No More 'Fun In The Sun'
Scientifically Illiterate Climate Zealot Orders Crackdown On Media Beach Photos During Hot Summer Days
Apparently, the media showing photos of normal people enjoying hot sunny days on the beach encourages climate denial and trivialises the impacts of ‘climate breakdown’ according to a Geography Associate Professor at the University of Exeter, appropriately named Saffron O’Neill. Well, it would hardly be Debs would it? Climate change zealotry appears to be an affliction almost solely of the ‘educated’ middle classes for some strange reason.
Remember 1976? You couldn’t open a national paper for months without seeing photos of people enjoying the long, hot, dry summer, mainly at seaside locations. Of course, a serious drought affected many parts of the UK at the same time and there was a fair share of photos of dried up reservoirs, shrivelled lawns and people queueing at standpipes. The reporting was balanced and fair. I doubt any mention at all was made of global warming seeing as most of the talk at that time was of an impending new ‘ice age’. The great British tradition of flocking to the seaside during hot sunny weather was alive and kicking and celebrated by the mainstream media who also reported on that other great British tradition of calmly facing a crisis and just ‘getting on with it’. Nobody complained. We made hay while the sun shined and endured the minor inconveniences of hosepipe bans, wrecked flower beds, damaged building foundations and incinerated lawns.
But now, if we get a couple of very hot sunny days and the press dare to air images of people having fun in the sun, we get killjoy ‘experts’ like Ms O’Neill leaning on the media for the thought crime of propagating dangerous wrongspeak during an alleged ‘climate breakdown’.
There’s something seriously amiss with these people. They have abandoned science, rationality and compassion for their fellow human beings for Green-eyed misanthropy manifesting as an ill-defined ideologically-based concern for the planet; not even, I might add, any particular concern for individual endangered species, as evidenced by their general lack of support for hard nosed ‘boots on the ground’ conservation measures. They just sit in their ivory towers telling us, the plebs, what we should be doing and even thinking in order to minimise the impacts of an imaginary ‘climate crisis’. They will of course profess to ‘care’ about the supposed human victims of their imaginary ‘climate breakdown’ but this is just window dressing. Look inside their house and you will see that they generally despise humanity.
The Guardian (of course) gives O’Neill freedom to express her whacko opinions thus:
How the media communicates about climate breakdown reflects and shapes how societies engage with the issue. Behind every picture that makes it into the news is a person mirroring and perpetuating how society thinks about climate breakdown.
She’s actually published a ‘research paper’ on this, currently in preprint and not peer-reviewed. They’ll need to find some equally humourless academics who can manage not to laugh their heads off upon reading this nonsense if they do want it to get through peer-review. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of such joyless, doom-obsessed individuals inhabiting the niche-like nooks and crannies of academia these days:
Our new research, led by the University of Exeter, highlights a distinct problem with how the European media visually represents news of extreme heat. We examined media coverage from the UK, the Netherlands, France and Germany during the summer of 2019. Importantly, we only included news stories that mentioned both the keywords “heatwave” and “climate change”, reasoning that if we were to see responsible and accurate reporting of heatwave risks, it would be in coverage that at least alluded to the increasing risk of heatwaves becoming longer, more frequent and more intense under climate breakdown.
We found two distinct themes in visual coverage. The first used images of “fun in the sun” that depicted heatwaves as something enjoyable. In all four countries, the majority of these images showed people having a good time in or by water. This was particularly prominent in the UK, perhaps saying something about how British culture narrates the experience of very hot weather in our historically mild climate.
O’Neill concludes:
Not everyone is having fun during heatwaves superpowered by climate breakdown – for vulnerable people they can be deadly. Fortunately, there are signs of progress as editors, journalists, suppliers of stock and editorial photography, and society more widely, start to think critically about the images used to visually represent extreme heat. News media and social scientists can work together to tell the full story of extreme weather.
A paragraph of pure, undiluted, unfiltered, 100% genuine bullshit. Of course not everyone is having fun during a heatwave. Many people have to work, often in the open, exposed to the heat, and whilst lounging on the beach with access to a shimmering sea and cooling seabreezes may be the ideal way to enjoy hot weather, grafting for 8 hours in the open or in a non air-conditioned building is probably not! Many other people just cannot tolerate extreme high temperatures and/or humidity for medical reasons. They suffer quite badly during heatwaves.
What the hell does ‘heatwaves superpowered by climate breakdown’ even mean? It’s unscientific gibberish, not evidenced by any empirical data whatsoever, just computer models churning out predictions which make reading chicken entrails look good even. ‘Climate breakdown’ is not a scientific term and has no basis in observation or fact, let alone science. We must resist these post Enlightenment climate cultists who wish to mould civil society in their own highly disturbed image.
Update 17th July 2022:
With the advent of a two or three day intense heatwave in the UK which has been declared a ‘Red Extreme Heat Warning’ by the Met office, we have this from Marshall Shepherd. So drearily predictable. These killjoys lack all humanity and reason, even though they profess to have it in greater quantities than the rest of us.
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