Global warming is one of most important issues of our times. But it’s not only a subject of interest for scientists. Politicians also started looking at this problem when it became disputed in mainstream media. They were influenced by the controversy it evoked, and what they wanted was to control what scientists say to the media. Politicians wanted censorship – not discussion.
Many or climate change researchers claim they were subject to huge pressure to hide all sort of scientific evidence showing that global warming is the effect of actions of the human race. Almost 50 % of American scientists tell that they’ve bee pushed to adapt the results of their researches to meet official Bush’s administration view of “climate change scepticism”. They say governmental officials were telling them to remove terms like “ climate change” or “global warming” from all reports and other documents that were going to be released to the public information. These clerks were even editing these documents before they were released to the media. And They were not even to discuss global warming in discussions taking place in public (like in TV). These procedure took place even at NASA – it was censoring all reports on the topic of climate change in 2004. That was to protect Bush from controversy before presidential election.
Even some of ‘average Joes’ tried to censor global warming debate. Climate change scientists reported receiving threatening emails. The most famous of them got dead animals dropped next to doors of their houses. Owners of some of racist www pages even went so far that they posted photographs of these researchers and put inscription “Jew” under each of them. The danger seem so real, one of the ‘stars’ of climate change started travelling with bodyguards.
There is other process that takes place at the same time. When politicians do what they can to censor global warming, journalist seek for sensational news. And climate change is a hit. Media need to attract peoples attention, and instead of trying to find objective truth and stimulate proper debate, they just show it as something ‘leading to the point of no way back’. They sell the emotions of catastrophe by adding lots of exaggerations and pejoratives. If it’ll happen to you to express moderate opinion, or some rational debate, be prepared for strong criticism or ostracism.
The facts described above show us the picture in which there are two competing groups of interest – a State (bribed by oil industry) and Media (TV and press journalists). Fist group is to try to censor any information saying that global warming is caused by human activities (like polluting environment by burning fossil fuels). The second group wants to show the threat in exaggerated form, pump it and make it even more dramatic than it really is. Our challenge is to stay with the common sense and use our own judgments about how much climate change is actually a serious problem.
Tags: censorship, climate change, global warming, journalist, media, politicians