In Denierland, q.v., and still available, though sadly now five years old and in sore need of an update – which I would do, if I could face extending the graphs with another five years of data and redrawing them – I gave an excerpt from the Wiki pages on media coverage of global warming and climate change denial:

“The term alarmist can be used as a pejorative by critics of mainstream climate science to describe those that endorse it. MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel wrote that labeling someone as an “alarmist” is “a particularly infantile smear considering what is at stake.” He continued that using this “inflammatory terminology has a distinctly Orwellian flavor.””

Wiki page on media coverage of global warming

“In academic literature and journalism, the terms “climate change denial” and “climate change deniers” have well-established usage as descriptive terms without any pejorative intent.”

Wiki page on climate change denial

I don’t consider myself to be a denier, but it would be a badge of honour to be called one by the dimbulbs who control public discourse. That doesn’t mean that I approve of the descriptions given above. Instead, it is merely one of many reasons that you can’t trust Wiki on a lot of topics.

Larry Sanger, Wiki’s co-founder, recently nailed nine theses to Wiki’s door. His criticisms included that certain perspectives were excluded:

…a favored perspective has emerged: the narrow perspective of the Western ruling class, one that is “globalist,” academic, secular, and progressive (GASP). In fact, Wikipedia admits to a systemic bias, and other common views are marginalized, misrepresented, or excluded entirely.

As was said in a different context, you do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate.

Wiki can’t be trusted on some things. So it would be good, wouldn’t it, if there was a trustworthy online encyclopaedia that people could visit for an alternative view to Wiki’s GASP? Well, a couple of weeks ago, I saw an UnHerd article that said such a thing already exists: Justapedia.

Justapedia claims to be “where neutrality meets objective truth.” Well, we’ll believe it when we see it.

Here’s what Justapedia says about climate alarmism:

The term alarmist has been used as a pejorative by critics of mainstream climate science to describe those that endorse the scientific consensus without necessarily being unreasonable. MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanual wrote that labeling someone as an “alarmist” is “a particularly infantile smear considering what is at stake.” He continued that using this “inflammatory terminology has a distinctly Orwellian flavor.”

Spot the difference there – well, there is a difference, but it’s a minor one. You’d have to say the “flavor” was of the same foulness that permeates Wiki. Now, I know: they probably cut’n’pasted the entire encyclopaedia, planning to make changes to pages in stages. Well, they haven’t changed this. And I think a better approach would have been to take an atom bomb to it and start again, creating a skeleton first and adding text where it was fit to, and yes cut’n’pasting from Wiki where the Wiki article was not GASPing effluvium.

The present version of the Wiki article contains the same text.

ASTERISK: I feel compelled to note at this point that, if you search for “climate alarmism” on Wiki and Just, you find there is no such page, and you are redirected automatically to the page “media coverage of climate change.” There is though on both a page called “climate change denial.”

Speaking of which, what about the other side of the coin, the treatment of denialists?

Wiki:

In academic literature and journalism, the terms climate change denial and climate change deniers have well-established usage as descriptive terms without any pejorative connotation.

Just:

In academic literature and journalism, the terms “climate change denial” and “climate change deniers” have well-established usage as descriptive terms without any pejorative intent.

A slight variation, and there is some variation in the words around that sentence. Just adds this:

Terms related to “denialism” have been criticized for introducing a moralistic tone, and potentially implying a link with Holocaust denial.

Nevertheless, they haven’t covered themselves in glory in this. Both sites argue that “skepticism” is not an appropriate term for those who think the “consensus” is no more authoritative than mass hysteria.

But wait… there is a new encyclopaedia in town… Grokipedia.

(It’s presumably entirely AI-generated, but saves the juice of conjuring a new answer every time it is consulted.) What does Grok say? Well, it seems to be a far less sprawling encyclopaedia, and it has no page on climate alarm or climate denial. The page on climate does, though, illuminate several denialist talking points, including: the role of natural variability, the Svensmark hypothesis, the role of urban heat islands in exaggerating warming, the models running too hot, the role of solar forcing, the exaggeration of the meaning of the “consensus,” and the clumsy thumb-on-the-scales of the model-generated feedbacks.

The Grokipedia article ends by noting the call for selecting the best climate model, rather than averaging the good, the bad, and the ugly.

*

The BBC was, this week, accused of just the kind of GASP bias that Larry Sanger accused Wiki of. A leaked internal document gave evidence that Panorama even spliced together different bits of Trump’s speech on January 6^th to give an impression of incitement when none existed. The BBC, the document said, had an unerring pro-Kamala bias in its coverage of the US election. The Arabic service showed an unerring anti-Israel bias. There was a slant on trans stories that studiously avoided covering any news that might give fodder to sceptics of gender identity. In seeking to prove the UK is racist, statistics were used that, in their right context, showed nothing of the kind.

I read the entire leaked document, but nowhere did I find what I was looking for: a little nugget about how sceptics of climate catastrophe, or even sceptics of our insane Net Zero energy policy, had been utterly excluded from the airwaves.

It seems reasonable: after all, you do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate.