I’m well aware that for anybody who regards him or herself as a progressive – criticising Charlie Brooker is rather like a lay Catholic trying to tell the Pope he’s got it wrong on a matter of complicated theological doctrine that’s just been announced.
To question the Almighty Charlie’s deliberations on any subject these days could well warrant the same kind of reaction people used to get for pointing out that the world is actually a round rock hurtling through space and not a large plate balanced on the back of a turtle.
So choose your rocks and get ready to stone me to death. Because that’s exactly what I’m about to do.
Charlie Brooker was wrong.
Not just a bit wrong. But completely, spectacularly wrong. And about something that really matters too.
What Charlie got wrong was this.
In an article in the Guardian, Charlie wrote that liberals shouldn’t react to articles by climate-change deniers like James Delingpole, on the not unreasonable theory that people such as Delingpole exist solely to “irritate passing liberals” and therefore any reaction to the things he writes about would simply mean he had won.
But that’s exactly what CB got wrong.
Because when people like Delingpole write their nonsense in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph attacking climate change or wind power or whatever – they’re not doing it just to irritate passing liberals. That’s one of their functions, yes – but it’s a secondary, minor one.
Journalists (and I use that word loosely) like Delingpole’s main raison d’etre is to muddy the waters in arguments about climate change in order to shore up waning public support for powerful oil and nuclear business interests.
The problem is that to a certain extent its working. Some people are becoming more sceptical about the undisputable fact that all the scientific evidence points to most of the current climate change being caused by human activity.
The only way to counter this propaganda is to challenge it in public and show it up for the nonsense it is.
So yes, all you progressive, liberal types on social media – don’t be afraid of being a Charlie Brooker infidel.
Don’t be afraid of being offended by the utter rubbish being written in the mainstream press by right-wing establishment fixers like James Delingpole or David Rose masquerading as journalists – and don’t be afraid of writing about it too.
OK. I think I’m ready to get stoned now.
.
You can see Charlie Brooker’s article here:
Django Unchained, Djack Whitehall and Djames Delingpole
.
Related articles by Tom Pride:
Met Office takes apart Daily Mail climate-change denier and Cameron friend James Delingpole
Daily Mail Apologises To Its Readers After Admitting Publishing Something True
Oops! The Daily Mail accidentally supports a fascist party. Again.
Daily Mail ‘fixer’ David Rose defends paedophilia accused and attacks child abuse victims. Again.
MAIL EXCLUSIVE – Kate’s morning sickness due to Gordon Brown’s profligacy
An APOLOGY to The Daily Mail from TOM PRIDE
The Death of Satire? The Mail’s David Rose complains about being smeared
The Sun, The Mail et al – sorry, did we say 120,000 problem families? We meant 16.
Daily Mail – Outrage As Number Of UK Immigrants On Podiums Hits Record Levels!
.
By the way, if you click on any of these buttons below, you’ll be doing me a favour by sharing this article with other people. Thanks:
Pride's Purge 
Calling it right again Tom. Science is not about personality or irritating people, it is about using objective studies to determine how facts fit into the best available theory.
Delingpole and his like decide beforehand what they believe and cherry-pick obscure bits of data that shore up their position. They then resort to insult and ridicule when they are challenged. Or even worse they effectively run away from the argument (even when they are in their own front room):
LikeLike
Naturally your lofty perch has evidence as its foundation. Therefore, do please provide evidence – not hypothesis – that
1. climate change has been caused by mankind’s tiny proportion of overall CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
2. Delingpole is trying to prop up oil and nuclear interests, given both industries are paid up members of the climate change lobby.
Thanks!
LikeLike
Evidence? OK. All gases can absorb electromagnetic radiation at most wavelengths, but emit it at only one or two. Thus the sky is blue because nitrogen emits blue in the blue part of the spectrum, neon lights are red because neon emits light in the red part of the spectrum etc. Molecules of gases made up of more than one type of atom, such as carbon dioxide, water and methane, emit electromagnetic radiation in the infra-red part of the spectrum, i.e. heat. This is not altogether a bad thing, since if we removed these gases from the atmosphere the planet would rapidly freeze, but there is no reasonable basis for thinking we could add more of these gases to the atmosphere without causing the planet to warm. Any theory attempting to do so would need to rewrite much of our current understanding of chemistry and physics (upon which a great deal of succesful technology is based), as well as coming up with a sensible alternative explanation for the sky being blue.
The dichotomy (sorry, scince word, it means two way split) of opinions coming from the oil industry is unsurprising, since the location and extraction of oil relies on geologists and engineers who would be unable to do their jobs if they were not sufficiently scientifically literate to understand this, but the companies are run by people who are primarilly interested in money, not science or the environment, who are quite prepared to pay lobbyists and corrupt journalists to muddy the waters in democratic countries where the public might otherwise be expected not to put up with some of the behaviour we see from such companies.
Sorry if this makes you look a bit thick, but if you didn’t realize that posting silly anti-scientific climate-change-denying stuff under a blog post aboout the importance of standing up to people who write silly anti-scientific climate-change-denying stuff would get you thoroughly debunked, then you’re an even bigger fool than your post suggests.
LikeLiked by 1 person
No need to apologise. It doesn’t make me look thick at all. What is shows is that you can describe a process (congratulations by the way), but are incapable of pointing to measurable evidence that it has happened.
Even current observation shows despite a statistically significant rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration there has been no statistically significant rise in temperature as a result. This, even Hansen and the Met Office have had to concede. Therefore you have to resort to ad hominems as a distraction.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Even the non-palaeobiologists who actually focus their work on climate and atmospherics are unable to do anything other than take correlation and claim this equates to causation.
Not a single climate scientist has been able to say unequivocally that mankind is responsible for any given amount of temperature increase which has been ongoing for centuries. They can only say they have a degree of certainty while having no tangible evidence. The AGW theories are slowly falling down one after another. Holding the line must be very difficult, so I can excuse the rudeness of your reply as borne of frustration. Perhaps you felt the same way when you discovered Santa Claus doesn’t really come down the chimney with presents at Christmas.
LikeLike
But he didn’t “run away from the argument” or resort to insults. You, however, did.
When the sanctified Rajendra K. Pachauri, the sometime railway engineer who has been the chair-wallah of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2002, was confronted with a report suggesting that melting of Himalayan glaciers was much slower than his team had predicted, his immediate reaction was to dismiss the criticism as “voodoo science”.
The later and more considered response was that when it was stated the glaciers would vanish by 2035, they really meant 2350 – an error that would surely only be feasible if the report had been profo read by someone at the Grauniad. That the error was most convenient to the IPCC and to those preaching that we should all go back to the Stone Age (if not back to living in trees) to save the planet, seems not to have been considered. Perhaps that would have been impolite.
LikeLike
Do you mean that you don’t believe in Santa Claus?
Heretic !
LikeLike
Current observation does show both an increase in carbon dioxide and an increase in temperature. Making stuff up because you don’t happen to like this won’t make it go away.
Correlation of prediction with observation is generally considered evidence for something not just by palaeobiologists, but by all scientists, and just about everyone else who isn’t so determined to belive in something else they can’t spot they’re starting to look like a loony (& hint, saying you look like a loony in this case isn’t an ad hominin attack; that would be calling you a loony rather thab dealing with the evidence you present, whereas in this case I’m calling you a loony for refusing to engage with the evidence in a situation where nobody else is going to be fooled).
LikeLike
Pingback: Prepare to stone me to death for saying this – but Charlie Brooker’s wrong about climate change deniers | Welfare, Disability, Politics and People's Right's | Scoop.it
Add me to the list of loonies then as I’m with AM. I’ll also refrain from any name calling in return. 🙂
LikeLike
I called delingpole a nutcase when I used to be on Twitter. He was online to john and asked john what he was doing talking to that nutcase delingpole.
Delingpole retweeted my comment. Not sure why maybe he wears it as a badge of pride. Idiot.
LikeLike
The weather hasn’t been normal these past few years. Snow and thunder and lightning at same time. Floods. Tsunamis and god knows what else . Polar ice caps melting miles of it within. Years. Nothing normal there.
LikeLike
Remember the rain forest? Maybe tree loving aliens took the trees away or the trees decided to rip themselves from their bases and jump onto huge trucks and run away.
LikeLike
Where is this evidence of statistically significant warming you refer to, Joe? What is it you have that NOAA, GISS, Met Office et al are unable to produce? Link please.
LikeLike
I wonder what effect repeated Ionosphere manipulation has on the weather? Funny how the use of Haarp is never mentioned by the climatists in relation to freak weather events don’t you think.
LikeLike
I don’t really like engaging in the ‘is/isn’t climate change man-made’ debate because what matters as much is that human beings are over-utilising the world’s resources in a wasteful, unnecessary manner, and if nothing else, mitigating climate change would create a more sustainable economy. However, in support of Joe Bauwen’s knowledgeable contribution:
Capitalism is the root cause of the rise in carbon dioxide/greenhouse gas emissions and capitalists pore millions of dollars into the climate change denier’s movement. In fact, Naomi Klein believes that the super-rich welcome the idea of climate chaos as the means to impose more control over the masses. After all, they won’t be the ones affected by it.
LikeLike
If possible could we have some comments after the weekly PMQs each Wednesday. Start from the”Little Shit” and go onto the rest of them.
LikeLike
“….the undisputable fact that all the scientific evidence points to most of the current climate change being caused by human activity.”
Your certainty on this point smacks of Hitler’s certainty over the superiority of his arguments.
Show me a climate change scientist who will make such an assertion that is a an “*undisputable* fact that *ALL* the scientific evidence” supports human activity causes Global Warming, or Weirding and I will show you a liar.
F_Galt
LikeLike
“Snow, thunder & lightning at the *same* time.”
When?
PS All words have meaning
LikeLike
Perhaps calling someone an “idiot” does not support your argument, but rather simply undermines any credibility you may have previously earned, if any?
#justsaying
Retweeting the world of your name-calling outs you, sir, as someone unable to support arguments that you hold in your head, but can only resort to calling names.
LikeLike
Recent scientific evidence strongly indicates the planet is getting greener. It is suggested that rising C02 levels (whatever the source) is a primary factor.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323374504578217621593679506.html
“Around the same time, a NASA scientist named Compton Tucker found that he could map global vegetation changes by calculating a “Normalized Difference Vegetation Index” (NDVI) from the data produced by a satellite sensor. The data confirmed Mr. Keeling’s suspicion: Greenery was on the increase. At first, this was thought to be a northern phenomenon, caused by faster growth in the great spruce and birch forests of Siberia and Canada, but the satellites showed it was happening all over the world and especially strongly in the Amazon and African rain forests.”
” CO2 is a scarce resource ….”
We need more C02 not less. Save the rainforests by generating C02.
Besides, warming of the planet is better and safer than a freezing of the planet for human life.
Peace
LikeLike
Current observation also shows that Italy has a relatively high rate of organised crime and a high rate of pasta consumption.
If correlation is the same as causation, did the crime rate cause more people to eat pasta or did high rates of pasta consumption somehow cause crime to soar?
LikeLike
When one considers that tsunamis are caused by earthquakes, it is difficult to understand how their frequency might be influenced by atmospheric temperature.
If one is looking at the reported frequency of tsunamis, that may be due to people expecting “bad things to happen” unless Something Was Done Now and finding an apparent (or alleged) increase in the frequency of tsunamis even though that could not possibly have been caused by – or to have caused – “global warming”.
LikeLike
So what do you suppose causes Global Weirding?
LikeLike
But their frequency can be affected by the use of Haarp technology. As can volcano eruptions and other nasties we have no business playing with. The fact that this correlation is never mentioned in the reports of climate scientists does much to inspire scepticism (note not ‘denial’) of the climatists claims, as far as their being impartial or entirely factual.
LikeLike
No – it’s the ice cream. It must be because there was the same correlation (or causation) between organised crime and ice cream in Glasgow with the ice cream wars.
LikeLike
F-Galt – according to the rules of Godwin – you mentioned Hitler first so I win.
But seriously – I’m a mere officer in the New Model Army – not a scientist. Using my semantic errors to make an argument against human causes of climate change quite frankly isn’t very convincing.
LikeLike
Pingback: Outrage after Peter Hitchens says Daily Mail readers should be excluded from juries | Pride's Purge