solutions to climate change.
Let me be perfectly clear, this is a fake debate – no debate takes place. Having given up the standards of professional journalism almost entirely, the Climate desk has moved on from misinformation, disinformation and fake news to . . . . Fake Debates.
If you have one and a half hours to utterly waste, you can watch the whole thing here.
Not only does the Times falsely claim that this represents some kind of debate, they can’t even count to ten – there are only six guest speakers and Hannah….and when I attended elementary school in the 1950s, six plus one made seven (it may be the “new math”, similar to that being used to count “New Covid Cases”). Oh well, almost nothing else in the video is true either.
We do get good insight into why the New York Times publishes so many Climate stories that are absolutely nutty [my psychiatrist friend assures me that this is a perfectly acceptable term in the mental health field] . Hannah Fairfield, the Editor of the Climate Desk, states in her introduction:
“Our mission is help readers understand their world and how Climate Change touches all parts of it. Like the science of Corona-virus, the science of Climate Change is very clear…the world is warming dangerously, humans are the cause of it, and a failure to act today will deeply affect the future of the Earth.”
“The devastation of Covid-19 has forced change for all of us. Much of it has been swift and startling. To combat corona-virus, governments poured money into rescue. Companies adapted their goals and production; central banks permitted exceptional stimulus packages, and societies mobilized to shield the most vulnerable. Have these dramatic actions given us a blueprint for mobilizing action against Climate Change? Is this an opportunity for a new path forward that puts accelerating Climate Change solutions squarely in the middle?
We know that Climate Change requires exponential solutions and that’s what we’ll focus on today. The global response to corona-virus can be the beginning of the economic, technological and society [sic] transition that will allow us to dramatically reduce carbon emissions in the next 30 years, helping us to avoid the worst effects of Climate Change, and limiting the global temperature rise in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement.”
This introduction informs us that the Times’ Climate desk thinks its mission is to produce propaganda supporting just one side of the real climate debate and a rather radical version at that, one which goes beyond even IPCC memes. The latest version of an acceptable editorial narrative on climate change is that “the governments of the world took over ordering individual people’s lives and destroying the economy for their own purposes – presented to the public as protecting them from Covid-19 – and so governments could, should and must do the same to “save us from Climate Change”. The apparent theory is that as government actions regarding Covid have already wrecked so much of the world economy – wrecking it even more in the battle against (mostly imaginary) future climate change is a “no brainer” (well, it is, for those with no brain or suffering a total lack of Critical Thinking Skills and/or those whose own personas have been overwhelmed by GroupThink – h/t Judith Curry).
Hannah Fairfield seemingly went to great lengths to make sure that her panel consisted of radical Climate Change Warriors who would all agree with her stated purposes. The panel consists of:
Nigel Topping – “UK climate action Champion”
Christiana Figueres — Introduced as the Co-Founder of Global Optimism Better known as the Former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
“I’ve never been asked why I it [the Climate Change issue] is important to me. …because, isn’t this the most important thing that every single human being should be focused on? …. is the future of the human race? …. we’re talking about human survival.”
Bertrand Piccard — of the Solar Impulse Foundation and the World Alliance for Clean Technologies
(if you’ve watched any episodes of the Netflix series “Space Force”, you might be able to identify this guy)
Alexandra Palt — L’oreal Group — Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer — included, as the PR wonk of a beauty products company, I suppose, because appearances are so very important.
Dayna Cunningham – Executive Director of CoLab, MIT
“The Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) is a center for planning and development within the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning “. They apparently focus a lot on painting murals on buildings….. “promoting democratic engagement and urban sustainability in communities facing disruptive moments, we strive to produce shared wealth and collective well-being.”
Johan Rockström — Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)
Those familiar with some of these names might guess that this massively stacked panel recommends that governments take over private industry and private lives and Save The World From the Humans.
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Author’s Comment:
Hannah Fairfield’s introduction is so full of nonsense that I could have written a whole essay on it alone:
- The Science of Corona-virus is anything but “very clear” – the medical world barely understands what it is, where it came from, how it spreads, why it infects some without symptoms and kills others, and is at an impasse on treatment. Early and preventative treatments have been politicized out of use in some countries while being front-line successful treatments in others.
- Climate Science is likewise not “very clear” – “dangerously warming”??? “humans are the cause of it”???
- “…societies mobilized to shield the most vulnerable.”??? King Cuomo (governor of the State of New York) sent sick elderly patients to die by the hundreds in death-filled nursing homes while keeping kids, who are the safest group, out of schools and confined at home.
- “We know that Climate Change requires exponential solutions….”??? What, in heaven’s name, might “exponential solutions” be?
Enough, what the world does not need is destructive Covid Madness Solutions to be added on to what are already societally-suicidal Climate Change Madness proposals.
I can only hope that sanity to returns to our local, regional, state, national and international leaders before they do permanent damage to the great enterprise of human civilization.
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