What the liberal elite feel you should know about 'Climate Change'

telegraph.co.uk

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: March 1st, 2010

Bishop Hill has a summary – at once fascinating, deeply revealing and rather chilling – of a recent workshop staged at Oxford University to discuss the role of the media in reporting Climate Change. (hat tip: Barry Woods)

It shows that EVEN NOW as far as the liberal elite is concerned, all public doubts about AGW are merely a question of “false consciousness” in need of correction rather than the result of evidence-based scepticism.

Here is the BBC’s Richard Black:

I’m not surprised at the level of UK scepticism as the main impacts of climate change are decades away and in other places. The problem is poor science awareness. We need to improve science education so people properly understand climate science.

Here is the Guardian’s David Adam:

The meaning of sceptic is very specific. It’s not taxi drivers or people who don’t want to pay higher electricity bills. It’s someone who knows better and takes a contrary view for pathological reasons. No journalists believe that climate science was undermined by the emails.

Here is the Financial Times’s Fiona Harvey:

Sceptics were clever in choosing their name. We do need a new name, denier won’t work because of Holocaust associations.

Later we find Ms Harvey yearning – inna Sir-John-Houghton-stylee – for a catastrophe that will show all us denier/sceptics JUST HOW WRONG WE ARE:

Climate scientists aren’t generally newsworthy; sceptics, IPCC problems and emails are making the news. “Climate – guess what? Still changing” is an unlikely headline. A short-term disaster is needed to guarantee coverage as people aren’t good at processing information about there being no ice at the poles in 30 years.

You couldn’t make it up. By far the scariest contributions, though, come from a Sun editor called Ben Jackson. A notionally right-wing tabloid is not what you’d normally associate with the liberal elite, but his remarks betray exactly the same prejudices as those of the Guardian, the Financial Times and the BBC. I leave readers to speculate why this might be.

Here, for example, is yer Sun man’s remarkable bizarre statement about Jeremy Clarkson:

People listen to Jeremy Clarkson who’s sceptical (although eventually Jeremy will come round).

What’s he proposing? Blackmail? Thumbscrews? Contract withdrawal?

Still, it’s not all bad news. Here’s the Sun editor again on how the public mood is changing:

The other day a Sun driver talked to me about the Medieval Warm Period. That wouldn’t have happened 6 months ago. All climate science will now be tested and people will ask how strong the science really is. There’s been a perfect storm of things going wrong – Climategate, Copenhagen, Met Office predictions – it could only be worse if David Attenborough had been caught in bed with Lord Monckton.