The Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change obliges countries to combat “misinformation” on the matter.
EPP TUUL
At the COP30 climate conference held recently in Belém, Brazil, several countries signed the Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change, committing themselves to combating “misinformation” in regards to climate change. The signatory countries must promote the integrity of climate change information at the international, national and local levels, in accordance with international human rights and the principles of the Paris Agreement, according to the United Nations. So far, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay, and Belgium have approved the Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change.
Governments, the private sector, civil society, academia, and funders must combat climate misinformation, disinformation, and denialism, as per the declaration. Climate change information must be consistent, reliable, accurate, and evidence-based. The UN believes that the provisions of the declaration are urgently needed to raise awareness, enable accountability, and build public trust in climate policy measures and actions.
The problem, however, is the way such declarations can be used to restrict people’s freedom of speech as well as scientific freedom, and although the UN claims that approaches to climate change must be diverse and science-based, so far the organization’s statements and conduct have rather seen it treat itself as the only the reliable source of the “correct” or reliable viewpoints – even if its claims have, upon a closer examination, often proved to be exaggerated, misleading or outright false.
Claims, opinions and studies that contradict the UN’s mandatory consensus have therefore usually been considered the work of malicious provocateurs and sceptics, and automatically labelled as ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation’.
The Critique from Renowned Scientists
This is the attitude that has been evident in a number of interviews here at Freedom Research too, when noted scientists have shed light on the background of the current climate science and talked of a possible commonsense approach to the matter. All of these speakers have experienced a level of smear campaigns and attempts to silence them. Judith Curry, a renowned climatologist and professor emeritus of Georgia Institute of Technology, remarked, for example: “Scientists who did not vocally support the IPCC (the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) consensus are heavily ostracized. Not just in the media, but also by what I would call the establishment climate scientists – those who participate in the international and national assessment reports and have an outsized media presence. Many of these scientists are behaving as political advocates, and they are trying to stifle any disagreement, not just about the science, but even about the proposed policy solutions. Scientists who aren’t going along with that are not only marginalized, but things become very uncomfortable for them in the universities.”
Dr. Richard Lindzen, atmospheric scientist and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told us in an interview that none of the UN IPCC reports claim that climate change is a huge problem. The only fact that emerges there is that further warming is slightly more likely than cooling, but even that by not very much. Neither do any scientific reports predict extreme weather conditions, flooding or ‘the end of the world’ – that is the language of politicians. “Politicians have arranged the UN reports so that you do have one section on science, and then you have lots of other sections that are not on science, that say crazy things. And so you say, the UN says this, but it doesn’t say it in the science section. They designed it so that they would have a platform for issuing crazy statements. That there would be one section that is the science – that no one would read – but which allows them to say they had hundreds of scientists working on this,” Lindzen criticized the reports.
Guterres’s boiling planet
UN Secretary-General António Guterres is one of the political figures who is known for his apocalyptic messages. For example, in July 2023, he declared that global warming was over and that planet Earth had entered an era of boiling. So when Guterres talks about disinformation, he is now including all those who just say that the planet is not boiling.
“We must fight mis- and disinformation, online harassment, and greenwashing,” Guterres said, adding that the current declaration (Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change) is a way “to fund research and action promoting information integrity on climate issues. Scientists and researchers should never fear telling the truth.”
He was seconded by several other politicians. For example, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the President of Brazil, the country which was hosting the COP30 climate conference, stated that climate change is “no longer a threat of the future; it is a tragedy of the present. We live in an era in which obscurantists reject scientific evidence and attack institutions. It is time to deliver yet another defeat to denialism.” At the same time, President Lula has been accused of hypocrisy since in the run-up to the very same conference, he approved the clearing of a large area of the Amazon rainforest so as to build a four-lane highway for the guests of the conference. He has also favoured exploratory oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon River.
UNESCO has also joined the so-called information integrity initiative, with Director-General Audrey Azoulay explaining that without reliable climate change information, climate change is impossible to overcome. “Through this initiative, we will support the journalists and researchers investigating climate issues, sometimes at great risk to themselves, and fight the climate-related disinformation running rampant on social media,” Azoulay said.
The UN believes that the more countries that join the climate information declaration, the more it will be recognized that threats to information integrity are “one of the defining challenges of our time, weakening the foundations of public debate and undermining societies’ capacity to build collective solutions to the climate crisis.” The UN is also asking donors to contribute to a global fund and calling on them to support data integrity projects, with the fund being managed by UNESCO.
This article (UN Silences the Critics of Climate Measures) was created and published by Epp Tuul and is republished here under “Fair Use”
Featured image: UNESCO
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