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

The BBC conspires not only to keep climate change critics off the air but to smear, undermine and denigrate them and their views as much as possible, going so far as to claim they are in need of psychiatric help.

However when you look at the outbursts from, and the extreme views of, many climate ‘believer’ advocates you might begin to wonder just who it is that might be in need of some form of help.

There is a massive ‘industry’ devoted to communicating the ‘Truth’ about global warming….much of that at first driven by the BBC’s Roger Harrabin along with his side kick Dr Joe Smith in the famous CMEP seminars.  The ‘Science’ has been sidelined now…the policy is to accept it…and the new project is to make the Public believe…not the science but the ‘fact’ global warming is man made.

Every BBC programme is now on standby to push that message in any way possible.

Part of that is as I said to destroy the credibility and authority of any ‘Sceptic’….but Roger Pielke, Professor of Environmental Studies  says ‘... for climate science, experts (pro AGW scientists) being activists can actually lessen their credibility.’

Seems that’s not the case for the BBC.

When you read the below you might wonder when the BBC will start to think perhaps these scientists aren’t perhaps the disinterested scientific parties they proclaim to be and are prepared to say and do anything to make sure only their views are heard.

And let’s not forget the infamous Michael Mann, he of the dodgy ‘Hockey Stick’ graph and Climategate fame.

Remember as you read that Paul Ehrlich has just been elected to be a member of the Royal Society…is he really the sort of person that is held up as an example to the rest of us?

This post has its origins in a post by Bishop Hill about scientist Paul Ehrlich.

As an aside have a look at the Royal Society’s website and see who has been recently elected to become ‘Fellows’ under the Presidency of Sir Paul Nurse (Another BBC favourite climate fanatic):

Paul Ehrlich….a biologist but fanatical climate change advocate.

Ralph Cicerone….the scientist who ‘turned’ David Attenborough and made him believe.

Steve Jones…..another fanatical climate change advocate….his new stature might raise a few eyebrows as he admitted himself that he was washed up as a scientist…and only rescued from obscurity by the BBC….a debt which he has amply repaid.
It is curious that the RS say that it is his contribution as a ‘communicator’ on science that has caught their eye…and yet it is Jones who demands the BBC silence all those who have differing views on climate to those of the ‘Consensus’.  Ironic no?

Makes you wonder what the real reasons for making them Fellows of the RS were.

The Royal Society’s motto?
Nullius in verba, Latin for “Take nobody’s word for it”

Bishop Hill casts an eye over Ehrlich’s Twitter comments and suggests that they go beyond reasoned or rational….you might think Ehrlich could be dangerous if given a free hand as he dismisses climate sceptics as mentally retarded morons and idiots, sexist, racist, anti-scientific or worse…Republican….or Murdoch…‘murdering our grandkids for profit’:

Paul R. Ehrlich ?@PaulREhrlich
#Climate disruption. Remember this when denier morons claim snow proves no warming. Just the opposite. #greed. http://bit.ly/Xiwu7G

Paul R. Ehrlich ?@PaulREhrlich
#Overpopulation and idiocy — more on the WSJ’s latest moron. Right wing struggling to find even dumber “analysts” http://bit.ly/WxTdva
Paul R. Ehrlich ?@PaulREhrlich
WSJ gibbing idiocy on #population http://on.wsj.com/Ytfg6p  no accident. Part of Murdoch empire’s attempt to murder our grandkids for profit.

Paul R. Ehrlich ?@PaulREhrlich
#Population. Julian Simon proved by example long ago the ultimate resource, which will never be exhausted, is morons http://on.wsj.com/VBAmmd

Paul R. Ehrlich ?@PaulREhrlich
Interesting article on treatment of mentally ill from journal targeted at the mentally retarded http://on.wsj.com/11QT6v1

…and look at this exchange just so you know how else he categorizes you if you don’t agree with him:

Paul R. Ehrlich ?@PaulREhrlich
O [Obama] must use bully pulpit against climate-denier, racist, sexist, plutocratic, anti-science, anti-education, Republicans http://politi.co/WgLym1

Barry Woods ?@BarryJWoods
why use this language not helping I get called a denier,but am not republican, nor anti-sci, nor racist, nor sexist, etc,etc @PaulREhrlich

Paul R. Ehrlich ?@PaulREhrlich
@BarryJWoods Sorry — it’s increasingly a package, but obviously not everyone fits. Are you a denier or a sceptic — and why?

So  ….if you’re a ‘ climate-denier, or racist, sexist, plutocratic, anti-science, anti-education, Republicans ‘……. Ehrlich clumps them all together: ‘it’s increasingly a package’.

Going back to his Tweets on the WSJ, why might Ehrlich hate what’s being written in the WSJ?  Could it be he has a personal grudge after he (and the scientific consensus of the time) was shown to be entirely wrong about population growth and takes badly to criticism?:

‘The fall in the birth rate is a largely voluntary phenomenon. It has happened just as fast in countries with no coercive population policy as it has in China, with its Draconian two-child law. The demands for coercion that were common in the 1970s—”Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?” wrote Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich and John Holdren in 1977—seem embarrassing in retrospect.
Birth rates have gone down because of prosperity, not poverty.’

Or this one:

‘On the eve of that decade, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich opened his best-selling book “The Population Bomb” with this sunny declaration: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Of course, nothing of the kind happened.‘

Ehrlich is an advocate not just for Climate change but, as you read above, for population control:

‘Some precautionary steps that should be considered include
moving as rapidly as possible to humanely reduce the human population size.’

‘Humanely’…that’s good.

Here he reveals what is going on when the BBC invites in psychologists to pass judgement on climate sceptics and denounce them as in need of psychiatric treatment…..a collaboration of different scientific spheres aimed at attacking those who dissent:

‘We know that simply informing people of the scientific consensus on a serious problem does not ordinarily produce rapid changes in institutional or individual behaviour…..there is a need for natural scientists to collaborate with social scientists, especially those who study the dynamics of social movements. Such collaborations could develop ways to stimulate a significant increase in popular support for decisive and immediate action on the predicament.
Without significant pressure from the public demanding action, we fear there is little chance of changing course fast enough to forestall disaster.’

David Attenborough also thinks along Ehrlich’s  lines on population:
‘He said the only way to save the planet from famine and species extinction is to limit human population growth.
“We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now,” he told the Radio Times.’

And look here is another scientist who advocates population control…you might remember him as the man who called for climate sceptics to be executed…but he also went on to suggest the Pope also be similarly executed (all completely and remarkably unreported by the BBC I believe):

Richard Parncutt : last updated 25 October 2012

‘In this article I am going to suggest that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for influential GW deniers.
I wish to claim that it is generally ok to kill someone in order to save one million people. Similarly, the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for GW deniers who are so influential that one million future deaths can with high probability be traced to their personal actions.

That raises the interesting question of whether and how the Pope and his closest advisers should be punished for their consistent stand against contraception in the form of condoms.
There is a clear causal relationship between the Vatican’s continuing active discouragement of the use of condoms and the spread of AIDS, especially in Africa. We are talking about millions of deaths, so according to the principle I have proposed, the Pope and perhaps some of his closest advisers should be sentenced to death. ‘

Do you see a common theme here…climate change and population control….and extreme measures to ‘solve’ the problem.

Think that all through a little…consider Ehrlich’s views on climate and population, and Parncutt’s….then consider what Bertrand Russell said about selectively reducing the population:

“We may perhaps assume that, if people grow less superstitious, government will acquire the right to sterilize those who are not considered desirable as parents. This power will be used, at first, to diminish imbecility, a most desirable object. But probably, in time, opposition to the government will be taken to prove imbecility, so that rebels of all kinds will be sterilized…..the matter would of course be in the hands of State officials, presumably elderly medical men. Whether they would really be preferable to Nature I do not feel sure. I suspect that they would breed a subservient population, convenient to rulers but incapable of initiative.”

Sounds familiar…opposition to the consensus proves imbecility…or idiocy…or sexism, racism or Republicanism and needs treatment.

And not just those with undesirable physical or mental attributes but those who dissent from the conventional thought of the day will be eradicated.

It’s not a great leap from what Ehrlich suggests, in particular the manner of his expressing his views, which might lead you to think you would not want to give him or his ilk the power of life and death.  Such fanatical views only lead one place however ‘well intentioned’.

We have too much consumption among the rich and too little among the poor. That implies that terrible thing that we are going to have to do which is to somehow redistribute access to resources away the rich to the poor.

What other ‘terrible things’ might be considered to shape the world to his, and the BBC’s liking?

Good that the BBC considers those who think that there might be a different explanation for global warming are unfit to comment.

‘Modern methods of printing and advertising make it enormously cheaper to produce and distribute one newspaper with a large circulation than many with small circulations; consequently, in so far as the Press controls opinion, there is uniformity, and, in particular, there is uniformity of news.
Broadcasting is a new method likely to acquire great potency as soon as people are satisfied that it is not a method of propaganda.’  Bertrand Russell  1924

We are being fed a diet of Green pap by the BBC in programmes which masquerade as being on subjects entirely disconnected with climate but when you look closer are entirely shaped and aimed at pushing the climate change message.  The BBC has become the ‘Soylent Corporation’ pushing dead theories rather than dead bodies.

Thanks to Wallygreenthinker who pointed this out.

Biologist Richard Mabey  is given a BBC slot (perhaps fortunately on R3) to air his thoughts on weather…his thoughts on climate change are incidental but of vital importance…and they are his own…but conveniently reflect the BBC view …and as he says on his web site: ‘He writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and Granta, and contributes frequently to BBC radio.’   And yes, he is a constant contributor to the BBC.

Make of this what you will…but I can’t imagine someone with highly critical views on the climate change consensus being given such a platform to air their views:

‘This series hasn’t been about climate or its changes.  It’s been a personal look at how we live with the weather that is our daily intimately experienced embodiment of climate….but if the climate itself is on the move then it becomes part of the story.

Only those with ideological blinkers or vested interests deny global warming is happening and that human activity has a major role in it…but I wonder if a similar kind of denial, a refusal to accept extremely uncomfortable likelihoods is blinkering those who believe we maybe able to halt it.

My own view, if I may be forgiven one last metaphor, is that we have a snowball’s chance in Hell of stopping it, at least in the short term.

The last 20 years have seen nothing but missed targets and repeatedly postponed agreements, politicians are so self interested, corporations too greedy, scientists barely able to grasp the complexity of what is happening and the rest of us, the buck passing public, too irrevocably wedded to our high consumption life styles.

But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying.

It would be good to think we could be mature enough as a species to pull this off.  Yet I wonder if we could tolerate the authoritarian governance and the high risk engineering that would be necessary if we were to find a solution.‘

‘Only those with ideological blinkers or vested interests deny global warming is happening and that human activity has a major role in it’…that’s straight out of the ‘Harrabin Handbook of Green Propaganda’….. I’m sure there really is such a thing in existence which is handed over to anyone recruited by the BBC to talk in any way what so ever on subjects related to climate change….it will of course relay to them the essential ‘facts’ on climate…things to keep in mind as they write their scripts.

I like the part about the ‘believers’ also being in denial…but then he doubles back…it was all a cunning plan….he criticises the ‘believers‘ so the impression is that he must be ‘reasonable‘ and fair minded…so we can safely listen to him as he continues….we must keep trying to rein in CO2 and consumerism and indeed our sceptic natures…..or long term we’re all doomed.

So no change to the message then at all.

‘This series hasn’t been about climate change’….er…yes it was……This is just another of the BBC’s propaganda efforts inventing a programme theme that inevitably has some connection to climate change…which must be addressed.

Perhaps this post should have been titled ‘Stones and Glasshouses’.

More than 850 BBC employees have come forward to raise their concerns about bullying and sexual harassment at the corporation, fueling fears about the broadcaster’s culture.

A “staggering” number of staff members have contacted private consultants brought in by the BBC in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal. Their feedback has been shared with Dinah Rose, QC, the barrister brought in to investigate the internal culture of the BBC.

In an email to staff, the BBC’s director of human resources Lucy Adams told colleagues that some of the testimony is “uncomfortable to hear”.

One member of the BBC’s staff described the scale of the response as “staggering”. They told The Independent: “These are people with real stories and details of harassment and bullying who are living with the scars of an abusive management culture.”

I have absolutely no doubt the BBC will carry on chastising and berating  other organisations for their failures whilst burying the bad news about their own.

Perhaps we should have a little competition….who can write the best ‘If the BBC were running the XXXX’  essay.

….running the Afghan War perhaps, or the Police…or the economy…..you would be forgiven for imagining the BBC already has an overly powerful control and influence over such things.

In light of the previous post by DB I thought this was appropriate along with a look at what turned David Attenborough into an advocate for climate change:

US bracing for ‘historic’ blizzard

A blizzard of potentially historic proportions threatened to strike the Northeast with a vengeance Friday, with up to two feet of snow forecast along the densely populated corridor from the New York City area to Boston and beyond.

I suppose there is no better time than now to amuse oneself with a look back in time at what the Met. Office in 2008 forecast  the climate had in store for us in the future:
‘This long-term warming trend is set to continue as the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to increase. Inevitably this will lead to further impacts on our lives and the world’s natural ecosystems. Heatwaves and droughts are likely to become more prevalent; snow cover is projected to continue to diminish.’

They also suggested that their long term forecasting was of such quality and reliability that it provided a sound basis for many organisations to base their future planning upon:

‘Predictions of future conditions, such as the seasonal, decadal and centennial forecasts provided by the Met Office, can help considerably in dealing with the challenges of our changing climate. For example, the emerging science of decadal forecasting has exciting potential to provide water companies, emergency responders and local authorities with information that can help them in planning for future droughts and floods.‘

Of course we know now that the Met. Office has had to abandon its long term forecasts because  they got it wrong so often.

You might ask how that can be with so many resources and endless amounts of money invested in massive arrays of powerful computers.

You might also ask if the computer models are so obviously unreliable why governments, industries and other agencies rely on these models to shape their economic, social, political, industrial and military policies.

Why have we essentially handed over the running of our lives to a few lumps of machinery that fail again and again to accurately predict the climate?

Have you ever heard such a discussion on the BBC?  A discussion that is surely of prime importance…the consequences of handing over decision making to error prone machines are frightening and horrendously damaging…all the more so because it is not just our own economy alone, or the French or US that gets damaged by decisions  taken by some hopeless homegrown politician…these computer driven decisions are global……effecting everything from the economy, industry, planning and land use to the food we eat and the way we travel to work…..‘determining the new twenty-first century wealth of nations.’

The BBC does a huge disservice, putting it mildly, in not challenging the ‘consensus’.  The consequences of getting it wrong are so serious, so damaging, that to come down so heavily in favour of AGW and then not to change or consider change as evidence mounts telling a different tale is extraordinarily foolish.

The BBC of course claim the opposite…the consensus is that man made climate change is so serious and damaging that not to do anything about it is almost criminal…..but where’s the proof?  There still isn’t anything remotely conclusive.

The evidence on the ground is telling a different story…..that for 16 years global warming has slowed to negligible amounts…statistically insignificant, to use a favourite phrase of Phil Jones.

The models predicted droughts, no snow  and increasing temperatures…..well you know…that ain’t happening is it….it may but for years now it hasn’t.

At the very least that should be raising some very serious doubts about the climate models and their predictions…but the BBC sails merrily on producing programme after programme selling the ‘nightmare’….only recently churning out programmes on archaeology in South America….repeatedly mentioning ‘extreme weather’, ‘catastrophic events’ and ‘catastrophic consequences of extreme weather’…..this is intentional…it is meant for you to pick up the cues and make that association in the future, in the real world of today…extreme weather events mean catastrophic consequences.  We know that the climate seminars held by Harrabin set out this way of programming…introducing almost subliminal doom mongering about climate into every type of programme from comedy, children’s,  drama, history and documentaries and news.

By coincidence in the Guardian of all places (thanks to George R and DB in the next post for highlighting this) we see the result of Harrabin and Dr Joe Smith’s handiwork in action…inserting spurious and exaggerated claims about climate into a programme fronted by the Nation’s favourite TV ‘uncle’:

I was also curious about why Attenborough would have used a somewhat obscure factoid buried deep within a report published by an NGO as long ago as 2006 to make such an arresting statement within a primetime BBC natural history programme in 2013. And what of the source report’s strange reliance on the term “maximum temperatures” rather than the more normal (and comprehensible) “average temperatures”?

But again it all comes back to those computer models controlling your lives and the politicians who make decisions based upon those few computers….as stated below for the likes of the BBC  ‘climate becomes the one ‘known’ variable in an otherwise unknowable future.’…...which of course we know is utter and complete nonsense….the climatologists have not the faintest idea of what the climate will be in 10 years let alone 100.  The Future is almost totally unknowable…even your own day to day existence can be turned upside down by the slightest thing…to claim to be able to predict climate a 100 years hence is no less than a lie of the grandest order.

Here is Mike Hulme, ironically, as he comes from the UEA climate change department and is a hard core advocate of AGW.  But here he outlines the dangers of handing over ‘authority’ to a computer model:

First telling us why the BBC et al love to scare us:

“Expected risks are the whip to keep the present in line. The more threatening the shadows that fall on the present because a terrible future is impending, the more believed are the headlines provoked by the dramatisation of risk today”

Reducing the Future to Climate: a Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism
Mike Hulme

Simulations of future climate from climate models are inappropriately elevated as universal predictors of future social performance and human destiny.

The argument put forward here is that the new climate reductionism  is driven by the hegemony exercised  by the predictive natural sciences(climate computer models) over the contingent, imaginative and humanistic accounts of  social life and visions of the future.  It is a hegemony which lends disproportionate power in political and social discourse to model based descriptions of putative future climates.

It is a hegemony manifest in the pivotal role held by climate (and related) modelling in shaping climate change discourses. Because of the epistemological authority over the future claimed, either implicitly or explicitly, by such modelling activities , climate becomes the one ‘known’ variable in an otherwise unknowable future. The openness, contingency and multiple possibilities of the future are closed off as these predicted virtual climates assert their influence over everything from future ecology, economic activity and social mobility, to human behaviour, cultural evolution and geosecurity.

I conclude the paper by placing this reductionist tendency within a wider cultural context of Western pessimism and loss of confidence about the future and by pointing towards some correctives which involve restructuring ideas about how the future can be imagined and made known.

This transfer of predictive authority (to climate models), an almost accidental transfer one might suggest rather than one necessarily driven by any theoretical or ideological stance, is what I earlier defined as “epistemological slippage”……it offers a future written in the unyielding language of mathematics and computer code.

These models and calculations allow for little human agency, little recognition of evolving, adapting and innovating societies, and little attempt to consider the changing values, cultures and practices of humanity. The contingencies of the future are whitewashed out of the future. Humans are depicted as “dumb farmers”, passively awaiting their climate fate. The possibilities of human agency are relegated to footnotes, the changing cultural norms and practices made invisible, the creative potential of the human imagination ignored.

The consequence of such reductionism is expressed clearly in Karl Popper’s attack from a generation ago on historicism and its deterministic roots: “Every vision of historicism expresses the feeling of being swept into the future by irresistible forces”.  

I suggest that the climate reductionism I have described here is nurtured by elements of a Western cultural pessimism which promote the pathologies of vulnerability, fatalism and fear.

“Expected risks are the whip to keep the present in line. The more threatening the shadows that fall on the present because a terrible future is impending, the more believed are the headlines provoked by the dramatisation of risk today” The epistemological pathways offered by climate models and their derived analyses are only one way of believing what the future may hold.

Some of these futures may be better; some may be worse. But they will not be determined by climate, not by climate alone, and these worlds will condition – perhaps remarkably, certainly unexpectedly – the consequences of climate change.

In this new mood of climate-driven destiny the human hand of climate change has replaced the divine hand of God as being responsible for the collapse of civilisations, for visitations of extreme weather and for determining the new twenty-first century wealth of nations.

Interesting piece from Guido this morning in which he highlights Leftwing attempts to launch a politically motivated muzzling of certain media providers…notably Murdoch.

EU Lefties Trying to Ban Murdoch, Axel Springer and Berlusconi

‘Their real goal is betrayed in the ‘about’ section of their website: “Some, notably the UK, suffer from problems of excessive concentration leading to undue influence of certain economic groups, notably Murdoch’s media empire, over political processes”. Arguably Berlusconi’s media empire has more influence over political processes.  By coincidence all three media groups are, to varying degrees, right-of-centre and sceptical of Brussels…’

We all know who wields the real Media power and influence in the UK… the BBC with its massive unearned resources, its enormous media footprint…from TV to national and local radio, to the web and on into its immensely powerful commercial side which crushes all genuinely commercial rivals with its state provided advantages.

The BBC plays its part in manipulating politics on many fronts…from immigration, religion, Europe, our response to terrorism and war.

Perhaps the biggest effect has been its malign influence on politics itself….We used to have separate political parties which each had a definable set of policies…not any longer….it is hard to tell the Parties apart in reality and that has effectively meant the death of politics and the death of Democracy as they all fight for, or posture on, what they are told is the centre ground….but is in fact a left of centre place that the BBC et al define as the new ‘normal’.

The reality is that probably the majority of the population are right of centre on all of the things that the BBC holds dear….and yet Cameron has abandoned any attempt to appeal to those voters as he fears the BBC’s reaction.   Cameron merely pays lip service to limiting immigration, European influence or multi-culturalism with his fine speeches which get the headlines and plaudits but result in little effective action…probably intentionally.

Charles Moore in the Telegraph in 2004 spelt it out for the Tories about the BBC’s damaging influence:

‘Having to pay to support the “soft left” BBC bias – “is like compulsory tithes to the Church of England in the 18th century.”
Michael Portillo correctly observed that the BBC subjects Tories to a sort of continuous character test much more harsh than that applied to other parties.
The assumption behind this test is that there is something defective, even almost perverted, about being Conservative, or indeed conservative. You are therefore guilty of racism, homophobia, selfishness etc. until proved innocent.
It seems to me that the BBC today is the enemy of conservative culture in Britain. This is not immediately obvious….The few glorious programmes are used as the camouflage behind which political correctness can advance.
How does the BBC approach subjects such as American power, organised religion, marriage, the EU, the Middle East, the actions of the Armed Forces, the rights of householders to defend their property against burglars, public spending, choice of schools, or any perceived inequality?
Who will be more politely treated – Gerry Adams or Norman Tebbit, a spokesman for Hizbollah or Paul Wolfowitz? If someone appears on a programme described as a “property developer” with someone described as a “green activist”, who will get the rougher ride? If a detective drama features a feisty lesbian and a chilly aristocrat, which is more likely to be the murderer?
None of these attitudes is unique to the BBC, but what is unique is the BBC’s power to impose them.

In order legally to have a television in your home, you have to pay the BBC £116 a year. This allows it to dominate virtually all forms of broadcast media, many of which have nothing to do with any idea of “public service broadcasting”.

Out of the deference that this power instils, senior BBC executives are paid more than anyone else in the entire British public service. Greg Dyke, the now ex-director-general and editor-in-chief who seems to have been too busy to edit, got £464,000 last year. BBC executives are like the princes of the Church of England before the commutation of the tithes. They are rich and powerful, and no doubt they mean well, but there comes a time when non-conformists get fed up with paying for their sermons and their privileges.
That time is surely near. We must find a way of abolishing or hugely reducing the licence fee while reviving the core of public service broadcasting. How half-witted of Tory Britain to hand this chance to Tony Blair, instead of claiming it for itself.’

The sensitivity of the climate to the effects of CO2 may have been exaggerated admits a climate change scientist:

Staggering Admission By James Annan: “High Climate Sensitivity Increasingly Untenable”

‘Several recent papers showing much the same – numerous factors including: the increase in positive forcing (CO2 and the recent work on black carbon), decrease in estimated negative forcing (aerosols), combined with the stubborn refusal of the planet to warm as had been predicted over the last decade, all makes a high climate sensitivity increasingly untenable. A value (slightly) under 2[°C] is certainly looking a whole lot more plausible than anything above 4.5[°C].’

Roger Harrabin was tipped off about the new thoughts:

Barry Woods ‏@BarryJWoods

. @RHarrabin @davidshukmanbbc James Anaan: “makes a high climate sensitivity increasingly untenable. ” http://notrickszone.com/2013/02/01/staggering-admission-by-james-annan-high-climate-sensitivity-increasingly-untenable/ …

and said he was already on the case:

roger harrabin ‏@RHarrabin

@BarryJWoods @davidshukmanbbc Thanks Barry. It’s in the queue

That was on February 4th.

It’s now February 7th.

So where oh where is Harrabin’s, or any other BBC environmental journos’, article on this?

Ah..here it is:

Elsewhere on the web

Forbes.com / 5 February 2013Most of the science in this areas seems to be saying under 4.5 oC. And the estimates keep getting a little lower. As James Annan, one of the experts

but not on the BBC?

It is absolutely astounding that BBC journalists seem completely free to run their own private fiefdom, their own private news agency that puts out only what they want to put out.  They seem to be completely untroubled by any restrictions supposedly imposed by the BBC charter, the law or indeed by journalistic ethics (bit optimistic with that one I suppose).

I think they could teach the evil Fox News a thing or two about partiality.

Keep paying the license fee.

The BBC showed a distinct reluctance to report the emergence of these racist ‘Muslim Patrols’….and when eventually getting around to it they emphasised how the perpetrators, and especially their beliefs, were not representative of the Muslim community or religion.

Many people might dispute that….whilst most Muslims would not ‘patrol’ the streets they would endorse the beliefs….as they are integral to Islam….as one Muslim woman said on the Asian Network in response to the below…‘We cannot sacrifice our religion to integrate.’

(It is hardly impartial of the BBC to have an Asian, a Hindu not a Muslim, Nihal, ask on the Asian Network whether Asians should integrate more…you can guess the general drift of the programme)

Here Jane Kelly reports her experiences with a neighbourhood becoming ever more Islamic:

‘I feel like a stranger where I live…As new figures show ‘white flight’ from cities is rising, one Londoner writes a provocative personal piece about how immigration has drastically changed the borough where she has lived for 17 years:

‘Worryingly, I feel that public spaces are becoming contested. One food store has recently installed a sign banning alcohol on the premises. Fair enough. But it also says: “No alcohol allowed on the streets near this shop.”

No alcohol allowed on the public street outside a Muslim shop?….that is no different from the Muslim Patrols in intention and effect….is that shop keeper not ‘representative of the community’?

And here you see the effect of Labour’s immigration policy…the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of whites, especially working class ones who don’t vote Labour,  as intended:

‘I see London turning into a place almost exclusively for poor immigrants and the very rich.’

Here is what a Muslim seeking reform says of the Muslim Patrols:

“The Muslim patrols could become a lot more dangerous and, perhaps willing to maim or kill if they are joined by battle-hardened jihadis,” he wrote.
He compared the Islamist vigilantes to extremists like the far-right Golden Dawn supporters in Greece and right-wing vigilantes in France who ran Roma families out of a Marseilles estate and burnt down their camp.
Countries such as Denmark and Spain have also seen Islamist extremists trying to enforce their own sharia law, he noted.
All were imitating Hitler’s Brownshirts by “enforcing with threats and violence their version of the law in neighbourhoods,” said Mr Nawaz, who spent years in his youth as a leadership member of a global Islamist group.‘
Mr Nawaz is now a leading critic of his former Islamist ideological dogma, while remaining a Muslim.

So the result of  multi-culturalism is in effect that we have an ideology loose on the streets of Britain similar to that which gave rise to Hitler.

The BBC, as I have mentioned before, is hyper-active in its efforts to issue ‘warnings from history’ about the possible rise of the Far Right, in other words another Hitler, in the midst of Europe, due to Austerity economics….clearly they will never issue such a warning about the rise of an ideology that even Churchill thought Fascist…they don’t even do so for the ‘Far Left’ which is on the march once more.

Many programmes and articles have been broadcast and published by the BBC solely to link the hated ‘Austerity’ to the rise of the Far Right in a highly political smear….senior BBC journalists such as Stephanie Flanders and Paul Mason have eagerly pushed this black propaganda benefitting the Labour Party by readily maligning the Tories, the BBC’s scaremongering out to spread fear and anger…even digging out decades old documentaries to back up their legend.

But no such ‘warnings from history’ for the Stalinists rising again in Europe.

Amusingly the BBC do warn us that UKIP’s Nigel Farage has Stalinist tendencies:

Nigel Farage a Stalinist dictator, says UKIP MEP

Never mind the real Stalinists roaming the streets of Greece…or indeed the Islamist Fascists on British streets.

During the highly successful Olympics last year Labour’s Tessa Jowell was a constant guest on the BBC being Labour’s ‘Olympics Minister’.

The BBC presumably keen to let the success of the Olympics rub off on Labour and for Tessa Jowell  to take the plaudits.

From 2005-2009 possibly over 1000 patients died because of negligence and appalling lack of care at an NHS hospital.

From 2005-2009 Labour was in power and these were the Secretary’s of State For Health:

John Reid

Patricia Hewitt

Alan Johnson

Andy Burnham (Labour’s current Shadow Health Minister)

Have we heard much from any of them on the BBC?

The BBC not so keen to hand out the brickbats along with the plaudits to its favoured political party?

What does Labour man Dan Hodges think?

Where is the liberal outrage over Mid Staffs? The Left is killing the NHS by putting it on a pedestal

So now we know. Britain’s nurses and doctors are as bad as Britain’s bankers. Our angels in white are just as selfish, just as arrogant and manipulative and secretive, as the barrow-boys in pinstripes.

In fact, in many ways they’re worse. The bankers bled the country dry, but to my knowledge they didn’t kill anybody. The death toll at Mid Staffs is placed at 1,200 victims.

And what has been the response to this institutionalised carnage? Or more specifically, the response from the radical left, the self appointed guardians of the National Health Service? Nothing but deflection or silence.