I’m not a scientist, but I do often smell a rat in BBC science stories, and here we go with another corporation special, this time a major glacier scare.
Melting mountain glaciers are making sea levels rise faster now than at any time in the last 350 years, according to new research.
For years they have been telling us that the snows of Kilimanjaro are about to disappear because of AGW (they aren’t); and now the greenie BBC zealots are pushing another obscure research-grant paper – one that claims we are going to drown because of massive glacial melt. This time, according to the doomfest headlines, the glaciers of South America are melting 20 or 30 or even a 100 times faster than was previously thought. The cause (implied not stated), as usual, is nasty humans and those vile “emissions” that started with the industrial revolution.
Smelling that rat about the alleged rising sea levels, I dug around a little. Steve Goddard here provides a series of facts that – surprise, surprise – the BBC report does not mention. Like sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago at a more or less constant rate. That there’s been no change in the rate of increase (c.2cms a decade) since 1880. And finally, in the last 30 years – when those nasty CO2/farty cow emissions have been at their highest – the rate has remained stubbornly constant.
Mr Goddard concludes:
Sea level is rising, and the abuse of this information is one of the most flagrantly clueless mantras of the alarmist community. Even if we returned to a green utopian age, sea level would continue to rise at about the same rate – just as has done since the last glacial maximum.
In short, there’s a rather inconvenient but major contradiction that the BBC fails to mention. If these glaciers are melting so damn fast, where is the water going? And if they are melting and there’s no sea level rise, what’s the problem? Especially as South America has just endured one of its coldest winters in living memory. Answers on a postcard, please.
RH
A more recent posting on WUWT quotes a report from some poor soul infected with warmism to the effect that the Kilimanjaro snows are actually returning due, in part, to “climate change” [ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/21/kilimanjaro-regaining-its-snow-cap/ ].
Haha.
Actually even if this research is not hyped, the cause is not even guessed at. No mention of CO2 anywhere.
This is my pet hate with all this alarmist “reporting” – the cause is not mentioned but implied.
It does not take a genius to see that CO2 does not drive temperatures the way the BBC propogate If they did how can this be true?
“Consider the earth 14,000 years ago. CO2 levels were around 200 ppm and temperatures, at 6C below present values, were rising fast. Now consider 30,000 years ago. CO2 levels were also around 200 ppm and temperatures were also about 6C below current levels, yet at that time the earth was cooling. Exactly the same CO2 and temperature levels as 14,000 years ago, but the opposite direction of temperature change. CO2 was not the driver.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/21/co2-does-not-drive-glacial-cycles/
What is the difference between so called man made CO2 and natural CO2. All I see is one carbon atom and 2 oxygen atoms in “both types”. Maybe David Gregory will enlighten us or maybe not.
in complement, I was quite interested in this, when linking to a story on the BBc from the AV thread below this one:
With a picture of a Japanese girl in a mask, we have this bit of ‘not advocacy based on scaremongering at all’, entitled:
——-
Expert view
Fukushima shows that renewable energy is the way to go
——-
Expertly inking to ‘show’, as opposed to discuss the various views:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12960655
I am sure some here may be able to offer some context to the background of the expert Mr. Froggatt.
As a layperson interested in the topic, not sure that I have seen this over-substantiated factually so far:
‘Numerous studies have shown that renewables along with energy efficiency can deliver all or virtually all of our global energy needs, and that therefore nuclear power does not have to be part of the future’.
The comments, if and when, and where they appear, will be interesting.
The BBC can argue that this is the opinion of one person not bound by BBC Guidelines. The irrelevant picture of what I assume was a photolibrary Japanese girl in surgical mask (suitable for flu prevention and nursing illustration) with no connection to the caption was 100% BBC subediting. I would be less concerned if I could expect right-of-reply from someone holding the opposite view.
For the record Antony Froggatt has no formal scientific credentials that I ccould find, not even a bachelor’s degree. He has worked on international energy and climate issues for over 20 years providing research and information for a wide range of bodies including companies, governments, the media, non-government organisations and international organisations and has published over 50 reports and papers.
Experience
Sept 2006-Oct 2007 Research Associate, Warwick University Business School
1997-present Freelance energy policy consultant
1989-1997 Greenpeace International Nuclear Policy Campaigner
‘For the record Antony Froggatt has no formal scientific credentials ‘
Ah. Not a deal-breaker, but possibly helpful when offering an expert view… or reporting… or giving free pulpit to such.
Meanwhile, the few times I see opinion from actual engineers, the odds of global energy needs being met solely by renewables, even with draconian usage inhibitions or other mitigations (maybe Mr. Packham has a view?), seem… optimistic.
Just a quick correction: the rate of sealevel rise is about 2mm per year – or 2cm per decade.
It’s worse than we thought! 😉
Some alleged increases in sea level are due to isostatic adjustment. Land masses which were depressed due to the weight of ice during the last ice age are rising in places like Scotland, and the tilting of the land mass is causing the south east to fall.
The suggestion that this is due to greedy overweight bankers is unfounded.
More probably due to the number of pies eaten by NGO Environmental Campaigners as they flit from conference venue to conference venue?
My God, what a fuss about a few millimetres, especially when you consider the average wave height on the Channel coast, on a summer’s day, say, in Brighton (where it’s apparently very “green”). A few millimetres. What a joke.
Why is it this shower of ecotards at the BBC grab this stuff, and only push half the story? Do they really think they can frighten anyone any more, with their proven record of biased, lying ecoclaptrap? I don’t think so, somehow. I don’t know why they bother, I really don’t.
“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”
— George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
When it comes to doublethink, the anti-science marxists have made it into an art..
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/settled-science/
The sea-level rise issue is another one where complex adjustments are made to the raw data (similar to the ‘hide the decline’ climategate scandal that related to temperatures). Various ‘fudge’ factors are made to the raw data from satellites and coastal stations and the buoys that float around the oceans and these ‘fudge’ factors always are in the direction of what they think the answer should be (i.e. an increase in the rate of sea level rise0.
Other studies that look at actual observations at tidal monitoring stations around our coasts indicate mixed signals, but generally the evidence is that sea level increases (which have been taking place since the end of the last glaciation) are either stable or slowing – particularly since the 1990s. Even in the classic ‘scare story’ areas of the Maldives and Bangladesh actual sea levels have been broadly flat for a number of years – not the message the Maldives Government wants you to hear because they can ‘guilt trip’ the rest of the world to give them large sums of money if it sounds as if they are going to drown imminently!
Reminds me…Saturday night’s ‘Casualty’ featured a hospitalised character who was suffering a mental breakdown due to a conspiracy by unnamed forces to stop her vital work on Climate Change.
I should be horrified at such remorseless propaganda and such utter institutionalised underhandedness but have become somewhat numbed to living in a materially-luxurious version of the Eastern Bloc.
Studies showed glaciers have lost volume on average “10 to 100 times faster” in the last 30 years.
Or if you like my team York City will either remain in the Blue Square Premier League, or perhaps end up beating Barcelona 12 – 0 in the Champion’s League final in the next 30 minutes or in the next 30 years, depending on a 10 – 100 faster climate change.
Both statements seem somewhat fanciful, but at the very least mine is out of a forlon hope, as opposed to those who ingratiate themselves with the BBC’s science department in the hope of a receiving a highly paid “on message” non-job and without recourse to annoying contradictory facts so as to ruin the “agenda”.
No matter how warm (or cold ) the planet becomes, the abolishion of the BBC can only benefit our understanding of what isn’t going on !
And yet, with partizan optimism even I know we couldn’t beat Barcelona without allowing them a consolation goal in the 90th minute without blaming the weather.
But I will show the BBC’s science department a “red card” on a charge of climate change horror story recidivism in front of the paying public. It wont be in the 90th minute, it will be in the first.
@My Site:
I too noticed the “Viewpoint: Fukushima makes case for renewable energy” under Expert View. It’s unlikely Antony Froggatt, the author, is an impartial opinion. Here is the guy’s profile:
http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/about/directory/view/-/id/129/
Notably:
-Virtually all his publications titles mention renewable energy linked with climate change. One special one is “The International Climate Change Agenda: Opportunities for the G8” in a Chatham House briefing paper from May 2008 and “Low-Carbon Economy: Frontier Energy” his most recent publication from August 2010.
-His recent publication involving nuclear energy was from a book entitled “Nuclear or Not? Does Nuclear Power Have a Place in a Sustainable Energy Future?” from 2007. He has never worked in nuclear energy. He co-authors the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report but I am dubious as to the partiality considering from the Wiki page it appears to have been commissioned mainly by Green parties.
-Antony Froggatt worked as a Greenpeace International Nuclear Policy Campaigner from 1989 to 1997. Greenpeace is not well known for liking nuclear energy.
“Antony Froggatt worked as a Greenpeace International Nuclear Policy Campaigner ”
Tells us everything we need to know about how this man earns his crust, and what twaddle he shoves in his head. In any half-reputable publication he would be required to declare interests so readers can judge for themselves. Too inconvenient for the bBBC, raises questions of veracity, instead they palm us off with a byline “Expert” – better known as “lying”. The BBC are beneath contempt.
No they are far worse than that. Think of that high-powered expensive “BBC Trust” urbanely lunching away with fine wines at your expense, their ethnically balanced good and great whitewashing this crap. Wicked deceitful arrogant scum – errr fine upstanding pillars of the liberal West London establishment who sleep soundly in their feather-beds.
The BBC once again only publicise research that meets thier approval.
Here is some more research from March 2011 on sea levels that was not mentioned by the BBC.
“In this paper Houston and Dean (2011) review and add to the academic literature on sea level rise. They are primarily concerned with the historical evidence from U.S. tide gauges, with some analysis going back to data collected in the 19th century, but with more detailed comparisons of different studies starting at later dates, such as 1930, when more observations were recorded.”
“Houston and Dean conclude that the evidence points to the absence of tide-gauge data supporting any acceleration in the SL rise trend of the past century. This calls into question the many projections of rates of rise above this trend, which would be required for larger projected total increases due to AGW. They feel it is essential to resolve this discrepancy between the theoretical projections and the historical data.”
“A remaining problem is the fact that the satellite data show much higher rates of rise, of the order of 3.2 mm/year. However, there is no physical reason why the rates should suddenly increase in the 1990’s. One suspects therefore that there is a calibration problem in the satellite data, which will be solved eventually.”
http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2011/mar/29mar2011a1.html
Since much of the case for warmism is based on wilful ignorance of statistics (particularly noticeable in the work of Harrabin, Shukman and Black), on the Bishop Hill blog here http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/4/4/keenan-on-climate-statistics.html His Grace links to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal which is a straightforward evisceration of the IPCC bible due to the IPCC’s incompetence in handling the small change of statistical practice.
The total failure of bBC Science on MMGW/’Climate change’ should come as no surprise.
bBC Science used to be respected and of some actual use 25 years ago.
It has now dumbed down so much that it is mostly plain dumb, and largely science free.
Horizon programmes on shoddy theories or populist non science don’t count. Neither do Professor Dawkins giving his religious views (legitimate or not) and dressing them up as science coverage or Mr Attenborough regurgitating the same stuff over and over and over as if he repeats a theory often enough it will be believed as fact, repeating tests is good science, repeating theory is not.
The bBC website is particularly guilty with a whole series of “if, maybe, possibly, could be” stories that are denied even by most scientists and have no reference to scientific evidence or method.
I wonder where all the bBC ‘scientists’ are, who, when I was a young child, used to insist the world was in between ice ages and in serious danger of returning to one without massive human intervention…