British Government Funds Campaign to Rewrite Climate Science Entries on Wikipedia

A major rewriting of the science published on Wikipedia that is sceptical of the ‘settled’ climate narrative is being funded by a number of Governments from Scandinavia and the U.K. The operation is being directed by the green activist group, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), under a project titled ‘Improving communication of climate knowledge through Wikipedia’.

The operation targets climate change pages that have significant daily page views. The SEI notes that Wikipedia articles usually appear at the top of internet search results, and the site plays a “key role” in helping promote climate change knowledge. “The improvement of the key articles making use of available scientific expertise is necessary,” it says.

The key word of course is “improvement” but, alas, a brief list of the “content experts” does not inspire confidence that rigorous dissemination of all climate science views will prevail. For instance, Kristie L. Ebi from the University of Washington has the curious notion that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are “affecting the nutritional quality of our food”. Poor old CO2 you might feel. It gets a shocking press these days but few doubt its role as the gas of life, whose 60% reduction in the atmosphere would lead to the swift removal of all plant and life forms on Earth.

Elizabeth Gilmore of Carleton University, another of SEI’s “content experts”, runs a class on inspiring young eco-activists. She recently wrote that after Greta Thunberg “admonished” delegates at COP24, “it has become increasingly apparent that university students feel the brunt of multiple and interlinked existential crises of climate change, biodiversity, persistent inequality, inequity and economic precarity”.

The SEI project includes academics who have “scientific and climate change expertise”. In fact the ‘expertise’ seems to tend towards the burgeoning world of eco bureaucracy, consultancy and green activism. All the parties collaborate by revising and cutting text, proposing new content and adding new references. There is also interaction with published experts, “who advise us on necessary content edits”.

The Stockholm Environment Institute was founded in 1989 by the Swedish government to “support decision-making and induce changes towards sustainable development around the world”. It claims to provide this by supplying knowledge that bridges science and policy in the field of environmentalism and development. Its green activism is well supported by governments and many interested parties including Left-wing billionaire foundations. According to figures publicly revealed, it received over £11 million in 2020 from Swedish government interests, and £1.5 million from Norway. The British government even supplied £326,000 of funding it says in its 2022 report.

SEI is closely connected with the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its Chairman, appointed by the Swedish government, is Lennart Bage, the former Co-Chair of the U.N. Green Climate Fund (GCF) that aims to raise $100 billion a year to pay for green boondoggles in the developing world. Signing off his chairmanship of the GCF in 2019, Bage noted that “we have moved from millions to billions but we need to move to trillions”. Some of the content experts for the Wikipedia re-education programme come from the U.N., the IPCC and the Conference of the Parties (COP).

Recently, the U.N. Under-Secretary for Global Communications, Melissa Fleming, told delegates at a World Economic Forum ‘disinformation’ seminar that her organisation had partnered with Google to ensure only U.N.-approved climate search results appear at the top. In chilling tones, she explained: “We are becoming more proactive, we own the science and the world should know it.” In the context of this remark, the disclosure that a concerted attempt is being made to propagandise Wiki pages is unsurprising. Across all media, collectivist-minded operations funded by a wide variety of sources including governments, NGOs, foundations and wealthy individuals are rewriting the climate narrative with the help of mainstream media to suit a drive to Net Zero and economic and societal change. Advertising boycott campaigns face any individual media operation that steps out of line, academic careers are held back, fatuous ‘fact-check’ attacks are launched, school text books are rewritten and massive green scare campaigns are launched on an almost daily basis.

What is truly depressing is that the Conservative Party is often to be found at the front of the queue when it comes to handing out taxpayer cash to fund climate and woke campaigns. Providing money to alter Wiki pages is just the latest misuse of taxpayers’ hard earned money. In February, the Daily Sceptic reported that the British Foreign Office was helping to fund the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which was circulating a ‘blocklist’ of conservative publications including the American Spectator and the New York Post.

As we noted at the time, one of the reasons the GDI posed such a threat to free speech was that its definition of ‘disinformation’ is unusually capacious. It doesn’t just mean information that is false and dissemination by people knowing it’s false. It has broadened the definition to include what it calls “adversarial narratives”.

Just weep for the death of science – “adversarial narratives” no longer required.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.