Bishop Hill The BBC's week of lies
Dec 2, 2015 BBC Matt Ridley The tsunami of environmentalist disinformation, naked campaigning and outright lies coming from the BBC this week is quite extraordinary. It's impossible to keep up with it all and I'm not even going to try. I'll leave this as an open thread for anyone who wants to post stuff. Feel free to transfer things from unthreaded too.
As a starter for ten, in an email Tony Newbery notes Nick Robinson's frantic attempts to make sure that all the listeners knew that Matt Ridley is not a scientist and compares this with the introduction given to Britt Basel in a segment the same day about Vanuatu: the lady in question was introduced as "a climate change adviser". However, this is not how she describes herself:
I’m an adventurer, a socio-environmental scientist, and a storyteller. Challenge, learning, and exploration fuel me. The diversity and richness of our world fascinate me. I am driven by a conviction that there is a more sustainable and satisfying way of living of our daily lives. My passion and my work have brought me to more than 30 countries. My camera is my constant companion.
And that, ladies and gentlemen is why the BBC should be closed.
Amusingly, Ms Basel has posted the adaptation plan she developed for some of the Solomon Islanders. Seriously.
;)
Reader Comments (106)
Speaking only for myself, I stopped reading his comments once it became evident that if he had something significant to say, then he would have said it. I'm only prepared to spend a limited amount of time on such people. He was trolling.
Smoothing. But I'm guessing. The plot is from here
http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2015/11/lesson-1126-in-how-to-be-science.html
From the text I'd say its annualised data.
Update: yes, I downloaded and plotted the annual data from the Met Office and its the same graph
(off topic for this thread but as you're here)
Hi Phil,
thanks for your replies,
hey we all make mistakes: Watts and his anomalies, The Guardian with their 2% and 5%, some people even confuse Nicholas Ridley with someone completely different! I made a mistake myself once...but it was a long time ago :-)
I like your honesty about the scale of the (C)AGW problem and I think you'll find many here aren't that far off, indeed many argue that say giving Africans access to plentiful energy to help alleviate poverty should take precedence over Co2 concerns.
As for the Catastrophic bit, I wasn't saying you were saying that, but it is certainly what our leaders spout ("50 days to save the planet") and why it does currently have equivalence to terrorism in Paris. So (according to the believers) is it going to be catastrophic or just a mildly beneficial slow warmiing (in which case, what's the big deal).
we can make small (in the overall scheme of things) changes now to avert a large, and potentially very serious problem decades hence
Ah, this is where we have a problem. If this were true I think we'd all agree but many would say it is the exact opposite . Why are we trying to solve non urgent problems now when future generations (whose technology may/will be wildly different to ours now) will be better placed to solve them (and be clearer how serious those problems are, if at all).
I do agree that we should be looking for "no regrets" actions we can do now. I suppose we'd disagree on what those actions are. Personally I'd support anything that can be proven to work: leccy cars (?), insulating homes (obviously), even Wind power/hydro combos if they can stand on their own two feet. It's the barrier to this progress I object to by skewing the debate with CO2 considerations and mad subsidies (i.e. picking winners).
As for your graph, this is where we can both look at the same thing and see something completely different. Re the graph, it is exactly what I was railing against here the other day. Which bit is the hindcast (easy) and which bit is the forecast (the test if it's any good).
My take on it is the range to hit was as big as a barn door...and they still missed. Now you say the "surge" is just bringing it back into range (so clipping the bottom of the barn door). Still not very convincing - "if it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong", remember.
Genuine question : Would you say the observations over the last 10 years have made the AGW theory more likely or less likely to be true? (you're taking a fresh look remember, comparing then to now)
I would say clearly less likely. Yet all I hear is "mounting evidence", let's just get on with it, time is running out, even the IPCC upped their confidence levels. It just makes no sense.
If you do answer more likely: which observations in the last 10 years have made you MORE convinced?
Thanks, Simon
In my view the observations over the last decade have neither strengthened nor weakened the case particularly. Ten years is not long enough for the noise (natural variability, weather) to average out. (What has increased is the number of attribution or fingerprint studies). The pause is said to have lasted what is it - 18 years? But if you look at the 15 years ending 2005 the trend is about 50% higher than that projected by the models. Why is one period significant, the other not?
On the models, the observations have never strayed out of the 95% confidence range, in fact the TAR prediction for 1990 - 2010 was bang on.
Why do Lomborg's figures differ so much from other projections?
Thanks for your views Phil. I agree on timescales. We'll agree to disagree on the other stuff.
Hope to catch up with you on other on-topic threads.
Cheers, Simon