The woke Guardian newspaper asserts this week “global heating” is responsible for the corruption of forests “from the Arctic to the Amazon.”
“Global heating, along with changes in soils, wind and available nutrients, is rapidly changing the composition of forests, making them far less resilient and prone to diseases, according to a series of studies that have analyzed the health of trees in north and South America,” writes Oliver Milman in Wednesday’s Guardian.
It is unclear from the article whether the Guardian sees forests as a good or a bad thing, since it criticizes both the advance of healthy trees in previously barren tundra in the arctic and the retreat of trees in boreal forests further south. It would appear that in the Guardian’s mind, any change is bad.
One example is the discovery of a patch of white spruce trees in northwest Alaska in an area of arctic tundra “that hasn’t had such trees in millennia,” an apparently worrisome phenomenon.
The article cites Roman Dial, a biologist at Alaska Pacific University, who saw the shadows of the trees on satellite imagery and went to investigate.
“It was shocking to see trees there. No one knew about them but they were young and growing fast,” Dial said.
As is its custom, the Guardian does not bother to demonstrate causality between climate change and forest transformation, trusting its readers to accept its assertions on faith.
Autumn colors come to the forest, marking the change of seasons, as seen on October 8, 2021 in the Catskill Forest Preserve in New York State. (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
The article does, however, provide the Guardian with another chance to employ its editorial style guidelines that turn up the heat on climate rhetoric.
As the UK’s flagship of climate alarmism, the Guardian announced in 2019 that it was transforming the language used to describe climate, and would no longer refer to “climate skeptics” but only “climate deniers.”
The newspaper updated its official in-house style guide to step up its climate change rhetoric, adopting language meant to scare readers and motivate them to action.
“Instead of ‘climate change’ the preferred terms are ‘climate emergency, crisis or breakdown’ and ‘global heating’ is favoured over ‘global warming,’ although the original terms are not banned,” the paper stated at the time.
“The phrase ‘climate change,’ for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity,” said Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief.
“Increasingly, climate scientists and organisations from the UN to the Met Office are changing their terminology, and using stronger language to describe the situation we’re in,” she said.
Citing the BBC, the Guardian declared: “You do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate” and those who dare question the accepted climate groupthink deserve no place at the table.