Today I want to return to a particular pet hate of mine that goes by the name of Critical Ignoring. But before I get into detail I would like to open with a quote from Google Gemini which I think perfectly encapsulates my concerns:
If a mainstream institution engages with Jit’s raw data on UK grid curtailment or logs onto a debate about Ridgway’s evaluation of the Matthew Effect, they have conceded that Cliscep is a rational interlocutor. They are forced to debate the numbers.
By branding the entire domain as a “climate denial website” from the outset, institutions can execute an intellectual excommunication. They signal to journalists, academics, and the public that the site’s content is inherently toxic, saving themselves from having to publicly untangle or answer the specific, uncomfortable questions the blog raises.
Ultimately, Cliscep is branded as a denial website because it operates in an environment where dissent from the institutional consensus has been fully pathologized. If you view the climate crisis as an immediate, existential threat to human civilization, any website that advocates for “slowing down,” “exercising caution,” or checking the economic math looks less like an alternative viewpoint and more like an act of active sabotage.
Basically, the problem is as follows: Although there may be a legitimate purpose behind critical ignoring (to provide a rationale for concentrating upon a manageable subset of the informational overload provided by the internet) it does so through acts of ‘intellectual excommunication’. These acts are designed to ensure that reliable sources are blessed whilst the unreliable receive their damnation to Room 101. How is this discrimination safely achieved? Well, as Gemini has just pointed out, it isn’t. This is because ‘dissent from the institutional consensus has been fully pathologized’. The logical difficulty should be obvious. In order to test whether the institutional consensus is correct, one needs to test the strength of arguments that challenge that consensus. However, critical ignoring requires that sites that do not carry institutional endorsement be labelled as untrustworthy and thereby ignored without examination of the counter-argument offered. The institutional consensus is left inviolate, which (in my book) should be reason enough to treat it with the utmost caution.
To illustrate the point being made, I would like to draw attention to a recent assertion that the advocates of critical ignoring would accept uncritically simply because it was made by sources that are presumed to be reliable. It is the claim that data suggests the May and June heatwaves killed about 2,700 people in England and Wales. It is a claim based upon research conducted by UCL and it has been widely reported by a number of sources, all of which would be on the list endorsed by the critical ignorance enthusiasts. Apart from the UCL itself, these sources include the BBC, the Guardian newspaper, the MET Office, and Sky News, to name but a few. These are all supposedly gold-standard sources that can be trusted to report the real story accurately. You don’t need to waste your time looking at the excommunicated blogs to see what they think the real story is. In fact, to do so would be a mistake, not just because it will expose you to misinformation but because it rewards ‘bad actors’ with your attention, which is what they are deemed to want more than anything else. Or so say the proponents of critical ignoring.
And yet, this strategy of critical ignoring would result in a failure to pick up on the essential word that all of the ‘trusted’ sources have failed to include in their accounts; all of them will tell you that the UCL research suggested a particular excess death rate, but none tell you that it incorrectly suggested the excess death rate. The reason why it is an incorrect suggestion is simple: the research is based upon UCL model predictions that are not borne out by actual ONS data. That is the real story that should be being reported, but it isn’t, because the UCL is treated as an organisation whose predictions have sufficient importance without having to be checked against real-world data. And how do I happen to know that UCL is wrong? It’s because I consult blogs that I have been told to ignore, such as Paul Homewood’s Not a Lot of People Know That, which points out that:
Professor Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson from the University of Oxford’s Centre of Evidence Based Medicine say official death figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) show no clear spike against the previous decade during the weeks covering the May and June heatwaves.
And whilst I’m at it, I might as well point out that Jaime Jessop, another of those supposedly unreliable purveyors of misinformation, has her own website in which she indicates that the UCL have some pretty strange ideas regarding the 2026 heatwave’s meteorological similarities with the 1976 heatwave, and even stranger opinions as to what is the most dangerous form of extreme weather (it’s actually cold weather, as any of the allegedly toxic websites can tell you). But you shouldn’t be looking at that, of course. It’s all fake news!
I’d like to think I am helping to put the record straight here, but of course I am not. How can anything I write on a ‘fake news’ website (Cliscep) help the cause of other websites that are branded as peddling fake news? The usurping of critical thinking by a so-called critical ignoring has made sure that it can’t. It is true that I have written on the dangers of the Matthew effect, and it is equally true that those concerns are authoritatively dismissed on the basis that they are being expressed by one of the intellectually excommunicated. But the sad fact is that the basis for such excommunication – the critical ignoring of a pathologized group – is just an extreme example of what can happen under the Matthew effect once the mainstream institutions have achieved such ascendancy that they can dictate (in the guise of innocent time management advice) who is and who is not entitled to have a voice to be listened to. So, I’m sorry, but I am not a fan of critical ignoring and I imagine I never will be – not that my opinion is anything that is supposed to concern you.
Climate Scepticism 
John,
Where, I wonder, should one draw the line if one is a member of the right-thinking establishment, when it comes to critical ignoring? Why, take this Guardian article for instance:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/14/most-coverage-june-heatwave-did-not-mention-climate-crisis
More than half of the Guardian’s 131(!) articles about the heatwaves didn’t link them to the “climate crisis” (sic). How bad is that? How could anyone take them seriously? Perhaps they should be critically ignored?
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Fortunately for the Guardian, I think they would need to drop the ball a damn sight more often before they would lose their gold standard Merchant of Truth accolade.
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Climate change and health researchers have zero credibility. Back about 17 or 18 years ago, the Lancet published its first “Climate Change is the Biggest Public Health Threat of the 21st Century” doom-a-thon. Unfortunately they included real data which is used to measure real public health impacts, ie. burden of disease measured in disability adjusted life years (DALYs). This is the proper metric to use instead of straight mortality – or even age adjusted mortality. It showed that the net impact of climate change was about 0.2 – 0.4 % increase in global burden of disease, almost all of which is concentrated in poor countries. Rich countries the net impact was less than 0.05%. The Lancet has since published about 10 of these types of articles, none of which reprised the DALY data. Admittedly this is modelling, but it fits with other environmental impacts, such as air pollution, which shows the same trend with poor countries being the most affected. Air pollution (particulates, CO and SO4) contributes up to 10 % of the burden of disease in some countries.
The other factor never taken into account is mortality displacement – extreme weather and other high morbidity events (pandemics etc.), disproportionately affect frail elderly, and those with pre-existing chronic health problems. The net effect of a high excess mortality heat wave is to reduce the at risk population so that the next event (winter flu season for example) will have proportionately reduced excess mortality.
I found the actual research for this paper and fed it into Notebook LM along with several articles about DALYs and Mortality Displacement mortality. It concludes basically that garbage research is justified by authors wanting to promote “climate action” –
Methodological Flaws in the Report The report “Climate Change and Excess Heat Mortality in 2026 UK Heatwaves” exhibits several methodological flaws and limitations, largely stemming from its failure to incorporate nuanced epidemiological metrics:
The Rigor of the Peer Review Process The document appears to be a “rapid assessment” rather than a traditional, double-blind peer-reviewed academic journal article. The paper explicitly lists a small panel of three named “Review authors” on its opening pages, indicating an expedited, internal, or open review process designed to release the findings quickly.
Given the flaws identified, a more rigorous peer review process would have been highly beneficial. A standard, rigorous review panel—particularly one including independent epidemiologists or health economists—would likely have:
However, this lack of rigor is a direct trade-off with the report’s purpose. The authors state that the “rapid nature” of their work is intended to quickly highlight the urgent need for heat adaptation, preparedness, and emission mitigation. While a more thorough peer review would have corrected these epidemiological blind spots, it would have delayed publication by months or years, defeating the purpose of a rapid climate attribution report meant to inform immediate policy.
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PJM1961,
Thank you, those were all very valid points well made.
It has to be remembered that papers such as these are not produced for the benefit of fellow scientists. Instead, they are designed to generate copy for the information outlets favoured by critical ignoring. As such, you will find plenty of choice quotes from experts, underlining the institutionally authorised narratives, but not so much of the scientific rigour that you and Notebook’s LM deem necessary. For example, the BBC report carries this from Prof. Friederike Otto (yes, this is very much a Grantham Institute production):
I suppose that is the sort of statement one would expect from someone seeking to overestimate the risk.
Then there was this oddity from Dr Claire Baines:
So, it is all about ‘putting out’ estimates that will scare people. How the ‘big numbers’ stack up with the reality doesn’t seem to be a concern for these scientists, nor is it for the journalists who act as their useful idiots. In fact, there is a definite appeal to the preventive paradox here, such that if the numbers turn out to be wildly over the top the scientists involved, rather than concede the failings of their superficial work, can claim credit for having run a successful fear campaign. These scientists are not interested in rigorous analysis so much as firing an elephant gun:
https://cliscep.com/2026/06/01/rcp8-5-the-ultimate-elephant-gun/
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I am wondering if “scientist” is a out of date term with no real meaning anymore.
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dfhunter,
Modelling seems to be the new science, even though it isn’t science. Worryingly, those who produce models, and those who would have you believe everything produced by models, seem determined to give modelling the same religious-like aura as “the science”.
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We have to be careful not to dismiss modelling as a legitimate tool in the scientist’s toolbox, lest we come across as anti-science. Modelling certainly has its place, particularly when it enables an insight into what the empirical evidence would tell us if it had the chance. However, when scientists, such as those at the Grantham Institute, wear their activist hearts on their sleeves, it becomes easy to discern a potentially unhealthy attitude towards models and their outputs. This appears to be what has happened here, since the empirical data is available to enable an evaluation of the model, and yet the scientists involved are behaving as though such evaluation is unimportant. It is as though they are treating the model output as the empirical data, rather than hypothesis. With their activist hats on, that is all well and good; the ‘data’ is scary, and that fear is considered to legitimately inform policy.
Also, there is an unhealthy relationship between these scientists and the media, who are themselves too willing to promote the activist message made without questioning the scientific basis of that message. It is the poor quality of journalism that worries me as much as any reservations I may have regarding the science.
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I am not the first, of course, to voice concerns regarding critical ignoring. In 1859, philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in his essay On Liberty:
The point is that not allowing the approved view to be challenged, simply because it is the approved view, is never a good idea. It benefits no one, including those who hold to the approved view. Thus says a critical thinker.
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John,
There are – of course – some excellent journalists, but the climate propagandists know all too well that if they issue a dramatic press release, then many lazy journalists will be delighted to cut and paste the most dramatically alarmist bits.
I regularly find, when looking for something on the internet, that my search will throw up numerous results across both the lesser and greater MSM in virtually identical form. In each case the wording can be traced back to an activist press release.
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I should have pointed out that my quoting John Stuart Mill was in order to further explain the following line in my article:
A consensus is devalued if we use censorship in such a way that we end up having to treat the consensus with extra caution.
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