Jim Al-Khalili has shamelessly, shamefully, set aside his scientific principles and those of his newfound career in Journalism to bring us half an hour of climate change propaganda….not science at all…just pure, outright hard sell and ‘facts’ that would not look out of place on Press TV.
In The Life Scientific he interviews (and I say that advisedly as it is more a scripted ‘one-two’) Joanna Haigh who pushes the IPCC’s case and ‘explains how she deals with Deniers.’
Haigh is somewhat of a fanatic and one who refuses to countenance any doubts about her science…..she says she objects to calling people who have reservations about the causes of cliamte change ‘sceptics’…she prefers to label them ‘deniers’ because they apparently deny climate change is happening.
As far as I can see most ‘Deniers‘ in fact say climate change does occur….it always changes…the question they ask is ‘What causes that change?’.
Haigh tells us that the IPCC’s science is reviewed rigorously…the IPCC is not a consensus body of green lobbyists…and consensus is very hard to achieve.
She also tells us that the computer climate models are in fact very accurate and reliable…..input a few equations into a computer and there you go…..the climate predicted for the next one hundred years…’Amazing!’…it gives us faith in the future, allegedly. Simple really, how could anyone have ever doubted her and her kind.
She tells us that long range forecasts are more accurate than short term….I suppose that’s why the Met. Office stopped publishing its long term ones as they were continuously embarrassed by them.
Of course that is somewhat hard to prove…..a forecast for 100 years from now is more about that ‘faith’ she was spouting earlier than reality.
And of course it is difficult for the Public to know what to believe because of all those ‘Deniers’ blogging away distorting the science.
As for the 15 year or so standstill…well you know there are always going to be errors and a range of predictions….and the climate always varies but….the trend is upwards, ever upwards…no really.
All the signs are that we must do something radical.
Now that the last BBC review into its climate change coverage has been and gone it seems normal service has resumed….not a sceptic, sorry, denier, in sight or sound of a BBC studio as far as I can see.
Trash radio I’m afraid. Nothing more, nothing less. Utterly disgraceful. What has happened to Imperial College? Her junk would shame a benighted polytechnic!
As soon as I heard the term “deniers” I switched off. It’s a basic defence reaction, just as when I hear “Sandi Toksvig” or “Jeremy Hardy”, there are some things it’s just not worth wasting half an hour of your life on.
She has form here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/21/haigh-anxiety-a-psycho-comedy-of-errors/
and here:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/01/23/misleading-statements-prof-joanna-haigh-attempts-to-fool-telegraph-readers-about-boris-johnsons-climate-views/
well and truly ridiculed.
‘well and truly ridiculed.’
So the perfect choice by the BBC then, from all available.
If Mrs. Merton interviewed BBC science show producers; ‘What was it about the belief-worshipping, science-lite loop-de-loop that first attracted you to inviting them on the show?
We used to tease Imperial, but respected their academic standards.
If my kids got an offer from them now I’d be telling them to stay clear.
On the plus side, if you want to visit the V&A at the weekend, Imperial College’s car park is convenient and should be even easier to get into, if Imperial continues to confer professorships on muppets like Haigh.
Nice bit of secondary propaganda – “Jim” Al-Khalili sounds like “he might be a moslem, but he’s really one of us”. Looking forward to the life and times of Dave bin Laden.
Or George Qatada.
That’s William Q’tada surely?
And welcome to today’s Fuckwit award to Ian Hills. The fuckwit award is given to the daftest comment of the day by one of the trolls and socks and Ian’s utter pig ignorance makes him the clear winner.
Ian said
“Nice bit of secondary propaganda – “Jim” Al-Khalili sounds like “he might be a moslem, but he’s really one of us””
He is one of us. He’s a Christain as anyone with half a brain cell could discover. Only he hates religion and fuckwits as well.
Arise Sir Fuckwit
Wear your utter ignorance with pride.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Al-Khalili
Look at the bigger picture The King instead of picking out what suits you
Self-hating impotent white man (or “The King” to overcompensate) – I was clearly referring to the BBC’s choice of a presenter with a suitable name. Like Konnie Huq of Blue Peter?
Wikipedia notes his given name as Jameel, as as for his religion, quotes him as saying –
“as the son of a Protestant Christian mother and a Shia Muslim father, I have nevertheless ended up without a religious bone in my body”
As you linked to this entry, that half-brain cell you mentioned must be missing as well.
Congrats on your fuckwit award.
You earned it!
Read my original comment and then the explanation for fuckwits like you, if that won’t damage your half-brain cell too much.
Woody Ian cant have it because you have it in perpetuity for your mindless criticism of his comment. Typical no thought reaction
Ian Hill. Dave Bin Laden. I love it . superb!
bishop hill has blogged about this as well. he sums it up by saying
“Once again, the BBC has done a full-scale propaganda piece for the IPCC and the green movement. The spirit of the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme is alive and well within the corporation.”
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/8/27/a-life-propagandic.html
For an expose of the IPCC, Donna Laframboise’s book “The delinquent teenager …” is worth a read.
Delingpole in the Telegraph says it is time the BBC stopped using the word “Deniers” –
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100232735/time-for-the-bbc-to-ban-the-d-word/
He advises anyone who listens to this awful programme to have a sick-bag handy, and also a towel to wipe away all the drool.
One of the things that first drew the attention of mathematicians to chaotic systems was the failure of early attempts to computer model the weather. Because of computer stoppages (planned or unplanned) it was the practice to restart the model using the dumped data as the new starting point. It was found that the invariable rounding off or truncation of data introduced small errors so that different simulation runs using the same starting data and same program could produce different results. This came to be known as ‘The Butterfly Effect’, the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing could set off a hurricane on the other side of the world.
Knowing that weather/climate systems are chaotic it is laughable that anyone can come up with the statement that long term models are more accurate than short term ones. The best that one can hope for is that ‘reversion to the mean’ is taking place, i.e. if we wait long enough any positive excursions are balanced by sufficient negative excursions to get us back where we started.
The real benefit of long term forecasts to these charlatans is that a) public memory is short and b) they will be retired/dead before it can be shown by actuality that they are wrong.
And it was reported recently that many of the models produce different results on different machines, probably related to the handling of the rounding off of floating point operations.
Result!
Delingpole has written recently on the way the BBC conspicuously continue to use and promote the use of the pejorative word ‘denier’ in association with climate sceptics. This is a calculated, very deliberate choice on the part of the Corporation – a Corporation which would, one presumes, never for instance use the ‘n-word’ in connection with black people, nor would they describe homosexuals such as myself as ‘benders’ or ‘arse plumbers’ – but, strangely, it appears to be perfectly fine as far as the hateful Corporation is concerned to equate climate sceptics with Holocaust Denial – and to infer it again and again with never a moment’s hesitation.
This is the wickedness of the corrupt, preening ‘progressive’ Left; the sneering, toxic bile of those who set themselves up as our moral, intellectual and scientific arbiters – the self-congratulatory Marxist elite who consider themselves somehow immune from charges of insult or defamation when they publicly abuse those who refuse to buy into their propaganda and lies. These socialist belligerents consider they own the only version of ‘Truth’ – especially ‘Climate Truth’ (but by no means exclusively) and any who dare to dissent will be ruthlessly vilified, publicly ridiculed, humiliated and abused repeatedly. Stalin would be proud.
The BBC is a shameful, unprincipled, duplicitous vipers nest of CAGW zealots – they alone, on the advice of their common purpose chums in NGOs and advocacy organisations (far from the ‘experts’ the BBC likes to claim) are similarly signed-up to a politically-driven CAGW doctrine (which is itself an agenda for pan-European social change, nothing more, nothing less) and have decided amongst themselves what will and what will not henceforth be considered ‘truth’ in matters of so-called ‘man-made’ climate change.
Who will stop them? Who can stop them?
The BBC shouldn’t ban any words.
Haigh was discussing in particular why she uses that description. In that context its hard to avoid the word.
The BBC has indeed broadcast the ‘n-word’ many times. I can’t vouch for ‘bender’ or ‘arse plumber’ but I’d expect similar in comedy.
It seems to me, you are denying man made climate change. Seems accurate to me. I don’t equate that to mass murder.
I understand you ‘sceptics’ get a bit worked up, but to go from that to ‘The BBC is a shameful, unprincipled, duplicitous vipers nest of CAGW zealots’ might be a bit OTT?
“…might be a bit OTT?
Perhaps. I tend to get carried away into flowery prose when attempting to describe the iniquities of the BBC.
To address the rest of your post:
“…The BBC has indeed broadcast the ‘n-word’ many times. I can’t vouch for ‘bender’ or ‘arse plumber’ but I’d expect similar in comedy.”
In comedy, perhaps, but as you are fully aware that is not the context in which the BBC insists in using the word ‘denier’. They mean it in all seriousness – or are they just joking about their fixation with CAGW? Perhaps they’re just having a laugh..?
“…It seems to me, you are denying man made climate change. Seems accurate to me. I don’t equate that to mass murder.”
I am certainly not denying climate change and I doubt you’ll find too many climate sceptics who will – but I am very sceptical indeed about claims of ‘Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming’ (CAGW) – this hysterical invention is not the same as ‘climate change’ which, as the ice cores show us, is a totally natural phenomenon. When the world has not warmed in any significant way for over 16 years – according to all the approved scientific readings – it is a travesty for the BBC or any other organisation to be insisting otherwise.
When someone proves that man made climate change is a danger, maybe I will listen to them. At 62, all my adult life I have been bombarded with tales of the EcoApocalypse. None of the insane predictions of the likes of Hansen or Ehrlich have remotely come to pass. Why should I bother with yet another tedious reiteration of what is more a belief system than a science.
I feel your pain.
We are old enough, and long enough in the tooth to reflect on our own climatic experience during our lifetime, and watch the sad alarmism generated by ‘scientists’ and their sponsors, with their predictions of doom and gloom which never ever occur – if anything, the opposite seems to happen. Rather than back off, and go quiet for a while, they tend to continue to dig themselves into even deeper holes.
The sea levels have failed to inundate us, the temperature has failed to rise as they swore that it would, (despite the blame being put on to CO2, which has increased, with no ill effect), and have remained flat for 200 months, and are probably cooling off, and the Arctic ice, which was all supposed to have disappeared by the end of this summer, is still there (and increasing). Most of us know that the climate (and everything else on this planet) is largely driven by the sun, yet these “scientists” dismiss it, and insist that they’re right all the time, and we are loonies for questioning them. Funny how everything seems to occur in cycles, and they ignore that, too.
There is an agenda (involving the control and manipulation of humanity, using fear as a tool), and we are firmly in the Age of Stupid, aided and abetted by the BBC, who also, clearly, have an agenda.
Likewise I became bored with the disaster scenarios years ago. These attempts to scare us because of the latest disaster are beginning to ring hollow now.
Just as a brief selection of examples
Smoking. Lung cancer is a nasty way to die to be sure but considering the average life span of a smoker is only a few years below that of a non smoker (you die at 72 rather than 79)why all the fuss? After all its not like those extra 7 years are going to be your most healthy is it?
HIV. This nasty little killer is infecting around 70k people in the UK up from 30k in 2002. The biggest group of infected are men and heterosexuals have it more than gays. Yet condom sales have plummeted in the last few years, so shouldn’t HIV be increasing? Well it appears to be slowly levelling off. All that hue and cry in the 80’s and we’re talking about less than 1% of the country being infected 30 years later.
nVCJD. Another nasty killer the moral panic over which destroyed one of our internationally reknown industries. And for what? Since the introduction of legislation only a handful of people have died from prion infection (and consider – we now know that we can’t even be sure beef is not horse). Far more people die each year of necrotising fasciitis than from nVCJD – yet no-one is suggesting we destroy every rose bush in the country. The ‘scientists’ originally said nVCJD would show itself in a meat eater within 5 years, then 10, then 20 and now its 50 years. 50! How long before the incubation period is longer than the average life span?
Then there’s asbestos, e-coli, etc on and on and on. And we’re all still here, mostly.
The boy has cried wolf too often.
The Space Special Interest group of Mensa has calibrated man-made carbon dioxide warming for the 20th century to be about 0.007 Kelvin for the 100ppm or 0.1 millibar increase in CO2, using the “Unified Theory of Climate” which solves the problem of explaining the temperatures in all parts of the atmospheres of all the planets in the Solar System, including the Earth and the carbon dioxide atmospheres of Venus and Mars. An answer that was not possible with the Arrhenius method of calculating the Greenhouse effect, but I have just received information about a mistake, the two Oxygen atoms are taken from the atmosphere, so the latest calculation for man-made warming is 0.003 Kelvin
Nice try Woody the pecker but as we now know offence is in the mind of the offended so if one word can shock and disgust you but not me it doesn’t in this liberal war of words make that word OK for me to use! so there fore if you use a word I find offensive and disgusting then it isn’t OK for you to use it or excuse it’s use !
“to go from that to ‘The BBC is a shameful, unprincipled, duplicitous vipers nest of CAGW zealots’ might be a bit OTT? ”
Really? I’d day it was based on observed and widely reported facts.
As opposed to computer models, you understand….
I actually quite enjoy Mr Al-Khalili’s work when it relates to matters atomic (his own field of study) but of late he seems to have become a general purpose “media academic” and his work seems to suffer for it.
Incidentally my brother the lecturer worked with a colleague who became a similar media academic (not Mr Al-Khalili). It was all a novelty to start with but then as he spent more and more time on TV his academic work suffered , the fame went to his head and other academics started backstabbing. In the end the media work dried up , his research work had gone and he took early retirement.
I think that Joanna Haigh was appointed a Professor of Atmospheric Physics because she was the only candidate that showed no doubts about what she had learned as a student. A case of the worst candidate winning. Other candidates would have had doubts based on thermodynamics, and also the recent proof of negative feedback when positive feedback is essential for the Arrhenius method of calculating the Greenhouse effect. She is the only known Atmospheric Physicist that the BBC allows air time without being called a sceptic. Jim Al-Khalili is also a well known useful idiot, that is why he is employed by the BBC.
“Denying that the Climate changes“, did she really say that, well there you are then, you do not need to be a scientist to realise when you are more intelligent than a Professor of Atmospheric Physics.
The computer model predictions 10 years ago all predicted something that did not happen six miles up, that would usually be enough to abandon a scientific theory. I believe the Met Office still uses this fantasy science in long range weather forecasting, even though there is no known correlation with Carbon Dioxide in past records, other than with temperature causing the atmospheric CO2 levels to rise 800 years later, due to Oceanic thermal inertia and the overwhelming dominance of the mass of the Oceans.
The King,
Your own link says Jim Al Kalili is not a christian, but describes himself as an atheist.
Your own link also says his father is a muslim. Islamic law says if the father is a Muslim, then the child is a Muslim. So that makes him an apostate by his own description.