The BBC is relentless and continues to push the AGW agenda, in fact pushing it harder now that global warming has ‘stalled’ (and the BBC’s impartiality review of their coverage of climate is over)….can’t have anyone getting complacent and thinking it’s nothing to worry about children!
Once again they roll out the old trick of inviting someone on to be interviewed about their work knowing full well that the real intention is to get around to a particular subject.
‘Today’ frequently invited on guests, musicians, artists and writers, to talk about their work but it was rare to never that somehow the interview didn’t end up with a denunciation of George Bush and the war in Iraq.
In a similar vein the BBC frequently invite scientists onto the ‘Life Scientific’ to talk about their speciality only to end up with strongly worded support for the AGW lobby.
The latest programme was no different when the BBC invited scientist Mike Benton onto the ‘Life Scientific’ to talk about dinosaurs and all that but the whole programme seemed designed around that one theme…climate change.
Presenter Jim Al Khalili didn’t waste any time and made the introductions saying:
It’s a sobering thought that just a few degrees rise in global temperature led to mass extinction that wiped out nearly all life on the planet.
He later repeated this and ensured we got the message and then connected it to climate change today asking if it is a likely scenario that could be repeated if we don’t change our ways:
It sounds terrifying that just an initial few degrees rise in temperature can trigger further global changes that can lead to the wiping out of all life…is this something that we should be worried about with the current changes in our climate?
Did you get that? Just a few degrees in temperature rise and all life will be extinguished.
We’re on a knife edge and the slightest change in the level of CO2 and a resulting tiny rise in temperature will have a snowball effect (?) that could drive us over that edge..to extinction.
Something must be done!
Mike Benton, though a ‘dinosaur scientist’, seems more concerned with climate these days and seems to have reinvented himself as a climate change advocate:
Benton, M.J. Presidential Address 2007: The end-Permian mass extinction events on land in Russia. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association Volume 119, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 119-136
Conclusion: If the runaway greenhouse model is correct and explains perhaps the biggest crisis on Earth in the last 500 Ma, it is a model worth exploring further. It appears to represent a breakdown in global environmental mechanisms, where normal systems that would equilibrate atmospheric gases and temperatures took hundreds of thousands of years to come into play. Models for ancient extinction events affect the current debate about global warming and its possible medium-term consequences. Some scientists and politicians look to the sky for approaching asteroids that will wipe out humanity. Perhaps we should also consider how much global warming can be sustained and at what level the runaway greenhouse comes into play.
Clearly the Earth isn’t working properly, as both polar ice sheets are expanding. Could this failure to perform as the models predict be down to global warming?
Whilst the Antarctic ice sheet continues to break new records for extent:
“…Every day for the last 23 months, Antarctic sea ice area has been above normal. It is currently 13,100 Manhattans above normal. To put this in perspective, alarmists got hysterical last year about a perfectly normal glacier calving in Greenland – which was 2 Manhattans in size.”
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/twenty-three-consecutive-months-of-above-normal-antarctic-sea-ice/
…The Arctic ice recovery continues apace:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2415191/Global-cooling-Arctic-ice-caps-grows-60-global-warming-predictions.html
Hands up, how many of you reading this have seen the BBC breathlessly reporting these stunning facts about the rude health of both poles..?
Anyone..?
Just note that the actual volume of ice is down in the Arctic although the surface area has dramatically increased.
This may be due to the problems of recovering from the exceptionally low levels in 2012.
In the winter of 2012-2013 the ice sheets recovered substantially in size from the minimum – but the lack of depth increased the melting in Summer 2013.
We await the results of winter 2013-2014 with interest. No doubt the size of the sheets will recover – but will the volume?
Yes.
Bigger ice sheets = higher albido
Oceanic Thermal lag, the trend towards a mini Ice Age.
Perhaps they will claim that Mother Nature has employed Plan B.
I am totally on your side, but quoting the ill-informed Daily Mail in regard to these issues does not help our cause.
Ill-informed on many subjects the Daily Mail most certainly is, but is it in this case?
Not sure what cause ‘you’ feel part of, but the minute something is excluded simply on the basis of a generic prejudice as opposed to the ability to satisfy the demands of the task at hand, based on its substantial merits, is heading into hairy territory usually. That is more a Guardian or BBC irony-free trait.
So… the cited article: correct factually or not?
Le Sage – I don’t consider the truth “a cause” – truth is not a partisan point of view. The truth is all, a cause is nothing. Perhaps you consider the battle between good and evil a battle of equals? It is not.
The Daily Mail is behind the times and cautious about radical new Climate science evidence, but the BBC and the Guardian censor almost all of this science.
But their Enviro-MENTAL Journalists do prefer idiotic pseudo-scientific stories such as Dinosaur fart induced Global Warming.
They are not alone. According to a recent ‘New Scientist’ fatties are responsible for AGW too. Apparently the fatter you are the more CO2 you expel.
And no, I’m not joking.
On Question Time tonight we ask our panel of renewable energy firms hiding behind proxies, plus some loony from UKIP, should fat dinosaurs be subject to carbon tax?
It is a bit unfair to single out John Prescott like this but, what the hell; why not? Tax away!
Yes, better to quote the well-informed Guardian / BBBC on this issue – because the left-wing is always well-informed and the popularist/right wing is always ill-informed. Back to thought school, Sage!
“…Researchers have found evidence to suggest that climate change, rather than humans, was the main factor that drove the woolly mammoth to extinction.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24034954
Today carried this non-news/pro-CAGW item this morning; it’s a pointless story because apart from pushing the tired CAGW meme it serves no other useful purpose. The BBC admit that whilst natural climate change may have had something do with the eventual demise of the Woolly Mammoth, that same natural climate change probably also proved advantageous to the rise of humans – the article on the link above concludes that:
“…The pattern seems to fit forcing by natural climate change: any role of humans in the process has yet to be demonstrated”
Quite. I don’t recall the presence of SUV’s running around Northern Europe 20,000 years ago causing a world-ending CO2 ‘tipping point’. Oh, and The Royal Society (notorious self-serving pimps for the CAGW narrative) backs up it’s risible theories with, of course, a computer model which confirms it’s preferred view of events.
The BBC, naturally, take this and every opportunity to bang away on the CAGW drum – no matter that in this story there is no link at all to ‘man-made’ climate change. To the BBC all climate change is the same as CAGW – and all must be propagandised at every available opportunity.
Science be damned: The Holy Consensus will be served!
I like this bit
They found that the species nearly went extinct 120,000 years ago when the world warmed up for a while
‘A while’ here equals something something of the order of 15,000 years, and ‘warmed up’ equals temperatures in northern Greenland 5-8 degrees Celsius warmer than today. They’re not claiming any role for CO2 in this, so there’s no need to inform the reader that atmospheric CO2 probably fell within the range of 240-300 parts per million for the entire period.
Yep. Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble running around in their 4x4s….jetting of to Florida for their hols…centrally heated caves
They’ve got a lot to answer for.
The Red Indians hunted them to extinction about 10,000 years ago. Damn, there goes that job vacancy at New Broadcasting House.
One thing that the BBC fails to mention is the fact that 12,000 years ago the arctic ice sheet ended round about Oxford and that everything north of there was under about two miles of ice and that Islington, Bloomsbury and Highgate were a howling wilderness of tundra – with the tree line only starting in central France.
It was cold and it got warm and it got cold and it got warm again several times from the (temporary) retreat of the ice cap to today. All before any significant human population existed.
No sane person denies that the climate changes, but that the real issue is green fascists and governments using it as an excuse to radically change behaviour in one case and to extort taxes in the other – simply to buy electoral continuity. No one really gives a f**k about the cimate, the greens just want to stop people heating their houses and travelling in comfort (because that is “bad”)
The great and lamented Douglas Adams had it bang to rights with the tale of the Golgafrincham:
Golgafrincham is a red semi-desert planet that is home of the Great Circling Poets of Arium and a species of particularly inspiring lichen. Its people decided it was time to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population, and so the descendants of the Circling Poets concocted a story that their planet would shortly be destroyed in a great catastrophe. (It was apparently under threat from a “mutant star goat”). The useless third of the population (consisting of hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitisers and the like) were packed into the B-Ark, one of three purported giant Ark spaceships, and told that everyone else would follow shortly in the other two. The other two thirds of the population, of course, did not follow and “led full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone”.
Very nice allegory, anyone got a list of those who must go? Where to start I hear!
Any bellend with the word diversity in their job description
Anyone with “sustainability” in their job description. Do you want dinosaurs still roaming the earth? Should plague be “sustainable” in the interests of ensuring species diversity?
First people on the Ark should be the University academics whose cosy sinecure depends on issuing “warnings”
The woolly mammoth angle this morning is just beautiful. The implication being, of course, that if WE don’t do something about climate change, WE will become extinct.
Nice try, BBC, nice try.
I recommend a visit to the Bishop Hill site with a view to the debate on the revision of the Climate Change Act – very interesting. I agree with your comment, but the whole BBC attitude to science as being a Dara O’Brian joke fest is a problem alluded to recently in the media. Science is a serious business and the public on the whole understand it – 40% are graduates allegedly. I remember fondly the gravitas of Horizon of the 90s compared to the populist diatribe it has become. Apparently there was twitter literate joke at the end of Newsnight last evening – did not understand it, but I looked I up – sack Katz now.
It is no surprise to me that science has been downgraded on the BBC and elsewhere; this merely reflects the spirit of our age in Britain.
Science, at its best, is unemotional, detached and impartial, seeking truth based on evidence before all else, while remaining mindful of the possibility of conscious or unconscious bias among researchers.
BBC output, on the other hand, is often emotional, politically committed and biased, seeking to promote a utopia based on how a small elite think the world ought to be, and blind to the possibility of its own bias.
If you have any sort of blueprint for society based on prejudice or sentiment, science is unlikely to remain your friend for very long, because it will at some point demonstrate – or at least suggest – to you that you are wrong on some things.
Perhaps the easiest way to put it is to ask where you stand on the question, “Truth or kindness?” The BBC and socialist view is that kindness (at least as they define it) is more important than truth; but real science must deal with truth, however unpalatable to us. Once avenues of research are blocked off for reasons of sentimentality (or “kindness”) then science and truth suffer, and bad political decisions follow.
I believe that was a warning that Dr Jacob Bronowski made.
“…because it will at some point demonstrate – or at least suggest – to you that you are wrong on some things.”
Which for most normal, balanced, reasoning people is an opportunity to improve (and no shame in that, I say having been there).
But instead the Warmists get very angry when reality refuses to conform to their models, don’t they?
Because what else have they got if not their ideology?
And oodles of our money, I suppose…
… and our zombied scientific institutions (now degraded and politicised)
… mainstream science journals and peer review process (brought into disrepute)
… and our broadcast MSM (openly showing bias and ignorance)
… and the anti-science BBC (stating the ‘science is settled’)
… and our main political parties … and our trade unions… and the EU… and the UN and pretty much every public body sucking the life from the tax-payer.
And it just doesn’t seem to be doing them any good.
And so they increase the propaganda, more programmes with more celebrities, shouting the message louder at the naive trusting young.
– and still reality ignores them – denies them even.
I’d be smiling if they hadn’t so completely fucked over our civilisation while telling us how superior they were and how bad we are.
What a bunch of thieving shits.
Well spoken. Should be on the front page of every MSM news output tomorrow. Except news is now entertainment (What does Miley Cyrus think she’s wearing!?) or disinformation from SWP/ green pole climbing activists wormed into media jobs. Cut and paste latest Greenpeace release.
So non man-made climate change killed the mammoths?
An interesting idea. Assuming the ancestors of mammoths were around for dozens of millions of years before then and that we’ve had an ice age every 100k years or so it makes you wonder how previous generations of “mammoth-like” animals survived the climate change?
I am not endorsing any particular reason for why the mammoths died out (it may well have been humans) but blaming it on climate change alone doesn’t add up.
Winter is coming…
Not so many mammoths this year….
Don’t mention the Summer! As the facts don’t fit the agenda, the BBC decides to ignore them and run a deflecting story instead. This piece of propaganda focuses instead on the thinning of the Arctic ice during Winter, which apparently has reached a new low. Based on, er, three years data and the supposition that 30 years ago there was more, er, perhaps. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23964372
The only question you have to ask is why the BBC needs to have a climate change policy? Shouldn’t it be impartial?
You might as well ask why a school run by Catholics needs to have a policy on the catechism.
It’s starting to look as though the warming in the 80s and 90s was caused by natural variability and we’re now on the flip side and should expect cooling for a while on top of the last 15 years of ‘pause’. It’s all down to the Pacific Decedal Oscillation apparently.
Anyway the IPCC and Al Beeb will find it increasingly difficult to peddle their warmist fiction in the face of global cooling.
What you won’t hear reported on Al Beeb is that the IPCC is currently having a crisis meeting to edit the executive summary of the 5th assessment, due in October, because the governments funding it have demanded 1500 changes. They are not happy that it fails to account sufficiently for the last 15 years of no warming.
Another story Al Beeb chooses not to hear.
They do not want them to conveniently remove the pause, but to come up with a credible sounding reason why CAGW still exists in spite of it. To come up with complex psuedo scientific reasons that the masses will not be able to comprehend, for where all the heat energy has gone. The latest version is that it hid from the ARGO buoys as it decended to deeper than 700 meters in the oceans and it is hiding down there, ready to leap back with a vengence the moment we take our eyes off the ball. Yes, the latest climate threat is “sneaky heat” Heat that cannot be detected because it intelligently moves around avoiding detection. It hides in the stratosphere, avoiding satellite detection and it hides in the oceans. Somehow it does not avoid detection at land based measuring stations, if located on large areas of black tarmac near air conditioning heat outlets.
These anti-scientfic deniers of natural climate change need the current levels of warmth to be unprecedented to keep their gravy train running. It seems from the actual available evidence that this is not the case. There is nothing unusual about current global temperatures, which casts mankind’s CO2 as suspect into a much more questionable position.
What we should focus on is areas where there is no doubt about the impact that human polution is having on local and reagional scales. Sadly, the hysterical alarmism about CO2 puts so many people off ecology and environmental protection and environmental responsibility altogether, that the real danger to the planet and mankind, is that this false CO2 scare will prevent the correct and needed care of our local and regional environments around the world, leading to serious harm in years to come.
A problem in Astronomy was that the Earths average surface temperature was much higher during the days of the Dinosaurs, but Solar irradiance was weaker.
The paper (Unified Theory of Climate, Ned Nikolov & Karl Zeller, 2011) shows that the average surface temperature divided by the grey body temperature 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.
The solution is that this correlates with higher atmospheric pressure, or in other words a decrease in the Earths atmospheric pressure at the surface due to the Earths atmosphere being lost to space since the time of the Dinosaurs. This also resolves two other anomalies, which are how a dinosaur’s heart could pump blood 23 feet upwards and how a giant flying quetzalcoatlus had the energy to stay airborne, something that biology and aerodynamics says is not possible in today’s atmosphere. I have heard that the Atmospheric pressure must have been at least double and possibly as much as 5 bar.
So add, Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller to a list that includes Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin. Also add, Mike Benton to a list of useful idiots that includes BBC employees Jim Al Khalili and Michael Mosley.
O, I would like to add that CO2 levels increase after an increase in temperature, and that reality will not change. Cosmoclimatology produces the answers for increases in temperature.
Nigel Farage speaking the truth (with photographic evidence), and Mr. Barosso talking utter bollocks, as usual.
How soon can I cast a vote for Mr Farage? The next General Election just cannot come soon enough!
Thanks for posting the video – always a pleasure to see Mr Farage in full attack mode, especially on the subject of so-called ‘man-made’ climate change!
Brilliant, fearlessly outspoken in the face of the enemy, this is the man who should be sitting in Cameron’s place , speaking the truth to the Climatariat.
Great, thanks for posting, more is better.
According to Barroso, if Cameron doesn’t start showing more love to the EU, Farage will replace him. I couldn’t be more confused as this is the exact opposite of what the BBC tells me.
Maybe Barroso is trying to split the anti-EU vote so that the more people who vote UKIP will reduce the Tory vote?
In that case, it increases the chance of a (Pro-EU) Labour government.
Wasn’t he mostly worried about MEP elections, though?
Given that Mr Farage was showing photos of changes in Arctic ice coverage over a period of one year, that should have proved to Mr Barosso that Mr Farage is amongst the 99 percent who think that the Climate can Change. But Barosso seemed confused over this as he is about the existence of pro-EU UKIP supporters.
Poor old Barosso even got the alleged percentage wrong – it was supposed to be 97% (but we all know it wasn’t…).
What warming again?
Global warming? No, actually we’re cooling, claim scientists
A cold Arctic summer has led to a record increase in the ice cap, leading experts to predict a period of global cooling.
They’re probably all in the pay of Big Oil, right, BBC?
Colder temperatures and too much ice blocked a Warmist group from reaching their destination.
We had hoped to make it to Pond Inlet, Nunavut by early September but this has proven impossible. Severe weather conditions hindered our early progress and now ice chokes the passage ahead.
Our ice router Victor has been very clear in what lies ahead. He writes, “Just to give you the danger of ice situation at the eastern Arctic, Eef Willems of “Tooluka” (NED) pulled out of the game and returning to Greenland. At many Eastern places of NWP locals have not seen this type ice conditions. Residents of Resolute say 20 years have not seen anything like. Its, ice, ice and more ice. Larsen, Peel, Bellot, Regent and Barrow Strait are all choked. That is the only route to East. Already West Lancaster received -2C temperature expecting -7C on Tuesday with the snow.”
Richard Weber, my teammate to the South Pole in 2009 and without doubt the most accomplished polar skier alive today, is owner and operator of Arctic Watch on Cunningham Inlet at the northern end of Somerset Island. Arctic Watch faces out onto our proposed eastern route. Richard dropped me a note the other day advising: “This has been the coldest season with the most ice since we started Arctic Watch in 2000. Almost no whales. The NWPassage is still blocked with ice. Some of the bays still have not melted!”
How bizarre! Who could have imagined? Although I suppose we can blame the lack of whales on the Japanese and Republican intransigence or something.
North Pole Sees Unprecedented July Cold – Arctic Sees Shortest Summer On Record — ‘Normally the high Arctic has about 90 days above freezing. This year there was less than half that’
BBC: We’re all doomed, Capt. Mainwaring!
But the expedition members “know” that the Arctic is warming up really, because a few Eskimos told them. One had even spotted ravens where none had been seen before.
With shamanistic wisdom like this, who needs western science? Time for a documentary on first nation victim groups…
http://mainstreamlastfirst.com/and-the-trip-comes-to-an-end/
“Shamanistic wisdom”? For a minute there I thought you were talking about the output of all those BBC titled editors…..
BBC legal advice.
(1) In spring and summer, say that the Arctic is warming
(2) In Autumn and Winter, say nothing
Makes more sense than Al Gore…
Seeing the Beeb want to link the demise of the Woolly Mammoths to perfectly natural Climate Change, which has been occurring for as many hundreds of millennia as scientists can enquire into, it is also worth noting that the Earth has not yet fully recovered from the last set of Ice Ages. Prior to their onset the Earth was, without any assistance from even the most primitive forms of mankind, because none existed, warmer than it is currently and was warmer than even the most hysterical Warmist claims.
As for the assertions about previous climate changes causing mass extinctions, which of the five major mass extinction events would that be? The last one was caused by a massive object hitting the earth and the others have all been, as far as scientists can tell, been created by massive natural changes in the make up of the Earth’s surface such as the breakup of continents, massive continental sized volcanic eruptions or similar events on a scale that not only is it difficult to imagine but certainly far larger than humanity can, or ever will be, able to have any method of affecting. We cannot have the slightest effect on even small volcanic eruptions so we have no chance when it comes to Super Volcanoes, which are far larger than anything we have ever experience, and some past extinctions were caused by events of a scale even larger still.
The current concerns over extinction events has nothing to do with Climate Change at all but is caused by destruction of habitat which is a completely separate issue.
Surely any dedicated ‘dinosaur scientist’ would be at the TUC conference this week.
A counter to BBC warmist agitprop
http://ricochet.com/podcast-episode-popup/content/view/popup/810708
“Global warming is just HALF what we said: World’s top climate scientists admit computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong”
By David Rose.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2420783/Global-warming-just-HALF-said-Worlds-climate-scientists-admit-computers-got-effects-greenhouse-gases-wrong.html
‘MAIL ON SUNDAY’ COMMENT:
“These climate fanatics only cloud debate”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2420871/MAIL-ON-SUNDAY-COMMENT-These-climate-fanatics-cloud-debate.html