Climate Skepticism, Even in Sweden! Swedish public radio asks inconvenient questions about UN reports

Sweden’s Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that Greta Thunberg and hundreds of other activists cannot proceed with a class action lawsuit that had sought to force the state to take stronger action against climate change.

Activists filed a lawsuit in 2022 arguing that the state violates the European Convention on Human Rights by not doing enough to limit climate change, or mitigate its effects, and the case has since been subject to review on procedural grounds.

The group of 300 plaintiffs in the case, who call themselves the Aurora group, wanted the courts to order Sweden to do more to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

“A court cannot decide that parliament or the government should take any specific action without the democratic bodies deciding independently on those issues,” Supreme Court Justice Jonas Malmberg told Reuters.

Now comes more good news from Scandinavia. The University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. notes the encouraging developments at his outstanding Substack site The Honest Broker. But first Prof. Pielke sets the sad context:

Lapses of scientific integrity in climate science have become normalized. I no longer expect the community to care about obvious and egregious problems in climate science, even when documented in the peer reviewed literature. The community’s willful blindness has had a long time to develop muscle memory — More than 15 years ago I documented how the [U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] falsified a graph on disasters and climate change, inserted it into the IPCC assessment, and then lied about it when called out. No one cared then either.

Expectations having been appropriately lowered, readers can imagine the pleasant surprise to find out that some people still care—and they show up in some of the last places one would ever look. Raise your hand if you expect to hear against-the-grain independent climate reporting from public broadcasting. Yet Mr. Pielke writes:

A few weeks [ago] Sveriges Radio (Swedish public radio) released an English language version of its outstanding investigation into multiple exaggerations and falsehoods about climate change that have been promoted by the United Nations. Props to Swedish journalist Ola Sandstig and Sveriges Radio for conducting the investigation…

Mr. Pielke describes some treasured green folklore that has now come under scrutiny:

In what can only be described as propaganda, UN Secretary General António Guterres visited Samoa last year and filmed a video in front of an abandoned house, which he claimed was abandoned due to sea level rise and increasing storms:

“Those who lived in these houses had to move their homes further inland because of sea level rise and the multiplication of storms. Sea level rise is accelerating. It is now the double of what it was in the 90s. If we are not able to stop what is happening with climate change, the problem that we see in Samoa will not stay in Samoa.”

Ola Sandstig, the Swedish journalist, tracked down those who had abandoned the house in 2009, and found that they had actually left the home following the 2009 earthquake and tsunami, and not sea level rise or storms. Earthquakes and tsunamis have nothing to do with climate change.

There has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones in the Western South Pacific (or, the entire planet, for that matter). In fact, in 2009 when the house was abandoned following the tsunami, the region was in a bit of a tropical cyclone lull.

One could think of a worldwide journalistic lull during the era of climate hysteria, but perhaps times are changing.

Mr. Pielke writes about another climate claim that turned out not to be a climate claim:

Thanks to the Swedish Radio investigation, Swedish UNICEF corrected a false claim that it had previously been promoting — that 1.7 million children die each year due to climate change. Swedish Radio explains:

1.7 million children under the age of five die each year from climate change. Swedish UNICEF has had this figure on their website since 2019-09-27. It was removed after the Swedish version of the program in the fall of 2024. The article now states: ‘In a previous version of the article, it was stated that 1.7 million children die from climate change. This is incorrect, the figure refers to environmental factors such as air pollution and dirty water.’

Oops.

***

James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival” and also the co-author of “Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts and Bailouts at Citi.”