David Craig, on January 4th, 2023Wednesday/Thursday/Friday blog
You all probably know the newspaper adage “if it bleeds, it leads” – if a story has plenty of blood and death in it, it will likely be the leading story in each day’s edition. Basically people are more drawn to bad news stories than good news.
This has been called the “negativity bias”. There has been quite a lot of research done into why people are more drawn to negative rather than positive news stories.
In one study�when asked, people said they preferred good news. On average, they said that the media was too focussed on negative stories. But during the study, participants often chose stories with a negative tone � corruption, set-backs, hypocrisy and so on � rather than neutral or positive stories. People who were more interested in current affairs and politics were particularly likely to choose the bad news.
There have been various explanations of the “negativity bias”. It may be that we get a certain self-satisfaction reading about other people who have improved the human gene pool due to their own stupidity. It may be partly due to epicaricacy�- the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. Sometimes it may be due to what I’ve called “survivor’s exhilaration. When I was 17, I was in a train in Switzerland which crashed into a tunnel wall killing a few people. I think most passengers experienced a rush of adrenalin and exhilaration that they had survived the crash. Or there may be some other explanations.
But basically, good news doesn’t excite people and doesn’t sell nearly as well as bad news.
So, here’s some good news our mainstream media are unlikely to ever mention:
(All these examples are taken from my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS. So apologies to anyone who has already read the book)
Good news 1 – A massive decrease in poverty
Over the last 20 or so years around one billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty (having to live on less than $2.15 a day). That’s an incredible 137,000 people a day:
I suspect most people didn’t know that.
Moreover, one key contributor to this reduction in extreme poverty has been the availability of cheap energy from fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas. In fact, the greatest environmental harm has not come from the use of fossil fuels. The greatest environmental harm has come from those with no access to fossil fuels and who have had to use wood and charcoal for cooking thus destroying massive amounts of forest.
For example, if I remember the figures correctly, when Pakistan became an independent country it had a forestation level of about 35%. By 2018 this had fallen to (I think) 5.2% and then to 4.8% in 2019. The utterly corrupt, incompetent and worthless Pakistani Government did launch a “plant one billion trees” project. But I believe that (as usual) most of the money got stolen by corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and their business cronies and nary a tree got planted.
Good news 2 – We’re all living longer
The increase in average life expectancy from around 30 years to over 70 years since 1870 has been a phenomenal achievement:
Good news 3 – Food production is soaring
The climate catastrophists love to claim that supposed Climate Change will wreck food production. They made these claims in the 1960s and 1970s when they predicted a new Ice Age:
And they’re making the same claims now with supposed Global Warming:
But yields on most crops keep rising in spite of the climate catastrophists’ predictions of the opposite:
Good news 4 – Deaths from natural disasters falling
We’re constantly being told that Climate Change will lead to more extreme weather resulting in more human casualties. Yet, in reality, the opposite is happening. In fact, the higher the level of atmospheric CO2 (the black dotted line), the lower the number of climate-related deaths (the blue line). I’d like to hear a climate catastrophist explain that:
In 1920, there were around 480,000 climate-related deaths when the world population was around 1.9 billion. Now we have fewer than 40,000 climate-related deaths a year when the world population is about 7.8 billion.
I wonder why the BBC and Sky News and the main newspapers never mention this incredibly positive news. In fact, all the mainstream media revel in creating the impression that the opposite is happening.
Are most people clamorous to be led to safety?
With pretty much every death-and-disaster claim made by the climate catastrophists, the opposite is happening. But nobody dares mention this. All we get is bad news.
H.L Mencken famously warned us:
In my previous blog I cited Mattias Desmet’s book “THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM” (which I haven’t read) analysing what percent of the population complied with the totalitarian Sino/US lab-leaked plague lockdowns. The majority of us (around 80%) were apparently “clamorous to be led to safety”. Our rulers were reported as being surprised at how supinely we complied with their restrictions.
This will embolden them as they crush our standard of living and our freedoms with all their planned completely futile and unnecessary “saving the planet” climate restrictions.
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It seems to me the good news far outweighs the bad but it is very clear that the media are not one bit interested in reporting anything that goes against the narrative. God knows why not, surely the WEF can�t have bought all of them?
There is an alarming programme on radio 4 at 9am this week called �Rethink�. This week the topic is climate change – I have had to switch it off twice now as they have been infuriating me with their brain washed moronic beliefs, they were discussing how they can get more people to start conforming, turn vegetarian, stop using cars etc. of course it is the BBC so what do I expect but it�s still winding me up.
I heard on the news tonight they had record temperatures of over 24c in Europe today – you can be sure that�s going to blown out of all proportion.
R4 has been my “go to” radio station, until recently accompanying and informing me as I pursue sundry manual tasks around house and garden or drive to visit friends and family. No more though. Of late, I can guarantee that almost the first words I’ll hear, be the programme what was once the BBC’s early morning flagship “Today”, or the 5 p.m. or 10 p.m. news programmes, or indeed most transmissions in between, will be “Carbon Emissions” and “Climate Change”, Catastrophe, Warming, Disaster”, etc.etc. Erstwhile dedicated listeners who once heard informed debate, now suffer indoctrination. A few minutes before reading Carolyn’s response I had switched off, saying to myself, “No more!”. I fear that indeed the ghastly Schwab and his WEF and its supporters have indeed “bought” the BBC and all UK mainstream media other than GBNews. All, for instance, are still pushing the mRNA jab for all they’re worth rather than instigating informed debate on its safety and effectiveness. I’ve seen and heard enough yesterday evening and this morning too, to pick up that the BBC is starting to push, not so subtly, for a return of mask-wearing mandates. Back to the “carbon/global warming” issue, why are not all mainstream media, BBC above all, rejoicing that, apart from a couple of weeks in early December, this winter is not so far producing excruciating cold? Warmer winter days = lower fuel consumption = lowering of carbon emissions. Good thing, right? In fact no, since reduction in demand for the ever so evil fossil fuels also reduces the Government’s power over and thus ability to control us. Because THAT is what it’s all fundamentally about. The aim, with the “15 minute cities” and restrictions on car use by both fuel pricing and charges for entering or leaving designated zones followed, inevitably, by programming of electric vehicles so that they will stop at pre-designated borders, will reduce 21st century UK citizens to the status effectively of Medieval serfs, who were the property for life of the Lord of the Manor in which they were born and which they left only secretly and on pain of severe punishment if traced and captured.
I think bad news seems more relevant because it might contain information we need to be aware of to protect us. If the good news related to free concerts or similar it would attract great interest. The more relevant issue is whether we can believe the opinions about issues. For example, last night a GP was interviewed and she quoted Kary Mullis as saying that the PCR test should not be used for diagnosis because of false positives, but he didn�t say that. He said he should not be used because it could not identify whether the person was ill and/or infectious. He also didn�t accept that HIV causes AIDS. I wonder whether she quoted him in that issue.
I tend to accept that poverty is reducing, but is $2.50 a day an acceptable level to define it. Last year I spent about �85 a day including taxes and I don�t have a car and don�t take holidays. Those living on $2.50 must be pleased to know the average world life expectancy is 70. In the west life expectancy is now apparently going down and state dependency is increasing. It is not good news.
Food production may be increasing but it does not help those dying from starvation. About 12,000 a day from one source I looked at.
With climate related deaths shouldn�t this be compared to the number of climate events likely to cause death rather than CO2? Are there more or fewer, or is it because we are better prepared?
Are people being led to safety? The indications are that with the vaccines they have been led into danger. We will have serious energy issues if the belief in climate alarmism continues and poverty looks set to come to us because of our acceptance of living on debt.
There are some dire predictions for 2023 and the worst of it is that nobody knows what to do about them. Perhaps the Davos crowd will reveal the solution to it all. Probably back to serfdom as Stillreading says
Just switched to bbc and they�re doing the weather. Showing a map of Europe and the uk which is all bright orange making it look like it�s on fire. Am I surprised? No!
R4 used to be my go-to as well but the rot started with woman�s hour which went from an interesting and varied programme to a shrill woke fest. Mercifully I can get GB news in the car but I�m still occasionally left with no choice but to listen to R4 hence catching this hideous Rethink programme.