I have just listened on Radio 4 to the latest programme in the eco-crazy strand Costing the Earth. I don’t, unfortunately, have a transcript, but from beginning to end, this was a scare-fest about the dangers of melting ice. It was taken as read by Tom Heap, the presenter, that the science has been proved, that there is major catastrophic warming. He stuffed it full with researchers who are being paid to find climate change, and – lo and behold – have found it. Not a sceptic in sight. He even spoke to the British ambassador to Canada, who magically appeared to be able to pronounce on the danger of escaping methane and knew with certainty that everything was collapsing on an unprecedented level. Mr Heap told us, too, that the North-west passage had opened up in 2007 for the first time as part of the inexorable, irreversible melting.
This was CAGW propaganda at its most stridently political. Not a dissenting voice, not an ounce of doubt. In a sense, such programmes are now so common that they are not even noteworthy. But I’m going to go on writing about them because the BBC is crassly, arrogantly, dangerously wrong in the way it is handling such topics. And as BBC staff like David Gregory prove in their contributions to the debate (see my previous posting) they don’t even begin to get it.
Shame the Costing the Earth researcher did not look – even for a second – at this masterly piece of research; it would have shown him the true perspective on melting Arctic ice. It happens, it’s cyclical, it’s unpredictable and we don’t understand yet why. But sure as hell, it’s been happening for a very long time and “global warming” is only a tangential part of the story. The incontinent outpourings of Mr Heap and his cronies contribute nothing to our understanding of what actually goes on there.
We also had on the Television news this morning a “climate expert” saying that Australia will have more cyclones because of global warming. He then said it was tied to La Nina which is cooling in the pacific not warming.
In 2008 a peer reviewed scientific paper by Crompton and McAneney showed that since 1870 there has been a decrease in land falling cyclones in Australia.
When is the BBC going to start scolding the Australian Government for the deaths and horrible conditions suffered by survivors like they did with George Bush and New Orleans?
Never! Given the deep historical, familial and ethnic ties between Blighty and Oz the neglience and lack of interest in Australia by the BBC is astounding,
The World Service is at least partially a project of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office so the lack of interest in Commonwealth countries by the BBC is inexplicable.
Just listening to “Material World”, in which, amongst other topics, the Australian cyclone is being discussed, still this mantra that the globe is warming, and we can expect more extreme weather events because of it, when in fact more extreme events can be expected from a cooling globe. Nobody EVER seems to question these daft ponouncements on the BBC, we’re fed this rubbish and have to assume that it’s gospel. It’s SO frustrating – what’s the matter with them?
“He then said it was tied to La Nina which is cooling in the pacific not warming.”
La Niña is when warm water accumulates in the Western Pacific near Australia and colder, deep ocean water comes to the surface in the Eastern Pacific, near South America. Therefore the Western Pacific warms and is associated with wet conditions in Australia while the Eastern Pacific cools and is associated with dry conditions in South America. This is the opposite of El Niño conditions.
However, on a global scale the cooling of the Eastern Pacific more than balances the warming of the Western Pacific and so La Niña leads to lower global average temperatures.
One should not confuse the effect of La Niña lowering globaltemperature with it raising temperatures regionally in the Western Pacific.
La Niña regional impacts:
If you get a transcript, see what the man from the Antartic Survey has to say about melting sea ice. I’m sure he said that it was a concern to us in this country because it would lead to rising sea levels and flooding – which is nonsense. It’s only icecaps on land that pose a potential danger. Melting sea ice does nothing to raise the sea level.