Bishop Hill New BBC policy: right is wrong, wrong is right
Jun 26, 2014 BBC Climate: Sceptics News that the BBC continues to sing from the greens' hymnsheet is never hard to come by and so we can turn to the latest news with a sense of weary inevitability rather than any great surprise. The Today programme interview with Brian Hoskins and Nigel Lawson on the subject of the winter floods was, as readers no doubt recall, the subject of a concerted campaign from green activists and, with a certain predictability, a formal complaint or two. Anyone who has ever dealt with the BBC Editorial Standards unit will know that it can take months to get a response and years to get a ruling, but wheels seems to have been oiled to a remarkable extent for this green-tinged complaint and the Guardian now seems to have got hold of the findings, just months after the offending programme appeared:
Reviewing the broadcast, the BBC's head of editorial complaints, Fraser Steel, took a dim view. "Lord Lawson's views are not supported by the evidence from computer modelling and scientific research," Steel says, "and I don't believe this was made sufficiently clear to the audience … Furthermore the implication was that Lord Lawson's views on climate change were on an equal footing with those of Sir Brian." And they aren't. Sceptics have their place in the debate, Steel says in his provisional finding, but "it is important to ensure that such views are put into the appropriate context and given due (rather than equal) weight." Chong is only partially satisfied. He'd like a right of reply and perhaps a balancing programme. And others say "due weight" should mean not having Lawson on at all.
During the Science and Technology Committee's inquiry into the public understanding of climate science, I pointed out to the committee that other witnesses seemed to be pushing very hard for dissenting views on climate change to be flagged up front as "wrong", something that was hotly disputed by chairman Andrew Miller and Ros Donald of the Climate Brief:
Andrew Montford: The undertone of some of these answers is that somehow sceptic views are not valid. Ros says they should be there in the context of what the real science is, and that any sceptic view should be put forward with somebody saying why it is wrong. It is a mad way of running things.
Q138 Chair: I have not heard anyone say that.
Ros Donald:I think that is a bit unfair.
Andrew Montford: You wanted the sceptic views put in context.
Ros Donald: That means putting them in context; it does not mean they are wrong. That is a big difference.
As we can see, the head of editorial complaints, Fraser Steel thinks that audiences need to be told that Lawson is wrong; his "views are not supported by the evidence from computer modelling and scientific research". I wonder if Ros Donald still thinks I was being "a bit unfair"?
At this point it's worth returning to the transcript of the interview and it's hard to recall a better one on the BBC. It's not often you hear a scientist challenged on anything on the BBC, an organisation whose journalists seem to hold people with the letters PhD after their name in a certain awe. It's even rarer to hear a climate scientist challenged. And readers will be hard to put to find anything incorrect that Lawson said in the interview - indeed there was considerable agreement between him and Hoskins.
This is a stark contrast to Julia Slingo's infamous statement about the floods on the BBC, namely that "all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change", something that her own organisation denied. But in a way this is beside the point. Steel seems to want to take the view that any interview with Lawson that touches on the subject of AGW should carry a health warning.
When you think about it, the BBC's new position is going to put them in an utterly hilarious position. It will be possible for true things said by people like Lawson, to be preceded by a formal statement that they have "views that are not supported by the evidence [sic] from computer modelling and scientific research". At the same time incorrect things can be said by people like Julia Slingo, who will be introduced as those who have those evidence-supported views.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly preposterous.
Looking on the bright side though, it is another nail in the coffin of the BBC.
Reader Comments (69)
Clive Best
"Tim Yeo on Today"
Did you hear the declaration of Yeo's renewable interests at the start of the interview? Me neither...
cont'd
and why do you and your colleagues insist on calling global warming climate change. Deception ? Deliberate ? a means of avoiding the truth.?
Anyway what a load of BS we know this all is. It seems pretty likely that Bob Ward wrote that BBC report himself and although it can be debunked from first glance, and by going thru it logically and addressing the fallacies one by one. it sucks away our time.
1. Premise "the BBC should have made it clear that Hoskins is the scientists and Lawson a politician"
- that was clear to all listeners
- what wasn't made clear is that Lawson had more expertise on certain matters than Hoskins .,hence Hoskins errors.
2. Premise that scientist title confers higher level of truth .. Just not true
3. Premise that what Hoskins said is supported by models ..absolute fallacy as models the models in thise case are NOT-VALIDATED models, rather they are dependent on what opinions are programmed into them.
Well he certainly did take a dim view....and he isn't alone in his dimness.
Richard Betts
Many thanks for your thoughtful concern about the science behind the policy but it would seem that the need to communicate that better to government has still got a lot of way to go:
Nobody is more anti-sceptic than me. The real climate is 100% as described by the evidence from computer modelling and scientific research. No doubt about that.
So why do some people not see this real climate when they look around them? Why do most people think the Arctic ice hasn't melted and organizations such as NASA see the Global temperature as basically flat in recent years?
It can only be that millions of invisible pixies, angels, and space aliens are meddling with our observations.
I eagerly wait my invitation from the BBC to discuss these facts and - as my views are 100% supported by the evidence from computer modelling and scientific research - there will be no need for any "health warning" to put them into the appropriate context.
Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
From a future edition of today:
Naughtie: Good Morning and welcome to the Today programme. Our first guest is Lord Lawsion.
Voiceover: Lawson is an evil heretic who cavorts with Satan himself!
Lawson: Good morning Jim, good morning listeners.
Naughtie: He will be debating with Dame Julia Slingo. Good morning Dame Julia.
Voiceover: Dame Julia is the High priestess of science at the Heaven blessed Met Office and is always right.
Dame Julia: Good afternoon everybody.
Naughtie: Alert listeners may have noticed that the Today programme has been moved to the afternoon.
Kevin
+1 :-)
We've had a nice morning in the Isle of Wight today, and recalling the forecast of rain by the BBC/MO last night, I looked on the MO website. There, there was (and is) a 'severe weather warning', to wit:
"Heavy, thundery showers are breaking out and will become more widespread through Friday afternoon across Wales, southern England, East Anglia and the Midlands. Hail and lightning will accompany some of these downpours, but with an improvement likely later across parts of southeast England."
Having just consumed a salady lunch, accompanied by a G&T and a lolly, in blazing sunshine, I thought I should check the rain radar, which shows a conspicuous absence of rain for most of the south coast. Cognitive dissonance, or just the usual uncertainty? I expect they need a bigger computer.
Last night Channel 4 news allowed Chris Smith (non-scientist) to preach about climate change, saying that no politician realises the full seriousness of it. Jon Snow (bless him) accepted it without question.
Worth a formal complaint? Nah, C4 is another lost cause, as they showed during the Winter Olympics, turning it into a platform for gay rights activists, which in general I support, but not to the exclusion of everything else.
Lord Beaverbrook
Are we beginning to see our "climate scientists" distancing themselves from policy? A sort of "not me guv, I just produced some figures, you the public, through your politicians decided action was required"!
A few days ago I came across a presentation by Ed Hawkins contains a lot interesting detail but two comments stood out:-
One statement "we have a magic number of 2 deg C the policy makers care about, they seem to care about 2 deg C above pre-industrial global average temperature". This is at about 11 mins in, please check, I am not Alex Cull!"
Now where did I get the idea that the 2C "threshold" came from "climate science"? Are we now to believe that the 2C is in fact a number dreamed up by non-scientific policy makers who then foisted it on the climate science community? Because that is sure not my understanding of the 2 deg C "threshold". Is it anybody else's?
Also it would appear that 2100 is just an "arbitrary figure, sometime in the future"
Ed Hawkins, Reading University. "Climate Variability and Arctic Predictability"
(scroll down to first video)
Green Sand, I think this is probably what Ed Hawkins was referring to.
The Invention of the Two-Degree Target
Many thanks Ruth
So "scientists yielding to political pressure" yet they feel free to lecture people about not understanding the way they communicate the science!
Bottom line? Scientist "invented an easily digestible message" and now they claim it is a political target "not me guv"! Sorry IPR and therefore responsibility remains with the inventor.
Skeptics refuse to expose fraud by showing examples of it such as Steig's red Antarctica or Marcott's bladeless hockey stick input data on television or in debates. Thus only wingnuts like Steve Goddard or greenhouse effect deniers like Tim Ball and his registered child rapist co-author Oliver Manuel act as true whistleblowers, with counterproductive effect. It's a scam, but alarmists are legitimized by technical debate in which alarmists hold nearly all of the academic and official authority via whole scientific bodies. Finally we have Mark Steyn however declaring fraud, and skeptics assigned by the Am. Physical Society to redo their policy statement. That historically science-attacking Republicans jumped on board helped early in but now acts as inertia towards further progress. Outreach to working scientists means outreach to liberals but that's not happening because the second most popular skeptical blog allows skepticism to be successfully associated with far right wing politics, featuring the same rapist every day. And then I'm attacked for pointing this out here. Shame on you, blind partisans. You've screwed it up yourselves by harboring crackpots as your only outspoken whistleblowers. Where the hell is the emphasis in that media on clear cases of fraud? There *is* none! Thus you lose debate points, utterly. I'm afraid sending out the creationist Roy Spenser in an all black outfit to Congress isn't exactly useful but in fact strongly alienates the usual liberal academics and big city urban crowd. Behavior has consequences and here they are, those consequences, a lack of good reputation for climate alarm skepticism.
Richard Betts wrote: "Most people (including our host, and Lawson) agree on the basic points of the greenhouse effect and human influence on CO2 rise, and most people also agree that the future effects of these are massively uncertain. Trying to justify or criticise climate policy primarily on the basis of science is therefore futile - it all comes down to a matter of opinion on how much risk is acceptable from climate change and whether this justifies the policy."
Most climate scientists and activists think that our host and Lawson believe that GHG-mediated warming is a hoax. Some of them may occasionally admit some minor uncertainty exists in their science, but not enough to question a policy of rapid decarbonization of the economy. Saving the planet and our grandchildren is a religious mission.
NikFromNYC,
Well, this blog has several regular sceptical commenters who are self-described as having left wing politics. This writer probablyis a liberal in the traditional British sense of the word [the party of that name is no longer liberal].
I will 'outreach' to other liberals by being liberal. I believe the scientists among them are more than capable of reaching similar conclusions to me once they actually start looking at the facts in detail. I don't even think someone even needs to be a scientist to follow the most important arguments. Sure, not all will.
Every side will contain prominent people who are not representative of the others who may agree on some but not all points. And not everyone is in a position to denounce those who a third-party says should be denounced, whether it is merited or not.
And no one "sends out” Roy Spencer. He is his own man, and a good scientist as far as I can determine. Speaking as an almost card carrying atheist I don't consider his religious views relevant or important. I see no evidence that they affect his science. He has actually taken the trouble to explain them on his blog, and frankly I wouldn't describe him as a creationist, or not as they are usually portrayed in the media. I think you do him a disservice.
Greensand
We are probably starting to see more scientists being scientists and not advocates. To be fair to Richard he has been speaking out about dodgy reporting of climate science issues for some time now starting with more sceptical articles but graduating to consensus articles more recently if I can use those terms to describe the articles, I'm sure you know what I mean.
Another critical blog article ridicules arrogant BBC today for the Lawson ruling
http://conservativewoman.co.uk/david-keighley-bbc-arrogantly-censors-free-speech-climate-change/
Transcript, and audio link, of the Today Lawson-Hoskins interview
http://www.thegwpf.org/hoskins-vs-lawson-the-climate-debate-the-bbc-wants-to-censor/