The IPCC’s study into deaths in police custody in England and Wales between 1998 and 2010 shows:

Those who died in custody were mostly white (75%), male (90%) and aged between 25 and 44.

An invitation to Mark Duggan’s aunt from the BBC’s Nicky Campbell:

‘I’m going to give you two minutes to be open and honest about the cancer in our society…say honestly from the heart what you want to say….say anything you want.’    

There are some dangerous myths being propagated in some communities….one is that radicalisation is caused by ‘western’ foreign policy……today we hear the excuses for Black radicalisation….Black youths are more likely to die in police custody than any other segment of the population, and that police community relations are failing because of police actions such as stop and search.

I have heard these mentioned again and again today but not a word of dissent from the BBC, as with Muslim callers or commentators who suggest foreign policy causes radicalisation the BBC seems unable to challenge anyone who wraps themselves in their flag of convenience….that being their race or religion.

There is no mention of the real figures of deaths in custody nor the reasons for stop and search..no look at the numbers of black youths killed by other black youths, no looking at Trident in relation to all this.

The narrative does seem to go just one way…the police are to blame for all the problems….they don’t understand the community, they don’t communicate with them and they persecute them.

No thought that maybe the Black community brings it upon themselves….or rather a segment of the black community brings it upon the whole….all to be taken advantage of by the race hustlers.

Having caught quite a bit of the BBC’s coverage of the response to the Duggan verdict I can only conclude that the BBC would be quietly sympathetic to anyone who decided the best reaction would be to riot, burn down homes and businesses, and if innocent people are killed, then so be it….that’s the price of injustice when Democracy fails you and injustice stalks the streets.

David Cameron said that ‘the judicial process has to be respected.’

The BBC’s response was to say bollocks to that, asking instead….’Should the police guidance on the use of lethal force be changed?’

That question from the BBC tells you a lot about their thinking.  It immediately suggests that though a jury has found the shooting legal the BBC believes that the police guidelines on the use of lethal force are wrong…and therefore the verdict, based upon those guidelines, is wrong….and therefore…

The killing was unjustified…in other words the BBC are suggesting Duggan was murdered by the police.

Just a coincidence that the BBC’s  broadcast this by their tame Black activist, Alvin Hall, on the day after the verdict is given:

Sugar is apparently:

Toxic and detrimental to society…in fact it is worse than tobacco as tobacco isn’t introduced into food.

The BBC tells us that:

Nearly two thirds of people in the UK are overweight or obese – leading to other health problems such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Really?  You have to ask firstly is that true?  Not sure I believe the figure….looking around most people look pretty average to me.  Secondly who sets the parameters to make that judgement…how do you define ‘obese’?

Of course there are official guidelines, but you kind of suspect that many people so categorised would not accept the label…and would say if this is ‘fat’ then I’m quite happy being ‘fat’…so get lost!

The BBC have been banging on all day about this ‘major’ news story….a bunch of arrogant, not to say verging on fascist, doctors have yet again decided to dictate what we can and can’t eat ‘for our own good’.

There doesn’t seem much of a challenge to their claims from the BBC….this report is wholly from the doctor’s point of view save for the inset interview clip.

Campaigners vow to cut sugar in food

There is no balancing view in the report to put any other side to the argument….unlike the Telegraph which puts both sides:

Dr Victoria Burley, a senior lecturer in Nutrional Epidemiology at Leeds University, said the group’s claims were alarmist and misleading.

She said: “It is nuts to claim that sugar is as dangerous as alcohol. It’s total hyperbole, quite crazy.”

Here is some more of that hyperbole from the campaigners:

Action on Sugar says children are a particularly vulnerable group who are targeted by marketers of calorie-dense snacks and sugar-sweetened soft drinks.

Professor Simon Capewell said: ”Sugar is the new tobacco. Everywhere, sugary drinks and junk foods are now pressed on unsuspecting parents and children by a cynical industry focussed on profit not health.

That’s just rubbish….fizzy drinks, sweets, biscuits, crisps and whatever were all around in my youth and I wolfed them down as much as anyone when I could…..thing is I was limited in the amount I could eat……and was far from being anywhere near obese….conclusion…it’s not the amount of sugar in the products it’s how much of those products you eat…eat too much lettuce and you will also suffer problems.

As to ‘pressed on unsuspecting parents and children’….well as above..the same foods were available when I was young and yet my parents managed to avoid having cynical industrial types peddle their wares to them ‘unsuspected’ fleecing them for sugarcoated profits.

The doctors seem to think everyone else are stupid and ignorant, and incapable of making their own informed decisions about the food they eat…..and the BBC doesn’t seem to be disabusing the doctors of that opinion.

Listen to the tone when they do bring on an industry spokesman…it’s entirely negative and suspicious of the capitalist exploiters of children.

Shame that once again a fanatical pressure group gets given so much credibility and airtime by the BBC without a proper challenge to their claims.

Mark Mardell is enjoying saying this:

This scandal is hugely damaging – if not yet fatal – for Christie’s ambitions to be the Republican contender for president in 2016”

about this:

Chris Christie apologises for bridge-gridlock scandal

On 9 September, two of three traffic lanes to the George Washington Bridge, which connects New Jersey to Manhattan, were shut for several days.

Emails and texts made public on Wednesday appear to link Ms Kelly to the move.

The move caused traffic chaos in the New Jersey borough of Fort Lee, whose Democratic mayor had declined to back Mr Christie in last autumn’s gubernatorial election.

Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich said the alleged skulduggery was “appalling”….”It’s the example of the pettiest and most venomous side of politics,” he told the Bergen Record newspaper.

No such concerns about ‘petty, venomous politics’ when Labour opened the borders and imported millions of immigrants purely to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’.

Nor indeed any such concerns bout Ken Livingstone’s ‘traffic management schemes’ which deliberately jammed the traffic to give him an excuse to introduce congestion charges:

Hundreds of sets of traffic lights at some of London’s busiest junctions are being secretly altered to increase the time motorists have to wait, according to The Independent on Sunday (p5).

The changes affect as many as 300 traffic lights. After months of suspicion, the body in charge of traffic lights, Transport for London, has now admitted that many have had their red phases increased and the green phase reduced.

Motoring groups say London mayor Ken Livingstone has intentionally created traffic chaos now in order to make his congestion charging scheme more popular when it is introduced in nine months time.

Just how many ambulances and police response vehicles were delayed by Ken’s little games?

Joan Bakewell tells us politicians won’t win against the comics….

Something the BBC knows and employs to great effect on its comedy programmes:

It is an unwise man who picks a quarrel with comics. They may not be right; indeed, you may be. But they have the jokes. And that means laughter and the warm regard of the public.

However…

Perhaps politics is now seen by the public as so discredited that it’s time to bring on the clowns. In which case, more than a few will be in for a shock. Running the country is no laughing matter.

The census clearly shows that the decade preceding 2011 saw the greatest rise in the population in England and Wales in any 10-year period since census taking began growing by 3.7 million or 7.1 per cent. Some 55 per cent of this growth is due to immigration, immigration that primarily occurred under New Labour’s watch.

Interesting that the BBC has filled the airwaves all day with talk of immigration….based on Nick Robinson’s programme ‘The Truth about immigration’. and filled the right wing newspapers with his interviews…..shouldn’t all these debates be after the programme has aired….or is it all just the usual BBC trick of having a ‘news’ item which is actually no more than an extended advert for a TV programme?

Curiously, despite Nicky Campbell admitting this morning that ‘Immigration is of massive consequence to people’...and that nearly 80% of people want it reduced,  the programme is not (yet) on the ‘Featured’ section of the iPlayer, nor is it in the ‘Most Popular’, in fact I had to use the search facility to bring the programme up at all.

Campbell’s ‘Your Call’ this morning was based upon Robinson’s programme….and wanted your views and experiences of immigration.

The accepted orthodoxy of the programme was that immigration was good….we were constantly told that ‘studies show that immigrants have a beneficial effect upon the economy’….there was no examination of this, it was just taken as fact.

‘As a fact economists tell us that overall immigration makes us richer.’

And yet that just isn’t true…..

Limit immigration, warns House of Lords

The number of immigrants entering Britain should be capped, an influential House of Lords committee has warned.

Its analysis concludes that record levels of immigration are bringing no economic benefit to the country.

The overall conclusion from existing evidence is that immigration has very small impacts on GDP per capita, whether these impacts are positive or negative. This conclusion is in line with findings of studies of the economic impacts of immigration in other countries including the US.”

Even those studies that do show a benefit admit that the ‘impact is small…..positive, albeit small’

So no, not ‘all studies show immigration is economically beneficial’

The BBC gives the impression by not balancing any such benefit against the downsides, that the benefits are large scale.

Campbell brought on an academic whom Campbell assured us was strictly neutral and unaligned…well, no…he had a very definite bias…pro immigration.

He told us that immigration benefits us by £45 billion per annum….but oddly didn’t mention any costs….so the figure of £45 billion is just pure propaganda.

When a caller suggested that immigrants undercut wages and cost jobs his response was….‘of course it’s difficult but we live in a global economy’.

There is a stark contrast between what the academics and the likes of Campbell tell us and what the ‘man on the street’ who has to live day to day with the effects of mass immigration is saying.

Again and again callers told us that they’d lost out, either with very much lower wages or no jobs at all…never mind housing and access to schools and the NHS and the myriad of other problems immigrants bring but which are ignored by the BBC and Co.

The BBC’s line has been a constant mantra on all its programmes and news bulletins today that immigration is economically beneficial and that to limit immigration will therefore damage the ‘already fragile economy’ as Sheila Fogarty claimed…but the flip side, the negative effects of immigration just aren’t mentioned….or indeed whether those ‘benefits’ actually exist.

The very minimal, if any, benefits of immigration, are being hyped by the BBC whilst completely ignoring the social impacts and the damage to quality of life….which is in contrast to the BBC’s normal stance in which it denounces capitalism, money making, materialism and consumption and promotes as the better alternative, quality of life and the environment…hug a hoodie and a polar bear.

Campbell’s tone when talking to the different callers was markedly different….the pro-immigration callers had a much warmer reception… Campbell telling one he looked forward to hearing from him again.

Campbell had some interesting comments of his own to make which might inform us of his own leanings.

When a caller spoke of the ‘indigenous population’ Campbell asked:

‘What do you mean by indigenous population, we’ve had waves of immigration for years and years now?’

In other words…Campbell thinks there is no such thing as an ‘indigenous population’.

At odds to that po-immigration campaigners always tell us that the ‘indigenous population’ has nothing to worry about….there is no mass immigration…numbers have been exaggerated…it’s only say 13% of the population who are immigrants.

So…that would mean 87% are ‘indigenous’ based on that figure.

He went on to say ‘Public opinion is very incendiary on this,’

So the near 80% of people who want immigration controlled and brought down have an ‘incendiary’ view in Campbell’s opinion?

Sheila Fogarty also based her programme on immigration.

Here once again the BBC repeated the mantra…‘all studies show immigration is economically beneficial’…without quantifying exactly how much…or indeed questioning that at all.

However the two ‘expert’ speakers who were brought on both stated that the economic benefits were ‘small’….but such qualifications never made it to the news bulletins.

Here is the blurb from the programme which gives us a insight into the BC’s own view…which you can always judge by what it highlights:

A BBC survey suggests fewer people than ever think immigration damages the economy.

Depends of course who you ask…..ask someone who has a cheap plumber or nanny and they might think it’s great, ask someone with no job or a job on wages forced ever lower by cheap imported labour and the answer may well be different…but again that all ignores the social impact and the quality of life issues.

Fogarty had on Jenny Phillimore, Professor of Migration and Superdiversity from the University of Birmingham, Institute for Research into Superdiversity…supposedly another of these ‘neutral’ academics…but she was far from that…more like a campaigner than a impartial observer.

The real migration scandal in the UK are the people forced to live without any recourse to public funds. Migrant women who leave violent husbands, and women who have been trafficked into the UK to work in the sex industry, face the additional trauma of destitution, says Jenny Phillimore

Should an academic also be a campaigner? Can you then trust their research?

There are plenty of social scientists, says Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, who never produce research results at odds with their own worldview.

“You’re just supposed to tell your peers what you found,” says John Leo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “I don’t expect academics to fret about these matters.”

Phillimore though does ‘fret‘ about her findings…and works to provide a solution to the problems as she perceives them to be.

She is fairly arrogant and patronising.

Phillimore thinks the problem is not the immigrants, diversity is just something you need to get used to.

The problem is people in areas which haven’t experienced mass immigration before and where there isn’t much diversity now

They are clearly stuck in their ways with their old prejudices…they are far too used to a stable society….unlike those say in Brimingham where they all happily mix together and happily welcome new immigrants because they are such a diverse society already….allegedly…funny how it is always the inner cities that ‘burn’ when racial tensions kick off.

Even Phillimore admits herself that previous immigrant populations don’t like immigration:

#btrcelebration Phil Ware. Few established BME groups are adapting to address needs of new communities

— Jenny phillimore (@japhillimore) July 5, 2013

In other words her claim that societies with lots of immigrants are more welcoming to yet more immigration is false…a lie in fact.

And what of a ‘stable society‘?…isn’t that a telling remark?…immigration brings instability then…the ‘superdiversity’ means no one has any identity, no one trusts anyone, no one knows anybody…and society breaks up…as studies show.

The downside of diversity

A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?

The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

Phillimore goes on…the main problem is the ongoing negative rhetoric about immigration…..there are not anywhere near as many immigrants in this country as people think she claims.

In other words…shut up..you’re not allowed to talk about immigration.

Who then pops up on Fogarty’s show but one ‘Phil Mackie’ (around 13:10)…the BBC’s very pro-immigration journo…yes, another one to add to the long list.

Curiously his analysis was exactly the same as Jenny Phillimore’s…curious indeed…yes, it’s those ignorant rural hillbillies who are the racists….what they need is a few more black faces around to make them realise that they have nothing to fear and that a massive wave of immigrants is just the thing to improve their lives.

Here Phillimore admits there are problems…just that the solution is not to limit immigration but to ‘deal with it’…..keep the borders open but build more houses, schools hospitals, prisons, cough up more welfare payments, build more roads, concrete over the green and pleasant land….it’s not the number of immigrants that is the problem it’s the lack of help they receive from government and the attitudes of the ‘indigenous population’…should such a thing exist….

Time for change

In this era of superdiversity in the UK it is time for a housing and migration change of plan, says Jenny Phillimore

The census clearly shows that the decade preceding 2011 saw the greatest rise in the population in England and Wales in any 10-year period since census taking began growing by 3.7 million or 7.1 per cent. Some 55 per cent of this growth is due to immigration, immigration that primarily occurred under New Labour’s watch.

There is evidence that in some areas heavy concentrations of new migrants have restricted the availability of entry level housing, led to the development of unregulated HMOs, and pushed rents and house prices up. It is also clear that some landlords have been quick to cash-in on migrant housing demand by inflating rents, overcrowding properties, and neglecting fire safety and routine maintenance.

Some rural areas have also seen extensive changes. Rural Lincolnshire has seen some of the largest rises in the numbers of migrants of all of the UK with increases outstripping those in London and other cities. Again these increases do impact on house prices while lack of housing availability contributes to an explosion in the use of non-standard accommodation with migrants sometimes living and working in sheds and greenhouses or crammed into caravans and mobile homes. Migrants are often the victims of these problems rather than the cause but the net result is increased population density and a deteriorating environment and housing stock.

Much of the emphasis [from politicians] is upon greater controls and limits, strong action against ‘illegal’ migration and short and long-term action on intra-EU migration – the latter a clear attempt to pander to UKIP voters.Cooper fails to acknowledge that not only has the UK already become a country of immigration but, like the rest of the EU, we have entered an era of superdiversity where we have already witnessed unprecedented global movement and increase in diversity.

Movement and change are the new norms.  While we might want to slow these movements down by strengthening our borders we cannot turn back the clock.

“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” -Noam Chomsky

Chomsky also said this:
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Was there ever more proof of that statement than this headline in the Independent from Yasmin Alibhai Brown (via Is the BBC biased):

Nick Robinson is wrong. On immigration, the BBC has a duty to moderate our national conversation

When doors are opened to neo-jingoists, broadcasters must ensure fairness

What exactly does she mean by that….that the BBC should regulate our debate, define what can and can’t be said, define what is ‘acceptable’ not just the language but the ideas as well?

What the BBC does have is a duty to have the debate in the first place…something which it steadfastly refused to do for decades…and even now as it bows to pressure, it applies the measures Chomsky so accurately spelt out above, thus in effect closing down the supposed debate whilst giving the appearance of having one.

Alibhai Brown goes on:
Mr Robinson is presenting a programme on BBC2 this week showing the scale of public concern about immigration. Instead of being an objective conduit, he has, in a jingoistic, right-wing newspaper, slammed the BBC for censoring anti-immigrant opinions – a big lie.

As an immigrant I feel slandered by the caustic populism now flaunted by respectable intellectuals and politicians.

Well she can’t actually have read what Robinson wrote nor heard what he has been saying in interviews on the radio….if she had she might realise he is plugging the case for immigration….based on the economics.

Unsure why she should feel ‘slandered’ by a debate about immigration….after all in her position as a semi practising Muslim she has employed very extreme rhetoric to denounce Muslims who do want to fully practise what are the fundamentals of their, and her, religion…..not  just once, or twice but again and again.

This particular quote from her is all the sweeter considering she is trying to shut down all debate on immigration:

Our national broadcasters are not noble exemplars of Voltaire’s dictum: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I‘ll defend to the death your right to say it.” They are motivated by mischief. As Labour MP John Spellar said when condemning the interview: “It makes good radio.”

Followed by this:
And finally, we need reliable facts on how Wahhabism – Dark-Age Islam, funded by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States – has infiltrated Britain, especially in educational and religious institutions. Imagine China trying to disseminate Maoism in the UK, in a veiled, but planned and systemic way. There would, quite rightly, be an uproar. But because of oil dependency, Saudi Arabia et al are free to do just that and are protected by our cowardly state.
Unless there is a serious, concerted  effort to tackle these three evils, there will for sure be more savagery. Politicians and the media still don’t get it and don’t want to.

And this:
White liberals from left to right need to grow up.

Perhaps a certain ‘brown’ liberal Muslim ought to grow up as well.

And not forgetting this:
I could never have imagined, nine years on, that the Taliban
would be claiming to have ‘won the war’ in Afghanistan. Or, much worse, that our
politicians and Muslim ‘leaders’ here would allow their twisted ideology to
spread across Britain. Make no mistake, Taliban devotees are in our schools,
playgrounds, homes, mosques, political parties, public service, private firms
and universities. And if we are to have any hope of combating them, we need to
stop this attitude of appeasement and understand why so many Muslims are
attracted to the most punishing forms of belief, suppressing women and children.

Liberals tolerate the intolerable because they don’t have
to live with the consequences. Yet the problem is in part caused by liberal
Values.

To me, [their] hands-off approach makes no sense. Why are we fighting the Taliban in
Afghanistan and indulging Taliban values here? Even if it offends liberal
principles, the powerful must find a way of stopping Islamicists from
promulgating their distorted creed. If they don’t, the future is bleak for
Muslims and the country.

Some immigrants, along with their practises, are obviously ‘good immigrants’, some are obviously ‘bad immigrants’ in Alibhai Brown’s world.

Hope they don’t feel ‘slandered’.

A classic example of the so-called right wing bias of the BBC…. someone on the Left calling the BBC right wing because it apparently doesn’t agree with their world view….even though it actually does….and in the so-called debate ensures that that view predominates…..two classic examples arising today on Nicky Campbell’s show and later a repeat performance on Sheila Fogarty’s….the BBC’s mantra, repeated ad nauseum….‘studies show immigrants bring positive benefits to the economy.’

But it is interesting that Alibhai Brown thinks we shouldn’t even have the debate.

Extreme weather is a new phenomenon isn’t it?

In January of 1953, unusual weather conditions caused Britain’s worst national peacetime disaster of the 20th century. A storm surge flooded the eastern coast of England, killing more than 300 people and leaving thousands homeless. Fifty years later, ‘Timewatch’ re-examines a calamity which is largely forgotten today.

The 1953 storm, according to Ewen McCallum from the Met Office, is:

‘A very natural event…a typical winter storm…the Pole in the Northern latitude is very cold and there’s still some very warm tropical air further south and when the two air streams come together we get a tremendous energy bang…it’s  nature’s way of trying to equalise out the heat ….a very natural event, a very powerful event.’

And if you think it’s just a 20th Century occurrence possibly linked to global warming think again:

The (1st) Grote Mandrenke was a massive southwesterly Atlantic gale (see also European windstorm) which swept across England, the Netherlands, northern Germany, and Schleswig around 16 January 1362, causing at minimum 25,000 deaths.

Harrabin admitted he was a climate change campaigner:

I have spent much of the last two decades of my journalistic life warning about the potential dangers of climate change.

…bearing in mind his personal beliefs you can only admire his self control and determination to downplay his excitement at this from a few years back:

The business of going green
A small but influential group of CEOs are stepping up to face the climate change challenge. Roger Harrabin reports

It was a story many environmental activists could only have dreamed about a few years ago: top business leaders worry about climate change at World Economic Forum.

So what brought about this turn of events? The hardening of climate science was a factor, like the increasing acceptance of climate as an economic risk. But this revolution did not just happen? the CEOs have been led by a few key individuals whose names may one day be written in the annals of climate policy (if the mainstream scientists are proved right).

The green bandwagon

Thanks to the climate of opinion informed by leaders like these, the green bandwagon is rolling – Marks & Spencer and Tesco have amazed environmentalists by promising to join HSBC Bank in the carbon neutral club.

The ‘annals of climate policy’ eh….Harrabin will be up there with them…alongside his mate at the CMEP, climate activist Dr Joe Smith…

For over a decade (1996 – present) I have designed and facilitated strategic level seminars aimed at improving coverage of complex environment and development issues, working with the BBC and other partners. This work has been devised and implemented in partnership with the BBC’s Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin….In the tradition of action research my findings are feeding directly back into decision-making within media and related organisations.

In other words he pumped out climate change propaganda….essentially Harrabin and Smith were trying to work out how to force a sceptical public to believe in climate change….’the role of broadcast news media decisionmakers in shaping public understanding and debate of climate change risks. ‘

But let’s not forget all the close contacts Harrabin has with the University of East Anglia…and the Tyndall Centre:

BBC’s Mr Climate Change and £15,000 grants from university rocked by global warning scandal

Look at this headline from January 2013:

US 2012 heat record ‘partly due to climate change’

And this from 2012:

The last year in the continental US has been the country’s hottest since modern record-keeping began in 1895, say government scientists.

One of the agency’s weather experts suggested climate change was playing a role in the hot temperatures.

However the BBC had to qualify the claim with this spoiler:

However, it was still only the 14th hottest June on record – the hottest being June 1933, during the Dust Bowl period.

So…em…what caused that record heat then in 1933?

But now look at this report:

N America weather: Polar vortex brings record temperatures

Not a single mention of climate change as the whole of North America is engulfed in icy ‘weather’….that’s ‘weather’…not ‘climate change’:

Harrabin gets the hump with Bishop Hill on Twitter as he questions Harrabin’s curious lack of interest in the EXTREME cold weather in the US:

Scientists confirm 2013 as #Australia's hottest year. Follows 2012 as USA's hottest. Oz govt rolls back climate laws. http://t.co/AGwToquVNx

— roger harrabin (@RHarrabin) January 3, 2014

Have you noticed the weather in N America? @RHarrabin

— Bishop Hill (@aDissentient) January 3, 2014

@aDissentient Very chilly in International Falls. When I was in US the previous year people wore shorts in Michigan in Jan. Extremes abound.

— roger harrabin (@RHarrabin) January 3, 2014

They do. One has to be careful about reporting those at one end and not the other. @RHarrabin

— Bishop Hill (@aDissentient) January 3, 2014

Yep…it seems that the massive record cold temperatures are just weather and can be ignored as irrelevant to the ‘debate’ on climate change….surely, logically, if a burning hot 2012 meant the planet is about to fry us all then a similarly extreme cold period must mean we’re in for an ice age…no?

Harrabin of course still trying to push the new ‘extreme weather’ narrative.  Shame even the ‘experts’ don’t agree with him that the present weather is caused by climate change:

…detection of this projected anthropogenic influence on hurricanes should not be expected for a number of decades.

So extreme weather isn’t caused by climate change…not indeed for quite a time into the future..and then only to a minor degree….by the end of the century….

This from believers in the science and the cause of global warming as man’s activities:

Anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause hurricanes globally to be more intense on average (by 2 to 11% according to model projections for an IPCC A1B scenario).

It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane activity.

In short, the historical Atlantic hurricane record does not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming induced long-term increase.

Our regional model projects that Atlantic hurricane and tropical storms are substantially reduced in number, for the average 21st century climate change projected by current models, but have higher rainfall rates, particularly near the storm center.

there is little evidence from current dynamical models that 21st century climate warming will lead to large (~300%) increases in tropical storm numbers, hurricane numbers, or PDI in the Atlantic.

Roger Harrabin….as a BBC, impartial, balanced journalist, he’s a bit of a fraud isn’t he?

I have spent much of the last two decades of my journalistic life warning about the potential dangers of climate change.

and this is interesting from 2007:

• Observations since 1961 show the ocean has been absorbing more than 80% of the heat added to the climate system. Such warming causes seawater to expand, contributing to sea level rise.

So…the oceans have been absorbing heat since 1961….how then can Harrabin use the excuse of the oceans absorbing heat as the explanation for the pause, or ‘slowdown’ as the BBC prefer, in global warming since 1998?

Why no ‘slowdown’ since 1961 then?

Spokesman Alvin Stone tells The Australian that the stranding of their vessel, Akademik Shokalskiy, has been misconstrued.

“One of the misconceptions is that this is a climate-change voyage full of climate scientists, which is actually not true,” he says.

“There are a couple of climate scientists on board, but it is just a scientific expedition and it is quite broad, with biologists, geographers, looking at penguin and seal populations and a whole lot of other things.

Nothing to do with climate change?  Expedition leader Chris ‘The Penguin’ Turney explains the aims of the expedition in August 2013:

We are gong to discover just how much has changed in the last 100 years since the Mawson Expedition…melding science and adventure…a major research programme…looking at islands that are facing the uncertain impact of a warming planet….and trying to understand past climate to inform the present, the Southern Ocean plays a crucial role in global climate and the carbon cycle and the latest research suggests large changes are afoot..we will be collecting precious data on sea temperatures and salinity:

Note he also states that Commonwealth bay is badly clogged with sea ice limiting access over the last three years…he says they will try to reach Mawson’s hut but if unsuccessful will push on to other ice free locations and continue the work.

Good luck with that…oh…too late….didn’t listen to his own advice obviously!

I was going to add this to David’s indepth look at the troubled Antarctic expedition and the BBC’s less than perfect coverage but it grew too big as I linked through so here’s something the BBC aren’t mentioning (ironically from the Expediton’s Online who organised the trip):

Near Record Sea Ice in Antarctica (again)

The sea ice extent in Antarctica attained a near-record high level of 18.7 million square kilometres in mid-August this year, according to studies by the USA National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Normally averaging 18 million square kilometres at the height of winter, the increase is part of a long-term trend and is paradoxically consistent with how scientists believe global warming may affect the southern ocean around Antarctica.

oops….Somebody may have got it wrong:

The Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre says:

Changes in Antarctic sea ice extent are predicted under future climate change scenarios, although models for the 21st century show wide variability with a 25-40% decrease predicted.

Also via WUWT:

Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey say that the melting of the Pine Island Glacier ice shelf in Antarctica has suddenly slowed right down in the last few years, confirming earlier research which suggested that the shelf’s melt does not result from human-driven global warming. Dr Pierre Dutrieux of the BAS states bluntly: “We found ocean melting of the glacier was the lowest ever recorded, and less than half of that observed in 2010. This enormous, and unexpected, variability contradicts the widespread view that a simple and steady ocean warming in the region is eroding the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.”

From ‘The Australian’:

GRAINY film footage from Douglas Mawson’s epic Antarctic survey and expedition provides lasting proof that when the adventurer’s team reached Commonwealth Bay exactly 100 years ago, it was free of sea ice.

The BBC had on writer Sarah Wheeler a few days ago who claimed it was the Mertz Glacier collapsing which produced the ice…to everyone’s complete surprise apparently….as I mentioned earlier

Here is expedition leader, Chris Turney’s explanation:

It has been a sobering week.

The conditions we are experiencing over the Shokalskiy are a result of the frequent and deep low pressure systems that encircle the continent. In combination with a funnelling effect from the ice sheet, these lows are producing strong and pervasive winds from the southeast. The wind is not unusual but what is unexpected is the major reconfiguration of thick multi-year sea ice to the east of the Mertz Glacier. In 2010, a large iceberg known as B09B, calved from the continent and collided spectacularly with the extended tongue of the Mertz Glacier. The knock-on effect has been that Commonwealth Bay has filled with sea ice (termed ‘fast ice’), preventing direct access from the sea to Mawson’s main hut at Cape Denison. Unfortunately for the AAE, it appears the region has just undergone a massive reconfiguration of sea ice, years after the loss of the Mertz Glacier tongue.

So nothing to do with climate change….no melting glacier as implied by Wheeler….a massive iceberg hit the protruding ‘tongue’ of the Mertz Glacier knocking it off in 2010…the bay coast then became clad in ‘fast ice’ which clogged the bay…as already known by Turney before the expedition began.

Sea ice research at ACE CRC tells us that:

Sea ice is frozen seawater. It forms when the surface layer of the ocean becomes cold enough to freeze, not to be confused with icebergs, which have their origin in land glaciers.

Here is the Sunday Mail’s latest on the foolishness:

A university researcher has accused a group of scientists of carrying out an expedition to the Antarctic “on the cheap”.

Robert Headland, of Cambridge University’s Scott Polar Research Institute, blamed the team for not investing in a ship suitable to the ‘easily predictable’ sea ice.

Passengers, scientists and journalists were evacuated from the ship via helicopter on January 2, but the Russian crew must wait until the ice thins before heading home.

 Mr Headland said: “The team were in an area where it is common for ice to suddenly build up, and instead of using an icebreaker, they used an ice-strengthened ship, which is totally unsuitable.”

The team were taking the ship, which cannot break ice sheets and can only operate in light ice, around to repeat measurements taken by Douglas Mawson, an Australian explorer, in 1912.

It is thought that the rescue will cost £220,000.

Oh look…another pro man made climate change activist/scientist with a commercial interest in ‘proving’ it is happening:

I [Chris Turney] am an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and Professor of Climate Change at the University of University of New South Wales where my team and I are focussing our efforts on using the past to better understand the changes we are seeing today. To do something positive about climate change, I helped set up a carbon refining company called Carbonscape which has developed technology to fix carbon from the atmosphere and make a host of green bi-products, helping reduce greenhouse gas levels.

So…the expedition is based on climate change research…they knew already that there was huge amounts of sea ice present…and the expedition leader has a vested interest in AGW.

Shame the BBC doesn’t seem to want to look at all this indepth.