YOU CAN’T KEEP A GOOD MAN DOWN

 

 

And it seems you can’t keep Richard Black down either….I think we need a reminder of just how bad he was….and how ineffective the BBC is at policing what its own journalists get up to.

 

 
“It’s politics, not science,” Richard Muller told me by phone. “Politicians have been doing this kind of stuff for a long time – look at what Al Gore did with all his disinformation.
“Some start with their conclusion and they pick the data to find what they want. People should listen to scientists, not politicians or journalists.”

 

Certainly not ‘journalists’ like Richard Black….unfortunately others disagree:

As many have commented on here, Richard Black has resurfaced as the Director of Communications for the grandly titled ‘Global Ocean Commission’….launching today officially, with David Miliband being first out of the blocks with an interview on Today (08:20) ….Black was way ahead by pushing his new boss’s thoughts last week.
Richard Black ?@enviroblack
Political leaders need to catch up with business on #ocean issues, says @figuerescr http://www.efeverde.com/content/view/full/154760

It seems the GOC is where the men that once showed promise go to resurrect their careers.

A couple of questions….who funds the GOC and who exactly voted for them?   A ‘Commission’?  Who commissioned them?  What’s their authority?  They are essentially just a very well connected pressure group which undoubtedly will prove highly influential merely by virtue of being who they are.

One partner…and presumably funder, is the Pew Environment Group…an arm of the Pew Charitable Trusts.
The Pew Charitable Trust has total assets of over $5.3 billion…it spent a total of nearly $341 million last year…..on a variety of projects not just the environment.

Just thought it was worth mentioning that when Black and Co are always so eager to try and discredit sceptics by saying that ‘deniers’ are backed by enormous corporations….never mind that  massive charities, NGOs and pressure groups, not to mention the oil companies now,  back the global warming agenda with large wads of hard cash….as well as government funding of course.

That aside it is quite extraordinary that the GOC would employ Black…after all he has just about zero credibility, certainly with those who value the truth….even amongst the true believers there cannot be many who don’t raise a cynical smile when they hear Black’s name.

It was long apparent that the BBC’s Black was not a journalist but an out and out advocate for man made global warming theories….an advocate who was prepared to mislead readers and malign sceptics, happy to boldly misstate facts, ignore highly relevant  information that contradicted his narrative and use his position at the BBC to discredit  sceptics and make vast rambling attempts to disprove their criticisms…..so long and involved you had to believe this was a deliberate ploy to stop anyone actually doing their own research and checking what he himself claimed.

Here is a classic example of Black’s misrepresentation of what is happening in order to ‘prove’ his supposed point:

‘The original “hide the decline” claim is one of the most easily de-bunked in the entire pantheon of easily-debunkable “sceptic” claims.
Phil Jones wrote the email in 1999, immediately following what still ranks as one of the hottest years on record, and well before the idea of a “slowdown” or “hiatus” or even “decline” in warming gained currency.
So it can’t have had anything to do with hiding a global temperature decline.
If it were a scientific idea, the notion that it did would be consigned to the garbage bin of history alongside perpetual motion machines, the steady-state theory of the cosmos and the idea of HIV/Aids as a gay-only disease.

It’s that wrong.’

As Bishop Hill shows (see below) the sceptics did not make that claim about that particular  ‘hide the decline’ phrase….but the emails and later statements do show that Jones et al were prepared to hide the decline in global warming and other inconvenient information:

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Tim Johns <tim.johns@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, “Folland, Chris” <chris.folland@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: FW: Temperatures in 2009
Date: Mon Jan 5 16:18:xxx xxxx xxxx
Tim, Chris,
I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting
till about 2020.

 

Phil Jones, July 5, 2005:
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”

 

Phil Jones, director of the CRU, writing to Michael Mann, creator (le mot juste) of the now discredited “hockey stick” graph, about two academics who disagree with him:
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
Professor Mann on an academic journal foolish enough to publish dissenting views:
“Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”
Professor Jones’s reply:
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”
And you’ll be glad to hear they did!

 

Here is what Richard Muller, the supposed ‘sceptic AGW convert’ thought of the UEA‘s CRU crew:
‘What they did was, I think, shameful. And it was scientific malpractice. If they were licensed scientists, they should have to lose their licence.” ‘

 

So there you go…not only did Black misrepresent what sceptics said but he also sidestepped what Jones and Co were really doing….which was, em,  ‘hiding the decline’.

 

Here Bishop Hill examines and debunks in detail Black’s claim:

‘I’m struggling to put an innocent gloss on Black’s misrepresentation of what the allegation was. I can remember Sarah Palin making this claim a couple of days after the story broke, but did anyone make such an allegation to any of the inquiries? Perhaps readers could see how many people made the allegation as framed by Black and how many got it right – i.e that it was about hiding the divergence between instrumental temperatures and some proxy records.
The misrepresentation seems very blatant to me.
Update on Nov 2, 2011 by Bishop Hill
I’d also posted an update – something along these lines.
Richard Black responded:
Re ‘hide the decline’… yes, the Jones email concerned reconciling the tree ring record. But that’s not how it was interpreted – at least by some – which is my point. Read Fred Pearce The Climate Files.
Pearce cites Sarah Palin and Senator Inhofe. What Black seems to have done therefore is to find the least informed commenters he can lay his hands on and then say “one of the most easily de-bunked in the entire pantheon of easily-debunkable “sceptic” claims”
One can draw one’s conclusions about his journalistic standards accordingly.
Update on Nov 2, 2011 by Bishop Hill
Steve McIntyre has now added his thoughts in the comments:
Black’s article is especially misleading because David Rose, the author of the recent Mail article on Muller (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2055191/Scientists-said-climate-change-sceptics-proved-wrong-accused-hiding-truth-colleague.html ) had a very precise and accurate understanding of “hide the decline”, which he published in a Dec 2009 Mail article here
( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1235395/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-Climate-change-emails-row-deepens–Russians-admit-DID-send-them.html ).
Rose’s original article on Hide the Decline showed that IPCC had deleted the adverse portion of the Briffa reconstruction. The Climategate emails showed that this had been done intentionally so as not to “dilute the message” or “give fodder” to skeptics.

 

Black is clearly not impartial and aims all his effort at proving that global warming is happening and is caused by man… that sceptics are funded by evil corporations and are in some way mentally scarred and damaged individuals with no scientific qualifications…err…much like himself…. having no scientific quals.

 

 

Why is Richard Muller mentioned here?…because he was the man who claimed to have been a sceptic but became a believer…but the real truth was that he was never a sceptic….The BBC, probably Black, leapt on his ‘conversion’ as proof that AGW is real…even ‘expert’ sceptics renounce their scepticism in the face of the facts……

Ex-sceptic says climate change is down to humans

A formerly sceptical climate scientist says human activity is causing the Earth to warm, as a new study confirms earlier results on rising temperatures.
In a US newspaper opinion piece, Prof Richard Muller says: “Call me a converted sceptic.”
Prof Muller describes his own change in standpoint as “a total turnaround”.

A quick look on Google would have revealed this:
Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?
Oh yes. [Laughs.] In fact, back in the early ’80s, I resigned from the Sierra Club over the issue of global warming. At that time, they were opposing nuclear power. What I wrote them in my letter of resignation was that, if you oppose nuclear power, the U.S. will become much more heavily dependent on fossil fuels, and that this is a pollutant to the atmosphere that is very likely to lead to global warming.

 

Muller also set up the Berkeley Earth Project which measured surface temperatures around the Earth and  the results of which Black defended rigorously. in ‘Hide the Decline’

When looking at the results of that project, that temperatures are rising as a result of man made influences,  you might bare in mind that Muller, and his daughter run ‘Muller & Associates’...providing ‘Impartial Energy Expertise’

Muller is President and Chief Scientist of Muller & Associates, an international consulting group specializing in energy-related issues.
We know that in order to be effective, solutions must be sustainable
Power and Energy, Climate Change, Profitable Sustainability

Executive Leadership
Richard Muller, President and Chief Scientist
Elizabeth Muller, CEO

 

 

Naked Copenhagen
The numbers behind the OpEd
Richard A Muller

Conclusion
These scenarios suggest that even if the IPCC climate models are accurate, the Kyoto/Copenhagen approach (developed countries cut now; developing countries follow eventually) will not work.

What would work? The only clear hope would be a massive effort into making the energy use of the developing economies cleaner (more solar, wind, and nuclear) and more efficient. How can one achieve this? I suspect it would require much more intrusive cooperation between the developed world and the emerging one.

“If Al Gore reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion – which he does, but he’s very effective at it – then let him fly any plane he wants.” – Richard Muller, 2008