Fanatics Call for Climate ‘Deniers’ to Be Jailed

Comedy environmentalist Jim Dale and Dale Vince have both suggested that climate ‘denial’ should be a criminal offence. It gets them clicks and attention on cable and mainstream news, and it plays into a wider push by green billionaire-funded lawfare outfits using the courts to enforce Net Zero industrial shutdown. But it begs the question: what are the climate ‘deniers’ actually denying? Dale is a climate campaigner who points to bad weather as evidence that the climate is collapsing before our very eyes. But the evidence suggests no such thing. Data since 2000 show that there has been no increase in extreme weather, no increase in loss of life and no increase in economic costs.

The Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) is a U.S. Government-supported tracker of mass disasters as well as health and economic impacts. It lists 26,000 disasters worldwide from 1900 to the present day. Dr. Matthew Wielicki, a former Geology Professor, has compiled data from this source and they provide no evidence to support the claim that ‘extreme’ weather is on the rise.

Dr. Wielicki suggests that the recent decrease in perceived climate urgency and importance among the American public, especially young adults, as shown by the recent Monmouth University poll “may be influenced by an observable lack of escalation in the direct impacts of climate change”. Such data can lead to scepticism or reduced concern, he adds.

It seems that the lack of evidence drives the alarmists further and further away from scientific reality in their desperation to promote Net Zero. Last week’s absurd survey of 380 “top scientists” by the Guardian found climate modeller Ruth Cerezo-Mota wailing that it was almost impossible not to feel “hopeless and broken” after all the flooding, fires and droughts of the last three years. Biologist Camille Parmesan was so fearful she almost gave up what she called climate science 15 years ago to become a nightclub singer. Now she says all the scientists she works with are at the end of their rope “asking what the fuck do we have to do to get through to people how bad this really is”. Engineering Professor Jonathan Cullen states the climate emergency is already here because just 1°C of heating has “supercharged the planet’s extreme weather”. Millions of people have “very likely” died early as a result, he claimed. Lorraine Whitmarsh is an ‘environmental psychologist’ at the University of Bath, and worries about the future her children are inheriting since climate change is an “existential threat” to humanity.

The Guardian article was written by Damian Carrington, one of the green billionaire-funded lobby group Covering Climate Now’s three journalists of the year in 2023. This operation pumps out ready-to-publish climate catastrophe copy to media outlets worldwide. Carrington polled over 800 lead authors or review editors of all reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2018. He received replies from 380 authors, but as with all IPCC (and Guardian) reports, the definition of ‘climate scientists’ is very broad. Carrington describes Professor Lisa Schipper as an “expert on climate vulnerability”. Schipper notes that she is “particularly interested in socio-cultural dimensions of vulnerability including gender, culture and religion, as well as structural issues related to power, justice and equity”. Ralph Sims of Massey University says extreme weather events will escalate and there will be environmental refugees by the millions. Sims’s first job in academia was as a lecturer in agricultural machinery.

Meanwhile, back to the science, and the problem – the giant elephant in the room no less – is that the IPCC gives almost no credence to talk of a climate crisis based on observable bad weather patterns in the past and looking forward to the end of this century.

The above table published in the latest IPCC assessment report reveals this clearly. It shows there is little or no evidence that the following have been, or will be by 2100, affected by human-caused climate change: river floods, heavy rain and pluvial flooding, landslides, droughts (all types), fire ‘weather’, severe wind storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms, heavy snowfall and ice storms, hail, snow avalanche, coastal flooding and erosion, and maritime heatwaves.

Far from living in a time of climate collapse, we appear to be enjoying a benign spell in an interglacial period. A little extra carbon dioxide, rescuing the Earth from possibly dangerous denudation, and a gentle rise of 1°C in temperature from the Little Ice Age, has boosted plant growth around the world. Evidence continues to be produced showing substantial CO₂ greening of the planet including desert areas. A recent paper Chen et al. 2024 found that CO₂ greening had actually accelerated over the last two decades.

The people spinning the tale of climate collapse – some of them advocating jail time for dissenters – are hysterical, but deadly serious. Ask Gianluca Alimonti, an Italian Physics Professor, whose paper stating a climate emergency was not supported by the available data, was recently retracted by Springer Nature after a year-long campaign by activist scientists and journalists, including Graham Readfearn of the Guardian. The Alimonti paper, which also included the work of two other physics professors, found that rainfall intensity and frequency was stationary in many parts of the world, and the same was true of U.S. tornadoes. Other meteorological categories including natural disasters, floods, droughts and ecosystem productivity showed “no clear positive trend of extreme events”. 

Only a fool would consider arguing that climate contrarian scientists should be sent to jail, as Dale did with Andrew Doyle last Sunday on GB News’s Free Speech Nation. Alas, the transcript of Dale’s comments does little to clarify his argument – it’s just word salad gibberish for the most part. But his intention is clear. Time for ‘deniers’, whatever they are supposed to be denying, to be marched off to jail. The sad thing is that he is not alone – Dale says it is “common sense”, which, as Doyle observed, is the refrain of every tyrant in history who’s wanted to jail his opponents.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.