IN what you’d be forgiven for thinking was a parody of itself, BBC’s Radio Four Today programme yesterday produced a synergy of scaremongering from Broadcasting House to Bournemouth – where the LibDems are on their very noisy retreat.
It started with thrilled reporting of the former government chief scientist’s latest climate alarm speech. Professor Sir David King is frightened, very frightened and if you don’t believe me you can hear him here at 37 minutes in. He’s has been predicting the end of the habitable world for quite some time now. Now it is imminent.
He certainly managed to agitate the motherly Martha Kearney. She could not of course question any of his assertions, since ‘denial’ as they call any questioning of their climate stories is banned by the BBC. She managed however to express her worry that these extreme predictions were getting a bit too much for our brainwashed teenagers (my description not hers) beset, as a result, by a new mental health syndrome – eco-anxiety. I kid you not.
The woke BBC found itself in somewhat of a dilemma. What mattered most, climate or children’s mental health, the matter reported elsewhere of parents instructed to stop terrifying their kids with talk of climate catastrophe. Given the rising numbers of anxious children seeking therapy was it necessary for scientists to frighten them quite so much, she asked, forgetting the BBC’s own role to the fore and centre of this. The Ministry of Truth’s messenger of environmental woe was on hand to tell her it was. Quite necessary said Roger Harrabin, taking the opportunity to repeat King’s dire warnings.
The increase in extreme weather conditions though as yet unproven (he muttered) we would be stupid not to see as a result of climate change.*
Yes there was concern about the impact on young people’s mental health of ‘the end of the world as we know it’. But sorry Martha, it had to be. Scientists he had personally surveyed said they indeed did have to use this sort of emotional language. Because, you see, we’ve been talking in ‘dry scientific terms’ for years and ‘nobody’s been taking much notice’.
What?
Not the BBC, the government’s climate change committees, the schools and every other part of the establishment and business now aboard the new zero carbon bandwagon? Not the Lib Dems in their Bournemouth redoubt, having their jolliest conference in years according to Justin Webb, so busy are they planning ever more oppressive ‘save the climate’ policies?
Not the party’s star climate spokesperson, Wera Hobhouse, given time later in the programme to detail her ‘radical agenda for tackling the climate emergency’ – set out in some detail at the weekend, and seemingly straight from the Extinction Rebellion handbook – needed to head off the said apocalypse?
Yes, we can prepare for a less than liberal future should Swinson’s Millenial Cult team ever take over. Be ready to have your holidays abroad and personal air travel all but banned (concessions for those with dying relatives abroad to be made on application). As for your petrol car, forget it. They too, with diesel cars, will be banned by 2030 all helped along by list of necessary infringements on liberty to ensure a 2040 zero carbon future – Mrs May’s 2050 costly and futile carbon commitment not being urgent enough.
Listen to the programme 19 minutes before nine to Justin Webb giving free rein to Wera and her sidekick Luke’s advocacy of policies that would impoverish the population and turn us into a police state.
It was not a parody. That is what is truly alarming.
*The Global Warming Policy Foundation’s State of the UK Climate 2018 report due to be published in the next couple of weeks is expected to comprehensively debunk these claims.
