News Round-Up: EU Stepping Up Censorship Efforts Before Elections, WHO's Climate Debate Guide for Health Professionals and Children Growing Out of Gender-Confusion
News Round-Up: EU Stepping Up Censorship Efforts Before Elections, WHO's Climate Debate Guide for Health Professionals and Children Growing Out of Gender-Confusion
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
WHO's Toolkit for health professionals regarding communication of climate change: don't debate the climate science – it is settled and there's nothing to discuss.
15-year study reveals: gender-confused children grow out of it.
The author of “Climate: The Movie” was surprised by the scale of internet censorship.
The EU Commission's urgent advice to social media: limit the spread of 'misinformation' in the run-up to elections.
Climate alarmism creates jobs: big cities around the world hire ‘chief heat officers’.
WHO's Toolkit for health professionals regarding communication of climate change: don't debate the climate science – it is settled and there's nothing to discuss
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently published a guidance document aimed at health professionals to teach them how to talk about climate change. In simple, plain language, the guide explains to health professionals what they should base their messages about climate change on, and how to frame them.
First, health professionals need to understand that when talking about climate change, they are not talking about the Earth's long-term climate change, but about changes that have taken place over the last 150 years. According to the guide, these changes are linked only to anthropogenic rising greenhouse gas emissions and pose the greatest threat to health in the 21st century. The negative impacts they are causing are also already present, such as extreme weather events, poor air quality and water, and food shortages. The brochure explains that there are solutions to climate change and related problems that will result in positive health impacts if implemented. For example, the solution is, according to the document, to use renewable energy and eat plant-based food instead of meat. WHO also points out that forests and oceans should be protected as they absorb a small proportion of CO2.
WHO says that communicating climate change and the solutions mentioned is an important task for health professionals, but at present many professionals do not feel confident on this issue, as described in the guidance material. The aim of the toolkit is to give them the confidence they need to talk about the topic.
In order to talk about climate change, the WHO suggests that health professionals should follow a 10-point guide:
keep messages simple;
focus on human health;
understand the local context;
avoid jargon;
let people know how they can protect themselves from the impact of climate change;
talking about the health benefits of climate action;
tell climate change stories rather than scientific facts;
avoid polarising language;
talk about climate change during extreme weather events as they can be 'teachable moments';
don't debate the science.
It is the last of these points that is particularly significant. Indeed, in its clarification, the WHO advises health professionals not to engage in conversations that ask questions about climate science. "It’s not up for debate. If conversation veers into this territory, redirect it back to your professional expertise and the links between climate change and health," it is stated in the guidance document.
In climate science, as in all science, there is of course a lot to question and debate in reality, because science must always ask questions to test the evidence and move towards better knowledge. Climate science, however, is nowadays simply one of those fields where such questions are avoided and the scientists who ask them are pushed out of the picture, declined funds for research or otherwise censored.
15-year study reveals: gender-confused children grow out of it
An in-depth 15-year-long study by researchers in the Netherlands shows that most children who experience gender confusion in their teens grow out of it, reports The Daily Mail.
Researchers followed more than 2,700 children from the age of 11 until their mid-twenties, asking them every three years about their feelings about their gender. The results showed that at the start of the study, around one in ten children (11%) expressed varying degrees of gender confusion. But by the age of 25, only one in 25, or 4%, said they felt "often" or "sometimes" discontent with their gender.
The researchers' conclusion was simple: "The results of the current study might help adolescents to realize that it is normal to have some doubts about one’s identity and one’s gender identity during this age period and that this is also relatively common."
Although the study did not address this, we can guess that children at a younger age may also be more influenced if they are told, for example already in kindergarten, that there are more than two genders, that boys may actually be girls and vice versa, etc. In the case of early adolescents, the trans-ideological movement has gone so far that adolescents who are confused about their gender are advised to take puberty blockers to inhibit their gender-specific physical development, to take hormones of the opposite sex and even to undergo surgery, for example, mastectomy for young girls. Of course, such methods have extremely serious consequences for children's health.
At the same time, however, there have recently been important revelations from inside the trans-ideological movement that show that children's health is a rather irrelevant issue to the adult activists who discuss these issues and promote the gender-change narrative. There is also news on the positive side though – for example, in the United Kingdom, there is some attempt to regulate the activities of sex-change advocates, and the prescribing of puberty blockers has been stopped by the National Health Service (NHS).
The author of “Climate: The Movie” was surprised by the scale of internet censorship
Some big tech companies, such as Google and its affiliate YouTube, are making efforts to curb the circulation of a recently released documentary critical of mainstream climate science, according to British documentalist Martin Durkin, the film's author. The film "Climate: The Movie" takes a look at the basic tenets of climate alarmism and gives a damning assessment through the mouths of world-renowned and respected scientists. However, YouTube, the world's most popular video platform, has decided to covertly restrict the distribution of the film and shadow-ban it, so it would reach only as few people as possible, according to Durkin. "The climate police are hard at work. Despite millions of hits, finding CLIMATE THE MOVIE on YouTube is getting harder. We have zero budget for publicity. I urge all those with a YouTube channel to keep posting it. Thanks," Durkin wrote on social media platform X.
In another post, Durkin admitted that he had not expected such behaviour. "YouTube continues to shadow-ban CLIMATE THE MOVIE. I confess, I’m quite flabbergasted. I had naively thought that political censorship on social platforms might be exaggerated or imagined. Now I know. Please download and disseminate as many copies of the film as you can," he wrote.
Durkin's film offers clear evidence of how scientific studies and official data do not actually support the view that we are experiencing an increase in extreme weather events such as hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, etc. The film strongly refutes the claim that today's temperatures and atmospheric CO₂ levels represent an unusual extreme – on the contrary, both are at exceptionally low levels in the context of the last half a billion years on Earth.
The film includes interviews with a number of very prominent scientists, including Professor Steven Koonin (author of ‘Unsettled’, a former provost and vice-president of Caltech), Professor Richard Lindzen (formerly professor of meteorology at Harvard and MIT), Professor Will Happer (professor of physics at Princeton), Dr John Clauser (winner of the Nobel prize in Physics in 2022), Professor Nir Shaviv (Racah Institute of Physics), professor Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph), Willie Soon and several others.
While there is no scientific basis for declaring a climate emergency, it is precisely this basis that authorities have used around the world for clamping down on people's freedom to decide for themselves how they live their lives. In such a context it is particularly important to highlight factual information about the nature of the imaginary problem and to demand that the authorities to explain their actions and respect individual freedoms.
The EU Commission's urgent advice to social media: limit the spread of 'misinformation' in the run-up to elections
The European Commission recently approached major social media platforms with new guidelines and told them that, with the European elections approaching, they should follow these to avoid election-related risks and limit the spread of misinformation, Euronews reports.
The Commission's guidelines are aimed at platforms with more than 45 million active users in the European Union (EU), formally known as "Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines" under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA). These platforms include X, TikTok, Facebook, and others. The Commission says it will stress-test the rules with "relevant platforms" at the end of April, but could not confirm which platforms may be required to undertake the tests.
The DSA provides the basis for measures to combat the proliferation of so-called illegal content. This includes, for example, fighting the spread of misinformation. This may appear to be a virtuous activity, but experience in recent years has shown that in fact what the authorities often treat as misinformation or disinformation is actually true information which, for whatever reason, the authorities just consider inconvenient for their purposes or deem otherwise inappropriate. We've written about this quite a bit, e.g. here.
Thus, when the Commission talks about measures to prevent the spread of misinformation or disinformation, the decision-makers who decide on this are not always guided by facts, but by ideological preferences that suit them. Although these new guidelines are not legally binding, the DSA, which came into force in August last year, offers a number of possibilities for taking legal action against platforms that flout the Commission or deviate from the provisions on elections and democratic processes laid down in the DSA. For example, the Commission can bring offending platforms to justice by imposing fines of up to 6% of a company's global turnover. For large companies, these would be huge sums, potentially running into hundreds of millions or even billions of euros, which would in all likelihood mean bankruptcy for some companies. Platforms could also be shut down under the DSA in certain cases.
The Commission has already launched the first small-scale test cases, for example against X, owned by Elon Musk, a well-known free speech advocate, but at least for the time being these have not led anywhere. We have written more about the DSA here.
Climate alarmism creates jobs: big cities around the world hire ‘chief heat officers’
In recent years, new posts have been appointed in a number of cities around the world to deal with everything that has to do with hot weather, reports CNBC. The main aim of these officials, called ‘chief heat officers’ (or CHO) is to help residents prepare for warm weather and cope with excessive heat.
Eleni Myrivili, the global chief heat officer under the UN's Human Settlement Programme, says hot weather can be described as a silent killer. Myrivili, who has previously worked in a similar role in the Greek capital Athens, noted that hot weather is often overlooked as a threat because other bad weather events such as hurricanes and floods are prioritised. "Heat, I believe it to the bottom of my heart, is going to be the number one public health challenge that we will be dealing with in the next decade. And we need to prepare for it now," said Myrivil. "We can – but we really need to make it a priority," she added.
While CNBC also claims in the article cited that heat is the number one weather-related cause of death (the CNBC article is talking about the data from the US), such statistics are not actually accurate. The same has been consistently claimed for Europe, but in reality, there are ten times as many cold deaths in Europe as those caused by hot weather. Why is no one talking about the crying need for officials who would somehow try to manage the cold weather?