Apologies to Stuart Jeffries of the Guardian….the irony of that.
Just as famous film stars such as John Wayne, Noel Coward and James Stewart were recruited by government during WWII to ‘The Cause’ and used in propaganda films, sometimes whilst serving in the military, the BBC has mobilised its stars in the war against climate change ‘deniers’.
David Adam from the Guardian reveals the thinking that lies behind such decisions:….‘A short-term disaster is needed to guarantee coverage as people aren’t good at processing information about there being no ice at the poles in 30 years. Or get David Attenborough as the front man because everyone trusts him.’
In other words get a familiar, almost father-like figure, who is liked and trusted by the Public to ‘sell’ the idea of man made global warming….never mind the science…..use David Attenborough’s long established credibility, as a TV wildlife presenter, to beguile people into accepting this theory as fact.
The latest ‘honest, homely face’ to be mobilised by the BBC for the ‘frontline’ is Kate Humble, the bubbly, attractive and well liked presenter, probably best known for ‘Spring Watch’.
She is on our screens presenting ‘Orbit: Earth’s Extraordinary Journey’ along with the equally telegenic (No doubt a good reason for the BBC choosing a good looking scientist) Dr Helen Czerski as they ‘follow the Earth’s voyage around the sun for one complete orbit, to witness the astonishing consequences this journey has for us all. ‘
I haven’t seen the first episode, only catching this latest one, episode 2. It’s an hour long and you can watch for a long time unaware of any agenda…..they relate the way in which the Sun influences the planet’s weather.
You could be easily fooled into thinking…what? The BBC, so keen on man made global warming, is telling us how powerful the effect of the Sun is on the planet…..you can wait and wait and wait…and all you get is facts about the Earth’s orbit, the tilt of the Earth and the distance from the Sun of the Earth at different times of the year.
Forty minutes in and nothing on the radar really…but then you start to notice the trigger words and phrases slowly being slipped into the script….not a hint of ‘climate change’ though.
The scene is being set, the trap laid.
We get mentions of ice ages, tipping points and delicate balances as well as lags in warming and minute changes having devastating effects…not to mention sea levels rising….still no ‘climate change’.
Watch it and you will realise it has been carefully choreographed to bring you almost unawares to a certain point of credulity….it has primed you to be ready to accept their propaganda….you have been ‘groomed’ if you like….there should be a law against it….oh, there is…it demands the BBC be ‘impartial’. Never mind.
Part of the reason for this attention to the effect of the sun is paradoxically to persuade you that the sun has in fact no influence on global warming…or at least it has not been the main factor behind the recent rise in temperature over the last half century or so.
Climate change sceptics have long argued that the effect of the Sun is disregarded by the AGW advocates and that it plays a far larger part in global warming than is accepted by the ‘consensus’. The BBC here is slyly attempting to discount that effect whilst acknowledging that the Sun is a powerful force that, although effecting climate, its effects are now overwhelmed by man made causes.
So the mood music plays on and the programme rumbles on with Humble giving her bubbly best.
Finally the BBC makes its move and plonks Humble down in the Arctic. You know what is coming but she keeps you waiting, even saying the sea ice is growing just to tease the Sceptics some more…..then she strikes.
She informs us that the existence of sea ice is a testament to the complex responses of the planet to the Sun…..BUT…it is a delicate balance…..and no one is more aware of that than the people who live there.
This year, she tells us, has seen less sea ice than previous years….part of a trend over the whole of the Arctic, the area covered by sea ice shrinking signifcantly over the last twenty years.
Warmer winters mean the sea does not cool as normal…
…And, there is little doubt that the cause of the warmer winters is US.
Finally she got there…but she’s not finished yet….
You may think, she tells us, that global warming feels like a myth in Britain where we have had a string of cold winters but here on the frontline, in the Arctic, it’s a reality.
The Arctic will continue to warm over the next century and we will generate the kind of climate change created in the past by changes in the Earth’s orbit.
Brilliant…she ties it all together…all that innocuous science about the Earth’s orbit and the powerful effects of the sun on climate suddenly coalesce into an attack on the sceptical, almost using it as a blunt instrument to bludgeon them into acceptance of the alarmist’s scare mongering….not only that but she discounts the cold winters here…they don’t matter at all.
However, all that subtle build up was wasted really, certainly on me, the supposed rapier denouement being too blunt, too obvious in the end but no doubt a clever ploy, however let down by a clumsy finish, that may have frightened a few people to sign up to ‘The Cause’.
Fantastic that the BBC has such creative talent at its disposal who can sit down and actually craft a programme that is designed, not to inform and educate, but to persuade, gull or sucker, the viewer into believing a desired viewpoint.
The aim of the programme was not to give you information that could enable you to decide for yourself…it was solely a cynical exercise in manipulation, ‘manufacturing consensus’ if you like….telling you what to think not respecting your own views at all.
The BBC…producing propaganda worthy of any Stalinist regime.
Ironic really in a week when Orwell is the man of the hour so to speak.
Margaret Atwood in her herogram to Orwell in the Guardian earlier this month: “People who run counter to the current popular wisdom, who point out the uncomfortably obvious, are likely to be strenuously baa-ed at by herds of angry sheep.”
Not so much 2 + 2 = 5. More a case of 0 + 0 = 5 (degrees centigrade, that is).
Funny how they only ever talk about The Arctic. Well, not funny, really, just part of the well co-ordinated script the BBC has been honing since the 28gate meeting with its activist buddies. So here’s why they never mention the far bigger Antarctica:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/10/icesat-data-shows-mass-gains-of-the-antarctic-ice-sheet-exceed-losses/
And when it comes to The Arctic, Kate and her buddy might like a read of this inconvenient take on it:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/16/arctic-ice-refreezing-after-falling-short-of-2007/
‘The temperatures in the arctic have indeed risen in recent years and ice has declined, bottoming out in 2007 but it is not unprecedented nor unexpected. The arctic temperatures and arctic ice extent varies in a very predictable 60-70 year cycle that relates to ocean cycles which are likely driven by solar changes. It has nothing to do with CO2, showing poor correlation and since cold open arctic ice is a significant sink for atmospheric CO2 just as warm tropical waters are the primary source.’
As Anthony Watts says in this report “How would the media report this now?”.
USS Skate surfaces in open water near to the North Pole.
Shock, Horror – Call Al Gore.
The only problem is, the photos were taken in 1958!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/26/ice-at-the-north-pole-in-1958-not-so-thick/
Although there has been no global warming in the 21st Century. A Hale magnetic warming phase for the Arctic started in May 1996 and is predicted to end in 2026. The increase in cloud cover in the Arctic according to the CERES instrument on the Modis satellites has increase temperatures as clouds trap heat. This is because the Arctic has far more heat input than the Antarctic region, due to the jet stream.
This is caused by the Suns magnetic polarity changing every two solar cycles allowing an increase and decrease of cosmic rays as the Earths magnetic poles line up with the Galactic magnetic field. A positive north pole of the Sun leads to an open heliosphere where cosmic rays reach the Earth more easily. This oscillation causes the Earths weather at the poles to alternate between a cooling phase and a warming phase every two Solar cycles.
It is the reason why the ignorant warmists cherry pick the Arctic, it’s the last place left that has a warming phase before the predicted little ice age.
The fact that the Orwell Prize for political writing is presented by the pro-censorship Media Standards Trust – itself a branch of the BBC-linked Common Purpose – says it all. Ignorance is strength.
On that note…very good article…
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100197296/the-enemies-of-press-freedom-should-stop-handing-out-prizes-in-the-name-of-george-orwell/
“…Fantastic that the BBC has such creative talent at its disposal who can sit down and actually craft a programme that is designed, not to inform and educate, but to persuade, gull or sucker, the viewer into believing a desired viewpoint.”
Alan, this is how the BBC puts into action the net result of all that secretive conferencing with its climate, er, ‘experts’ (aka Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and many other assorted common purpose trolls). This is the mission plan. You can’t go swinging around a dirty great bat labelled ‘CAGW’ and bludgeon the proles into accepting the approved manifesto; no, far better to be subtle, to be sly; above all to be cross-platform and consistent across all delivery channels.
So with taxpayer money – all quaint concepts of ‘impartiality’ long since tossed recklessly aside – they wheel on ‘trusted’ personalities to read the well-rehearsed (and approved) line; they disseminate the pro-CAGW meme via a multitude of genres, infiltrate the agenda into every aspect of its broadcasting – but softly…softly. Make it look almost incidental, matter-of-fact. Don’t want to scare the horses, after all. Just keep it on message and never allow the critics to get a word in (unless they are immediately sneered at with dismissive appeals to authority and hollow invocations of the Holy Climate Consensus).
The BBC understand that if you can insist 2+2=5, and if you can just stay on message with that, in the end most people will grow too weary to fight against it.
Orwell wrote 1984 as warning. The BBC mistook it for an instruction manual.
‘The BBC understand that if you can insist 2+2=5, and if you can just stay on message with that, in the end most people will grow too weary to fight against it.’
Certainly true of BBC Complaints, that took swearing black was white to Director level before conceding they actually didn’t have a leg to stand on, and will never do it again, until the next time.
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/trust-upholds-complaint-against-bbc-news-over-inaccurate-tweet
‘No doubt a good reason for the BBC choosing a good looking scientist’
Always intrigued me why, in the wonderful world of ‘ism-sensitivities, from sex to race to age, that of being ‘easy-on-the-eye’ appears to get an FoI exclusion across the media estate.
Few lasses in my science and engineering years would have been described as comely, but despite many of my acquaintance being well qualified in knowledge and personality none seemed to have that ‘special something’ producers appear to prefer in those who present to the public.
Just another unique I guess.
QT panelists on the other hand…
“Orwell wrote 1984 as warning. The BBC mistook it for an instruction manual”…..Classis.
Oops….or maybe even…. ‘Classic’
I was listening to BBC Radio Scotland on Tuesday teatime when a climate scientist was being interviewed, mainly, I suspect, because the Scottish Government had, during the day, been pushing it’s fanatical renewable energy aims.
The climate scientist dared to point out that, whilst CO2 did have an effect on the climate that effect was nowhere near as great as had been suggested and that there was no need for panic measures as we had more time to make any necessary changes than was currently being insisted on.
The interviewer went into near hysteria, I thought he was going to collapse in shock but he recovered his position in true BBC fashion. “So you’re a DENIER!!”, he violently challenged. The scientist started to explain that he indeed accepted CO2 did have some effect of climate change. Realising the accusation the scientist was a so called “Denire”, with all the intended malicious political implications that accusation carries, was going to be rubbished, the interviewer rudely, as is the way of the BBC, interrupted to cut the scientist off with the altered accusation, “But you are a Man Made Climate Change Denier.”
At that point I lost interest completely having realised that there was no interest in what the scientist had to say, just the pushing of the BBC Climate Change Propaganda. Joseph Goebbels would be proud of the BBC’s Global Overheat propaganda outputif he werre still around.
I went to the BBC Radio Scotland website to try and listen to that but they don’t have it up. They do have an interview with Tony Benn who says “Well in 1928 when London was flooded, and our house was flooded, we moved up to Clydebank and we lived there for a year…”
No! He’s not telling me they had ‘weird weather’ in 1928, surely? And then I find they had ‘weird weather’ in London again 1947 . I think I need a lie down and a session with a BBC approved psychologist.
I think this is the interview that AL is referring to. In true biased fashion the Greenie never gets a difficult question.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/1/29/newsdrive.html
They are going on about “weird weather” in the 1953 Lincolnshire floods as well.
Well, that is why the BBC does not usually interview climate scientists, unless they are on the activist gravy train.
Other than some of their weather presenters, I do not think that a single documentary about the Climate on the BBC has been presented by a climate scientist.
Also I suppose that means that I am not a denier because I can explain why Planetary Atmospheric Physics can now calibrate 100ppm or 0.1 millibar of carbon dioxide warming in the Earths Atmosphere as producing a temperature increase of 0.007 Kelvin. Far too small to be detected.
The iterviewee was Anthony Montford (aka. Bishop Hill).
If it is too small to detect how do we know about it?
Because of the “Unified Theory of Climate” we can see that the greenhouse effect on the Earth is 133 Kelvin for 1000 millibars of pressure. Therefore for 100pmm of carbon dioxide to add 0.1 millibars of pressure would produce 1/10,000 x 133 Kelvin = 0.013 Kelvin. But the addition of 0.1 millibars would produce only around half this figure because of the Poisson formula curve.
This is proved by the average surface temperature divided by the grey body temperature, which gives you the magnitude of the thermal inertia which resembles the response of the temperature/potential temperature ratio to the altitudinal changes of pressure described by the Poisson formula, with predictions matching evidence for Venus, Earth, Mars, Europa, Titan and Triton, to prove that the physical nature of the so-called Greenhouse Effect is in fact a Pressure-induced Thermal Enhancement or Thermal Inertia which is independent of the atmospheric chemical composition.
I find it very curious when the BBC shows the globe with green top and bottom with a great swathe of desert in the middle. Is that really a true representation, as if the planet was uninhabital around 1000 miles each side of the equator?
I did enjoy a news item during this January’s winter freeze and snow storms. A convoy af extremly large lorries carrying very large wind turbines: which were unable to procede because of the bad weather. The BBC did not see the irony.
And the recent photograph of a wind turbine having fallen over in the gales.
You wonder how much metal “worth nicking” there is in a wind turbine? A lot of our metal infrastructure – from electricity cables to our front garden gates have been nicked. It would be a shame if anything were to happen to those windmills (hint hint).