Blame it on Climate Change!

Here are the lyrics of the first verse of a satirical song!

Is it raining, is it snowing, are you dry or are you wet,

Is there thunder, is there lightening, do you shiver, do you sweat,

Is the sun out, is it cloudy, are you melting, do you freeze,

Is it raw out, does it thaw out, do you cough or do you sneeze:

Climate change is all to blame for it!

To blame, to blame, to blame for it!

Why so, why is climate change to blame?

My child don’t ask, it is to blame!

Your problems too, go blame climate change!

Believe you me, it is to blame,

To blame for all, to blame for all. Olé!

Acknowledgements to the great satirical song writer, Friedrich Hollander, whose lyrics we have slightly – perhaps significantly! – modified. We are deploying here a technique known as intertextuality. Intertextuality: the relationship between texts, especially literary ones.

So what it my point? The above is a short introduction to something to come – a demonstration that people and organisations that speak with the voice of authority by virtue of their standing in society are spreading misinformation. In this case it is the BBC, in a natural history programme called Seven Worlds, One Planet, where there is an example of Blame it on Climate Change. A false truth claim! You will have to wait for the details, but once again I leave you with words from Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”