Producer of Climate: The Movie Tom Nelson: Climate Scare Will Crumble Sooner Than You Expect
“There's not going to be a big revelation where people say we were wrong completely and sorry about that. They're just going to stop talking about it.” HANNES SARV
Producer of Climate: The Movie Tom Nelson: Climate Scare Will Crumble Sooner Than You Expect
“There's not going to be a big revelation where people say we were wrong completely and sorry about that. They're just going to stop talking about it.”
JUN 7
"Check out my DeSmog page here," is what Tom Nelson writes in the 'About' section of his Substack publication, to link his profile on a publication called DeSmog. Calling itself 'the world’s number one source for accurate, fact-based information regarding global warming misinformation campaigns', DeSmog is a well-known platform to try and debunk – or smear – the so-called climate sceptics. The publication was founded in January 2006 by Canadian PR-expert James Hoggan. Hoggan has said that his interest in climate issues began in 2003 when he was invited to join the board of the David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian environmental organisation that unconditionally backs the theory of a man-made climate crisis. Interaction with pro-climate crisis scientists and political activists such as Al Gore led Hoggan to take the climate issues presented to him very seriously, and this led to the founding of DeSmog – 'to raise awareness and help people become savvy about the global problem of climate change disinformation.'
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Climate crisis PR and the 'disinformation database'
Indirectly, the origin story itself shows that the purpose of the publication is not to provide unbiased scientific information on the arguments of all parties to the climate debate, but to present only one side of the science to the public, so as to support the founders' chosen and unchallengeable basic claim that humans are changing the climate and a catastrophe lies ahead. In essence, the website can also be seen as a PR-publication for one side, which ironically was acknowledged by Richard Littlemore, one of DeSmog's key authors back in the day, as early as 2009. In November 2009, emails from scientists on the computer server of the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit were made public by a whistleblower or perhaps hackers. The whole affair became known as Climategate. These emails contained 15 years of communications between the most prominent climate scientists in the world. And they were embarrassing. The emails provided insight into the practices that ranged from bad professionalism to fraudulent science. Bias, data manipulation, dodging freedom of information requests, and trying to subvert the peer-review process were uncovered. In the midst of this scandal, DeSmog author Littlemore informed Michael Mann, author of the flawed 'hockey stick' graph of rising temperatures in the 20th century and a prominent climate scientist who played a major role in Climategate and mainstream climate science in general, that DeSmog's role in reporting on the issue was 'all about PR here, not much about science.'
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While such bias should make one sceptical of the publication, DeSmog is used by both the mainstream press and fact-checkers of all kinds as a source of essentially unchallengeable truth today. And despite the errors – which can happen with any of us – there is in fact a great deal of truth to be found there. For example, it factually describes that John F. Clauser, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022, has said he does not believe there is a climate crisis. Similarly, it reviews the lives and work of many other scientists of the same calibre, and shows where and in what words they have denied a man-made climate crisis. But if everything is as said, what is the problem? The point is that the heading under which information about these renowned scientists and other 'sceptics' is listed to the public is called 'Climate Disinformation Database'.
Nelson's profile, which he refers to on his Substack, is also on the same database. Why is he giving a link to it? “It's quoting what I have actually said. Somebody spent a lot of time on it, and I wouldn't have spent that much time myself to write up this kind of 'about me' page. So it's a pretty good 'about me' page and if people want to take a look at it, they can get a reference to my work over the last few years,” Nelson explains. DeSmog's editor, for example, has read through all of his posts on social media platform X and highlighted the most important ones. It also outlines which prominent scientists he has interviewed on his climate podcast. And there's also a section explaining that Nelson is the producer of Climate: The Movie, a recent documentary by British documentary filmmaker Martin Durkin, which critically examines the climate catastrophe claims. Nelson says he is not at all bothered by the coverage of his work alongside world-renowned scientists at such a 'disinformation database'. “Whenever somebody in the climate cult talks about ‘disinformation’ or ‘misinformation’, I replace that with ‘information’ and that's what it is – it's information,” he says.
How a woodpecker lead to climate realism
Nelson is an electronic engineer with a master's degree and has worked in tech and software for many years. He became interested in climate issues in the second half of the 2000s, and this is linked to his hobby of birdwatching. In 2004, claims were made of the rediscovery in the United States of a species of bird that was declared extinct in the 1980s, the ivory-billed woodpecker. Nelson recalls it was reported on the radio and some people were moved to tears that a species thought to no longer exist had been rediscovered. It was also the subject of an in-depth, peer-reviewed paper by 17 authors published in a scientific journal. But when Nelson delved deeper, he discovered something he was not expecting to find – no evidence of the supposed rediscovery. According to him the whole story was based on a particularly blurry video and an even blurrier photo as evidence of the species' rediscovery. “It was completely crazy. It was just groupthink. They didn't see it and they never did get a picture of it. It was all a complete crock,” Nelson says.
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Around the same time, a friend told him to take a similar look at the debate about climate and global warming. Until then, he hadn't paid much attention to the issue and believed that if that's what the scientists were saying, then humans were probably causing global warming with their CO2 emissions, and possibly a catastrophe would eventually follow. “When I looked at the evidence for myself I was surprised to find that there was nothing, no evidence that there's a climate crisis,” he says. According to Nelson, anyone can search and look for themselves and see for themselves whether the heat is really too warm now, or were the heatwaves of the 1930s worse? Are polar bears really going extinct? Have yields dropped dramatically? Are droughts in the US state of California worse than 200 years ago? Is the stormy weather becoming more frequent and storms more powerful? Are there really more wildfires? “You don't have to be a climatologist. You don't have to have a degree. Just an ordinary person who can read data and use Google and look at graphs – you can check all these alarming things yourself,” he says. “It's a complete crock. All of it. Every single bit of anything alarming you've heard about the climate and CO2 causing bad weather, it's all a complete baloney. Not true and no evidence supports it,” Nelson says.
Since about 2006, he has been researching, publishing and arguing about climate issues on a daily basis. According to Nelson, the whole climate emergency is a scam for power and money. There is a lot of money in the energy transition movement, while all sorts of 'climate restrictions', be they carbon credits or nudges to change our diets from beef to insects, or possible travelling instructions, are part of this power play, he argues.