I hope Umbongo will forgive my posting his comment here, but it’s rather good. The glee with which criticism of The Great Global Warming Swindle was publicised by the BBC was noted, for instance here on EURef. Little wonder then that this point of view is amplified and repeated, just in case we missed it (actually, I think we did fail to mention it “up top” so to speak…), today on the BBC:
“Another landmark in “impartiality” was reached today in Lisa Jardine’s “A Point of View” Radio 4 at 8:45 this morning. In slagging off anthropomorphic climate change scepticism she shows her deep misunderstanding of the origins of legal process in England by claiming that the English confrontational system of trial is a direct descendant of the Roman Republican system epitomised by the trials starring Cicero. That England’s system derives from development of the Common Law brought here by our Anglo-Saxon and Viking ancestors escapes her. But, of course, she is trying to make another rather more serious and controversial point. That point is that the system of finding the “real” truth by setting out the opposing “truths” epitomised by “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Global Warming Swindle” might confuse the punters.
For her the “closely argued” and consensually accepted truth of the Gore film (although she admits that in a court of law – ah you see where she’s coming from – some of the “facts” were found to be . . . er . . lies) is contrasted with the outpourings of a “vocal tiny minority” through the Channel 4 documentary. She doesn’t claim that any of the facts contradicting AGW in the “Swindle” were lies but relies on the finding that the warmist scientists quoted/interviewed were misled into taking part in a polemic. She likes polemics but not if they contradict her “truth”. So we have on TV a simulacrum of (to her) the discredited English system of getting at “legal” truth opposed by her preferred “false but accurate” argument of the BBC impartiality mind-set of which she is such an enthusiastic proponent. She closed the programme by wondering if the vocal non-consenting minorities should (a la Hansen) be silenced – if not prosecuted – for daring to oppose the consensus.
Lisa Jardine is the daughter of Jacob Bronowski. The final image of Dr B, in his “Ascent of Man”, standing in the mud at Auschwitz is implanted in my brain. He wept and said that Auschwitz and, by implication, all the other hell-holes constructed by Man, is the unavoidable destination reached by the denial and silencing of truth. Were he still alive I don’t think Dr B would be proud of his daughter.”
