Environmental campaigners, more than any other group, are the ones living off fake news.

 There's nothing new with what's now called fake news - in WW1 rumours of a Russian army spread:

"There is being circulated everywhere a story that an immense force of Russian soldiers – a little short of a million, it is said – have passed, or are still passing, through England on their way to France."

The news was given credibility by this being reported in The Times - even though that newspaper merely reported the rumours, it failed to explain they were false (which a quick call to the Foreign Office would have confirmed). So it is with fake news:

Singers and actors including Madonna and Jaden Smith shared photos on social media that were seen by tens of millions of people. “The lungs of the Earth are in flames,” said actor Leonardo DiCaprio. “The Amazon Rainforest produces more than 20% of the world’s oxygen,” tweeted soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo. “The Amazon rain forest — the lungs which produce 20% of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire,” tweeted French President Emanuel Macron.

Last week you couldn't move for media reports describing a catastrophe in the Amazon as the entire cast of great and good the world over piled into the story so as to demonstrate that, above all, they cared! Thing is, though, that a lot of what the great and good were sharing was every bit as fake as Russians with snow on their boots marching though England in 1914.

And yet the photos weren’t actually of the fires and many weren’t even of the Amazon. The photo Ronaldo shared was taken in southern Brazil, far from the Amazon, in 2013. The photo that DiCaprio and Macron shared is over 20 years old. The photo Madonna and Smith shared is over 30. Some celebrities shared photos from Montana, India, and Sweden.

Even if this is down to an excess of enthusiasm over fact-checking, the fakeness of the story is at an even bigger magnitude than just celebs splashing pictures of random fires across social media while shouting "climate change" or "far right Brazilian government". It seems - at least according to one of the authors for the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that not only are the photographs fake but:

The Amazon rainforest is not the "lungs" of the planet - “There’s no science behind that. The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen but it uses the same amount of oxygen through respiration so it’s a wash.”

Nor are the fires burning at a record rate - "it’s just 7% higher than the average over the last 10 years ago, Nepstad said."

And anyhow those fires aren't actual rainforest - "(w)hat increased by 7% in 2019 are the fires of dry scrub and trees cut down for cattle ranching as a strategy to gain ownership of land."

It seems - as always that, if you poke a little into any scare story you quickly find it's full of holes, based on dubious information and doubtful science. The reports are filled with frightening words "agribusiness", "right wing", "multinationals" and assorted dots are joined to show how, even if it's not quite a world-wide conspiracy, there's a lot of 'links' between all the nasty people we're told not to like by the great and good.

The same - and this is linked to those fires - goes for cows. To listen to so-called experts, you'd surmise that, to save the planet, all we have to do is stop eating meat and drinking milk. If we do this, hey presto, climate change is fixed. But again the claims look dodgy (and they come from a report that "claimed livestock are responsible for 18% of GHG emissions, but the figure calculated emissions along the entire supply chain, from land use to processing and refrigeration in supermarkets").

So given that every sort of food get transported from farm to processing plant to supermarket, we're left mostly with the methane that cows burp (methane we're told being a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide). Here's what happens to that methane in the actual real world:

While methane is 28-times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, methane’s lifespan is just a decade, while CO2 — known as a long-life pollutant — remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years.

After ten years, methane is broken down in a process called hydroxyl oxidation into CO2, entering a carbon cycle which sees the gas absorbed by plants, converted into cellulose, and eaten by livestock.

To put that into context, each year 558m tons of methane is produced globally, with 188m tons coming from agriculture. Almost that entire quantity — 548m tons — is broken down through oxidation and absorbed by plants and soils as part of the sink effect.

And then (who knew?) the number of cows we farm has reduced - America's beef herd is a third smaller than in 1975 and dairy cattle numbers have dropped by even more. Those cows are bigger and produce more milk or more beef per cow - better livestock management, improved feed and genetic science is doing more to save the planet from cow farts than all the shouty vegans telling us to be 'plant-based', and all without us losing the joy of a t-bone steak to go with that great bottle of red.

These are just two examples of how the environmentalist movement, now locked in step with anti-capitalist thugs and animal rights fanatics, uses fake news to propagate its ideology. We could do the same with fracking, nuclear energy, the number and impact of extreme weather events, declining glaciers and dying polar bears. There really is a case for responding to climate change but almost none of the arguments dominating social media and the press stand up to close examination. All these arguments have done it create a ridiculous sense of panic and emergency among the credulous - and we're all credulous at times regardless of how wise we think ourselves.

What's missing in all this is journalism - from big broadcasters and agenda-setting broadsheet newspapers - that asks sceptical questions about the things that environmental campaigners tell them. It seems that, in accepting climate change (or even Climate Emergency or Climate Crisis) as an act of faith, too many journalists simply don't bother to question the latest scare and plonk it straight in front of the viewer, listener or reader. As a result anyone questioning of these stories - even those like me who accept much of the science around global warming - is badged a denier, someone who doesn't recognise that there's a climate emergency dontcha know, and we must act now. More than Trump, Brexit or those nasty right-wingers, environmental campaigners are the ones living off fake news.

....