As mentioned before climate change sceptics are pretty unwelcome at the BBC:

The Green Hush Strikes Again

 

Btu now is the time to be talking if ever there was one:

Climate change: the debate is about to change radically

The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due out next week. If the leaked draft is reflected in the published report, it will constitute the formal moving on of the debate from the past, futile focus upon “mitigation” to a new debate about resilience and adaptation.

So the mitigation deal has become this: Accept enormous inconvenience, placing authoritarian control into the hands of global agencies, at huge costs that in some cases exceed 17 times the benefits even on the Government’s own evaluation criteria, with a global cost of 2 per cent of GDP at the low end and the risk that the cost will be vastly greater, and do all of this for an entire century, and then maybe – just maybe – we might save between one and ten months of global GDP growth.

Can anyone seriously claim, with a straight face, that that should be regarded as an attractive deal or that the public is suffering from a psychological disorder if it resists mitigation policies?

 

The BBC has consistently painted the Sceptics as scientifically illiterate, ignorant bloggers, in the pay of Big Oil, or merely as loons….Roger Harrabin, Richard Black and now Matt McGrath have all contributed to that smear campaign.

In this recent article McGrath has a subtle attack on Sceptics whilst pretending to be seeking an accommodation with them….

Taking the war out of global warming

I once had a dream (or was it a dram?) in which the things we thought we knew for certain about the world were suddenly turned upside down.

In this strange universe, the cold war seemed to suddenly return, Ireland began to perform consistently at rugby, and arch-climate sceptics began to believe in dangerous levels of global warming.

 

So one thing we know for certain is that the world is threatened by dangerous levels of global warming in McGarth’s opinion.

He goes on, the main thrust of his piece, to misrepresent the views of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and its motivations……

Imagine my surprise then, on reading this new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

Here was one of the world’s foremost bastions of contrariness when it comes to man-made climate change, admitting that temperatures were actually rising in response to human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Huh? What about all that stuff we’ve heard in the past from those who refused to accept the science? That the whole thing was a warmist conspiracy, driven by out-of-work ex-communists?

Strangely, the GWPF are not highlighting this acknowledgement that man-made emissions are driving rapid changes in our climate, compared to the historical experience.

 

 

Note that link he provides…to a fringe blog:

COMMUNIST CLIMATEGATE

 

McGarth’s intention is purely to try and associate the GWPF with what McGrath would like you to think of as ‘right wing nuts’ and therefore lose any credibility…..

The key to the success of the GWPF is the trust and credibility that we have earned in the eyes of a growing number of policy makers, journalists and the interested public. In our relationship with our members, with MPs, the media and our wider readership, it is the most important quality that we have.

 

 

Then there’s this little dig:

So how has mainstream science reacted to a research paper that has not been peer reviewed, written by people who are not employed at mainstream scientific institutions, casting doubt on a central tenet of their work?

 

They can’t possibly be right because they’re not ‘mainstream’ can they?

 

McGrath finishes off with…..

It may not be a “peace in our time” moment but perhaps it might signal that the time is right for a new, more inclusive debate about climate change.

Dr Ed Hawkins, from the University of Reading, took encouragement from the fact that both the GWPF and the IPCC accepted that significant amounts of further warming were likely this century.

“If we broadly agree on this, the debate can crucially move on to what action is needed to deal with a warming planet,” he said.

Some light perhaps, amid all the heat.

 

 

So he suggests….as long as you think like us we can have a debate….it’s not a debate then is it?

 

Apart from that McGarth is a bit of a misleading little fellow.

The GWPF isn’t really about the science…it is about the policies that should be used to deal with whatever the science says.

• The GWPF does not have an official or shared view about the science of global warming – although we are of course aware that this issue is not yet settled.
• On climate science, our members and supporters cover a broad range of different views, from the IPCC position through agnosticism to outright scepticism.
• Our main focus is to analyse global warming policies and their economic and other implications. Our aim is to provide the most robust and reliable economic analysis and advice.
• We regard observational evidence and understanding the present as more important and more reliable than computer modelling or predicting the distant future.

This of course is why the BBC don’t like the GWPF:

Above all we seek to inform the media, politicians and the public, in a newsworthy way, on the subject in general and on the misinformation to which they are all too frequently being subjected at the present time.

 

You may have noted there has been a pretty vocal campaign against Nigel Lawson being ‘allowed’ to speak on the BBC and elsewhere….no coincidence then that McGrath joins in?

Note his description of the GWPF as...the world’s foremost bastions of contrariness....if you disagree with the BBC you are not basing that on science, reason or analysis…it’s ‘contrariness’.

 

 

Secondly McGarth misleads as to the content of the report:

A SENSITIVE MATTER      HOW THE IPCC BURIED EVIDENCE SHOWING GOOD NEWS ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING

 

Curious McGrath failed to mention the title, and therefore the whole thrust of the report as ‘sceptical’.

McGarth tries to claim that they now support his own views on climate change when in fact the report merely ‘reports’ what the IPCC say and doesn’t claim it is true or false…..purely stating that using IPCC figures a different scenario could be calculated….if you were to believe the IPCC’s figures such and such could happen…that is not endorsement of the man-made global warming theory…which is all it is as yet.

 

The third misrepresentation is that global warming, if it is happening is ‘man-made’.   Global warming may be happening, though on pause now, but there is no proof that it is man made.

Therefore, back to the Telegraph’s reasoning, you need to talk more about adaption than mitigation as there may in fact be nothing to mitigate, or, your mitigation efforts are useless anyway even if man is the cause of global warming….so why waste massive amounts of money on them?

 

Still nice to see the BBC being as fair and reasonable, and scientific, as usual.

Almost as if Richard Black never left.