Strident eco-camapigner Sarah Mukherjee may have left the BBC, but Richard Black is carrying on her propaganda work, even over the holiday weekend. Here’s his latest offering – a largely uncritical re-cycling of a paper paid for by taxpayers’ money – that purports to show that 250 people living in the Himlayas somehow know the truth about global warming.
I was taught years ago – during my training as a journalist – that if you ask ten people about the weather, you get at least twenty different stories. But no matter, this is a cutting edge investigation by our top minds into our future, so anything goes.
The background to this nonsense, of course, is that the IPCC was caught making hugely exaggerated claims about the impact of climate change on the Himalayas. They alleged that glaciers were melting so fast that they would be gone in a matter of decades, putting the millions who depend on their annual release of meltwater in peril of drought.
Unabashed, and incapable of accepting that they were wrong, the Royal Society (grant from the UK taxpayer last year £46m) sanctioned two climate change zealots from the US – including a prominent member of one of India’s main greenie think-tanks – to ask the local farmers what they thought was going on. Rubbish in, rubbish out. I am not aware how it could possibly be imagined that a sample so small from a tiny micro-area of the Himalayas (most of whom have probably already been bombarded with climate change propaganda) could remotely have a meaningful or reliable grasp of the huge mixture of forces involved. I concede that it could be interesting sociology and testimony to human suggestibility – but reliable data about climate variability? What utter tosh.
That said, climate zealots increasingly believe that scientific truth is based on “consensus”, so perhaps this fits the new methodology. Let’s in future decide scientific validity on the basis of opinion polls.
In that vein, the farmers told the “researchers” that it’s getting warmer and drier, there are more mosquitoes and the glaciers are definitely melting more. So it’s been published and pushed round the world as a valid piece of climate change investigation, and evidence that despite the IPCC cock-up there is still much to be alarmed about.
And Richard Black has faithfully recycled it. You can tell by his tone that he knows that the so-called research has all the validity of the claims of a three-card-trick huckster, but hey-ho, this is climate activism, it’s been sanctioned by the Royal Society, and this is BBC science reporting, so it must be true, and it deserves bank holiday weekend prominence.
