Nothing binds the entire deniosphere tighter than the blind opposition we share to whatever the United Nations does with its overweening authority. After all, our common hat­red for the supranational classe politique is why most of us got into the rejecting-scientific-facts game in the first place, and why any self-affirming denier would sooner die of septicaemia from a polar-bear maul­ing than give those bastiches in Turtle Bay the satisfaction of admitting what we all know is true, deep down, in our heart of hearts.

(Namely: that The Science™ is absolutely kosher and terrifyingly persuasive; and that if it’s guilty of anything at all, which it isn’t, it’s an all-too-human tendency to under-exaggerate the devastation ‘locked in’ with every new p.p.m. of carbon pollution* we chunder forth.)

There’s a reason no other institution since the Roman imperium has been entrusted with the power to invent new weeks out of thin air. Well, OK, maybe the Medi­eval Church; but where are they now?

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and what power could be more powerful than the power to manipulate the calendar itself—to literally molest time?

This time, however, even I, Scepticus I, must admit the UN has used its mutant abilities for good. (I guess a broken calendar really is right twice a year.)

I refer to Secretary-General Guterres’ announcement of International Islamophobia Awareness Week [IIAW], which will replace the week of September 11 through 17.

I’m sure you’re all perfectly aware of that, thanks to the success of this month’s IIAW Awareness Month [IIAWAM] events, which have already raised a record number of awarenesses around the issues, challenges and prejudices facing ordinary Islamophobia Awareness Weeks in today’s modern society now.

Islamophobia is an issue close to our hearts here at CliScep. Not only has it been linked to the deaths of a handful of people since 2001, most of them Sikhs—which makes it infinity times more lethal than silly old global warming ha ha ha—but one of our writers has personally struggled with the diagnosis since his late teens.

To honour the remainder of IIAWAM we’ll be reblogging on an irregular basis, for your improvement, the very best media coverage of the illness.

Our first pick is a Guardian article featuring every sceptic’s favourite thinker from the field of Punitive Psychology.

Look for it in tomorrow’s CliScep.

You probably won’t find it, but never mind—it’ll be up by the end of the week, latest.

Your leader,
Gaius Augustus Scepticinianus Caesar I,
known as Scepticus the God or Scepticus Modestus

*Note to non-scientists: carbon pollution is simply a fancy way of saying carbon dioxide. Scientists love to add letters to words, completely praeter necessitatem, as a way of obscuring their meaning, coping with turning 50 and making themselves sound smarter than they are—and as a science blog, we naturally have to do likewise.

Don’t judge them too harshly; remember, scientists don’t receive any training in communication, only in dissimulation and crypticness. This situation is finally changing, of course, thanks to the climate-science movement, the first discipline to truly grasp the need for clarity and candor so as to empower you, the layperson, to come to your own conclusions armed with as much information as possible.

But these improvements take time—the climate movement can’t just snap its fingers and change how scientists speak English overnight, or even in one generation. It would be wonderful if they could, but they just don’t have that kind of influence.

Anyway so yeah, next time you see the word pollution, don’t get perplexed: it’s just a longer, more sciency, technical word for dioxide (-O₂), the anion you’re so familiar with.

On behalf of science, sorry for the confusion.