The Guardian itself, of course, has a long history of doom- and gloom-mongering, well do I remember it from the Winter of Discontent that saw Maggie Thatcher elected. The newspaper actually squealed with dismay as you turned the pages with pictures of Keith Joseph (it was real paper in those days, of course). I was doing my teacher training in a thoroughly miserable and freezing London, a truly nightmarish experience, and “The Grauniad” with its misspellings and Steve Bell quite suited the mood.

Now, of course, climate catastrophe is being peddled — The Climate Crisis Is Here, But No One Is Telling Us, Guardian columnist George Monbiot proclaims. Oh, re-hally? No one is telling us about the climate crisis? I mean: can you people ever shut up about it, might be a better question.

Now, I have my own line of doom and gloom to purvey. This is on the environmental, social, and health effects of microwave masts irradiating our entire environment. I have thousands of scientific papers, and much personal experience and research, to testify as to the dangers. As a former physics lecturer and a licensed amateur radio operator for over 40 years, I have known about the dangers of microwave exposure since I was a teenager in the 1970s, reading the American amateur radio magazine QST. I read a warning there from a ham who nearly cooked his eyeballs by working on an open microwave transmitter, a warning I’ve never forgotten, and which was standard among radio operators of our day: never, ever, expose yourself to microwaves, they are terribly dangerous.

When I saw little children holding powerful microwave transmitters against their heads, I knew there was a problem. I truly hate to be a scaremonger, but I felt I had to do something. My first step in about 2004 was getting the Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa to ban advertising of cellphones to under-16s. To this day, it remains the only warning from any organisation or authority in that country that microwave exposure might be dangerous (even the fine print in the handset instructions is different: I got the CEO of Nokia in South Africa to admit to the ASASA that in Europe, they have to give a direct health warning, while in Africa, the leaflets only warn that the phone might affect medical equipment like pacemakers — a clear double standard).

Over the last two decades, I’ve taken this issue up with hundreds of journalists and scores of publications. And I’ve actually put it on the record (in a fight with bad science reporting in The Telegraph, which I took to Ipso, the fake UK press regulator) that The Telegraph is far from being the worst in terms of reporting on this danger. Their former environment reporter Geoffrey Lean is literally the only UK journalist who has done any kind of proper reporting on the dangers of microwave radiation and the planet.

The very worst reporting on this issue in the UK press, I told Ipso, was without doubt The Guardian — for years it did not print a single word of warning or any hint that cellphones could be dangerous. I lobbied the Mail & Guardian in South Africa, whose reporters were entirely negative and actively hostile to the idea that mobile phones could be dangerous in any way.

The Guardian’s propaganda in this particular case is really interesting, it’s very clever and quite subtle, unless you know what’s really going on, in which case it’s some of the most blatant and egregious fake reporting you will find anywhere. Take this headline and subheading, for example, the perfect example of Guardian-speak:

How to think about the risks of mobile phones and Wi-Fi

Experts need to talk about uncertainty as well as simple fact. The rise and fall of the controversy over the safety of mobile phones offers some useful lessons

First, note the basic stance of The Guardian: it is here to instruct you how to think.

Second: the “experts” are obviously, and clearly, just talking about “simple fact”. Re-hally, the issue is, at heart, “simple” and ruled by “fact”. But, for the sake of form, we now need to mention “uncertainty”, just to cover our backs.

Third: we immediately get one of the Guardian’s “facts”. It’s a complete and utter given for this article that the controversy about mobile phones has risen and gone away. This is now what you are being instructed to think. There was a controversy, but it’s all just… gone away. How does this become a “fact”? To be reported in a headline? If you look, it’s because in surveys of all possible health dangers that worry people, mobile phones and masts have fallen from a high of 31% down to 8%.

Does this prove that mobile phones are safe? Or that the real controversy being raised by activists has in any way abated? No, it just proves that The Guardian’s propaganda is working, along with that of the rest of the media: panic, panic, panic, about all sorts of health risks, tick-borne diseases from climate change, everything under the sun; but relax, there’s no problem with mobile phones. When they have satisfactorily buried the issue under avalanches and deluges and tsunamis of gloom and doom of every other ilk, they can then smugly report on the “fact” that the “controversy” has had a “rise and fall”.

You either see what arrant fake news this is, from beginning to end, or you don’t.

But most egregious of all, and I really do mean this, was George Monbiot’s insulting, patronising, and totally offensive article in The Guardian titled:

Protesting against mobiles is damaging the environmental movement

I regard this as the single most disgusting piece of journalism ever on this subject, anywhere in the world. It would be extremely funny if it wasn’t so vile. The reason I say it’s funny, is because the “environmental movement” per se has never, ever, uttered a peep about mobile phones or masts. Thus, when I originated one of my very few stories on Medium, this was my choice of headline and subheading:

The Greatest Danger To This Planet, By Far

Hint: it’s completely invisible, especially to environmentalists.

And I do mean, invisible. I can count on exactly one finger the number of environmental activists I’ve met in the last 20 years who have shown even the most basic awareness of the issue (thank you Sue).

George Monbiot is out to save us from being “distracted by issues that are either trivial or imaginary”. We should go and find proper environmental causes to espouse, as recommended by him. For our own poor sakes, he asks: “Can we please stop wasting our lives doing battle with imaginary foes?”

All these silly people who claim that mobile phones give them headaches, give them glioblastomas, give them testicular cancer, gave them acoustic neouromas, must just shut up and go away.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that if I were running a campaign highlighting the health effects of mobile phones and phone masts, I would see this as a good time to wind it up.

If you were running a campaign against masts, George? You would look at one report from the most savagely biased agency in the UK, the government’s Health Protection Agency, and conclude, ah, well, that settles it, time to just “wind it up”? Please note that I’ve had absolutely direct dealings and interactions with the “radiation expert” scientists on the HPA, I’ve written about this elsewhere on Medium. These are the biggest liars and fake scientists on the planet, not least a Dr James Rubin, a psychologist at King’s College, London (where I did my training as a physics teacher), who is also a government appointee to these international panels and is paid directly by the UK government to allay public health fears. Thus, Dr Rubin does research that shows that it is not microwave radiation that gives people headaches, no, no, no: it’s journalists, who write articles about it. Dr Rubin’s favourite word for our symptoms is “idiopathic”. You don’t have to have watched House MD to know that “idiopathic” is medical code for “idiot”.

You can read my analysis in the above link of how Dr Rubin made sure the “unexposed” subjects got a far higher dose of radiation from their seemingly identical handsets than the “exposed” subjects. A very clever trick used in multiple fake studies that only a radio man like me would spot at a glance. Then, when the “unexposed” people reported headaches, they were gleefully paraded by Dr Rubin as examples of “nocebo” “idiopathic” cases. “Idiopathic” is also the favoured term of the World Health Organization in this case. We should be pathetically grateful, perhaps, that “tinfoil-hat case” does not become an official medical diagnosis.

So: panic, panic, panic over climate change! The world is ending! It’s all catastrophe! That’s how intelligent people think! But those tens of thousands of masts across your landscape, those billions of handsets you are holding against your heads, the Gestapo installing smart meters in your home, the 5G right across the landscape, with satellites radiating every corner of Earth from space: pish tosh, how silly you are to worry about that. Educated, sophisticated, enlightened Guardian readers would never be so gauche.