In February and March of 2022 we ran a series summarizing a scientific paper by a team of Italian scientists led by Gianluca Alimonti presenting a review of data on extreme weather. The paper found little evidence of upward trends in most disaster types. That inevitably ran afoul of the climate censors who mounted a media campaign to get the journal to retract it, even though they couldn’t identify anything scientifically wrong with the paper. The journal asked the authors to add more data, which they did. Then, even though most of the new reviewers approached by the journal praised the revised article’s quality, the journal caved in to the bullies and announced the whole thing would be retracted, partly on the advice of one reviewer who admitted the paper was correct but warned “think of the implications of publishing it.” We say think of the implications of not publishing it, and especially of not publishing it on the explicit grounds that Ignorance is Strength. In honour of the work of Alimonti and his colleagues we’re going to re-run our original series, so you can see for yourself what the alarmist goon squad doesn’t want you to know. This week: hurricanes.
The authors note that, because of their potential for causing enormous amounts of damage, hurricanes grab a lot of attention and play a central role in debates about climate change policy. One routinely encounters claims, as preamble not thesis, such as: “We are seeing more hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and other natural disasters because of climate change.” But to date:
“global observations do not show any significant trends in both the number and the energy accumulated by hurricanes, as shown in Fig. 1 and as claimed in several specific papers for the USA, which report the trend dating back to over 160 years ago, or for other regions of the globe.”
The top chart shows global tropical cyclone frequency and the bottom shows Global and Northern Hemisphere Accumulated Cyclone Energy, both since the early 1970s. Nothing to see here folks, move along.
And this is a prime example of your conspiracy at work.
A cultist (not in the conspiracy but compliant) reads this article and notifies the cult leader (a conspirator).
The cult leader identifies the threat, notifies his co-conspirators who set up a media campaign to discredit the work. If successful, this would lead to the magazine looking innocent: 'there were faults in the article, so we could not publish it' and 'the scientific community' once again proving that all that realism is rubbish.
As the work is so unquestionably correct, this approach fails, and so they take it to the next level, playing the 'compliance with dogma' / 'this is not socially acceptable' card.
The cultists fall in line because if they don't, they will have to accept and concede that their dogma is simply wrong and has been for a long time. This has been proven to cause actual physical pain in people so people go to great lengths to avoid it. They probably also get a real (monetary?) reward for their compliance. This ties them ever stronger to the dogma etc etc.
Without the cult leaders, this kind of behavior would quickly dissipate because not every outlet would follow these rules and some would publish this great article. Some big newspapers would also report on it as important news. This would instantly reflect very poorly on those that refused to publish on these particular grounds.
In practice there will often be a layer (editor?) between the cultist (reporter) and the cult leader, but that will still be a cultist.
This spiral of alarmism can be broken if a few editors and journalists at big newspapers decide that the actual future of their children is more important than the fake future taught by this dogma and start doing their actual job instead of being afraid. It's scary, I've been there, but it's so much more rewarding than the alternative.