Here’s another BBC warming fanatic. He’s James Painter, who for the past decade has been filing warming alarmist stories from his beat in his various roles as BBC World Service Spanish American editor and Miami bureau chief. He came to my my attention because he’s led the field in reporting alleged climate change related drought problems in the Amazon, one of the areas where the IPCC report has been found to be discredited; Richard North reveals today why it’s bunk.
He’s now moved on to become a lecturer and research fellow at the Reuters Institute in Oxford, but this is partly funded by the BBC and he is still a BBC Latin American analyst, filing stories on the impact of drought and the shrinking of glaciers. So Mr Painter remains a BBC man through and through. He is clearly of that BBC breed that believes climate change is a crusade. He recently gave the annual keynote lecture to the Society of Latin American Studies. It’s well worth a careful read because his speech is a case study of the extent to which bias has infected every aspect of BBC journalism in this area. He says:
To summarise then, climate change is happening, it’s happening faster than expected, and it will have a huge impact on Latin America. Of course there are all sorts of scientific uncertainties, but uncertainty should not be an excuse for lack of coverage in the media. In the same way that climate adaptation policies have to be incorporated into governments’ development strategies, global warming as an issue has to be mainstreamed into the media.
Basically, this fanatic believes that 90% of scientists accept global warming, and therefore the views of sceptics should not be reported; that the Arctic is melting, that the Amazon will be badly affected by drought , and vast parts of South America will become desert. He thinks also that the 2007 IPCC report did not go far enough:
…there is plenty of evidence to suggest that by some key performance indicators – the rate of warming, the rate of melt in some parts of the world and the rise in GHG accumulation – real-world changes are at the upper bound or beyond the worst-case scenario presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) last year.
The main thrust of his argument is that media organisations must stop reporting other news, and focus their main efforts on climate change. I’ve noted before that if you scratch the surface of the nature of BBC journalism, you find that it’s actually a propaganda machine, and that almost every reporter that is examined is actually a political activist. Mr Painter fits that profile; the tragedy is that he clearly believes – from the tone of his lecture – that’s he’s an objective reporter. He’s not, he’s a peddler of snake oil.
I don’t normally subscribe to the BBC – cocaine connection but this is funny. Will it be reported on the BBC? Cocaine users ‘making global warming worse’ By Bob Roberts 3/03/2010
Cocaine users were last night accused of helping to make global warming worse.
MPs on the home affairs select committee said the drug was devastating Colombian rainforests because trees are knocked down to grow coca plants.
Group chairman Keith Vaz said: “We were horrified to learn for every few lines of cocaine snorted in a London club, four square metres of rainforest is destroyed.”
Read More …
The crew of Radio 1 alone is probably responsible for a few thousand missing hectares:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4161/is_20001203/ai_n14516195/
From the same article in 2000, one can only guess how bad things are now:
“One well-known BBC DJ came straight out and told me, ‘The problems at Radio One are to do with cocaine and about who takes it and who doesn’t. If you take it you are in the in-crowd and if you don’t you are looked upon as an outsider who is out of the loop’. “This DJ had, until quite recently, worked for Radio One but told me how he had been frozen-out by the clique because he doesn’t take the drug.”He is now working at another part of the BBC. The point is that this DJ played a certain musical genre and, because he no longer works at Radio One, there is less diversity and the output suffers.”
I would guess the DJ to be Andy Kershaw? He is well known and also left Radio 1 in 2000, and went on to join Radio 3.
Well it certainly isn’t Chris Evans. I had a friend who used to go to Evans and Billie Pipers house back in their heyday where they used to do more hoovering than Dyson.
The BBC will be pushing apocalyptic climate for ages yet. Daft ideas take decades to work themselves out of public sector institutions like the BBC or the state education system. We have to wait for the culprits to retire.
Well, was anybody unfortunate enough to hear The Forum “some of the most eminent minds of the 21st century” the other night? BBC World Service has become the backwoods testing ground for domestic media manipulation strategy over the last 4 or 5 years.
There is a creepy, “that was just a blip” mentality that has obviously taken hold at the BBC – if you listen to the pretty gushing endorsements of the twaddle spouted by this utterly independent and well informed panel of eminent experts – you’ll see what to expect from the arrogant half wit dicks and dickettes at our state funded broadcaster over the coming months.
Really – St. Bob might be a bit ticked – but as a regular BBC World listener – I can vouch for both the tabloidization of output and the ramping of propaganda – this regularly using the “opinion as fact” strategy
Sometimes a little sense sufaces in the oddest places – like the BBC Science and Environment reporting Climate ‘fix’ could poison sea life By Richard Black.
It starts:
Fertilising the oceans with iron to absorb carbon dioxide could increase concentrations of a chemical that can kill marine mammals, a study has found.
Iron stimulates growth of marine algae that absorb CO2 from the air, and has been touted as a “climate fix”.
It ends:
“If the end goal is to use it to fight climate warming, then we have to understand the consequences for marine life.”
Surely that is true of any drastic actions aimed at ‘fixing’ Climate Change?
Today, 12:11:51 – Flag – Like – Reply – Delete – Edit – Moderate
Surely to God nobody seriously thinks that deliberately fertilising the oceans with iron is a good idea? =-O
You don’t have to be Einstein to figure this could have utterly unforeseen consequences to marine life.
What gets me time and time and time again is the trendy, sneering, made up halfwittery that’s presented as “scientific fact” without a shred of evidence.
I wish I could find it – one of the BBC’s online environment correspondents did what looked like a sincere moonlighting piece for an American magazine on how parrots are telepathic.
You literally cannot believe a word most of them write – sad but true. I often wonder at the lack of attribution for stories on BBC’s web site.