Monthly Archives: June 2011

Richard Black has posted yet another warmist homily, this time rubbishing the widely-reported claims here and here that a fall in solar activity could lead to a medium-term fall in global temperatures.

The claims originate from a warmist organisation and he can’t therefore use his usual ploy of shooting the messenger. So his first tactic is to say that the relevant paper is not yet “peer reviewed”. Not everyone in the science community has yet seen the paper and some don’t like it – so it might be suppressed. No doubt Mr Black is hoping that will happen.

Kick two is that he then points that the predictions “might not turn into reality”. Funny though, Mr Black rushes in to print as fast as his little legs will carry him when Phil Jones tells us that global temperatures are on the increase, or Greenpeace invent a cock and bull story for the IPCC that renewable sources will provide most of the world’s energy by 2050.

Kick three is that the sun’s activity would in any case have to fall more than the “man made contribution to the greenhouse effect”. Here, he descends yet again into blatant advocacy and puts a tendentious theory at the level of being beyond reasonable doubt Some people, Mr Black, outside your zealot’s bubble, don’t accept that the greenhouse effect is as important as you do. But of course that does not matter – the BBC has weighed scientific opinion, and has decided that the said “greenhouse effect” is as serious as any greenie wants it to be.

Kick four is that he reverts to his own authority. Mr Black reviewed solar activity four years ago and found that

• It is not the major issue on human timescales
• Any effect from modern changes in solar activity is likely to be dwarfed by greenhouse gas emissions and associated issues such as sulphate aerosols.

Well, Mr Black, all I can say is that David Whitenouse – unlike you a genuine scientist – reviewed your scientific endeavours recently and found them to be, well, lacking. Of course, you think more highly of your own efforts – otherwise you would not have invoked your own authority in this way – but I think I know who I would prefer to believe.

I’m getting bored with this – the litany of biased handling continues – and I won’t deal with every single point that I would challenge, including the perennial tiresome reliance on models that don’t prove a thing. But then, finally Mr Black invokes his usual trump quote card – evidence from a solar physicist who he believes shows beyond doubt that the predictions of cooling don’t count. It turns out that the said Joanna Haigh – surprise surprise – is a Met Office alarmist and an IPCC stooge who believes that CO2 warming will dwarf that of any sun cycle. That will be the same IPCC that publishes Greenpeace agitprop as fact.

I would expect better, even of Richard Black. This piece of writing stinks to high heaven for all the usual reasons and could have been compiled by a seven-year old climate change student.

The BBC is eerily silent – as usual – about the Exocet attack by warmist Mark Lynas in which he notes that the IPCC deployed Greenpeace evidence to justify a preposterous claim that 80% of the world’s energy could be derived from renewables by 2050. The report has been ripped to shreds piece by piece on the blogsphere over the last 48 hours. Yet, surprise, surprise, Richard Black was obscenely hasty in endorsing the original proposals.

I am tired of writing about Richard Black’s bigotry and zealotry, but I will continue tracking it. One day, he will realise…

The BBC’s self-declared flagship of so-called quality journalism, Panorama,has been found seriously lacking by the BBC Trust. In short, it fabricated evidence disgracefully in order to attack Primark, a store which the boys and girls at the BBC no doubt view with horror because it provides cheap, affordable clothes for the masses.

I know from personal experience that the BBC Trust will normally go to the ends of the earth to support BBC journalists, so this is an earthquake of sorts. But note the way the BBC website has handled the story. Nice Roy Greenslade – so old fashionedly left-wing that by his own admission he makes Arthur Scargill look moderate – of the Guardian has been wheeled out to defend the offending piece. The intro is also mealy-mouthed and begrudging – there’s no direct acknowledgement that Panorama got it wrong, only that the BBC must say sorry. And as the icing of the cake of the denial, news boss Helen Boaden says that this is wholly exceptional and everything else that the BBC does is beyond reproach, always, always, always….

In fact, the ruling is among the strongest upoholdings of a journalistic complaint that I have ever seen and the corporation should be utterly ashamed that it used such cowboy, slipshod methodology. Although that’s par for the course.

Last week, I noted that Richard Black had sunk into blatant advocacy – again – in his obscenely hasty support for the fanatical Phil Jones’ claims that global warming has been proved (again) by his crooked statistics. Now David Whitehouse, a former BBC correspondent who, unlike Richard Black does have science qualifications, has waded into the debate. In a masterclass of accurate reporting and reporting technique, he agrees with me that Mr Black’s so-called journalism in this instance is nothing but warped advocacy, and this is what he concludes:

It is a sloppy, skimpy article in the extreme. It provides little in the way of analysis and that which it does is one-sided. But even if one did not look at the accuracy of the statements it has, not for the first time, an air of triumph, as if those whom it deems skeptic (and it has a strange definition of skeptic) have been overcome. It is not impartial.

In its selective coverage of climate change science BBC News has become not a reporter of climate change, but a supporter of it. It has, as this regrettable article shows, veered into advocacy. Science and Environmental journalists are often enthusiasts for the subject but as reporters they must not become cheerleaders and uncritically use shoddy science in a one-sided attempt to trounce those whom, as is obvious from this piece, the reporter thinks are wrong. There is no mention in the article that the statistics for the post-2001 temperature standstill are accepted by the scientific community. This changes the story completely.

I recommend you to read the whole thing. Not so long ago, the BBC could attract reporters of his class and pedigree; now they have only agitprop lefties. Once again, it is clear beyond doubt that Mr Black is nothing but a warmist zealot. Not only that, he’s not fit to lick David Whitehouse’s boots.