PROPAGANDA PROTOCOL

Here we go again. Like a rat up a drainpipe, Richard Black gleefully regurgitates the outpourings of research scientists who are being paid – in this case indirectly by the EU – to find climate scare stories. This one is the old chestnut the ozone layer, a favourite of greenies the world over since the 1980s and the topic on which, as this post points out, they cut their teeth in their shamanism and political agitation, the warm-up, as it were, for the global warming and climate change activism that has ensued. Mr Black accepts unquestionably – as usual – claims from these grant-guzzling warmist zealots that there’s a big new hole over the Arctic caused by a lethal mix of nasty industrial chemicals and climate change. The subtext of his every word is triumphant panic: “I told you so”.

There’s a major problem with this theory, as Joseph D’Aleo ably points out in the link above from January. A paper (actually in the warmists’ handbook Nature) has noted that much more research needs doing on this topic before conclusions can be reached, because the processes involved are highly complex and not yet understood. The basic problem is that the Antarctic hole in the ozone layer has not gone away, despite the Montreal Protocol ban on CFCs in 1987. Others have warned that much of the data on which the panic that led to the Montreal Protocol was based was crudely rigged to fan political activism.

That doesn’t stop Mr Black, and nor does he quote a smidgeon of doubt. I don’t pretend to fully understand the science behind this highly complex subject. But I am sure that what Mr Black presents is one-sided, purposeful propaganda. Much is yet to be done before we understand the processes. So why the hell does he present it in the way he does?