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Mar292015
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Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill An unbalanced panel
Mar 29, 2015 BBC Climate: WG3 Ethics Greens I'm in Bath at the moment, appearing on BBC The Big Questions. The show was broadcast live at 10am here, but we are asked not to mention our involvement ahead of time. It should be on iPlayer in due course.
The subject is:
Are we right to impose environmental costs on future generations?
The show's panel also features Tony Juniper, Ben Harris-Quinney of the Bow Group and Hannah Martin of Christian Climate Action. This is what Helen Czerski would refer to as an "unbalanced" panel, no doubt.
Reader Comments (123)
Tomo
I agree that the alarmists came across as a bunch of lunatics. But sadly these lunatics are able to set the parameters of the debate and call people who disagree with them names like denier.
Also I don't think people should get too het up over cook's 97% scientist paper. If one accepts that some emissions of co2, other things being equal, leads to warming, then we can attribute some of that warming to human activity. However, that doesn't mean the alarmist view is correct. The sensitivity of the climate to co2 emissions might be very low, so human activity will cause minor warning of which we can stop worrying about.
Alex Cull
heh - he's making a minor career out of "talking to skeptics " by the look of it.
Were previous generations right to impose the environmental costs of the industrial revolution on later generations, i.e. us?
I would say yes. Most of us would not even be alive if it had not happened. Old brown-field sites get covered trees in a fairly short space of time even without remediation efforts. I love cycling on old railway lines and have spent happy hours rock climbing in old quarries amidst abundant vegetation and wild life.
Modern alleged environmental costs are almost never as bad as the green machine likes to claim. Extra carbon dioxide enhances photosynthesis and greens the planet. But those kind of simple facts don't fill the collection plate in the church of global warming.
If ATTP was any kind of scientist (ho ho) he would happily present both sides of the argument and argue accordingly. Instead, all we get is warmy-warmy, disaster-disaster. So, not so much a scientist, more an advocate. But then, when we're reduced to Third-World status because of the inevitable AGW-cuts to come he'll be the first out of a job - to join all the aluminium smelters and heavy engineering jobs his beliefs have totally buggered.
Michael Hart:
Very good point, Michael. Two world wars - for instance - imposed a hell of a difference to future generations - and a whole load of future generations that never happened. If warmists could tell me that wars that killed multi-millions would not happen as a result of their efforts then they may have some saving grace. But they can't. They preach about the costs to our grand-children but I fear they would have been agin the warnings of the likes of Churchill (WWII) and Roosevelt (WWI) and called them deniers. After all, fascism is their wet dream - from whichever side it comes.Tried to sit through it all, but sadly it ceased to be worth the commitment of time and I bailed when the eye-rolling death stare young lady re-intoned out magic numbers that the host had already locked in as gospel at the start, and then re-iterated throughout.
"able to set the parameters of the debate and call people who disagree with them names"
Mar 29, 2015 at 5:17 PM | Abc
Pretty much the whole point as far as the programme producers seemed concerned.
When you have a host of the impartial calibre of Nicky Campbell as moderator it ceases to be sensible on any basis.
I must confess to basing my desire to stay with such efforts on whether any of the passionate advocates of spending vast amounts on preventing 'climate change' appears likely to have a rationale answer to when it has not changed.
That and an evident willingness and ability to entertain and connect many crucial influences and consequences between economies and ecologies together at once.
It was rather clear here only a few could, or wanted to. The rest were there to reinforce each other, the host and the prograrmme makers.
But one presumes that somewhere, deep in the bowels of the BBC, protected by FOI exemption lawyers, there is a file with a new box that got ticked and will be used by BBC spokesmen on behalf of various BBC market rate talents when they tell the world how balanced the BBC knows itself to be.
Well, I didn't think it was Andrew Montford's finest hour or even finest two minutes where he actually got an input.
Unfortunately Andrew's quite understandable reaction to the spital flecked catastophist rant of Tony Juniper was ill judged as Campbell seized on it like a latter-day Frankie Howard, "I heard a titter, titter yee not!". It made Andrew sound suspect as being insincere and patronising.
Not only was the panel stacked with shouty catastrophists, but he was denied a fair hearing by Niki Campbell, who from the first never let complete a point. Even when Andrew challenged him on his repetition of the debased 97% meme Campbell at first invited a response then switched to another panelist. BBC balance as we now know it I imagine. This was a skirmish that Andrew could not win, the opposition were zealots and the rules of engagement were biased. Not really a skirmish, more like the brave but forlorn hope dashed against the ramparts of the BBC and catastophist zealots of all stripes.
Alex Cull, Jonny Scaramanga is clearly a man of great faith. Unfortunately, without any scientific proof, he is willing to inflict his faith on others.
His religious beliefs, are open to discussion on other websites.
Did anyone really think it would be a level playing field on the BBC?
In the run up to Paris the BBC has gone into climate change overdrive with climate change on the agenda somewhere almost every day.
I hate to say it, but it is probably best to let the eco-loons enjoy their alarmism on their own. At least the BBC will be happy with the balance of the programmes and the Trust will be pleased too, given that they now have a policy to be 100% biased, in breach of their charter. The feel quite safe that no government minister will notice or worry about that.
Don't hold your breath for a right/wrong climate science paper Golf Charlie, we need an effing Great Exhibition to cover about 30 years of climate BS.
It is important to show who is violent, who is intolerant, who is ignorant. This program did just that.
You and your pals at the GWPF do not represent me or anyone else in Britain apart from yourselves. Neither do the greens.
Too much debate over the CONTENT of the show as opposed to the purpose - which was to expose "sceptic" questions to ridicule. Big F I'm afraid. "Big Questions" is the BBC Religion Department emulating (badly) the format of the Jeremy Kyle Show. All that was missing was the Paternity Test and a flash of Mr Scaramanga's third nipple.
What emerged was ONE, calm, rational message on the subject of Biofuel which left Tony Juniper apoplectic. Cumbrian Lad @ 1.25pm has it (as always) spot on to the casual viewer (as has Brute at 17.48). We actually want more of these from the BBC. They clearly acknowledge the need to counter "sceptic" arguments. If this is how they do it
- bring it on.
Also thanks to Ken for showing us the difference between sceptics, "sceptics" and "sceptic's", and congratulations on your latest engagement with the theologians on Judith Curry's site (on the Christopher Essex article). How does it feel to have your arse handed to you on a plate by a real physicist?
Could someone stick it on Youtube? We foreigners are not allowed to watch the BBC on iplayer. Thanks
ATTP is a troll.
Do not feed the troll.
Wasn't Scaramanga 'The Man with the Golden Gun'?
Imho,
Andrew demonstrated some remarkable sang-froid, because the atmosphere was poisonous and I always thought of Campbell as being a tad more objective...more fool me. Campbell sadly once a Beeb patsy always a left leaning worm tongue - there's no middle road! Thus, bias was broadcast and bent as you like, Campbell skewed what little debate there was to be had - so typical of the beeb and is this not the left's favourite weapon? To - "close the debate down" - I am surprised no one called the Bish' a "RACIST!"
Calm is surely, that is the only way to deal with a
bunch of pumped up eco-lunaticsbeeb ritual slaughter. To call that a debate, is akin to describing the 'Oxburgh report' as an in-depth and rigorous inquiry. Blockheads broadcasting calumny.The other month, I looked in on a TV programme featuring JD and he - Delingpole never got a word in and even if he was allowed to utter a sound - he was cut off in mid sentence. It is just the same sort of thing on Dimblebore and QT - where a hand picked audience of left wing extremists and Common Purpose boo and hiss like kids do having swallowed too many sweeties - E numbers - during a Saturday afternoon panto'.
Mark Morano, is the virtuoso and past master, he keeps it brutally simple in words of one and two syllables if he can and precisely to the point and will engage with skills learnt in the back streets as a Capitol Hill political gang-banger. He is, a star and they daren't cross swords because he eats alarmists for breakfast.
I'll leave it with Professor Lindzen - a hero of
the resistancetruth, logic and realism.Perhaps we should stop accepting the term, ‘skeptic.’ Skepticism implies doubts about a plausible proposition. Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible as does the evidence from climategate and other instances of overt cheating.
In the meantime, while I avoid making forecasts for tenths of a degree change in globally averaged temperature anomaly, I am quite willing to state that unprecedented climate catastrophes are not on the horizon though in several thousand years we may return to an ice age.:
link WUWT.
Otter
I did wonder if that's a pseudo-name - some British fundamentalist Christians aiui* can be a really vindictive mob - there's a "closed tribe" of them north east of London that run several farms and they've been involved in considerable argy-bargy with lapsed members / escapees....
Sounds a bit like Saul / Paul - swapping one brand of zealotry for another....
Athelstan +1
*[alumni? BH]
" ... Jonny Scaramanga is clearly a man of great faith. Unfortunately, without any scientific proof, he is willing to inflict his faith on others."
Mar 29, 2015 at 7:21 PM | Unregistered CommenterGolf Charlie
Not according to the BBC subtitles (3rd segment). He is a former fundamentalist church member but now an atheist.
He was also having a "good" smirk with Tony Juniper at the end of the 2nd segment.
"*[alumni? BH]"
No, aiui = as I understand it
Sorry about the acronym soup aiui - or whatever it's called - I try to keep it in check but sometimes, well - it seems useful to telescope down a sentence...
fwiw (oops!) - if the BBC were in the slightest even handed then I think it would be reasonable to have a civilised discussion program about stuff like Helen Czerski's Climate Change effort or good ole Climate Change by Numbers in much the same fashion that they extract the maximum cheap airtime out of "panel game style" "forking over" other programmes with panels of their chums.
That's not what they're up to though is it? Science (?) + Climate Change in religious discussion programming - what next? - there's got to be some entertaining juxtapositions to be had elsewhere....
As it appears that aTTP is not interested in continuing our brief dialogue, I'll sum up. aTTP interpreted Helen Czerski's tweet that about having a balanced panel which excluded "skeptics" (her inverted commas) by saying that "skeptics" referred to false skeptics. His definition: "[S]omeone who may think they're a skeptic, but really isn't. Someone who hasn't carried out a thorough and objective analysis of the evidence. Someone who is either insufficiently informed to actually hold a strong view, has some kind of bias that is influencing their view, or some combination of the two."
I asked aTTP to cite some specific individuals whom the BBC might think of calling upon, and who fit that definition. However, he refused to name any. More interestingly, he viewed becoming more specific as not "sensible". Well, perhaps it is.
Concepts -- valid concepts -- are developed by abstracting a common characteristic of multiple items. For example, one might look at Lawson, Montford, and Ridley and observe that they are "persons who believe that the IPCC view of the danger of climate change is exaggerated." In brief, consensus contrarians. Or skeptics.
By contrast, aTTP creates a term "skeptics", but steadfastly refuses to name anyone in the group. So what is the purpose of the term? He offers two differentiae -- "one who is insufficiently informed" and one who "has some kind of bias that is influencing his view." Neither characteristic is objective. Who gets to be arbiter of such vague criteria? Well, aTTP, that's who. Attempting to apply the term demonstrates its weakness.
"Skeptic" (in the aTTP sense) is no more than denier -- a semantically empty word used to label opinions which one wishes to discount, and thereby rationalize the action.
attp, or the vacuousness of the fascist troll
he is back behind his high anonimity dispersing walls of the BBC "have your say", AlQu'ardian "Komment macht Frei" or the vaaza or something else set up with tax funding to please the parasites.
A Friendly General Discussion with ATTP is a new disccusion thread, I just created.
- Personally I am all for friendly discussion and against censoring legal not malicious comments and it's so easy to create a new discussion thread like that one for a side issue if people want to give more than one or 2 comments. So keeping the main post comments tidy and on topic.
- And keeping a topic all in one place means that the same arguments are not rehashed again and again.
(on other forums I have seen that some people sometimes deliberately try to spoil a discussion by goading everyone to react to them, and thus ignore the main topic of the post.
- I think readers are better off , checking themselves and saying "yeh whatever I don't have to react, I can just ignore some comments and put my own on the main topic")
It was a WIN for skeptics, cos the alarmist tweeters are pissed off.
- How do I know that even tho I can't watch the prog. Well I watched Twitter as the prog progressed and saw that no alarmists were saying that they were winning the debate.
from what people said on Twitter.
People saw through it as "rig & shout down" the BBC had rigged it with the framing & presenter, and the alarmists used "the shout down" technique
- The vast majority of tweets came from independent tweeters who were really annoyed at the greens shouting
The partisan Tweeters
- The skeptic tweeters were all making serious points
- The Alarmist tweets themselves were also very shouty and unreasonable, mostly moaning that the BBC had dared to allow "deniers" on
: #bbctbq this is a f............. joke? Now we're hosting science denying corporate shills? This isn't a discussion it's pure propaganda
: Dear BBC. I'm sure you said you were going to stop inviting on idiots to add this 'false balance' to the debate on climate change? #BBCTBQ
: Oh yeah propper fun time bring on the religious loons who make even the climate change deniers sound sane and that takes some doing! #bbctbq
: Ah, here is Andrew Montford, another non-scientist denying climate change! Why do we listen to writers, politicians and jornos! #bbctbq
: Andrew Montford claiming the effects of climate change is nonsense. The only nonsense is coming out of your mouth! #bbctbq
: Andrew Montford and the Tax Payers Alliance, the perfect Climate change deniers marriage! #bbctbq #cranks #1950s
THEN : #bbctbq Andrew Montfort seems to be the sole voice of reason today
ALSO : There is the progs Discussion thread on Facebook 60 comments
Extra info : Tony Juniper is from FOE (Friends of the Earth used to be a lobby group for the environment)
@Tomo said : "Pretty disingenuous to not list the invited participants on iPlayer "
well they tweeted the guest list
Joining us are: Tim Newark from .@the_tpa; .@johnbirdswords from .@BigIssue; .@ChrisMould from .@TrussellTrust; .@frances__ryan @B_HQ from .@bowgroup; Author .@aDissentient; .@TonyJuniper from .@wwwfoecouk; Campainger .@Hannah_RM;
- Tim Newark - Tax Payers Alliance
- John Bird shouty man, The Big Issue founder
- frances__ryan The Bow Group is the United Kingdom's oldest conservative think tank
- Hannah Martin is from Christian Climate Action (multitasking : "Hannah Martin (on behalf of No Dash for Gas) ", "Greenpeace campaigner Hannah Martin said" , "Hannah Martin is a campaigner and activist with Reclaim the Power")
wow you got her and spikey haired activist Jonny Scaramanga who @Alex identified
- does anyone else read that as Jonny SCARE-MONGER ?
(not a surprise to me that people move out of one fundamentalist cult, right into another fundamentalist cult like alarmist certainty )
(prog also featured in other segments ? ChrisMould from .@TrussellTrust foodbank, Jonathan Bartley GREEN Party Parliamentary candidate for Streatham)
Bish also made an error in the html
a href="Are we right to impose environmental costs on future generations?">here
should probably be
a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05q0089">here
I thought Andrew did very well. Of course, you won't convert religious believers overnight, but his obvious reasonabless and well marshalled arguments might just cause some of the less committed who were watching to go away and think a bit more.
Good work stewgreen.
That guest list reveals exactly why it was yet another BBC environment stitch up job. They really are slippery bastards.
Really? I thought giggling when one of the others was speaking was rather unreasonable, but maybe that's just me.
Additionally, how is claiming that the IPCC suggests that the net effect of the next few degrees of warming will be roughly zero, remotely correct? It's almost certainly not likely to be the case, and is definitely not what the IPCC suggests. As I point out on my blog, if our host dislikes being regarded as a pseudo-skeptic, maybe he should avoid saying things that make it seem that he is. You don't get people to stop regarding you as a pseudo-skeptic, but telling them that you're not. You get people to stop regarding you in that way by behaving in a manner that makes it clear that you're not!
I am in agreement with all above who say we should not feed the troll. It is long past Obvious that particular person only exists to derail conversation on the subject at hand, even IF what they say sounds vaguely like it is about said topic.
Otter
The proof of trolling will be if he turns up up on stewgreen's discussion thread and stops disrupting sensible discussion.
aTTP:
It is just you. When someone says something as utterly ridiculous as Mr Juniper, who could supress a chuckle? (A chuckle is how I would describe what I heard, though could not verify its source – and I doubt you could either; you just took Campbell’s inferences for it – you interpreted it as a giggle (by implication, “How childish”); Nicky Campbell called it a titter, with the same implications.)The simple fact is that the entire discussion was biased from the start, with Campbell pouring out all the doom and gloom (droughts, flooding, mass extinctions, etc.) with no counter; the idea has been planted that this WILL happen unless we do something (by “we”, of course, it is not meant, “We, the people”, it is meant, “the government”, while everyone else can carry on with their lives as normal, until told what to do by “the government”. Who can argue that this is not a Socialist dream?). That, you have to admit, is such a loaded start that it can only be called bias. As a point, tell us all, Ken: when did you stop beating your wife?
I do not (and, I suspect, neither do the vast majority on this site) have anything against developing newer technologies to provide us with energy, but do we have to kill millions NOW so that those hypotheticals in the future may have a totally unverifiable benefit in their life. Now, surely, even you have to admit that that is a totally barmy proposition!
Radical,
Irrespective of whether or not what Mr Juniper said was ridiculous (it wasn't) that doesn't make it not juvenile.
No, of course not. This is a ridiculous thing to suggest.
Only just finished watching iplayer a few hours ago. Well done Andrew, you were excellent considering the rantings against you from right & left. The glib assertions & erroneous statements from Mr Juniper, were awful. A shame nobody mentioned that we're in an Interglacial period & not as warm as those of the past!
A warmer world sustains more total life and more diversity of life. Paleontology has not found the upper limit of the benefits of warming, but clearly shows that any cooling is detrimental.
I'll leave aside for the moment that changing climate, and changing biomes, are important for the evolutionary process.
===============
ATTP
do we have to kill millions NOW
No, of course not. This is a ridiculous thing to suggest
But a predictable outcome if we go down the path advocated by ATTP and his fellow Alarmists.
Ken, you could be more effective with spiky hair.
============
On BBC Bias and Balance:
To be fair the Assistant Producer of 'The Big Questions' did invite me go, but I decided Bath was too far to travel, and that this is not a serious programme wanting to hear the other side of this debate.
It's usually a 'ranting man' programme - and it didn't disappoint on Sunday. But hat tip to Andrew for going into the BBC's bear pit. I will make the effort next time if asked to be the token woman to add BBC balance.
Maybe some feathers, or a nose ring.
==============
Jonny Scaramanga. An ego in desperate need of an audience I feel.
Also nice tan on Mr. Juniper. Wonder where he got that in March.
Bitter,
Maybe you could describe what path I'm advocating, as I don't know what it is myself.
Ken Rice, Mar 30, 2015 at 9:13 AM: "I thought giggling when one of the others was speaking was rather unreasonable, but maybe that's just me."
Ken Rice, on his own blog, March 30, 2015 at 7:34 am: "I should bear in mind, Richard, given that this post isn’t really about you, I’ll probably just start deleting your comments. They don’t add much, typically disrupt the thread, and I quite enjoy doing it :-) Whine to your heart’s content, if you wish." [LINK]
So you've come here to demand that people are as 'reasonable' on your own blog?
Ben,
No, why would you think that? (this is a rhetorical question - that you would misinterpret what people say is no great surprise).
Question for the Bishop
You mentioned Bio Fuels
So what crops were the Sunni farmers growing in Iraq and Syria before the civil war broke out ?
The other great question points were being scored from both sides with accompanying applause ,so why no Feminist Jazz Hands ?
aTTP: what Mr Juniper was saying was utterly laughable: it’s going to be 3-4°C warmer by 2060? We have no idea what the weather is going to be in 3 days; could you assure us that it’s going to be a scorching summer? If that cannot be done, how can anyone be so confident that the dire warnings will come to pass? Mass extinctions? There are a few species that are at critical levels, but can we be so sure that this is because of humans? Rational thinking would conclude that pandas (aaah! Such cute, cuddly things…) are actually an evolutionary dead-end – a bear that has restricted its diet to a single item. Not the best way of ensuring survival of any species, especially when said species has such a lack of interest in sex. You could argue that there will be droughts and there will be floods, but, can you name any year when there haven’t been droughts and/or floods?
On the second point, Bitter&Twisted (a chosen name, I surmise, not one given by the parents), has it spot on: there are already many people suffering in the poorer parts of the world because of policies to “mitigate our carbon emissions”, as these policies are specifically designed to ensure that energy prices are higher than need be. Who cares if some piccaninnies are coughing and spluttering over a dung fire as lunch is prepared, so long as you can feel smugly comfortable that your electric ovens are powered by heavily-subsidised means? Whether you will ever admit it or not, you ARE advocating that millions die NOW to prevent some entirely hypothetical disaster in the unknowable future.
ATTP- Maybe you could describe what path I'm advocating, as I don't know what it is myself.
Let me help you. No fossil fuels, but lots of windmills and "sustainable", organic farming. Leading to a collapse of industrial civilisation, mass starvation and a nasty brutish and short lifespan for the survivors.
That is the logical conclusion of the Green "utopia".
Radical,
He didn't say that. If you're going to criticise what someone says, at least try to criticise what they actually said, not what you think they said.
No I am not. That you would make such a claim is utterly disgusting!
Bitter,
Okay, so you don't know either. When you don't know something, it's better to simply say so, rather than make stuff up.
Ken Rice - No, why would you think that?
Oh, I'm always surprised by green double standards.
You should speak to W.C. about misinterpretation....
William Connolley, March 30, 2015 at 8:27 am: That does seem like an extraordinarily ungracious response to an apparently well-meant attempt to offer you some relevant reading matter.
And that's the potty-mouthed WC talking!
Ken Rice: "Maybe you could describe what path I'm advocating..."
Radical Rodent: "you ARE advocating that millions die NOW to prevent some entirely hypothetical disaster in the unknowable future."
Ken Rice: "No I am not. That you would make such a claim is utterly disgusting!"
-----
Man up, Ken, you asked.