I feel like a cracked record here but I am not going to let go. Another dime, another day, and Richard Black is at it again, illustrating that the climate alarmists are anxious for any new straw they can clutch. This time, it’s our old friend, the farting cow syndrome – if that nasty CO2 doesn’t get us, say dial-a-scare scientists, then methane will because billions of tons of it are trapped on the arctic sea bed and are about to be released by our grasping, capitalist ways. As usual, Mr Black doesn’t deign to bring us any contrasting views to his own fanaticism. He also glosses over somewhat what seems to me to be the real story, that microbes seem to absorb methane at an astonishing rate. It’s not scary, so let’s not draw too much attention to it. For the cracked-record record, here’s the in-proportion judgment about the importance of methane by a genuine scientist who hasn’t got a greenie scare agenda.
Update: There’s nothing a greenie likes more than the idea of a new tax, and Mr Black and assorted chums from the WWF and other zealot organisations are demanding one with menaces here. He really is in overdrive. I’m all for sensible conservation, and maintaining so-called natural habits up to a point (though spare me from any form of ludicrous back-to-nature idealism – there are 7bn of us), but I guarantee that anything adminstered by the UN (as he advocates) or the EU will end up as a corrupt, stand-and-deliver monstrosity. Isn’t it simply astonishing how greenies think the solution to everything involves handing powers to faceless, unelected, power-hungry, often corrupt bureaucrats? Actually, I think the wonderful Jo Nova could have been writing about Richard Black when she filed this. Enjoy.
Frankly, it does seem a legitimate area of discussion.
The problem with Mr. Black is that his ‘reports’ seem rather selective on what is discussed… and is not. Most have now learned to treat anything he comes out with as suspect. Hardly optimal for one of the national broadcaster’s main environmental sources of ‘information’.
There also what he prioritises. Pondering any niche Nelsonian ‘focus’ on his blog thread, whilst vast inconvenient issues swirl around unaddressed, is a good way to get it shut down.
His last few have hardly made it past a few score.
Well, on a similar theme, todays’ Faming Today , was an utter disgrace, a deliberate attempt to mislead people with limited understanding of an issue, by use of distorted reporting.
The bbc , naturally objects to anyone but themselves and their chosen cronies getting a slice of the pie. Therefore they present the CAP as a totally bad thing, with only them fighting for its demise. They attend the Oxford Farming Conference – something no ordinary farmer would ever dream of attending, and carry out a series of interviews designed to lead listeners into believing the whole concept is wrong.
They utterly fail to mention all the upland farms or West Country grass farms, where families strugle to earn an average national wage, but without whose efforts, all that nice countryside they like for their costume dramas, would look a lot less nice.
Utterly contemptible arseholes, divorced from reality and motivated by their own warped agenda !
Same for the Alpine hill farmers in Austria. The Alpine meadows would have long since returned to scrub if the marginal communities were not supported. All that ‘Sound of Music’ landscape would be gone within a decade together with the alpine flora which would be driven back to isolated relicts if the natural scrub were allowed to do what ‘Nature’ actually intended.
Backwoodsman
The BBC has no business either supporting or denigrating the CAP: the BBC is there to inform us about the CAP with (unredacted) facts not its own opinions.
However, before turning from the BBC agenda for a moment, I’m surprised that (if what you perceive is true) that the CAP is not one of the BBC’s favourite schemes. After all the CAP bears all the hallmarks of the kind of project which would attract BBC support: a creature of the EU, tax-funded, wasteful, inefficient, undemocratic, run by unaccountable and overpaid beaucrats. IMHO if the CAP didn’t exist then it might be a UK government (and an Austrian government) would hand out the susidies you wish to see continued. However I am certain that CAP money – which travels from the UK taxpayer via UK bureaucrats via Brussels bureaucrats, back again via UK bureaucrats to you is the most expensive and wasteful way of doling out such support. That, in the end, you obtain a subsidy is scant evidence that CAP – designed as (and basically still) a gigantic bung to keep French and German farmers happy – should not be abolished.
However, that’s just my opinion. If the BBC agrees with me or not, it has a duty to allow all shades of opinion on to the airwaves. If your perceptions are correct, then it seems that the CAP is apparently yet another area where the BBC sets its own economic and political policies and seeks to see such policies adopted (or continued) by, in effect, lying by omission to its consumers.
Don’t know much about farming, but is it true that NZ farmers get no subsidies whatsoever ?
http://newfarm.rodaleinstitute.org/features/0303/newzealand_subsidies.shtml
JHT,
Thanks for that link.
NZ lamb seems to be cheaper in the UK than British lamb
and ,dare I say, it tastes better.
Incredibly, in Gambia and Senegal, Anchor butter is cheaper than the various butter-like spreads, Utterly Butterly etc.
Maybe the UK should leave the EU and stop subsidising
farmers ! ( Ours and their’s ).
Has Mr. Black ever heard of termites, I wonder? They, and just about every other organic biological process produces methane at an astonishing rate, and they always have done.
We have been eating cows only since we (and they) have been around.
Perhaps Mr. Black would be content if we consign cows to the scrap heap and eat termites instead.
And that formerly august institution of the airwaves, Farming Today, isn’t any longer – it’s just a biodiversity/climate change/ecoloony dogmafest, like Countryfile. Megadumbing down, with the “message” thrust right up our jacksies with a pointed green stick.
How I’d SO love to see the BBC fall, unceremoniously, into a pile of stinking rubble.
Keep banging away. If this twerp and his bosses at the BBC wanted to sue you for what you write, they obviously regard you as a very real threat.
Hippie,
Hear ! Hear ! Keep on posting, Robin !
Any chance of a new comments board please.
Keep those scares coming the CAGW cultists are pleading, doesnt matter if they are rubbish/gross exaggerations/lies just pile them on, never mind the quality feel the width.
One scare found to be false? ignore and move onto the next until that is proven false and so on, faster and faster the lies are found out and faster and faster the new lies are churned out.
Its a race, a real and deadly race and all the CAGW cultists have to do to win is to keep piling on the scaremongering lies, this is a time sensitive race, at some point the public will rebel. The trouble with crying wolf is that come the time a real wolf comes a callin then nobody will believe there is a real wolf, see the danger?
All the BBC reports about the planet killing plastic bags and packaging that led to draconian taxes and charges and rationing and price increases of goods, all of it not needed because the lies about plastic were obscenely exaggerated, far from being here forever it turns out that plastic is like every other material, it degrades, it provides a foodstuff for microbes and yet waddya know? Yep you can bet the farm that the taxes and charges for plastic bags will certainly carry on, obscene charges at the supermarket for bags and the eco taxes will stay.
Another example of good intentions built on lies and fraud that we ordinary people have to deal with the consequences, think Black will be running a report on the great plastic bag swindle? Think Black will be running a mea culpa sorry fest anytime soon? We have been had, the scale of the fraud is breathtaking.
Cassandra, glad you’ve got that excellent version of the Israeli flag flying proudly as your moniker once again. A joy to behold. You (and others) may be interested to know, if you dont aready, that one of the members of the UK Zionist Federation is doing officer training for the IDF and has requested messages of support as training is intense, some of her comrades have suffered frostbite, and she thinks it would help them to see how appreciated their dedication is throughout the world. ZFUK asks messages to be sent to this address:-
office@zfuk.
Thanks Hippie,
Its a beautiful flag that truly represents the highest principle of humanity, it is the flag of freedom and and represents the struggle between the light and the dark.
Keep it up, Robin. So long as the BBC continues to allow activists to masquerade as journalists, the pressure needs to be kept up any way possible.
i see the BBC has nothing to say about the “Fake” link between autism and the MMR vaccine, published by the BMJ, which has been reported all over North America. Not ONE word i could find on the BBC. Surely this ranks as a highly important news item for people in the UK??
http://www.globalnews.ca/health/autism+vaccine+study+fraud+journal+says/4069043/story.html
…or perhaps the BBC doesn’t want to prompt a discussion about fake science…
So a Liebour scumbag goes down for stealing and News 24 gives us a soppy one sided interview with Chaytor’s best buddy who suggests that we should now move on and to mention this now is pointless.
So there we have it.
What sickens me is that Chaytor only got 18 months which I assume means he will be out in 6. The maximum sentence is apparently 7 years , so why didn’t he get 7 years to set an example.
Is the judge a Labour supporter ?
There is something rotten at the heart of this country.
Oh now ANOTHER interview with a simpering Liebour MP, that’s two on the trot.
Yes, Chaytor did wrong, but the judge’s statement is punishment enough. He’s a good guy, great, hard-working MP who made a tragic mistake, and it’s a waste of talent to send him to prison (thanks, Ken Clarke!).
I have no problem with someone standing by their friend in difficult times, but what’s the need for such encomiums in a news broadcast? Seems a massive waste of time, and works to contradict the message sent to the public by the judge’s decision.
I guess we can all put the expenses scandal behind us, right? Where’s Nick Robinson to explain it all to us? He went out of his way to defend MPs against public anger when this all came out last year.
“Also, we don’t know how much of the releases we see are down to anthropogenic warming in the last couple of centuries, and how much relates to the natural warming we’ve seen since the end of the last Ice Age.”
What? “…anthropogenic warming in the last couple of centuries”
But the guru from CRU said:
“I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12130970
If they insist on the lie, at least be consistant
Good swipe by Victor Davis Hanson at “pundits” and the media preaching liews about climate change :
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/01/06/the_new_sophists_108447.html
I caught a few minutes of Richard Black pontificating about this nonsense on the BBC World Service late the other night (I think the programme was called “One Planet”, or something like that). What was the bonkers expression he kept using: “ecosystem services”? It was all about how “we” (meaning Richard Black, apparently, but deploying everybody else’s money) should pay people not to cut down forests, or nuke coral atolls etc..
I nearly crashed the car, when some character from Costa Rica was interviewed, to explain how all of this would work. Starting in the nineties, he said, Costa Rica had paid owners of forestry to maintain the forest. What he forgot to mention was that the biofuel scam has paid a lot more handsomely, so that deforestation has not stopped, or even decelerated, in Costa Rica in the last two decades. You can see swathes of land in Costa Rica now growing palms for palm oil, where, very recently, there was rain forest.
Of course, now we’re supposed to be into biodiversity, the eco-loons should be in a bit of a quandary about chopping down rain forests. When forests are removed and replaced with coffee plantations, the rodent population explodes. With this newly plentiful food supply, the pit viper population increases, too (apart from the egg-laying Bushmaster, which favours the tree coverage). I’d hazard a guess that the same thing occurs in the palm plantations, as well, since it is the human refuse, rather than the particular activity, which attracts the rats and mice.
The same BBC programme, I should mention, interviewed a very smug representative of WWF, who was all in favour of this ecosystems scam, without feeling the need to mention that his organisation speculated on doing very nicely out of it.