Beddington’s Scare Tactics:  Use Natural Disasters To Push Through Green Politics

Social control is best managed through fear. --Michael Crichton, State of Fear Climate-related disasters overseas should be used by the Government to persuade British voters to accept unpopular policies for cutting carbon emissions, says Sir John Beddington, the Government’s chief scientific adviser. Droughts, floods and storms in foreign countries could be used as “policy windows”, making it easier to introduce “bold actions” that would otherwise be politically unacceptable. --Ben Webster, The Times, 12 July 2011

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Given that individual weather events cannot be linked to climate change, this does make the report look very political and highly unscientific. When we read the IPCC's words, the use of extreme weather as a bogeyman by Sir John and his team looks highly incongruous. --Andrew Montford, Bishop Hill, 12 July 2011 The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen — that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. --G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and other Evils, London 1922 It is now more often said than any time in the past that natural disasters occur due to global warming. Often inviting ridicule upon the consensus upholders, this is more definitively predictable than the disasters themselves. --Shub Niggurath Climate, 7 July 2011 Primary school children are being terrified by lessons claiming climate change will bring "death, injury and destruction" to the world unless they take action. Resource material produced by the Australian government for primary school teachers and students states climate change will cause "devastating disasters". Psychologists and scientists said the lessons were alarmist, created unneeded anxiety among school children and endangered their mental health. --The Daily Telegraph 9 July 2011 Eco-apocalypticism is a cultish religious phenomenon with the same characteristics as any of the innumerable end-of-the-world cults that have appeared throughout history, with their prophecies of Armageddon. The principal difference, of course, is that the contemporary eco-apocalyptic cult has the full backing of the state, and particularly the education system, which is being used as a gigantic propaganda machine to literally scare children into adhering to the belief-system of the cult. --Merv Bendle, Quadrant Online, 12 July 2011

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