Here is a recent email headed “Black Propaganda continues at the BBC” from JohnA informing Richard Black of the BBC about the degree of bias in BBC reporting on climate issues.
(Can I just add here my humble effort “Exactly where Lockwood and Fröhlich are wrong” ?)
Richard,
I note your latest attempt in your continuing campaign to ignore and demean the considerable and growing evidence of natural influences on climate change, and especially on the cosmic ray/solar cycle hypothesis of Svensmark et al.
Last time you raced out of the blocks with an article entitled “No Sun link’ to climate change” about a paper then yet to be published, and couldn’t be bothered beyond leaving a few voicemail messages to contact Dr Svensmark for a response. The paper of course was by Lockwood and Froelich:
Then of course, you didn’t bother reporting that reply from Svensmark because we don’t want the license payers unnecessarily confused with a solid rebuttal, would we Richard? Especially since that paper by Lockwood that you trumpeted was rife with errors.
Here’s the reply from Svensmark
Here’s another from Ken Gregory and here’s another from Anthony WattsObviously you won’t spend any time reporting on them, because life’s too short isn’t it Richard? After all, what with burning up all of those carbon credits to visit glaciers calving perfectly naturally, and polar bear populations stridently not declining but growing strongly, there’s no time for nuanced scientific reporting is there?
Now we have yet another example of your tawdry one-sided reporting with this one: “No Sun link’ to climate change” (by the way, are you minimizing your carbon footprint by recycling the titles to articles?). This time its a letter to a little known and little read environmental science journal – so we’re a long way from any expertise in statistics or solar science, aren’t we?
This time the two scientists are Sloan and Wolfendale, and would you believe it! They come to the same conclusion as the one you want to hear! I’m not a betting man but if I was, I’d bet they contacted you about their forthcoming letter and you got some nice juicy “colour quotes” to pad it out to justify your BBC salary and the rest is history!
Nobody cares, because nobody checks anything!
Except that even Sloan and Wolfendale don’t show that there is “‘No Sun link’ to climate change”, they say that even with their limited analysis of 20 some years, the Svensmark process on its own contributed perhaps 25% of the warming. That’s not insignificant.
That’s not “no link”, that’s “some link” Richard. Even this limited analysis showed some connection between the Svensmark process and global climate.
You could have asked them to run the identical analysis looking at the correlation between carbon dioxide rise and temperature over the same time period, but you don’t want to rock the boat by showing that the carbon dioxide link is even more tenuous than the Svensmark process you’re trying to bury! Carbon dioxide has continued to rise, while global temperatures appear to have stopped rising in 1998 having stabilized below the 1998 level and might even now be starting to fall. Even the Met Office admits this – but you don’t report that of course.
But that doesn’t save the day, because in the same article that you failed to quote or even link to (and I think I know why you didn’t link to it) comes this:
“However, Sloan and Wolfendale are not the only physicists to have recently turned their attention to the cosmic ray hypothesis. Vitaliy Rusov of the National Polytechnic University in Odessa, Ukraine and colleagues do not agree with the IPCC’s view that man is to blame for the recent warming. To prove their point, they looked for a direct connection between cosmic ray flux and temperature.”
“The team constructed a model of the Earth’s climate in which the only significant inputs were variations in the Sun’s power output and changes to the galactic cosmic ray flux (arxiv.org/abs/0803.2765). They found that the model’s predicted evolution of the Earth’s surface temperature over the last 700,000 years agrees well with proxy temperature data taken from Antarctic ice cores (arxiv.org/abs/0803.2766).”
“Rusov agrees that Svensmark’s cosmic ray ionization mechanism cannot fully account for the observed correlation between cosmic ray flux and cloud cover, as Sloan and Wolfendale have demonstrated. But he believes that a small but direct link between cosmic rays and clouds could itself trigger a mechanism which causes further, and greater, changes in cloud cover.”
So here was another model study over 700,000 years and the link between climate change and the solar/cosmic ray variation was crystal clear.
But you couldn’t be bothered reporting it, could you Richard? It didn’t fit the narrative you’ve constructed.
Between copying and pasting Greenpeace publicity and encouraging reckless damage to the world economy and to the world’s poor in the “Green Room”, there simply isn’t time in your day to even report accurately and fairly on environmental issues.
It doesn’t matter that the BBC Trust says that its not the BBC’s responsibility to save the planet, nor is it responsible journalism to refuse to report on the criticisms of well-qualified skeptics to the whole global warming scare, because with you and your colleagues in the hot seat to set the agenda of continuing alarm, the BBC Trust can go hang and the concerns of many BBC License payers are so much white noise to be filtered out by the next “Alarm over…” or the next “The IPCC says…” story concocted in the BBC tearoom from the latest mailshot from Greenpeace or Fiends of the Earth or the WWF – those billion dollar multi-national corporations of public alarm.
Of course when you or Shukman or the others are travelling to the four corners of the globe to report on why everyone else shouldn’t travel to the four corners of the globe, there isn’t time to stop in small faraway places like New York and report on major scientific conferences attended by hundreds of well-qualified scientists who dispute the IPCC reports and the AGW scare? Who knows? You could have interviewed the President of the Czech Republic after he give his keynote speech?
But no. No reporting because its not what you want to hear. So it wasn’t reported by the BBC. Problem solved.
Your journalistic behaviour has at least been consistent: tawdry, one-sided, lazy, propagandist, alarmist and disgraceful. This isn’t BBC journalism that John Reith espoused, its more like extreme left-wing evangelization for the repeal of market economies by way of a faked vision of environmental apocalypse.
I encourage you to get honest: just join Greenpeace’s publicity department officially and have done with it. You’re doing the job already so you might as well get paid for it.
Yours truly
John A.,
cc: The BBC Trust
I am not an expert, but did do some graduate thesis work on 2-D turbulent energy flow modeling 27 years ago. (Is that like saying I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express?) I’ve been out of it for a while, but this Climate “debate” is bringing it all back and then some.
Some musings:
a) I wonder if sarcasm may not be useful in this “debate”, although it does help sooth my anger.
b) It is so utterly flabbergasting that the man induced CO2 warming cause is so widely accepted, especially when the errors in that position appear to be so “basic”.
c) I’m afraid that we may need a clear and rapid downtrend in surface temperatures over the next 12 months to quiet the mantra, but there can not be any populated areas in the developed world that buck the trend.
Why? because if Democrats get elected in the US, and Gore is on the team, say as EPA Administrator under Obama, carbon caps/taxes here we come and the economy goes downhill. Besides that there will be no funds to fight pollution (CO2 is not one) and improve the environment.
d) I don’t blame those driving by this issue who believe because they trust the seers, although some of them should be blamed for being lazy.
e) My anger makes me think that, to prevent a re-occurrence of this type of misinformation when the next complex technical issue arises, some may need to be publicly sanctioned or fired for ineptitude and/or unethical (or criminal?) hijacking…..
Arrrgh! ….Ok I;m calming down.
I actually believe headway is being made, but I just wish it would happen sooner, in case Obama’s socialism and Gore’s carbon bureacracy are introduced next January.
I’d like to know if BBC will give Dr. Roy Spencer’s upcoming paper the same attention when it presents damning evidence concerning climate models and cloud dynamics, with the net result being a much lower climate sensitivity than IPCC conclusions.
Spencer’s first paper was ignored despite it being based on real world observations rather than untested hypotheses embedded in computer models.
As he states, it may take years before the science community catches on.
Pete is frustrated:
“Arrrgh! ….Ok I’m calming down.”
I think one problem is that lay people (my credentials are from a Holiday Inn Express too) come to this arena either by seeing Gore’s movie or other biased sources. There aren’t many unbiased introductions, to I wrote an essay I call Science, Method, Climatology, and Forgetting the Basics. I haven’t quite figured out how to get it to people who need it, but the important thing is to have it ready for when the media figure out that the planet may be getting cooler.
Maybe Inauguration Day will be really cold. 🙂
The BBC gave a long range forcast on Friday 4 Apr. saying that this summer will be warmer and wetter, though the rains will not be as heavy as last summer. On 5 Apr. the report was of cooler temperatures, from IPCC. I didn’t realise that climate could change that quickly.
On a more serious note, there has been measured temperature rises but not due to global warming only due to incorrect positioning of the thermometers, now remote electrical not mercury max/min, and the loss of a large swathe of data from the old Soviet Union, they can now not be bothered to service the equipment. Both problems lead to high bias temperature readings and a perception of global warming. Couple this with models that do not work and the alarmists have a field day.
Yesterday, an article by Roger Harrabin said:
Today, those sentences were replaced with:
FM: What are the chances? Zero.
Lord Dowding during the Battle of Britain is quoted as saying “i am not very intersested in propaganda. If I am right they will stop coming. If I am wrong we will lose the war.”
If as now seems rather likely, Cycle 23 turns out to be more than 13 years long,there will not be very much room left for doubt as to the influence of solar cycles as it will quite quickly become rather cold.
I think the BBC, The Royal Society et al should all be given enough rope. They willl get their comeuppance soon enough.
I believe Mr. Watt is on target with regard to everyman, a noted Weather expert. The elite ruling classes however, are not as bright, observant or dependent on the weather’s vagaries.
I’m betting, at least in Europe, governments are beyond correction. That does not put an end to the matter, certainly.
I suppose you people have seen the new post by Jennifer Marohasy detailing how Roger Harrabin of the BBC changed an article under heavy pressure from a Green advocate.
re: link in 3 — nice work! The follow-on as well.
Re 8:
I think I found the original “leak” – Jo Abbess herself posted the exchange herself at BBC : Balance Restored!
Re 9:
Thank you for your note. I haven’t quite figured out how to get to the people who need it the most (both people unfamiliar with the science and scientists who’ve forgotten scientific method), I hope my little promotion isn’t too annoying. It’s not the sort of page folks are likely to find in a Google search. BTW, I’ve been quite amazed at the number of people who have found that page through my post here.
Nir Shaviv has responded to Sloan and Wolfendale:
www.sciencebits.com/SloanAndWolfendale
🙂
The BBC is inhabited by people who have lost the ability to report and inform, instead they have agenda’s and this perticular one is up the creek.
I long for a major business or individual to go to court over computer based scare mongering and sue the likes of Al Gore, the IPCC and certain govenments.
Then and only then will they be forced to admit theu are wrong.
Science has to put its house in order , especially publications and reports , stop these reports etc done by people who are budget hunting , and who deliberately forget parameters , and do more simulation than on the ground investigation to forward their ideas.
I believe we have to do somthing about all the consumption and pollution in this world , but without technically competant politicians and civil servants , and ones who will stand up and say reduce consumption and population , and refute the all GDP based ideas , we are going nowhere .
How can you expect the populations to believe the scientific community and or governments on climate predictions , when they can’t even predict next weeks weather or volcano ash cloud distribution , because they based everyhting on simulation . Simulation is only as good as the programmer .