Fade to grey

This is interesting: the Daily Telegraph has created a new post of Energy and Climate Change Editor and has decided to fill it with the current energy and utilities correspondent Emily Gosden.

Interestingly, Ms Gosden appears to have no discernable eco-credentials.

Does this mean that that the green advertisers no longer hold sway at the Telegraph?

Comments

[Eddy]

Bish any idea of when the photo was taken. It looks Victorian or maybe Edwardian. I had no idea that typewriters had been around so long and that one seems to be a portable model :)

[Pharos]

Congratulations to her then.

A difficult brief. Huge public anger. Well informed readership. And a Telegraph overall editorial stance that concludes in a recent editorial comment

'The upshot of the green agenda, therefore, is that in pursuit of unrealistic decarbonisation targets, we are switching to an even more expensive and unreliable form of electricity generation just as the country faces a looming capacity crunch next year. Ministers often boast that Britain generates more power from offshore turbines than the rest of the world combined. But that may be because no one else wants to follow our lead.'

[Dodgy Geezer]

...Gosden appears to have no discernable eco-credentials..

Er, do you NEED eco-credentials to churn out eco-rubbish?

I would have thought it was unskilled labour. Perhaps the eco-writers have been asking for too much eco-salary, and the editor has decided that it's time for an eco-change...

[Don Keiller]

Delingpole would have been a better appointment.

[Athelstan.]

Hmm, interesting, very interesting.

Pharos posits, perhaps a new more pragmatic 'Leader'?

Is it too much to hope?

A light, the dawn on the horizon, as the Torygraph distances itself from and casts out the anti science trolls promoting darkness and cold along with the zealots of Church of the green maniacs .

Inevitably one has to ask, an opportunity opens, and a propitious moment unveils.

It must be noted and not before time, that, as the Telegraph 'gets real'! Does this hopefully presage - a wider copy room reshuffle and a well overdue cashier erm.... career move for the CND throwback - who is to say the least leanest of all with the truth and of things pertaining to the now defenestrated supposition, that of CAGW?

Just a thought....................

[michael hart]

...Gosden appears to have no discernable eco-credentials..

Er, do you NEED eco-credentials to churn out eco-rubbish?

I would have thought it was unskilled labour....

Dec 4, 2013 at 11:24 PM | Unregistered CommenterDodgy Geezer

Yes. I was wondering what eco-credentials would like if they ran me down in the street.

[Ron]

Interesting that Geoffrey Lean was overlooked. His Telegraph blog is headed:

"Geoffrey Lean is Britain's longest-serving environmental correspondent, having pioneered reporting on the subject almost 40 years ago.".

He is also the one Telegraph regular whose take on issues is closest to that of the green lobby.

[sHx]

BTW, what happened to Louise Gray, the climate doomsday correspondent for the Torygraph? She seems to have faded away. Her last doom-mongering piece was on September 11 and is entitled, "Summers are getting hotter – honest".

[peter h]

@ Eddy

The picture is 1905. On a website about old typewriters it is described thusly:

"A clear example of early celebrity advertising is this 1905 ad for the Hammond 12. A very pretty young actress named Melle Harlay writes a letter to Mr. P. Castelli of the Hammond company in Paris: “Sir, What do I think of the Hammond? I use it and I love it, and the more I use it, the more I love it. Yours, M. Harlay.” Melle Harlay was an actress who performed in Parisian theatrical revues. This terrific eye-catcher was shot in the studio of Émile Reutlinger, a famous celebrity photographer who worked in Paris between 1890 and 1930. The pose is only slightly unnatural. The girl is carefully positioned so that the shape of the back of the chair balances the composition. She is also seated too far away from the typewriter for comfortable writing, leaning slightly forward in exactly the same angle as the cover of the typewriter case. A splendid photograph that credits M. Reutlinger’s reputation"

[Bishop Hill]

Shx

IIRC Louise G is no longer with the Telegraph.

[Messenger]

Re the picture: the job she is doing was sometimes known as that of "lady typewriter".

[Phillip Bratby]

In her Telegraph article 'Centrica threatening to pull plug on £2bn offshore wind farm plan', she is still given the title 'Energy Correspondent'. It seems a factual article, not the propaganda article Loopy Louise used to produce or Loony Lean still produces.

[Martin A]

That article does not seem to be by Louise...

"Centrica threatening to pull plug on £2bn offshore wind farm plan
British Gas owner Centrica prepares to abandon £2bn offshore wind farm plan because subsidies offered by the government are too low.

By Emily Gosden, Energy Correspondent

8:00PM GMT 03 Nov 2013"

[Swiss Bob]

I wouldn't take much notice of the Telegraph, they think Spitfires are jets and that the Japanese were still fighting in 1946.

[Mike Jackson]

The fragrant Louise has gone freelance.
You might like to catch up with her on her blog here. I think she might appreciate the occasional visit; I don't think she has what you would call a "large following"!

Swiss Bob
Do you have any empirical evidence for either of those bits of snidery? As far as the latter claim goes, some of them actually were.

[steveta_uk]

http://www.portabletypewriters.co.uk/ for some nice early typewriter info.

[Latimer Alder]

According to Twitter the unlamented Loopy Louise Gray is now a freelance.

If somebody can assure me that she really has gone, I might consider shelling out for the Torygraph occasionally. She was the main reason I gave up buying it.

The work I have seen from Emily Gosden seems to be pretty good. She is not obviously a Greenpeace/FoE/WWF mole as Loopy Lou so transparently was.

[Chaveratti]

Louise Gray is still Twittering away like crazy. https://twitter.com/loubgray

[Steve Jones]

Eco-credentials indeed. For most MSM outlets, including the BBC, it appears that neither environmental nor, heaven forbid, scientific qualifications are required in order to hold forth on green issues.
I echo Mike Jackson and Latimer Alder's views on Louise Gray. Her skills best suit her to the role of unread blogger, long may it continue.

[Swiss Bob]

Mr Jackson,

Why on Earth would you think I'd make stuff like that up?

This was the recent article claiming the Japanese scuttled their sub in '46. Since amended and comments gone:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/10493382/World-War-Two-Japanese-submarine-discovered-off-the-coast-of-Hawaii.html

The Spitfires as jets article has also been disappeared but look at the comments on this article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/burmamyanmar/9204921/British-farmers-quest-to-find-lost-Spitfires-in-Burma.html

ie this one from merlinkski:

What a pleasure to read a well written article after yesterday's travesty from the girls who think the spitfire was a jet fighter.

or this one from lordrayne:

Perhaps Adam Lusher could give lessons to the pair of twittering nits, Victoria Ward, and Rowena Mason who wrote an article yesterday on this story which subsequently had to be edited to remove references to these Mk II "jet" aircraft and to correct the grammar.

Adam, this is how it should be written. Go to the top of the class.

Having said all that, I sincerely hope that these aircraft can be found, disinterred, checked and reassembled so that we may see them fly again.

I also hope that Rolls-Royce continues to fly PS853 over Filton every Thursday lunchtime.

I believe an apology is in order.

[Julian Flood]

I rather liked Emily Gosden's stuff -- she showed signs of understanding that the green solutions being offered were inadequate and counter-productive. It can't be much fun having a functioning brain but being forced to toe the editorial line. Presumably it's worse at the Guardian, but there it may be so silly that she can just park her critical faculties at the door when she goes to work.

I fondly imagine that Emily Gosden sometimes strains at the leash where climate nonsense is concerned. The government is certainly laying down smoke and retreating on wind energy, so maybe the word has gone out to the Torygraph. I've been banging away for years to my MP, Matthew Hancock, about how the lights are going to go out. When I explained that each year the chance of power cuts increases, and that he was playing Russian roulette with his career, he looked taken aback. Add in the tiny detail that after each spin the government's energy policy is putting one more shell into the gun and he looks very green indeed.

I hadn't noticed but yes, Loopy Lou has vanished. Can Lean be far behind?

JF

[Phillip Bratby]

Geoffrey Lean must be well-past retirement age. I suspect even the Grauniad (Independent) were well pleased to get rid of him to the Telegraph a few years ago.

[Black Dog]

Ron at 1:20 AM
As regards Lean the Unlean, my thoughts exactly. I am sure the Telegraph have long realised that he is seen as a loon by commentators below the line. Up to now they have put up with his nonsense as their shot at showing how green, balanced and responsible they are. Maybe this new appointment is them waking up and saying enough of this rubbish and no longer trying to appeal to the green side? It will be intersting to see if Geoff starts to fade away over the next while and then reappears working for some green organisation. Or is he is just about to retire?

[bill]

Rather like the BBC employs announcers with accents bound to iiritate its bourgeois audience, so the Telegraph employ people to irritate the readers: Geoffrey Lean, Mary Riddell for example. I suppose some twit thought 'contrarian' views would be stimulating, thought-provoking etc etc without realising that the readership think they are b8888y stupid, and what we read the Telegraph for is to be spared that kind of tosh.

[sHx]

Mike, thanks.

Who says nobody reads what she has to say anymore?

For the last five years I have been at the centre of most breaking environment stories. So it was a little odd not to be at the launch of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. [1]

I watched my former colleagues in the background of the news reports from Stockholm, where scientists had gathered to tell the world they are more certain than ever that mankind is warming the world. [2]

I knew how they felt. The bland conference room might look terrifically dull but the information imparted by those men in grey suits is electric. [3]

You want to run screaming from the room.

“Oh my God! A Nobel Peace Prize-winning scientists just told me if we keep burning fossil fuels at this rate then the world is heading for temperature rise above 2C within 30 years. Do you know what that means? Do you?”

The sentences are almost too extreme to believe. Unless we can slow the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere then the world faces rising sea levels, floods and droughts.

Yet you are pitching to news editors who have to juggle the Syria Crisis, the Party Political conference season and Strictly Come Dancing. I remember filing stories about the end of the world from Copenhagen [4] at the same time as the expenses scandal and thinking why is no one listening?

I’m not saying I won’t make every effort to return to the centre of the fray and do my best to report on what is happening on climate change, but perhaps a little distance is good. Suddenly you can see how the rest of the world sees the problem, while eating their breakfasts:

“Hmm, interesting, temperatures have risen by 0.9C since 1900. Oh dear, there is a chance if we carry on at this rate they could rise by 4.8C. Crikey, they are considering putting mirrors in space if we can’t get this warming under control. Shit, the toast is burning!”

In a way, the best reactions on Twitter were from commentators who usually have nothing to do with climate change.

@caitlinmoran tweeted: “I’d like to rename green energy ‘the only energy that won’t run out or kill us energy’.”

This is because she is coming from the perspective of the ordinary person.

It think my concerns are the same as most people’s too. I insure my home because I need to have somewhere to live if there is a fire. I don’t smoke because I don’t want to get lung cancer. In the same way I think it is sensible to heed the scientists warning and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worse-case scenario for the world.

OK, my actions are pretty much the same as everyone else’s. I haven’t stopped eating meat or driving a car – despite years of reporting on the problem.

But I want the politicians to act. In the last five years, as well as hearing about the disaster scenarios under climate change, I’ve seen the potential of switching to a low carbon economy. No one really noticed that the government published the latest statistics on renewable energy as the IPCC reported, showing that in the second quarter of this year the UK got 15 per cent of its electricity from wind, solar and biomass. [5]

The point of the IPCC is to inform world governments of the reality of climate change so they can make a global agreement on how to reduce greenhouse gases by 2015 [6] ie by leaving fossil fuels in the ground and investing in renewables.

The trouble is, is anyone listening? Climate change has gone mainstream and become just another news story.

But this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We have two years to prove to governments that we care. After all, it’s only when the ordinary voters speak out that things start to change – or we’re all toast.

Sources

1. IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report

2. BBC News

3. The Telegraph

4. The Telegraph

5. Gov.uk

6. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

So there, folks, lots and lots of people are sill reading what she has to say.

Her blog is less prolific than my brilliant comrade Geoff Chamber's; she has had only three posts (Sept 20, Sept 30, Oct 24). Only one of them is about her previous obsession with climate doom-mongering so she can't blame unsympathetic editors for not airing what she has to say on her own blog.

It is evident in her own blog that she no longer believes in preaching people what to do even as she refuses to do what she preaches.

I feel sorry for her for throwing her lot with the doomsday cult and losing her job as a journalist as result. If she hadn't sub-contracted her critical faculties to oh-so-trustworthy Nobel-winning climate doomsday high priests, she might well have been the new Energy and Climate Change editor in Torygraph.

[Nial]

"I feel sorry for her for throwing her lot with the doomsday cult and losing her job as a journalist"

I don't, at all, because she was being paid to be a _journalist_ and....

"sub-contracted her critical faculties to oh-so-trustworthy Nobel-winning climate doomsday high priests"

Perhaps she's cleared the way for some old fashioned journalists who will ask questions.

[SandyS]

Swiss Bob
Quite a lot of Japanese soldiers continue the war after 1945, one keeping going for nearly 30 years.
Japanese holdouts

The IJN developed many novel submarine designs, the one in the Telegraph story was the I-400, which I read as being scuttled by the USN. Fortunately for the Americans the IJN was not that proficient at submarine warfare.
I-400

[Swiss Bob]

Mr S, I know that. But their Navy did not!

The article was all crap, first they claimed the Japanese scuttled it, they now claim the Americans scuttled it.

The US Navy sunk it with three torpedoes.

I note that Mr Jackson, hasn't returned, no doubt too technically inept to Google ' Spitfires Jets Telegraph' for himself, or to apologise for his remarks.

[sHx]

Swiss Bob

If we all had to apologise for all our mistakes, the world would be so nice as to be positively dull. Sometimes it is enough to just show the evidence otherwise; no need to demand an apology.

[Swiss Bob]

Mr sHx,

I apologise if I'm wrong, if you can be bothered to troll though my Disqus account you can verify that.

I just don't like being called snide by someone quick to abuse others without doing a simple check themselves.

[sHx]

Swiss Bob, dude, the only discuss I know of is the one thrown away for fun. Chill out and take it easy. There is more to life than being called a snide.

[Mike Jackson]

Swiss Bob
Odd as it may seem I do have a life outside Bishop Hill and Thursday morning is booked by Madame for weekly shopping augmented today by Christmas presents for far-flung relatives and the purchase of several lengths of wood for essential purposes around Jackson Towers that need not detain us.
Followed by an hour of fun watching Wee Geordie Osborne screeching at his colleagues (did you see Davey nodding enthusiastically when he mentioned shale gas? Hypocrite!) then lunch.
But here I am to see that you have indeed provided the evidence (though I stand by my comment about Japanese carrying on the war into 1946 - and beyond in some cases, I believe) so I suggest perhaps honours even on the apologies front.
In future I shall keep my mouth shut if you choose to sneer at the Daily Telegraph.

[Eddy]

Thanks Peter (and Steveta), amazing what you can learn on this Blog!

[Swiss Bob]

No problem Mr Jackson, I watched it too, not a fan of this particular Govt but some of it was amusing.

I am currently losing my shirt on India in the cricket.

All I would add is that some soldiers yes, sailors no ;-)

[sHx]

"I am currently losing my shirt on India in the cricket."

I recommend betting for Australia. Odds are on for Australia in the Ashes. I reckon if you bet one Hawaii shirt for Australia winning against England in the cricket, you'll win two Hawaii shirts by the end this summer.

[Swiss Bob]

Mr sHx,

Have bets on 5-0 (70-1) I got in early. 4-0, 3-0 and 3-1, any of those results would generate a great return on relatively small stakes.

Have the biggest bet I've made on this test on Oz, though that's not saying much.

India haven't batted yet but it's a big total, fingers crossed.

[Old Forge]

According to Twitter the unlamented Loopy Louise Gray is now a freelance.

If somebody can assure me that she really has gone, I might consider shelling out for the Torygraph occasionally. She was the main reason I gave up buying it.
Dec 5, 2013 at 9:02 AM | Unregistered CommenterLatimer Alder

LA - I wouldn't bother. Their leader on the 5th AR did acknowledge that there was less certainty these days about CAGW - but then it explained that the heat's hiding in the oceans. Their obsession with Downton Abbey speaks volumes for the triumph of illusion over reality.