A few weeks back, I was wondering whether to write a piece about the Jones' report on the BBC's science coverage and the impact it had made on the corporation's output. This was prompted by the thought that I hadn't seen a single sceptic viewpoint put forward on the airwaves since the report's publication. Then, a few weeks ago, we had James Delingpole's appearance on the Daily Politics opposite green campaigner Andrew Pendleton, and I decided to move on to other things - not that such a brief segment made much impact on my case.
Bob Ward, however, is unhappy with this new development (isn't he always?) and has been venting his spleen at the Huffington Post.
Pendleton, whose contribution was headed "global warming has not stopped", attempted to provide a link to a commentary I published earlier this year which points out that the rise in global temperature recorded since 1997 is not statistically significant, but also shows that there have been many such periods since 1970 when warming was undetectable from just 15 data points. The warming trend over the past 40 years is clear and statistically significant, but carrying out analyses only on small subsets of these data often means that the signal cannot be detected among the noise.
Statistically significant eh? Not sure about that.
However, Bob then makes himself look as bit foolish by criticising Delingpole for linking to a blog posting.
...he claimed that the three warmest years on record in the United States all occurred before 1940, citing a 'sceptic' blog which alleges that the temperature measurements by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies are wrong
So Bob's blog postings, it seems, are kosher, but other people's aren't. Funny that.
It will be interesting to see if Ward's activity has any effect. I fancy not. But I have mixed emotions about the idea of the BBC excluding sceptic views anyway. If Ward is successful it will only hasten the corporation's demise, and that is not a bad thing.