Anyone else catch Mark Mardell’s gushing coverage of Obama’s State of the Union speech? You would need a heart of stone not to laugh at Mardell’s sycophancy towards President Narcissus and his equal desire to blame those wicked gun-loving Republicans for not lying down and doing the will of their master in the White House.  As ever, the BBC go with Obama’s windy rhetoric and choose not to examine the substance of the issue. Obama came to power boasting of “fixing” the economy, he has waffled some more about this last night and it swallowed by Mardell.

Wednesday morning and time for a new one of these for your attention. Has the BBC been showing bias? If so please detail it HERE!

Anyone else noticed that the left wing “think tank” aka advocacy group The Resolution Foundation is never off the BBC? I caught one of their propagandists on Today this morning being given a free ride without an opponent. I debated one of them a few weeks ago and the bit that irritates is the way the BBC presents their Press Releases as fact. Naturally, the Resolution Foundation is firmly opposed to the Coalition and in essence is just Labour with another face. Wish the BBC would introduce their items by saying “and now here is the claim from the left wing think tank the Resolution Foundation….” That would be fair. They don’t and THAT is both unfair and indicative of a lurking bias that is not that far from the surface.

The BBC has failed to persuade the Public that Labour were not responsible for the economic crash…and they have not been able to persuade the Public that Labour’s Plan B is the answer.

Flanders admits as much:

‘…if you ask business leaders, or most economists, which government decisions taken over the next few years will have the biggest long-term impact on our economic future, I’m not sure that Plan A versus Plan B would even make it to the top three.’

So why has she spent so much time lecturing us on the merits or otherwise of both?

The BBC has come up with a new plan……concentrate on unemployment, especially youth unemployment, long term youth unemployment, attempt to undermine the upwardly surging employment figures, and incite ‘generational conflict’….attacking the ‘baby boomer’ generation for apparently being greedy, robbing the future leaving nothing for the kids.

As they seem to have given up on Plan B and on persuadng us that Plan A is failing perhaps that explains why the BBC has unusually ignored a strong attack on George Osborne’s policies.…and one that came from inside the Tory Party itself…reading it you might understand why the BBC ignored it….as it pillories Osborne for essentially continuing Labour’s own failed policies when in government:

Douglas Carswell, Conservative MP for Clacton, 08 Feb 2013

Yep, you can see why the BBC ignored that.

But they also ignored this which slams Labour’s research and development funding which should help drive the fabled Growth:

‘The lack of taxpayer support over the past decade may have “eroded” Britain’s competitive edge, given that R&D capital is seen as one of the major drivers of economic productivity, the OECD said.
The study, based on spending figures from 2008-9, shows the UK ranks last for funding support out of all 27 OECD countries, including America, France and Germany. The OECD said the decline in R&D spending in Britain is largely “historical”. The share of R&D expenditure in output fell from around 2.2pc in 1985 to 1.8pc in 2010, with both public and business R&D contributing to the decrease. ‘

The BBC has continually ignored or played down good economic news whilst headlining the bad.

It has indulged in an unflagging attack on the ‘Tory led Coalition’  (TLC) cuts portraying them as if it was the German army sweeping across the Russian Steppes slashing and burning as they go….a scorched earth policy reducing everything to ruin.

There has been little reflection or perspective….for instance when Labour councils took the politically motivated choice of closing libraries because of ‘cuts’ did the BBC ever stop to ask how those libraries survived wars and depressions over the last century…and yet now, at a time when council resources are higher than ever, they are being closed?

The fact is that there is still a huge amount of spending going on…a huge amount of investment in infrastructure by government and councils…but you wouldn’t know it from the BBC’s coverage.

Then of course we get onto tax…..the poor are suffering so much worse than the richest in society….taking a bigger ‘hit’ in the recession than the wealthy.  Aren’t they?

The BBC ignored this:
Top 14 per cent of taxpayers pay 60 per cent of all tax .   Britain’s wealthy are expected to
pay 60 per cent of the money raised by the Treasury from income tax official figures have shown.
According to a report in The Sunday Times, the number of people liable for the 40 and 50 per cent tax rate has increased from 3.25 million in 2010-2011 to 4.13 million in the current financial year. Their share of the income tax burden has risen from 54.2 per cent in 2010-11 to 61.3 per cent in 2012-13. The wealthiest one per cent of taxpayers, nearly 300,000 people who earn more than £150,000 a year, are shouldering 26.5 per cent of the income tax burden.

Here’s a table which shows how much better off the lower income earners are now than under Labour, and how much more the rich are paying:

Check the statistics for yourself:

Income Tax statistics and distributions

Income tax liabilities by income range 2010-2013

Income tax liabilities by income range 1999-2010

Income tax liability by income range….1999-2008

Here is Flanders kicking off the new Plan X
Long-term thinking for the UK economy

Why do we spend so little time talking about what really matters?
That’s the question I once again asked myself, reading the final report of the London School of Economics’ Growth Commission.
Reading and listening to the political debate about UK economic policy, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the most important economic decisions the government makes are all fiscal: Will they or won’t they press ahead with Plan A, or Plan A-minus? How much, exactly, will it cut from welfare? And when?
Strategic failure
These are important short-term issues. They might have some impact on the recovery. And, of course, they are exciting politically, with lots of opportunity for the main parties to lay into one another…..But if you ask business leaders, or most economists, which government decisions taken over the next few years will have the biggest long-term impact on our economic future, I’m not sure that Plan A versus Plan B would even make it to the top three.
Far more important, to them, would be the kind of long-term strategic choices highlighted in the LSE’s report….infrastructure, planning and funding….To economists, all of these things probably matter more, to Britain’s economic future, than the short-term debate between Plan A and Plan B.
 
I’ve been speaking to one respected economist and policymaker who thinks I’ve forgotten one big way that short-term decisions on UK fiscal and monetary policy could affect the UK’s long-term economic health. That is through their effect on youth unemployment.

The authors of the report (and the secretary of state for work and pensions) would probably agree – one of the greatest investments that any government can make in its future workforce is to help get unemployed young people into work.

The BBC continue to downplay rising employment whilst highlighting youth unemployment as the worst….they totally ignore the fact that it was youth unemployment that fell the most in the last set of figures.

I heard the below as a 5Live broadcast….it was a 5Live ‘investigation’….that seemed to consist solely of having a few people ring in with their experiences….naturally there is no way of knowing just who these people were…especially as most refused to give their names.

The BBC classed such calls as ‘evidence’ and proceeded to attack government policy based mostly on that:
Work advisers ‘pushing jobless into self-employment’
By Hannah Barnes 5 live Investigates

It was part of the BBC’s desperate scramble to explain away the good news on the jobs front….the jobs aren’t real, they’re self employed but in odd jobs…or lower wages….lower productivity…so why are employers employing people?
They can’t explain it other than GDP figures must be wrong…but they can’t accept that.

Here the BBC stir up inter-generational strife and conflict:

Generational theft?
The argument that young people have never had it so bad

Rising wages and low house prices helped the baby boom generation to prosper. Today’s young face high unemployment, expensive education, and a lifetime of renting. Have they never had it so bad?
The question for today’s young might be, have they ever had it so bad?
There have been eras indisputably worse. A whole generation went to war in 1914 and 1939. There was the hunger and unemployment of the Great Depression. And child labour in Victorian times.
Today, for the first time, a person in their 80s has higher living standards than someone working in their 20s, the Financial Times reported in October 2012.
A student who started university in 2011 will graduate with average debts of £26,000 and bleak career prospects.
Despite austerity, the state pension has been bolstered, winter fuel payments are outside the reach of means testing, and free bus pass and TV licence retained for the elderly. At the same time the government has cut benefits in real terms and axed the Education Maintenance Allowance in England.
Pensioners have traditionally been portrayed as vulnerable or deserving. But it is time for a rethink,
It comes down to fairness, says James Sefton, professor of economics at Imperial College Business School, who has done economic forecasts at the Treasury. Government debt is stacking up for the young.
So why are the young not taking to the streets?
The generational squeeze hasn’t hit home yet, says Sefton. But it’s coming.

The reality of that is that Labour piled on massive future obligations on the young….to pay for its apparent largesse when in government…Gordon Brown borrowing massively to hand out jobs in the Public Sector, buying, he hoped, Labour voters, voters who didn’t think where the money is coming from to pay their wages and how their pensions will be funded when the time comes….and not forgetting all those PFI schemes that only later, when it is too late, do the bills start appearing for them… bankrupting the NHS…meanwhile Brown swans off around the world being praised for his ‘genius’ when he should be in prison.

That portrayal is so far from the truth by the BBC that it almost defies comment…the poorest of the young today are so much better off than 20 years ago…the life opportunities are so much wider and easier to attain…..the Internet has made setting up a business vastly easier, travel has never been cheaper, goods are extraordinarily cheap now, and no, tuition fees are not ‘debts’…..and it is a fact which the BBC quietly slipped out that more people applied to be students this year than last….despite the rise in fees….the opposite effect the BBC have constantly trumpeted.

As for housing the Smith Institute figures say that…to suggest that the norm is to be a house owner throughout recent British history is dishonest.

In 1918 home ownership was 23%, private rentals at 76% and public housing 1%.

Home ownership peaked in 2003 at 70% and has declined slightly since….In England in 2011 there was over 67% home ownership, 17% social renters, and 15% private renters.

That is still very high and a historically unusual figure for home ownership.  As the Smith Institute makes clear the numbers will go up and down…that is to be expected.

Those expectations of home ownership should be lowered to a realistic level…and not raised by the BBC to the level of a ‘Right’ that is being denied.

The BBC is uninterested in delving too deep into the real causes of the economic crash, and not too interested in the real solutions…nor in any good news that appears on the economic front…their sole aim is to make sure the economy is perceived as a basket case destroyed by Tory policies so that Labour get re-elected.

A Labour minister once said the below in an unattributed quote:

‘There is a rather excellent piece in the Sunday Times today about Brown and his constant lying on spending that is well worth a read. Most tellingly in it though is the following quote from an unnamed minister about the real driver behind the entirely stupid dividing “line of cuts vs ‘cuts’ as ‘investment'” :

‘We don’t care if the commentators or the economists turn against us… This is all about shoring up the base in the northern heart-lands, which we lost in the European elections. We don’t want or need them to understand the nuance of the argument. We just want them to hate the Tories again.” ‘

That’s the policy….make sure the voters hate the Tories.

The BBC’s very own Jeremy hardy agrees it’s a good policy:

‘The Tories have taken on human form, which is when they’re at their most dangerous…..Something weird is going on.  People don’t hate the Tories as much as they should. ‘

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

Interesting observation here from our friends at BBC Watch;

On February 6^th, the BBC ran a report entitled “Hezbollah hits out after Bulgaria bus bomb report” in which it devoted considerable space to the denials of involvement coming from the organisation’s deputy leader. However, even after the announcement by the Bulgarian officials and despite the fact that five civilian holiday-makers and a Bulgarian bus driver were killed and around 30 people injured  in what was obviously a terror attack, the BBC still insists upon using the word ‘militants’ in all the above reports from February 5

It’s not a surprise though – the BBC does not think Hezbollah are terrorists. Just like they did not really believe the IRA were terrorists. Through the BBC prism, the only real terrorists are the likes of US marines or British soldiers,

My goodness, another week commences and time for the BBC  to hype the weather, drone on about horse meat and do everything possible to avoid discussing the killing fields of the NHS! A new open thread for you!

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.

I happened to catch an item on the Today programme this morning concerning the ongoing violence in Tunisia. The essential argument out across by BBC reporter Wyre Davies was the “conservative Islamists” are endangering the joyous hard won fruit of the “Arab Spring” and provoking the righteous anger of “liberal Islamists” who have taken to the streets to protest following the death of “leftist secular politician Chokri Belaid”.  It strikes me that the BBC deals with the menace of Islamism by dividing into good Islam (liberal) and bad Islam (Conservative) We get the same wordplay in Iran. At every opportunity the BBC brands the word Conservative to things which it knows most people dislike. Almost as IF there was an agenda in play….