Reader’s letter: Altering visuals of climate change

Discussions of climate change and Net Zero often involve references to ‘the science’ and to a ‘scientific consensus’.

Even highly educated citizens can be convinced by the idea of consensus because they are ignorant of the complex science involved and, because they think that, if all scientists are agreed, there is no need for them to try to understand the science for themselves.

Science is a mode of enquiry which has achieved huge success in improving the lives of humanity and has gained, therefore, a real authority in the public mind which some politicians have noticed, envy and wish to exploit for their own purposes.

The climate change narrative has gradually changed from an emphasis on small changes in global warming towards weather extremes (which occur almost daily somewhere on earth).

Real-time images of ‘catastrophic’ extremes are used as ‘proof’ of the reality of climate change and even as ‘proof’ that those extremes are due to increasing levels of carbon dioxide.

Those dramatic images of extreme events provide politicians with ‘visuals’ that have more emotional impact than small global temperature changes.

In their desperation to pursue their policies, they can even claim that climate change is an existential threat to humanity.

The attraction of political power is not the only thing which motivates politicians. Their power to award trillions in investment to the transition of our energy system means that there must be recipients of those trillions.

The beneficiaries of this huge investment need only to devote a few percentage points of those trillions to support promotion of the policies of the politicians to guarantee that investment in the ‘clean green energy’ which uses the products that only they can supply. — R. SHEPPARD, Beckingham.