Speaking in Suva in July 2022, Anthony Albanese declared a climate emergency in the Pacific. This came after joining regional leaders in Fiji to warn Australia’s neighbours face an immediate threat to their security and wellbeing. Pacific islands were sinking under rising sea levels, claimed the islands.

But back in January 2021, ABC News had reported new research that found hundreds of islands in the Pacific are growing in land size. Sticking stubbornly to the climate alarmist playbook like most politicians, the Prime Minister appears to give cover to those agitating for ever more draconian actions through misinformation about climate change.

At last count, a global network of over 1,600 scientists and professionals had signed the CLINTEL Climate Declaration stating there is no climate emergency. Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) is an independent foundation that operates in the fields of climate change and climate policy. CLINTEL was founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok.

The persistent climate alarmism, now at ‘global boiling’ hysteria level, is one of the most pernicious elements of discussion in the public square. How would fact-checkers in the proposed new world of mis-dis laws deal with the diametrically opposed views within not just politics but science itself? The ruling orthodoxy as espoused by government is based on science that is still largely a science of computer simulations. The reality is, as often emphasised by scientists not captured by the orthodoxy or reliant on it, climate science is full of wicked problems; uncertainty not consensus is the dominant status.

When tech giant Meta suspended its partnership with FactLab at the beginning of September 2023, some took that as a public indication of how risky it is to have fact-checking as a fixture of media oversight. That relationship break-up was over apprehended bias in regards to fact-checking amidst the Voice referendum discussions online. Climate change is a topic ripe for such controversial procedures. The disparaging of and billion dollar funding for climate alarm orthodoxy skews the integrity of fact checking carried out on behalf of the ruling orthodoxy.

What would fact-checkers make, say, of geology Professor Ian Plimer’s observation that, ‘Annual human emissions (3 per cent of the total) of carbon dioxide [in the atmosphere] are meant to drive global warming. This has never been shown. If it could be shown, then it would also have to be shown that natural emissions (97 per cent) don’t drive global warming.’ The 3 per cent of the total of 0.04 per cent of carbon dioxide, 0.0012 per cent, is what climate alarmists tell politicians is frying the planet. (That 97 per cent from natural sources includes outgassing from the ocean, decomposing vegetation and other biomass, venting volcanoes, naturally occurring wildfires, and belches from ruminant animals.)

‘When a society loses the desire to know the truth, that is a precursor to totalitarianism,’ observed author, Holocaust survivor, and political philosopher Hanna Arendt (1906–1975). And the truth is not going to be revealed by mis-dis fact checkers who are powered by authority to enforce the ruling orthodoxy.

It is indeed loudly broadcast disinformation that perpetrated the absurdity of climate alarmism in the first place. The unreliability of global warming enthusiasts was demonstrated long ago when Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, was criticised in October 2007 by a high court judge in Britain who highlighted what he said were ‘nine scientific errors’ in the film. The mistakes identified mainly deal with the predicted impacts of climate change, and include Gore’s claims that a sea-level rise of up to 6 metres would be caused by melting in either west Antarctica or Greenland ‘in the near future’. The judge said: ‘This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr Gore’s ‘wake-up call’.’ He accepted that melting of the ice would release this amount of water ‘but only after, and over, millennia’.

How would mis-dis fact checkers deal with that part of the story?

The zealotry of climate and energy minister Chris Bowen, for example, helps propel any fact-checker to equal zealotry, ignoring the thousands of scientists who have nothing to gain by challenging the orthodoxy.

Dr Richard Lindzen, former MIT Professor of Atmospheric Science and past IPCC contributor, says: ‘The narrative of climate alarm … is pretty absurd. Many people (though by no means all) have great difficulty entertaining this possibility. They can’t believe that something so absurd could gain such universal acceptance.’

Andrew L. Urban is the author of Climate Alarm Reality Check – What You Haven’t Been Told (Wilkinson Publishing).