My beef with Richard Black, repeated in more posts than I care to remember, is simple. He has become an advocate, not a reporter. I am not a scientist, but was once a BBC producer and reporter – who became a very senior executive of a news organisation – and so I do have the competence to judge him in this respect. Today, in this piece claiming that global warming is now proven, he has yet again crassly demonstrated that he is not doing his job.
True to style, he has picked one remark by a constroversial climate scientist called Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia and elevated it to the level of a major news story. The point that Mr Black has chosen to exaggerate and thus endorse in this way is that the said Professor Jones has now found evidence that the warming of the past fifteen years is a “real” phenomenon because global temperatures over the past year have again been high.
Why is this approach so wrong and so fundamentally at variance with his duties as reporter? First Mr Black knows that because of Climategate, Professor Jones is a highly controversial figure who in some quarters (to put it mildly) does not have credibility. He would be an idiot not to. Chosing him is thus deliberate confrontation, akin to asking Goebbels to give Hitler a character reference.
Second, the statistical concept which Mr Black maintains confirms Professor Jones’ observations, is not accepted in the way he suggests. Bruce Hoult, for example, on the Bishop Hill site, notes succinctly:
To put explicitly what others have alluded to: significance at the 95% confidence level (2 sigma) is generally accepted as the threshold for saying “gee, this looks interesting, more research is justified to see if we can tighten up those bounds a couple more sigma and see whether there’s really anything here or not”.It is most definitely NOT grounds for saying something is proven beyond reasonable doubt or to a level warranting policy action.
This is a point about elementary scientific methodology – as always Mr Black takes the side of the advocate he wants to believe. He further puts two fingesr up by stating:
Since then (Climategate investigations), nothing has emerged through mainstream science to challenge the IPCC’s basic picture of a world warming through greenhouse gas emissions.
Third, Mr Black never ever provides balancing comment or evidence. He wants instead to blare out that Professor Jones is right. Yet he ignores (in his piece today and always) evidence like this, the much-discussed and publicised G.G.Koutsoyiannis paper (fully peer-reviewed)which throws serious doubt on the theorising about rising global temperatures. The BBC has broadcast or published not a peep about this paper and yet carries on regardless pumping out endless climate change drivel.
I repeat. For all these reasons – and more – Mr Black is a cheap propagandist, not a reporter. I’m spelling it out yet again because I believe that one day, someone at the corporation will realise that such agitprop has made the BBC’s alleged journalism into a laughing stock.
No speculation on the cause, I notice. Again we see how just the idea that the climate changes becomes the proxy for Man-made warming. If one is proven, then the other is fact by default. Not exactly science.
Last night at about 2300 after finishing work I had a glass or two of whisky (because I have a sore throat and it is medicinal 😉 ) For some reason I decided to watch the full version of ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’. Has anybody at the BBC every watched it? Has Black, Horribin (sic) or Shukman ever watched it? I suspect that they have watched it and dismissed it completely whilst believing everything that Global Warming God Gore has said. This is a powerful piece Mr Horbury. It sums up what is wrong with the likes of Black and also, because he is not stopped from telling lies by his bosses.
I meant to say in my last post that ….because he is not stopped from telling lies, his bosses are just as bad
I think I shall invent a new principle. Let’s call it the Geek’s Law of Intended Consequences of Investment Protection. Or something.
Using the following formula:-
A => B => C
we can deduce that:
A = The Head of Pension Investments for the £8billion BBC Pension Trust since 2000, Peter Dunscombe
B = The Chairman of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC) with €3.7trillion assets, Peter Dunscombe
C = IIGCC membership, which includes the BBC Pension Trust Ltd
See? That was easy!
What if 2011 tips the “significance” back below 95% ? Will this make the news too ? I doubt it.
In any case, I am not sure that Phil Jones has done his sums correctly. Doug Keenan (a guy who has forgotten more about stats that Jones has ever known) has done the numbers and thinks Jones is wrong.
Black always argues that Jones was cleared of any scientific fraud, but this is not the case.
“From this summary account, two main conclusions emerge. First, there is good evidence to support the allegation that Jones committed fraud in some of his research—including research which influenced a chapter of the principal report upon which governments rely for a scientific assessment of global warming. Second, the evidence for the allegation was not considered by either the Oxburgh panel or the Russell panel; indeed, it has not been properly investigated by any competent and authorized body.”
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=6818
Both the Oxburgh and Russel reports were a white wash.
I much prefer the narrative here, than any of the claptrap Black and Harrabin ever have to offer – they’ll never change their spots, and black will always be white if it fits the agenda.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/
PLEASE let Black & S(h)uckman be among the culled !
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/10/bbc-news-world-service-jobs
Some of those suggestions for savings make good sense. I’ve said for a long time that there’s a lot of redundancy at the BBC – too many people making the same report for different programmes and channels. And maybe the newsreaders on the News Channel will have to suffer through four-hour shifts instead of two. Oh, the humanity.
Although I shudder to think of Peston having to spit out hourly business news updates every day. They’ll have to force him to take speaking lessons or it will be unbearable.
They’ve always had five Beeboids on site when one or two would do. They sure didn’t need to send half a dozen of them to Ground Zero last year. Maybe they’ll also cut back on letting Naughtie and Bacon and Dymond et al. traipsing around the US whenever they feel like it.
If they drastically cut down on US staff, it sure won’t mean you’re any less informed than you are now, that’s for damn sure.
Black is a nasty piece of work who does not desreve a job cleaning the environment with a brush let alone reporting on it.
“The trend over the period 1995-2009 was significant at the 90% level, but wasn’t significant at the standard 95% level that people use,” Professor Jones told BBC News.
“Basically what’s changed is one more year [of data]. That period 1995-2009 was just 15 years – and because of the uncertainty in estimating trends over short periods, an extra year has made that trend significant at the 95% level which is the traditional threshold that statisticians have used for many years.”
No this is rubbish. This is what has happened:
“GISS Global temperature of NASA has shown substantial deviations over the last years when compared to the other three data sets of global temperature (HadCRUT3, RSS and UAH), particularly for March 2008. Now the Met Office has itself apparently decided to adjust HadCRUT3 databases to better match GISS values.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/04/13/a-german-analysis-of-changes-at-hadcrut-getting-closer-to-giss/
No one knows how the data is “adjusted” and for what reasons The data is never released in raw format for real scientists to test Jones fiddlings.
http://climategate.tv/tag/hadcrut/
“Global warming is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life”
Harold Lewis Emeritus Professor of Physics
In my dreams, we clubbed together and had Harold Lewis’s words tatooed on Richard Black’s chest. Upside down, so he could wake up and read them every morning.
I notice this piece seems ‘broadcast only’, as more and more pontifications from the legions of narrative enhancers and events interpreters are spared any feedback (or their readers alternative views) by the new, easier, faster, cheaper and ‘better’ systems being instituted.
Look through to the bottom, i have a quick edit to suggest:
‘The BBC is not responsible’
“The only people who would be hurt by abandoning the Kyoto Protocol would be several thousand people who make a living attending conferences on global warming”
Professor Kirill Kondratyev
Russian Academy of Sciences
And that includes Black, Harrabin and Shuckman.
Trouble is Robin – that they’re in la-la-la-la-la ! … I’m not listening mode – or worse – they are extending the “scienec is settled” principal.
Black is simply a pimple on the arse of the elephant.
When the tide has turned – as tides do – I will not forget, and doubt that that I will find forgiveness for the BBC’s rotten games in this matter and others.
The tattoo is a good idea, I think it should be on his forehead and done twice, once in mirror writing.
BBC-greenie warmists and:
Summer snow falls on Snowdon –
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/06/story-continues.html
The usual way to explain adverse weather is to use the term “Climate Change”, but can Black do this now as he is back to “Global Warming”.?
Laughing stock, yes. Cheap.. sadly… not at all.
But whatever the flaws of the individual, it is the institutional aspects that are the most worrying.
If Mr. Black left his ‘role’ at the BBC and was replaced by another, I suspect he would find few if any follow him.
Meanwhile, merely by being ‘the BBC’ and one of its few avenues of possible response, Earth Watch would continue even if headed up by a coconut on a stick so long as it had a good classics degree from Oxford.