In case you were worried that a serious, broad-minded look at climate might somehow erupt, relax. Oxford, which used to be a university, now does stuff like “Building a mighty global network for climate journalists” so that these poor waifs who “have the unenviable task of navigating this uncharted territory – a sea of information and a range of often conflicting viewpoints – in their endeavours to convey basic facts and what they mean for their audiences” can feel validated. And just in case an actual debate could have broken out anyway, at the “G20 Leaders’ Summit” carbonfest in Rio, site of next year’s COP if they even bother with it, “The Brazilian government, the United Nations and UNESCO are joining forces to strengthen research and measures to address disinformation campaigns that are delaying and derailing climate action.” Big Green Is Watching You!

If you’re wondering why climate journalists are in need of the modern version of Samuel Smiles, or Tony Robbins, you see, “As climate-related challenges escalate across the globe, climate journalism is not for the faint-hearted”. So “Our key goal is to empower the people with whom we're working and provide the space to make journalists feel more confident about their work,” says one Mitali Mukherjee, “Director of Journalist Programmes at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism” who also “leads the Oxford Climate Journalism Network”. Arguably these journalists would feel more confident in their work if they just stopped writing banal and inaccurate drivel. But then, we represent an older way of looking at things where universities offered bracing challenges to one’s intellectual complacency not self-help sessions.

By the way Mitali, with a degree in political science, is also a TEDx speaker, speaking of the galactic metropolis. It’s a remarkably closed world, sociologically as well as intellectually, that has no idea how the other 90% lives and might well not care if they found out.

Speaking of it being a closed world, whose inhabitants have not received the gift Robbie Burns sought of seeing ourselves as others see us, our response to the Green Thought Police is: Yeah? How about the disinformation campaign where we say the people yelling most loudly about climate action are currently gathering in a cluster of international conferences from Baku to Rio (G20, 2024) to Rio (COP30, 2025) and beyond to delay and derail it because they don’t know what to do or how to do it?

Roger Pielke Jr. commented that “UN to create new climate misinformation police to counter ‘misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent’” while Terence Corcoran sneered more pithily “Climate disinformation police”. Indeed. But if they’re as bad at that job as at the others they tackle, we probably have nothing to fear.