Sunday
Jun292014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill The BBC's climate problem
Jun 29, 2014 BBC The juxtaposition of the two parts of David Rose's article in the Mail on Sunday today does much to illustrate the BBC's shattered credibility on global warming. The first part is about the BBC Action Aid, the corporation's in-house charity, which has been campaigning vigorously on the climate change issue.
The BBC has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money asking 33,000 people in Asian countries how climate change is affecting them.
The £519,000 campaigning survey by little-known BBC Media Action is designed to persuade the world to adopt more hard-line policies to combat global warming.
Reader Comments (62)
diogenese2
I am a Guardian reader. All Guardian readers are educated, grown up people. No one else matters. Checkmate.
Sometimes esmiff is incredibly funny and sometimes he is offensive. Sometimes he appears to be barking mad, sometimes incredibly sane.
I suspect he is actually a committee that cannot reach a decision.
Well, he does read the Guardian (and probably pays his BBC TV tax religiously too).
Mailman
I'm reminded that the only two groups who were most vocal in predicting the financial crash were the radical left and the libertarians; because they bothered to look at the facts rather than trust dogmatic economic gurus and their simplistic models. There is a nice speech on the net by Alexander Cockburn (my fav left-leaning journo - much missed) to a group of Libertarians where he had noticed the number of things they (oddly) had in common with the radical left; the principal one being the championing of personal freedoms in an age of too much nanny-statism and big-brotherism emanating from the republicrats. Cockburn of course was a huge AGW skeptic too, much to the annoyance of Michael Mann who goes spitting mad when one of his lefty heroes doesn't follow the righteous road to fossil-free nirvana. More power to lefties who want to break free of the AGW dogmatic stranglehold; I wish there were many more! As esmiff reminds us, you don't encourage that by trotting out Lord Lawson and his ilk to make the case! Why not David Whitehouse? Is he persona non grata at the beeb now?
I'm also reminded of Ted Heath describing Lawson as a one-club golfer because all he ever thought about was raising or lowering interest rates - and boy could he raise them! Whether Lawson has credibility on economics is possibly dependent on whether you were one of the 40% who got richer or the 60% who got poorer under Thatcher. Gawdelpus but Lilley isn't much better as a spokesman. When we can take out the cloying partisanship from the debate maybe folk will start to read opposing arguments rather than just dismiss them out of hand.
Why all the fuss about the BBC survey - it's Post Modern science, just as valid as the old sort.
The brilliant thing about PoMo science is that it doesn't require any difficult maths or physics. Numbers and all that are not what's important - what's important is how people feel about climate change. You can't obtain this priceless information using maths and physics.
/sarc
We should take away all their iPhones and tell them if they want one they should make one themselves - they might learn the value of maths/physics and many other things they avoided at school.
JamesG - agree.
Billy Liar
What do you get when you cross Michael Mann with Steven King ? Mike Hulme's post modern apocalypse..
Mike Hulme (UEA) received a lot of publicity for admitting on BBC radio 4 that climate science was a body of embarrassing nonsense. As a deeply committed environmentalist, his solution was as follows :-
"The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us."
Hulme then goes on to suggest that all climate change arguments should include at least one of the following four "myths" (being a motivational story).
1. Lamenting Eden - To give the idea that the world was stable until man turned up. And we broke it.
2. Presaging apocalypses - Where you should use phrases like "impending disaster" and "tipping point". This is despite having the knowledge of such predictions (as Hulme states) but should because it "capitalizes on the human inbuilt fear of the future."
3. Reconstructing babel - Appealing to our fear of advancement and technology. As though anything modern is inherently bad.
4. Celebrating Jubilee - Balancing the cosmic unfairness of the world where well off inherently make this worse for the poor and the balance should be readdressed every 25 years.
It is no wonder the beeb wants to shut down the debate.
To call realists out for whatever reason. Really, that's how children behave when instinctively they sense their argument is up the spout but will argue the toss anyway - because they cannot for a minute countenance being seen to be wrong.
Could you imagine the climb down?
The Chatteratti, the Islington, Notting Hill, Hampstead Heath set, all the London Luvvies and associated defunct pop stars. With, the grinning idiot presenters Packham [bye bye Bill Oddie] Michaela and a cast of thousands; newscasters and docu' makers and all the rest of the Common Purpose goons behind the scenes. More! - the climate shills in the Graun and our Barbary Ape monkeys in Westminster - not to forget most of the bloody administration, the Met Office and just about every quango ever to see the light of day.
Man made Global Warming = gone, finished, dead, as a Norwegian blue parrot.
In their desperation, the alarmist idiots are claiming and outrageous speculation that, the warming's what was 'ere has shape shifted and now is all gone into sea - I wonder, did the Luis Suarez legal team have anything to do with that preposterous supposition?
So, the bbc has come to terms ipso facto that, even a half wit with ADHD can see that the postulation of man made CO2 causing warming is bo**ocks. Thus, puerile to the last - it kicks back at easy targets - Nigel Lawson - they never have a direct go at Lindzen [do they?] and sends it teams across African, South America and into the sub continent where some folk might have been indoctrinated or haven't heard the news yet.........................
I'll finish with a quote from Jeff Id:
"Did you know we spent nearly 200 million dollars on climate education for minorities – which means anyone not white male."
Yeah and 'BBC world' know it too.
JamesG:
There's a lot of truth to that. There were some centrist figures who have the distinction of speaking up in time, though, Gillian Tett at the FT and Pam Woodall at the Economist.
esmiff
"the quality of BBC journalism.."
I thought you said you gave it up 15 years ago?
JamesG
"Why not David Whitehouse? Is he persona non grata at the beeb now?"
You need to ask? David Bellamy, too, of course (described amusingly in the Urban Dictionary as a 'larger version of Bill Oddie').
I was rather hoping that Dolly Parton would slip in a reference yesterday to AGW (Tennessee was pretty cold last winter) but she's probably smart enough not to try.
jamesp "I was rather hoping that Dolly Parton would slip in a reference yesterday to AGW (Tennessee was pretty cold last winter) but she's probably smart enough not to try."
Dolly was smart enough to enter a field of hip, young worshippers at the altar of Greenpeace and in under an hour have them joyously hollering out 'Amen' to her 'prayer to the Lord'. All dutifully broadcast by the BBC. She knew what she was doing, alright.
You don't have to be a pervert or Climate Alarmist to work at the BBC- but it sure seems to help!