2023 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #7

A chronological listing of news and opinion articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook Page during the past week: Sun, Feb 12, 2023 thru Sat, Feb 18, 2023.

Story of the Week

Revealed: The Science Denial Network Behind Oxford’s ‘Climate Lockdown’ Backlash

A traffic filter scheme in Oxfordshire has been “weaponised” by the anti-climate lobby, according to disinformation expert Jennie King.

Oxford City Crest w/ Guinea Pig 

Not Our Future put leaflets through letterboxes in Oxfordshire.

The “grassroots” backlash to a traffic reduction scheme in Oxfordshire is being boosted by an international network of established climate and Covid science deniers and amplified by right-wing media, DeSmog can report. 

The group ‘Not Our Future’ made headlines last month by putting leaflets through Oxfordshire residents’ letterboxes calling them “guinea pigs” in the UK’s first “climate lockdown”. This was a reference to a conspiracy theory about a government plan to curb people’s freedoms. 

False claims about the Oxfordshire County Council scheme to cut traffic and pollution went viral online, with one tweet by climate sceptic author Jordan Peterson being viewed 7.5 million times. The claims, which have seen local councillors receive death threats, have been fact-checked and debunked as misleading, and the council has described them as “harmful to public debate”. 

Not Our Future’s director David Fleming, an anti-Covid lockdown and vaccine activist, presents his campaign as a people-powered movement opposed to a coming “authoritarian future” imposed by what he calls “The Blob”.

However, DeSmog can report that the group was conceived by Fleming years before the pandemic or the Oxfordshire scheme, and is backed by a network of high-profile climate deniers and conspiracy theorists based in the UK, Canada, the United States and Australia. 

It is also the latest sign of a growing alliance between opponents of climate action and anti-Covid vaccine conspiracy theorists. Not Our Future’s founding signatories include Kathy Gyngell, a trustee of Tufton Street think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK’s main climate science denial group. 

Gyngell’s website TCW hosted an anti-vaccine event in London last week with climate denial author James Delingpole, anti-vax MP Andrew Bridgen, and 90s pop group Right Said Fred, the public face of Not Our Future.

Experts say fears generated by the Covid pandemic are being exploited to oppose green policies. 

“Until 2020, fear-mongering about so-called ‘green tyranny’ had little to point towards, and often felt like an abstract, even lame Boogeyman,” said Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) think tank. 

“The pandemic was a moment of genuine trauma for millions of people,” she said. “That trauma has been weaponised by the anti-climate lobby, who now condemn any public policy as an ‘infringement on civil liberties’ and draw direct comparisons with Covid.”  

Click here to access the entire article as originally posted on the DeSmog website.

Revealed: The Science Denial Network Behind Oxford’s ‘Climate Lockdown’ Backlash by Adam Barnett, Michaela Herrmann & Christopher Deane, Desmog, Feb 16, 2023

Links posted on Facebook

Sun, Feb 12, 2023

Mon, Feb 13, 2023

Tue, Feb 14, 2023

Wed, Feb 15, 2023

Thu, Feb 16, 2023

Fri, Feb 17, 2023

Sat, Feb 18, 2023

Posted by John Hartz on Saturday, 18 February, 2023

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