From the Guardian:

Got to admire the BBC’s ability to compartmentalize things.

On Today this morning we had a long exploration of the disaster that is Syria…conclusion…Assad, who has terrorised his own people with chemical weapons and barrel bombs is actually a better man to have in power than the Al Qaeda extremists fighting to remove him.

So that’s just how bad the Al Qaeda boys are.

Followed immediately by a heart warming tale of…an Al Qaeda terrorist…in Guantanamo Bay…who has written back to a plucky British Christian who wrote a letter to him.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ‘quite friendly’ says pen pal

Rory Green speaks about his his letter from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Guantanamo

The BBC managed to find two extracts they wished to read out from the 27 page tract…the first saying the lovable rogue never stops repenting for his sins (though we’re not sure what he thinks they might be) and the second an attack on paedophile Catholic priests….driven to their evil lusts by a decadent West apparently.

Sweet.

Might there be a connection between that terrorist and his compatriots who are actually chopping up Christian priests in Syria?

Not for the BBC.

The telegraph..and many others..including ‘Marketing Week’ (7 hours ago)…report this:

West Bromwich Albion shirt sponsors threaten to cancel deal over Nicolas Anelka’s ‘quenelle’ goal celebration

Shirt sponsors may withdraw from multi-million deal if West Bromwich Albion striker starts against Everton on Monday

The BBC doesn’t.

Zoopla is owned by a Jewish businessman….wonder why he wants to remove the funding?

Anelka is a Muslim making what is an anti-semitic gesture.

Wonder why the BBC is so slow on reporting this.

Not always so reluctant to report other religious/sponsor problems:

I mentioned in previous posts the BBC’s refusal to report the Governor of the Bank of England’s remarks about capping bank market share and bonuses…..it looks like they knew but refused to publish it because it was too ‘Tory friendly’…….

The BBC now are eager to examine Carney’s remarks…but the BBC’s Chris Mason seems to have forgotten that he is supposed to be impartial and not be pushing Labour’s narrative as in this entirely negative, one sided, Labour’s side,  look at Carney….

On Wednesday, shortly the BBC’s Political Editor Nick Robinson had broken the story of Labour’s plans to impose a limit on the market share of individual banks, Mr Carney happened to be appearing in front of the cross-party Commons Treasury Select Committee.

Labour were clearly less than gruntled by these remarks.

Remarks, after all, about the leaked contents of a speech that, at the time, had yet to be actually delivered.

Conversely, the Conservatives were delighted and keen to emphasise what he had had to say, and the importance of his remarks, in their conversations with us.

So Tory MPs were talking to BBC reporters about this…and the BBC reporters decided not to report what Carney said….despite the importance of the comments which completely undermined the credibility of Miliband’s plan.

As for ‘Remarks, after all, about the leaked contents of a speech that, at the time, had yet to be actually delivered.‘….well that’s a very pro-Labour comment…and misses the point…Labour deliberately leaked the speech (I liked that ‘Nick Robinson broke the story’) and got the BBC headlines it wanted…and then got them a second time today.

Robinson didn’t of course break all the story, ignoring a rather massive, important part of it….the Governor of the Bank of England thinks Miliband’s plan is unworkable twaddle.

Carney wasn’t being ‘political’ he was doing  his job and commenting on a technical issue….what would be good for the economy.

After all Labour has no such qualms about people being political when it is Doctors in the NHS speaking out against Government reforms.

The BBC finally came round to mentioning Carney’s remarks on its website today…….just one tiny short sentence….

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said earlier this week that he supported the view that a cap on banks’ market share “would not result in substantial improvement to competition”.

Yep that’s it….no substantial improvement to competition…..so the BBC are in effect saying Carney had nothing of importance to say…..except that he did, as the Telegraph reports:

Ed Miliband’s plans to reform banks undermined by Mark Carney

On the issue of limiting banks’ market share, Mr Carney said that similar caps in America had failed to prevent the financial crisis.

“In the United States, there is a hard cap on deposits – you can’t have more than 10 per cent of the deposit share in the US and that’s a rule that’s been in place for decades.

“And I think that’s one of the points I’d make from a financial policy perspective – that obviously that rule in and of itself did not prevent the creation of large, systemic financial institutions.

“In fact, one could argue a bit – and I wouldn’t overstate this – that by limiting the absolute funding of certain large institutions, in other words they can’t go above that 10 per cent deposit cap, it encouraged on the margin more wholesale funding for expanding balance sheets, which created risks in and of itself.”

So a cap in America did nothing to prevent market failure…and indeed may have created risk of banking failure.

The BBC did dip a toe into the water on this on the Today programme  (0632 ish)….where they were told that Miliband’s type of policy doesn’t work in the US, it’s a schizophrenic policy…wanting banks to be successful but capping that success….and Carney’s remarks were ‘downright negative’ about capping market share….and that is a big problem because if the Governor of the Bank of England doesn’t think it will work it won’t happen.

Strong stuff…and important you might think…but never heard again.  Listen to the news reports during the day and all you will hear is clip of  Chuka Umunna telling us what great things Miliband’s bank cap will do for competition and the economy….you won’t hear the criticism of the plan.

It is  a work of immense skill for any BBC editor to have found a good clip of Umunna’s interview with John Humphrys this morning (0733)….a more evasive and slippery character it is would be hard to find.

Humphrys said he had lots of questions to ask…..is Miliband’s plan in our interest, would it work, would it benefit us, do we want it?

But one question he didn’t ask…and it’s probably the most important one….if the Governor of the Bank of England doesn’t think your plan is workable and won’t support it will it ever see the light of day?

Everything else is mere pie in the sky until the plan gets support from one of the most important financial institutions in the country.

Good though to know that the Bank’s market share cap is designed to solve our economic problems…which are a low wage, low skill economy.

Em….isn’t that a Labour Party creation having imported literally millions of low paid, low skill workers into this country?

Anyway…capping the Bank’s market share will solve all that…and bring peace to the Middle East.

Humphrys didn’t challenge Umunna on his claims despite saying at the beginning one of his questions being….‘Will it work?‘…..He never asked the question so we never got the answer as to just how it will work in the real world….all we got were the intended end results…to grow the Middle classes.

Carney says it won’t work….so a perfect opportunity to bring his comments up…but Humphrys didn’t bother.

A lightweight interview from Humphrys letting Umunna, and Labour, off the hook.

What else has hardly had a hearing on the BBC?

George Osborne’s announcement that he wants to raise the minimum wage…whilst Miliband’s bank capping saga gets frontpage billing, twice in a week, Osborne’s minimum wage raise is relegated to a small line on the UK page…and is now shoved even further out of the limelight onto the Politics page…whilst Miliband is still on the frontpage.

Even Labourite Dan Hodges thinks Osborne’s pledge was the most politically significant event of the week…..so why is the BBC essentially ignoring it?

George Osborne’s announcement last night he supports an increase in the minimum wage to £7 an hour has shot Ed Miliband’s fox. And his cat, his dog, his goldfish, his hamster and his Bolivian marmoset called “Che”.

To be honest, Miliband’s speech is already redundant. The politically significant event of the week was the Chancellor’s minimum wage pledge.

Well not quite ignoring it…..

Today had a segment at 06:13 and then again at 0708.

Both times the BBC ‘exploration’ of the issues managed to convey an entirely negative view of the policy…which is quite remarkable really…imagine the reaction if Miliband had announced it…it is after all one of the left’s mantra’s…increase the minimum wage.

We were told the policy would have a significantly bad effect on jobs…but the TUC was in favour of it.

And of course….as businesses suffered or failed under the regime tax revenues would go down, unemployment would rise and welfare would go up…the economy would suffer.

At 07:08 we were told that some businesses could pay the minimum wage but that some sectors of the economy, like care homes, would have to lay off workers……the policy was inflationary and would hit pensions….all doom and gloom.

All very true of course….but the contrast with how the BBC treats Osborne’s proposal and Miliband’s ‘Living wage’ is marked……it’s funny how the BBC never went into this much detail about Miliband’s equally ruinous ‘living wage’ which the BBC never seemed to find the time to criticise.

So…Carney’s remarks which said Miliband’s proposal was basically unworkable, and Osborne’s minimum wage rise proposal, have either been given absolutely minimum coverage or if they have been mentioned it is only to denigrate and dismiss them.

Must be an election coming.  Maybe the champagne is on ice already at Broadcasting House….

‘….the corridors of Broadcasting House were strewn with empty champagne bottles – I will always remember that  – er – not that the BBC were celebrating in any way shape or form – and actually – I think it’s fair to say that in the intervening years the BBC, if it was ever in love with Labour has probably fallen out of love with Labour, or learned to fall back in, or basically just learned to be in the middle somewhere which is how it should be – um – but there was always this suggestion that the BBC was full of pinkoes who couldn’t wait for Labour to get back into power – that may have been the case, who knows ? but as I say I think there’ve been a few problems along the way – wish I hadn’t started this now…”

Perhaps the BBC is a bit left wing:

BBC Presenters Have ‘Deeply Held Left-Wing Political Views’, Complain Tory MPs
Much of the BBC’s political coverage is biased against the Conservative Party and the broadcaster “long ago gave up any pretence of neutrality”, Tory MPs have complained.
Angela Watkinson told the Commons on Monday that the BBC was failing in its duty to “provide balanced information” and was instead routinely offering “political opinion” presented as news.

It seems to be the done thing nowadays to psychoanalyze climate sceptics…the science is settled therefore anyone who ‘denies’ it must ‘a loony’ to quote one BBC boss.

A favourite device also used by the Soviet Union to eliminate its dissidents.

So I think it only fair a similar process is practised on other sectors of society…say comedians for instance…actors too might be worthy of examination…so very lefty.

There must be a reason after all why the BBC can find no ‘right wing’ comedians..

And there is….

Comedians have psychotic personality traits, study finds

In a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry, researchers analyzed comedians from Australia, Britain and the United States and found they scored significantly higher on four types of psychotic characteristics compared to a control group of people who had non-creative jobs.

“The creative elements needed to produce humor are strikingly similar to those characterizing the cognitive style of people with psychosis – both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder,” said Gordon Claridge of the University of Oxford’s department of experimental psychology, who led the study.

“The creative elements needed to produce humor are strikingly similar to those characterizing the cognitive style of people with psychosis – both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder,” said Gordon Claridge of the University of Oxford’s department of experimental psychology, who led the study.

The researchers found that comedians scored significantly higher on all four types of psychotic personality traits compared to the general group. Most striking were their high scores for impulsive non-conformity and introverted personality traits, the researchers said.

The actors scored higher than the general group on three types – but did not display high levels of introverted personality traits.

Must be a reason comedians and actors all seem to be left wing and have a very loose attachment to reality…..could explain a lot…such as support for all those left wing dictators and mass murderers.

The researchers recruited 523 comedians – 404 men and 119 women – and asked them to complete an online questionnaire designed to measure psychotic traits in healthy people.

Wouldn’t you just love to see who filled in the questionnaires?

Ed Miliband is here to save the banks and don’t the BBC love it? Here’s a new Open Thread to see us all off into the wild blue yonder of the weekend!

Imagine a global spying network that can eavesdrop on every single phone call, fax or e-mail, anywhere on the planet.

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s true.

The power of the network, codenamed Echelon, is astounding.

Every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission can be listened to by powerful computers capable of voice recognition.

That was written in 1999….and its still true now….what’s new?

The NSA has been hoovering up all your data….and it’s just one big surprise…who knew?  Obama has things under control though….

Mark Mardell’s love-in with the Pres. continues….

As ever, insiders say the president has mastered all the complex technical details in play and thought long and hard about which way to go.

As so often, his liberal instincts may be at war with his perceived duty as commander in chief – and he may be doomed to disappoint many on both sides of the debate.

Isn’t the Pres. just great?  So intelligent, so Liberal…and forced against his better nature to keep Guantanamo open, to increase drone attacks…and to spy relentlessly on his political opponents in the election.

Ironically perhaps this is from the Guardian:

Oh hang on Mark…… here is another example of Obama’s Liberal ethics:

Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me

Well….just for the election run up anyway…..

The ACLU released a report this week that shows that under Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American’s electronic communications is “sharply on the rise.”

Obama Warrantless Wiretapping….Obama Signs Extension Of Controversial Bush-Era Program

The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger said on the Today programme:

This is a remarkable day. The president of the United States responding to information that’s been put into the public domain by newspaper, not by the oversight committees that are supposed to look after these things.

Well…..hardly ‘Breaking News’ is it….14 years out of date in fact….not so ‘remarkable’.

Asked about MI6 chief Sir John Sawers’s claim that terrorists were “rubbing their hands with glee” at the revelations, he said:

That was a very theatrical moment, but there was no evidence attached. The NSA is collecting 200m records a day on people who are not suspected of anything. This is warrant-less, suspicion-less collection of data on all of us, and that’s why it has become such a huge issue amongst people who think this is a bit disturbing.

I mean don’t listen to me, listen to Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the internet [in fact the world wide web]; he was horrified to learn about the weaknesses that had been put into the web, and how this is going to harm the web itself.

Listen to the tech companies – the American … tech companies see a revulsion from the end of the world at their businesses, and this is going to have severe financial implications.

Just a shame that every time you log onto his paper’s website you are being tracked often by those very tech companies…….and such tracking can be blocked by the paper…the BBC usually has no tracking for instance…..

Does the Guardian get paid to allow tracking of its customers?

Here is Google Analytics:

Your customers go everywhere; shouldn’t your analytics? Google Analytics shows you the full customer picture across ads and videos, websites and social tools, tablets and smartphones. That makes it easier to serve your current customers and win new ones.

Know your audience

No two people think exactly alike. Google Analytics helps you analyze visitor traffic and paint a complete picture of your audience and their needs, wherever they are along the path to purchase.

Pretty clear….your every move on the net is being analysed by commercial companies….and clear that a company must actively want to have ‘Google Analytics’ on its site to help it track its customers.

You can of course try to block the trackers….but most sites require you to allow their cookies which also track you whilst ‘helping you get a better service’.

Why no concern about these Trackers…or about the phone companies that have your every movement on their data bases, or the network of numberplate recognition cameras that track you around the country, or Tescos logging your every purchase, or smart meters logging  everything you do at home…etc….

And is  all this such a surprise?  The BBC consistently fails to mention the exact same revelations from 1999.….the exact same complaints….and it was Republican congressman who began the ball rolling to investigate all that.

Not sure why the BBC lets the Guardian get away with this….Humphrys didn’t push Rusbridger very hard at all this morning…as said this is nothing new….massive trawls of data by the intelligence agencies, collection of intelligence on friendly countries and commercial interests, cries of outrage and appeals for investigations…..what’s new?

A couple of the BBC’s reports from 1999…..

Echelon: Big brother without a cause?

Critics accuse the United States’ intelligence community and its English-speaking partners of waging what is in effect a new Cold War.

At stake are international contracts worth billions of dollars, and at the disposal of the spymasters is an intelligence gathering system of immense power.

The Echelon spy system, whose existence has only recently been acknowledged by US officials, is capable of hoovering up millions of phone calls, faxes and emails a minute.

A report published by the European Parliament in February alleges that Echelon twice helped US companies gain a commercial advantage over European firms.

“There’s no safeguards, no remedies…….There’s nowhere you can go to say that they’ve been snooping on your international communications. It is a totally lawless world.”

EU probes Echelon

The European Parliament has voted to form a committee to investigate allegation that the US spy network, Echelon, is being used as a tool for industrial espionage.

So shouldn’t the BBC be asking what happened to all that ‘investigation’ in 1999?

Rusbridger’s ‘theatrical’ claims are just that…nothing new…and according to the intelligence agencies putting lives at risk as Rusbridger and Co aid the terrorists.

As the Guardian’s revelations are not new their publication of the material is clearly unnecessary…and therefore unnecessary risks are being taken regardless of the dangers associated with publishing….all so that Rusbridger can pose as the saviour of a Liberal world….

Is that not what the BBC should concentrate on with this story…whether the Guardian is unnecessarily putting lives at risk for commercial gain?

Met Office: Arctic sea-ice loss linked to colder, drier UK winters

Richard Black ?@enviroblack @markpmcc Leveson… ‘a cultural tendency…to practice journalism which on occasion is deliberately, recklessly or negligently inaccurate’

On Sunday I posted this:

Strangle The Climate Sceptics In Their Beds!!

It was meant to add some context to a post I intended to write up looking at a BBC piece on the Today show, Is there a Green hush?,  which claimed that climate scientists, green lobbyists and the media were being bullied and intimidated into silence by climate sceptics….but a look at the Today interview had to be put off because the more I looked into climate scientists’ claims and their theories the more I realised they just don’t have a clue.

However here we go…..

Is there a green hush?

First the technical issue…just how was the piece set up?
We had Evan Davis, who volunteered that yes, climate sceptics were vitriolic, so no bias there,  and then we had Mark Lynas and Rowan Sutton…both pro-man made global warming.

And that was it.  No sceptical voices, neither to defend sceptics against the charges or to put the other side as illustrated by my post, nor to debate the ‘science’ when Davis asked if the recent floods were the result of climate change.

There was absolutely no mention of ‘vitriol’ from the pro-AGW side…nor any other reasons given as to why there might be a ‘silence’ from the alarmist side of things…or even if there is a silence….can’t say I’ve noticed such a thing.

What we did get was firstly a denial that there is a link between floods and climate change…but then we had ‘But physics says’…then it was ‘yes ‘….but you can’t claim a particular event…but….you have to look at the world as a whole and at patterns over many years.

So….that’ll be a sneaky yes then…they are claiming a link.

Em……

Prime Minister climate change opinion not backed up by science, says Met Office
Nicola Maxey from the Met Office said the Prime Minister failed to draw the crucial distinction between weather and climate change.
“What happened at the end of December and at the beginning of January is weather,” she said.
“Climate change happens on a global scale, and weather happens at a local scale. Climate scientists have been saying that for quite a while.
“It’s impossible to say that these storms are more intense because of climate change.”
She added: “In real terms we had a low depression over the Atlantic which deepened, which caused the swell, and that combined with the spring tide caused the coastal waves.”

or….em…

Paul Davis, chief meteorologist for the Met Office said that very strong winds much of the UK experienced which was caused by jet stream.
“December has been the windiest spell since 1969, but unprecedented perhaps not. It probably feels unusual because the last few winters have been fairly settled and cold and we haven’t had the story conditions that just experienced.”

or…em….

Direct from the Met. Office:   There’s currently no evidence to suggest that the UK is increasing in storminess.

Still…we’ll just ignore all that.

Carry on…and panic.

Davis then gets onto the ‘vitriolic’ sceptics…..asking ‘Just how bad is it on Twitter…why would that deter you?’

Why indeed.

Apparently sceptic reaction to ‘alarmist claims’ by scientists and environmentalists, is instant and overwhelming….and has everyone looking over their shoulders…from politicians, to scientists, to the media itself all worried about being attacked by the Sceptics.

Terrible thing isn’t it that lack of deference to assumed authority…but isn’t that what the 60’s was all about?  How the tables have turned  now ‘they’ are the Establishment.

 
Then paradoxically it was claimed that it was a strong lobby, powerful voices from politics, who silenced the scientists et al…such as the Tories….em…like who?…Tim Yeo?

Apparently the Science is being misrepresented and used for political purposes by the Sceptics, and that is putting off people from engaging with climate change.

Ironically Lynas said that he would ‘love it if we could just talk about the science…it would be very useful for society.’

The Sceptics would also love to talk about the science but shutting them out of that debate has been the aim of the likes of Harrabin, Joe Smith and Steve Jones….this very interview was part of the plot to malign Sceptics and silence them.

Then apparently you can’t be too alarmist….it’s such an important subject with such serious consequences that you have to grab people’s attention….however that doesn’t include the Science of it all…just the dramatic and dire consequences must be publicised so that all those drastic new green policies can be implemented.

 
So all in all a pretty dire interview, bias all round from presenter to guests, and a definite narrative trying to smear and vilify Sceptics.

However if you’ve read that previous post you will have seen that it is the Sceptics who have been at the receiving end of extreme abuse and threats…even climate scientist Phil Jones runs scared of the pro climate lobby:

“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.”

The BBC has often been the cheerleader for the abusers giving the nod and a wink to them by its own denigration and dismissal of the sceptics.

Richard Black was a prime suspect in this…here is a classic example where he questions the sanity of sceptics…smearing them either as being conspiracy theorists or abused in childhood:

[One view is that] climate scepticism has psychological roots; that it stems from a deep-seated inability or unwillingness to accept the overwhelming evidence that humanity has built with coal and lubricated with oil its own handcart whose destination board reads “climate hell”.  As one climate advocate said…
“I’ve been debating the science with them for years, but recently I realised we shouldn’t be talking about the science but about something unpleasant that happened in their childhood”.

And then there is Professor Steve Jones…fanatical climate change advocate who wants to silence the sceptics…..just why was a man so clearly biased allowed to review the BBC’s science output and advise the BBC on impartiality?  Just who was it at the BBC that recommended Jones for the job?  Harrabin?

Why then are Sceptics so sceptical you might ask?

Not such a puzzle…..Harrabin’s mate, Dr Joe Smith, can provide the answer perhaps…..

Perhaps it shouldn’t puzzle us that that the promise of rapid environmental and social change is greeted with a ‘gloom of inattention’.
Much of the current discussion about climate change falls between the overstated rhetoric of jeopardy, which is now having a diminishing public impact, and more sober and open-ended discussions of risk and uncertainty, which are largely unreported because they do not readily fit into media conventions.

Most of environmentalism has done little new work in over a decade, and its tendency towards hyperbole, and its reliance on a narrow stock of fear-based narratives appears to have left portions of the public apathetic and fateful, and others hostile.

And a bubble of alarmist environmental hype…..

Lord Stern suggests that ‘The quantity and quality of coverage of climate change has undoubtedly declined’.
Joe Smith: Climate contrarian voices are having a very good run of it I’d agree with that too. But should we be surprised? The last quarter of 2009 saw an inflated bubble of (monotonous) climate-worrying stories. Even in June of that year you could more or less book a ticket to watch the media bubble bursting in the days that followed COP15 that December. It didn’t require an intriguing Climategate or a disappointing Copenhagen conference: editorial and public boredom would have dished the news value of climate change with no further effort from anyone.

In 2009 Joe Smith said they needed a new angle, a new narrative…..don’t scare the punters…

What have been the achievements of the environmental community over the last 20 years?….The generation of fear, concern and anxiety….now we need a different set of emotions to get a working majority to engage people and change policies….creativity,, innovation, imagination, even passion.

Ironically he didn’t follow his own advice about not being alarmist…here in 2012 he signed a letter to the Guardian, natch, saying we had 50 months to save the Earth (that’ll be 35 now then)

‘On current trends, there are around just 50 months left before we cross a critical climate threshold. After that, it will no longer be ‘likely’ that we will stay on the right side of a 2 degree temperature rise.
Now we call on the government and opposition to say what they will do in the same time frame to grab the opportunity of action and prevent catastrophic climate change.’

Perhaps it was the Marxist angle that makes climate change so unattractive:

‘Climate change must break out of its left-wing ghetto. Communicators need to drop the language and narratives of environmentalism that have only ever appealed to a minority of people.’

Richard Black tells us that it is the revelations of scientific bad behaviour that has driven scepticism about the science…..talking about the CRU emails….

‘Here was a crime with international ramifications – the theft and release of more than 6,000 e-mails and other documents that lit a fire under mainstream climate science, perhaps contributing to the torpor in the UN climate process and raising the level of doubt in public minds…… the tsunami of doubt that “ClimateGate” spewed into the court of public opinion on climate change……in the folklore of the sceptical blogosphere, it’s achieved cult status; no doubt about that.‘

Possibly scepticism might just be the result of climate sceptics coming to realise that the climate scientists just don’t have a clue what is going on……the BBC’s Roger Bolton on Feedback said this:

Roger Bolton: Hello. BBC journalists are required to be impartial, as is the presenter of Feedback. But should one be impartial where the facts are clear?

Well that’s one question but another might be ‘are the facts clear?’ Is the science really settled?
Harrabin and Joe Smith of the CMEP have worked out  a devious scheme to sideline sceptics…don’t talk about the science…talk about risk or how to stop the world warming…..

Climate change should not be responded to as a body of ‘facts’ to be acted upon (with the IPCC acting as prime arbiter). Instead it should be considered as a substantial and urgent collective risk management problem. Projecting climate change as a risk problem rather than a communication-of-fact problem helpfully deflates ‘debates’ about whether climate change is or is not a scientific fact.

My point is: lets not get stuck on the science. Climate change is a vast and widening body of investigation and debate: science is now barely the half of it, and in terms of political outcomes it is not the thing that counts.….a line that is designed to work for people who have ideological wax blocking their ears: ‘don’t get het up about communicating science – talk about clean American energy and jobs in a new efficient, competitive economy’.

But that’s the whole problem…..the facts are far from clear and becoming less clear as more is known…..the newspaper cutting illustrated at the top of the page shows that there was warming in the Arctic in the 1920’s, we also know that there was ‘Global cooling’ in the 1970’s….and then we have these types of claims….such as we’ll never see snow again….

This from 2012:

Met Office: Arctic sea-ice loss linked to colder, drier UK winters

Decreasing amounts of ice in the far north is contributing to colder winters and drought, chief scientist Julia Slingo tells MPs
She added that more cold winters mean less water, and could exacerbate future droughts. “The replenishment of aquifers generally happens in winter and spring … a wet summer does not replenish aquifers. So we are concerned if we have a sequence of cold winters that could be much more damaging,” she told the committee.
Last month the environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, warned farmers that drought might become “the new normal” for the UK, because of climate change.

“Two very dry winters – this may be the new norm,” the secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs.

Laughably Harrabin doubts the Met. Office when they don’t toe the Green line:

“The trouble is that we simply don’t know how much to trust the Met Office.”

And then there’s this:

The ice is growing.

And today from WUWT we have this from the Green scientist’s Bible, ‘Nature’:

The journal Nature embraces ‘the pause’ and ocean cycles as the cause, Trenberth still betting his heat will show up

Read the article and you will see they smash the CO2 link to climate change…..but they can’t agree….one scientist claims one thing…others the complete, dare I say Polar, opposite:

‘There are two potential holes in his assessment. First, the historical ocean-temperature data are notoriously imprecise, leading many researchers to dispute Cane’s assertion that the equatorial Pacific shifted towards a more La Niña-like state during the past century. Second, many researchers have found the opposite pattern in simulations with full climate models, which factor in the suite of atmospheric and oceanic interactions beyond the equatorial Pacific.’

Here is that feedback programme with Roger Bolton…where the presenter is happy to label sceptics as ‘Deniers’…Bishop Hill was not impressed:

Worst BBC programme of all time?

BBC Radio 4’s Feedback programme looked at the space given to global warming sceptics in the period covering the release of the Fifth Assessment Report.
The programme was shameless, stupid and dishonest.

What was so dishonest about the programme?…well for a start the so-called ‘callers’ were in fact people with vested interests in maintaining the green hoax…not mentioned by the BBC……merely calling them….‘some Feedback listeners’.

Source: BBC Radio 4: FeedbackURL: N/A
Date: 18/10/2013Event: Steve Jones about “passionate climate deniers” – “no point in talking to them”Attribution: BBC Radio 4Also see: Sep 27, 2013: BBC Radio 4: Bob Carter: the IPCC’s 95% probability is “hocus-pocus science”
People:
Dr. Anjana Ahuja: Science writer and author
Roger Bolton: Presenter, BBC Radio 4: Feedback
Professor Bob Carter: Palaeontologist, stratigrapher and marine geologist
Roger Harrabin: BBC’s Environment Analyst
Professor Steve Jones: Emeritus Professor of Genetics, University College London
Simon Sharp [?]: Feedback listener
Peter Verney [?]: Feedback listener

Roger Bolton: Hello. BBC journalists are required to be impartial, as is the presenter of Feedback. But should one be impartial where the facts are clear? The World at One gave airtime to a climate change sceptic, a geologist. Right or wrong decision? Many Feedback listeners think: the latter.
Male listener: This person was not a climate scientist, and he was clearly not qualified to speak on the subject.

Roger Bolton: The author of a BBC Trust report into accuracy and balance in science reporting, Professor Steve Jones, is also critical of the World at One’s decision. But should voices which challenge the consensus be silenced? Isn’t that censorship?
Steve Jones: The problem with passionate climate change deniers out there is that whatever the evidence, they will not accept that they are wrong. So, under those circumstances, there’s no real point in talking to them.

So just who were those ‘Feedback listeners’?

Peter Verney, “Darfur’s Manmade Disaster,” Middle East Report Online, 22 July 2004.
Simon Sharp   ‘I am the Director of Green Route Energy and have been working in the renewable energy sector for over 10 years.  We take great pride in giving honest, jargon free advice on the various products and services on the market.‘

Hardly what you might call impartial callers….highly dishonest of the BBC to present them as such.

The whole point of the CMEP seminars and other work was to ‘improve the communication of climate change’….not to help you understand…but to get you to believe….to change the public’s behaviour…here we are explicitly told why:

Nick Pidgeon, Professor of Environmental Psychology at Cardiff University, told us that ‘communication is vital for the narrative. If the emerging evidence  about the impacts of climate change – extreme weather events, floods, heat waves etc – are not communicated and not connected to climate change, then it won’t be possible to change behaviour or the public will not see it as a priority to adapt.
If the communication isn’t there, the lifestyle changes won’t happen.

Far from being ‘silent’ the BBC has been working hard to push that narrative…happily linking the floods to climate change…..

 
Battered Britain: Storms, Tides and Floods
After weeks of devastating weather across the UK, Sophie Raworth presents a special programme in which BBC News correspondents report on the scale of the damage, what caused it, and how those affected by it are coping.

Well..it wasn’t weeks of devastating weather…. a few days of powerful storms followed up by many days of rain….much of the damage was actually done by high tides.

‘The oldest man living does not remember such great floods and so much water. Everything beyond Bridgwater is like a sea.’ 1809

Here the BBC dishonestly concentrates on the Somerset Levels…a clue in the name there…just why do they flood?  The BBC didn’t bother to reveal that they always flood, and have done for thousands of years.

Muchelney on Somerset Levels still cut off by floods

From Wikipedia……
The Somerset Levels, or the Somerset Levels and Moors as they are less commonly but more correctly known, is a sparsely populated coastal plain and wetland area of central Somerset, South West England, running south from the Mendip Hills to the Blackdown Hills.

One explanation for the county of Somerset’s name is that, in prehistory, because of winter flooding people restricted their use of the Levels to the summer, leading to a derivation from Sumorsaete, meaning land of the summer people.

We have had the new narrative from Harrabin about why we get more floods now apparently….we get the same rainfall but it comes in shorter more intense bursts….

‘The issue is the way it falls in sudden bursts not the amount of rain.‘

The BBC’s own ‘sceptic’ Paul Hudson asks…..

Is the perceived rise in flooding real?

‘Could it be that this is more a function of urbanisation and flood plain development, than any significant increase in high intensity rainfall events?

And the media could have played their part in making us think that flooding is on the increase.

100 years ago we would have no idea if there had been flash floods in some parts of the country, but 24 news has changed all that and within hours pictures of floods from around the world are beamed into our living rooms.

This all adds to the perception that the frequency of serious floods are on the increase when it could be that its simply the awareness of flooding that has changed – coupled with the extensive flood plain development that we have witnessed in the last few decades.’

As this official plot shows there doesn’t seem to have been much change in rainfall patterns at all…and the earliest date must be around 1720…there is a distinct 50 year pattern:

The BBC continues to make dramatic headline linking floods and climate change:

Lack of research linking climate change and floods is a ‘scandal’

But hang on the BBC’s Matt McGrath says this:

Scientists expect rising emissions of carbon dioxide to weaken the temperature contrast between the Poles and the Equator leading to potentially weaker storms.

But aren’t the floods caused by global warming, caused by CO2,  and which forced extreme cold air down from the Pole to meet very warm air from the South…the contrast generating the Polar Vortex in the US and the ‘extreme’ storms here? Now we’re told global warming will bring us weaker storms.

Very complicated all this.  Just can’t keep up with all the great ideas.

‘Is the BBC biased’ picked up on this Harry’s Place look at a Newsnight interview with a far right associate,  Alain Soral,  of Anelka’s good mate Dieudonne……..

BBC Newsnight presents Far Right Holocaust denier as “writer and film-maker”

An example of Soral’s writing.

Harry’s Place concludes:

Neither Paxman nor Newsnight reveal the fascist and antisemitic background of Soral – he is simply a “close friend” of Dieudonné who helped him “popularise the quenelle.” This is a real shame, considering the BBC’s trusted role as a credible and authoritative public broadcaster.

Paxman does not challenge Soral for suggesting “a deep link between the system of domination that Mr. Dieudonné is challenging, and the organised Jewish community.” Neither does Paxman challenge Soral’s conspiracy theory about a “very powerful Zionist lobby in France”. Paxman also lets Soral’s claim go unchallenged, that the “annual CRIF dinner” (Jewish community dinner) proves the French government is “entirely under the influence of the Zionist lobby.

Paxman ends simply by saying “Thankyou very much indeed” to Soral.

What exactly went on during the editing process at BBC Newsnight that allowed a Far Right Holocaust denier to be presented credibly as a “writer and film-maker”, and allowed to promote his own antisemitic views unchallenged?

All quite extraordinary….if someone is brought on to explain, or excuse, a close associate’s behaviour perhaps it might be relevant to know the views of that person so that we can judge just how the things he says are coloured by his views…..especially if those views are of an extreme nature.

It seems that if you happen to be a Muslim footballer then the BBC turns a blind eye to you making gestures that are deemed anti-Semitic and concentrates instead on other issues, distracting attention from the anti-Semitism and the religion, and instead pretending it is an issue about free speech.

When footballer Thomas Hitzlsperger came out as gay the BBC went to town….5Live practically gave the station over to the story……but hardly a peep about Anelka.

Strange….just how important was Miliband’s announcement that he wanted to cap Banks’ market share?

It was the BBC’s top Frontpage story at 02:43 last night……

….But now it has vanished…relegated to a small line on the UK page…whilst ‘Rates of gout in UK ‘soaring’ remains frontpage news.

Could it have anything to do with the Treasury boss’s put down of Miliband?

From the Telegraph:

Mark Carney rejects Ed Miliband’s bank shake-up plan

Also frontpage in the FT (£):

Carney deals blow to Labour bank plan

Miliband must be busily rewriting his scheme for Friday’s big speech…and the BBC can rewrite its own script and give him the headlines again.