UK government tries to bury important news – so how can we ridicule Trump over his falsehoods?
In the report, the Government said high-risk issues that needed to be addressed included the damage expected to be caused by flooding [Image: Getty].
It isn’t an outright lie – which is lucky for Theresa May because it could have been her third within 24 hours (Trident and Brexit being the two outright falsehoods laid at her door).
But it is a cover-up. Not even ‘fake news’, as we’re all getting used to calling it – because it never even made the news. And the news media failed to notice that it should (with the Independent being the honourable exception). What does that say about them?
Attention has been focused on the way the new Trump administration has been playing fast-and-loose with the facts – wasn’t Sean Spiced-Up asked how anybody could trust anything he says? – at the expense of the facts right here in the UK.
We cannot trust a single word our own government releases as news. How can we criticise the Americans?
The Government has been accused of trying to bury a major report about the potential dangers of global warming to Britain – including the doubling of the deaths during heatwaves, a “significant risk” to supplies of food and the prospect of infrastructure damage from flooding.
The UK Climate Change Risk Assessment Report, which by law has to be produced every five years, was published with little fanfare on the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) website on 18 January.
But, despite its undoubted importance, Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom made no speech and did not issue her own statement, and even the Defra Twitter account was silent. No mainstream media organisation covered the report.
In the report, the Government admitted there were a number of “urgent priorities” that needed to be addressed.
It said it largely agreed with experts’ warnings about the effects of climate change on the UK.
These included two “high-risk” issues: the damage expected to be caused by flooding and coastal erosion; and the effect of rising temperatures on people’s health.
The Government also recognised that climate change “will present significant risks to the availability and supply of food in the UK”, the report said, partly because of extreme weather in some of the world’s main food-growing regions.
The report also said the public water supply could be affected by shortages and that the natural environment could be degraded.
Source: Government ‘tried to bury’ its own alarming report on climate change
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Climate change – we’re labelled “tree huggers” as an insult, – have been warning of food shortages since before 2000 which is why Saudi Arabia has been buying up arable land in Africa and anywhere they could get. So have the UK and the US. The mid west of America is once again turning into a dust bowl with the Mayor of one county looking into coastal desalination plants as a means of supplying drinking water. As for our own problems in the UK, if the Larsen Shelf does break off, flooding will see new heights(literally)and Britain will be totally unprepared for it. The Tories are not so much burying their heads in the sand as hoping their greater wealth will afford them a better life. Quite who they think will farm the land and look after the water and sewage for them, hasn’t registered with their self serving focus.
So the report says could cause this, that is all assuming the climate changes in the way they have been predicting for years but so far hasn’t happened, although of course other experts say it won’t. We heard could, may, might and perhaps time after time from the remain project fear campaign, and people jumped on those as meaning will, the climate of the earth has always changed, and there is nothing we can do to change that.
Have you not noticed the annual floods, the huge amount of damage to the UK’s infrastructure and the incapability of the Tory government to deal with it?
Forewarned is forearmed. If you want to ignore the warnings, then you’d better have a dinghy ready for when you are washed away.
The rest of us will do our best to get our government to pay attention and take precautionary measures, thank you very much.