Major Climate Grooming Course Shuts Down as World Turns Away from Constant Media Gaslighting

In a further sign of declining interest in the Net Zero fantasy, a major climate grooming course has shut up shop. The terminated six-month indoctrination was run by the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN) and was funded by a number of tax-efficient billionaire foundations. Over the last four years it has hosted around 800 journalists from over 100 countries. Described as a “flagship online course”, it will be “halted” from January 2026.

As regular readers will recall, the OCJN is one of a number of grooming operations that ensures a regular media drum beat of Greta-inspired climate BS. It is particularly keen on promoting the idea that extreme individual weather events can be tied to humans fiddling with the climate. Attribution Queen Dr Freiderike Otto sits on the OCJN Advisory Board and is a frequent speaker on this exciting new alchemical branch of pseudoscience. Another past speaker Climate and Society Professor Saffron O’Neill from Exeter University has speculated on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for expressing scepticism about “well-supported” climate science.

The market for mainstream climate journalism is falling off a cliff. An OCJN suggested essay around the theme of less tasty mangoes due to climate change can be easily farmed out to AI. In fact, all journalism written to a set political narrative can be entrusted to an AI programme. Given a recent essay published by the OCJN entitled ‘Newsrooms should develop a mental health strategy to help climate journalists’, there are likely to be a number of delicate flowers looking for future employment. They might wish to avoid other journalist areas of interest such as conflict and riot. Even local court reporting might tax their nervous dispositions.

The world has tired of clickbait, centrally organised climate claptrap, whether it be computer-generated tipping point tittle-tattle or sandwich board warnings of imminent Sodom and Gomorrah destruction. Forty years of the Gulf Stream still streaming, the coral reefs not disappearing and extreme weather not getting more extreme have all combined to generate cynicism about the real political/Malthusian reasons for the orchestrated gaslighting.

Reality is starting to dawn that humans cannot currently stop using hydrocarbons without destroying modern society. The fact that a little extra warmth from the ending of the Little Ice Age over the last 200 years has been almost entirely beneficial for life on Earth is starting to cut through. Carbon dioxide has been demonised as a ‘pollutant’, but more people seem aware that the recent atmospheric top-up has ‘greened’ the planet by around 15%–20%. Captured mainstream media doesn’t talk about this, but grooming help is available if, perish the thought, the subject of all this extra food should ever come up. SciLine is another Green Blob-funded agitprop promoter and is connected to the Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science. Its suggested response to all the inconvenient greening is to note that “in many cases, CO₂ disproportionately favours weeds over crops, causing more problems for agriculture”.

In the real world, you couldn’t make some of this stuff up, however hard you tried. Wrong sort of plants threaten Climate Armageddon.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that climate change gaslighting is falling down the editorial agenda. Last year in the US, the volume of climate change coverage on mainstream morning and nightly TV news programmes as well as Sunday morning political shows is reported to have fallen by 25% from the year before. The Trump effect is highly unlikely to have improved the time given over to invented doomsday scenarios. Earlier this month, the BBC’s Rowlatt-in-waiting Mark Poynting ran a 40 paragraph-plus story highlighting the Met Office’s claim that 2025 in the UK could be the ‘hottest year evah’ since it was on course to be 200th of a degree centigrade warmer than 2022. Cynics might note that the activist-riven Met Office published its forecast assuming an average temperature pattern until the end of the month. Curiously, at the same time the Met Office was forecasting a prolonged forthcoming spell of colder weather. The usual media suspects fell on the concocted story, but interestingly it seems to have been ignored by a number of mainstream outlets including the Telegraph, the Times, the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Daily Express and the Mirror.

Predicting ‘hottest evahs’ based on 200ths of a degree from a largely junk UK temperature network, with measuring ‘uncertainties’ ranging from 2°C to 5°C over 80% of the sites, is becoming very last year in many editorial rooms.

It is not clear if the OCJN will shut down completely, but its published material seems to suggest it relies on networking journalists around the world via its six-month course. It is part of the Oxford-based Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, which is backed by the Thompson Reuters Foundation and numerous billionaire funders such as Knight and Laudes. Media supporters are said to include the BBC, Google News Initiative, You Tube and the UK media regulator Ofcom. An interesting new recruit to the party is the former BBC Director of News Helen Boaden, who recently became the chairwoman of the Reuters Institute’s Steering Committee, replacing the former Guardian editor Alan Rushbridger. Boaden attended the infamous secret meeting in 2006 that helped put the BBC on the path of covering climate change to a strict political narrative determined by Net Zero. Rushbridger’s role in setting the Guardian on its hysterical climate change path requires no further comment.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.