I have often wondered about the tone to adopt in writing posts here about the BBC’s reporting of climate change. Are my thoughts about Richard Black and Roger Harrabin too waspish, and should they be toned down? I need not have worried. So-called “independent scientist” Steve Jones, whose so-called report about BBC science reporting is published today, is a first-class Millwall-terraces-of-old thug in the downright nasty, vindicative and partisan remarks he chooses to hurl at those who dare to challenge his “consensus” views about climate alarmism. On the day that Lord Monckton showed vividly – yet again – that when alarmists dare to engage in public debate their arguments are annihilated,the BBC’s trustees have given their blessing to an inquiry that is so tendentious, vicious and narrow that it lowers the tone of public debate to unprecedented depths of partisanship and shallowness.
How does the BBC choose to report this travesty? With the revoltingly complacent “BBC praised for science reporting”. Which is exactly as Professor Jones intended and exactly in line with the Pravda stylebook.
The trustees should be hauled to account, every man jack of them, but such is the poverty and depravity of what the BBC has become that they cannot see their bigoted, blinkered nastiness. I will leave the last word for now to Melanie Phillips:
The BBC Trust is supposed to be the guardian of the public interest. Its role is to ensure that the BBC adheres to the high standards of its charter. But with this recommendation, the Trust has shown that it will destroy the BBC’s duty of fairness and impartiality and replace it by an Orwellian double-speak on the grounds that there are certain ideas which cannot be challenged. This is not guarding the sacred flame of journalistic integrity. It is a secular Inquisition.
Jones found much to praise? What a shock.
Prejudice, bigotry and intolerance and moral depravity dressed up to look like fairness and high moral purpose, this is the degenerate BBC, this is the degenerate left, this is the reality.
They have no answer to their enemies other than to slience them, ugly despots do it, cruel regimes do it, the left does it as though it was a core function like a heartbeat or breathing. They are right, they know this, they do not need to defend their ideals because they are right.
The leftist will tell you that the error the right makes is their belief that free open debate is the way forward, that a free equal debate that allows the participants to decide for themselves based on the evidence is the only way forward is wrong both morally and practically. The left will say that debate merely confuses the issues and the issues are simplicity itself, they are always right even when they are wrong.
The leftist believes that free open debate about issues is a degenerate selfishness, there is only one truth and that is what the left decides it is, nothing more. From their perspective why debate with someone who is wrong? Its a waste of time and confuses the lower orders who need firm simple easily understood truths delivered in an easy to remember format. In leftist world the truth is not the actual truth, it is the proposal placed before a client populace and the proposal is always the truth even though it isnt. The BBC is leftist to its core, its who and what they are, their corporate credo is ‘the ends justify the means’.
As ever, we end up needing Robin to point out the bankruptcy of what purports to be “science reprting”.
How a Steve Jones is considered qualified to pronounce on the validity of “climate change”-well, only the BBC and its liberal arts graduates would allow themselves to be so gulled.
It suits these fatuous “celebrity boffins” to range across any area of science that they like without any comment or gainsaying. More panstick than anything else-but the BBC will pay for market research, free product placement and agenda bending! Jones related to the numpty at UEA I wonder…interchangeable talking heads that make me pine for Magnus Pyke or Heinz Wolf!
Robin, Cassnadra, Melanie, Booker…all the independent experts are to be found way outside the Beebs makeup room
CERN has placed a gag order on its own scientists ordering them to refrain from publicly drawing any conclusions about their latest experiment because the results don’t support Warmism.
The chief of the world’s leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment. The CLOUD (“Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets”) experiment examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation. CLOUD uses CERN’s proton synchrotron to examine nucleation.
CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Welt Online that the scientists should refrain from drawing conclusions from the latest experiment.
“I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them,” reports veteran science editor Nigel Calder on his blog. Why?
Because, Heuer says, “That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”
So much for trusting scientists on this issue.
From the CRU in 2000:
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
The effects of snow-free winter in Britain are already becoming apparent. This year, for the first time ever, Hamleys, Britain’s biggest toyshop, had no sledges on display in its Regent Street store. “It was a bit of a first,” a spokesperson said.
ATS Euromaster now:
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
The effects of snow-free winter in Britain are already becoming apparent. This year, for the first time ever, Hamleys, Britain’s biggest toyshop, had no sledges on display in its Regent Street store. “It was a bit of a first,” a spokesperson said.
And the BBC gets a CRU genius to judge their reporting on the topic.
This year, for the first time ever, Hamleys, Britain’s biggest toyshop, had no sledges on display in its Regent Street store. “
Now there’s a proxy for you.
Climate warming on steroids exemplified by the absence of sledges in Hamleys.
Ten years later, the evidence suggests that it was a wee bit over the top.
But the alarmist message was deployed. Mission accomplished. The BBC is in that business, too.
And, it is a business.
In effect, the BBC, self-congratulating for its science coverage, has become the mouthpiece for policy.
That is known as taking party.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ariel/14223802
Coverage in the inhouse magazine “Arial”…
Regards
Jim
PS. Letters page can be quite amusing sometimes, comes out weekly. Thursday I think it is.
I had a look at Ariel.
This caught my attention.
“The review, by geneticist Professor Steve Jones, says individual BBC science teams are doing excellent work, but should collaborate more – and programmes should stop trying to fulfill impartiality guidelines by always having ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ commentators on science stories, for example, climate change.
Of course, climate change.
Why should climate change (AGW or CAGW) be ring-fenced from the pro and anti as a special case.
Pure science eg can theorise, hypothesize in academic neutrality.
It is applied science that has a social and hence a political component, nuclear, genetically modified food etc will always generate different views. Look at fluoridation, for example. AGW policy has enormous consequences if accepted at face value and as a policy it is based on probability and uncertainty.
So if the consensus of those scientists who work in the nuclear energy field is that a nuclear reactor design is entirely safe, the BBC would, following the Jones doctrine, exclude all debate and relegate those who find fault to the realm of the ‘flat-earther’.
It flies in face of an open society that a tax-payer funded public broadcaster can allow itself to adjust its output to favour ‘consensus’ even if it appears as “overwhelming “consensus, to they exclusion of the other. A marginalisation. A discrimination even.
That way the BBC is moving towards a glossy, hi-tec Pravda.
The BBC should remember that eugenics was widely accepted and found its way into society in the twenties and thirties of the last century. Eugenic theory based on determinism and statistics (G*d help us) was supported by leading and authoritive men and women of science as a solution to a problem of a population where the wrong class was breeding threatening, they insisted, a dimunition in the quality of the human stock (their term).
The argument from ‘fact’ which is really hypothesis and theory is only as good as the next challenge. It must admit falsifiabilty.
Just reading Prof Jones report. The global warming stuff starts around page 66. Wow. Just wow. It’s a truely sickening piece of work. Packed with lies and prejudice – and with an unbelievably agressive tone. If this guy started lecturing me about global warming with that agressive tone, using all those insults – “denialist” – comparing me to 9/11 truthers etc, quite frankly I don’t think I’d be able to control myself. I’d have to kick the shit out of him.
And sorry – any one who claims the vindictive “Meet the Sceptic(s)” character assasination of Lord Moncton was balanced and fair is a complete lying bastard.
And among the justifications he gives for his religious belief in MMGW: Recent snow in England (=proof of warming!??!!) and the warmest April on record in the UK (a statistically meaningless cherry picked factoid – we also had one of the coldest December’s as I recall). All topped off byridiculous appeals to the authority gravy train activists and vested interests.
The man is beyond stupid and beneath contempt.
Thank you dor reading the Steve Jones “tosh”.
He revels in being a radio and TV personality, and a writer. Not a scientist in the sense of total focus on his subject.
Just the kind of “go-to” guy the BBC would choose to get “expert opinion” to close down debate on climate science.
HOW DARE HE compare the large number of AGW scientist-sceptics with the handful of nutters who objected to injections to save kiddies dying ? He is playing emotional twaddle.
HOW DARE HE condemn serious scientists who challenge AGW ?
HOW DARE HE attack Lord Lawson – who has never wrotten about the science, but who has merely challenged the economic lunacy of people like Lord Stern who want to strangle the economies of the free world.
I bet Steve Jones has not even read Nigel Lawson’s book.
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It is not clear yet if the BBC Trust has accepted the Steve Jones report. His biased report, his IGNORANT report.
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The more the BBC digs iteself into the global warming hole, the more the man-in-the-street can sdee BBC bias. If the BBC is seen as biased on one issue – people might recognise that it could well be biased on other issues.
Robin I have tried to keep the language and temper when dealing with true blood heaters but to be honest I just loose it with them now, either approach has problems like being calm and factual just gets the same repetitive reply’s I.E
Oil money /IPCC /Consensus/hottest since/you don’t have the right qualifications/BBC said it so must be true why would they lie?
So I save me time call them morons and find something better to do like this place or Bishop Hill but the down side is I have run out of morons!
Peter,
Exactly mate…the language used by Jones was completely and utterly inappropriate for such a, supposedly, professional publication. By labeling anyone who dares question the dogma of Mann Made Global Warming ™ as denialists immediately means he, and his report, have lost all credibility.
Even the uni grads at work understand that if you want to be taken seriously then you have to write seriously because the minute you start throwing insults around at people just because they dont agree with you is the minute you loose their attention.
Its a sad, sad day indeed that such language was allowed to be published by the BBC. Surely even they understand the problems with having left the report as it is. God help us though if the worst of Jones slander was removed in earlier edits though!
Mailman
Yes the loaded language is truely shocking. He uses the insulting “Denier” and “Denialist” seven times in the global warming section. Likening anyone who questions any alarmist claim to a holocaust deniers while misleadingly and deceitfully attempting to portray them as denying the obvious truth that Earth’s climate always has and always will change. Pathetic.
And look how he contemptuously dismisses Andrew Montford and Tony Newbery’s very polite, diligent and balanced submission on BBC Science Coverage. Prof Jones is quite clearly an extremely partisan left-wing hack. In what way could his diatribe against “deniers” possibly be considered as an impartial review of BBC science coverage? It stinks.