Shameless BBC still peddling porkies for greens

This time it's the story of a City lawyer cum environmentalist called Lewis Gordon Pugh, who has gone for a dip at the North Pole "to highlight the effects of climate change". Mr Pugh's website shows him to be a man with no qualms about blowing his own trumpet. He describes his ability to swim in cold water thusly:

As soon as I enter cold water my body shunts all my warm blood to my core to protect my vital organs. It then generates incredible heat. However, before I even enter the water, I am able to elevate my core body temperature by as much as 1.4°C (35F). This phenomenon, now known as "anticipatory thermogenises", has to our knowledge not been noted in any other human being.

Golly. A superhuman physical specimen then. So, what about the dip in the Arctic then?

The City lawyer said the swim was a triumph but it was "a tragedy that it's possible to swim at the North Pole. I hope my swim will inspire world leaders to take climate change seriously," he said.

What a load of old twaddle. We've been here before haven't we? Remember this from a few years back?

An American scientist says a large expanse of ice-free water has opened up at the North Pole this year. Dr James McCarthy, an oceanographer, says he found a mile-wide (1.6 km) stretch of open ocean on a recent trip to the region.

Unfortunately for Dr McCarthy (an IPCC man, by the way) and for the attention hungry superman, Mr Pugh, it was pointed out by the late great John Daly that expanses of open sea water had been observed at the poles for decades. They even had a name - polynyas - and they could be tens of miles wide.

 

The McCarthy scare story was widely reported, although some reputable outlets like the New York Times withdrew it once it was shown to be arrant nonsense.  The BBC doesn't seem to operate to these kind of standards though and McCarthy's tall tale is still available on their website. And now, of course, they are recycling it again for the benefit of Mr Pugh and the environmental movement, presumably hoping that no-one will notice that it was utterly debunked seven years ago.

Bad week at the Beeb

The BBC is really having a dreadful week. The sexed up trailer about the Queen was a remarkable failing in itself, and Biased BBC's expose of the lies and spin the BBC website's writers went through as they tried to cover their backsides is a damning indictment of the corporation's attachment, or lack of it, to portraying the unvarnished truth.

To add to their woes, Conservative Home has revealed that Anthony Jay of Yes Minister fame is about to issue a pamphlet called Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer. It doesn't seem to be very complimentary, to say the least. For example..

Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place, you name it, we were anti it.

Meanwhile there is renewed speculation that the BBC has an employee who is a member of Hamas. The Jewish Chronicle also alleges that the same man, one Fayad Abu Shamala, was involved in negociating the release of Alan Johnson. I wonder whether anything what goodies Mr Fayad had to offer.

Climate cuttings 5

Welcome to the latest Climate Cuttings, in which I round up interesting stories on the Global Warming front. 

First up was the Lockwood paper which purported to end Svensmark's arguments that the main driver of climate change is cosmic rays.  Certainly the press were keen to echo Lockwood's statement that this ended the argument. Commenters at Climate Audit wondered about why Prof Lockwood used a long filter when dealing with a short-term effect, why he used the notoriously unreliable surface temperature record, and whether he was looking in the wrong place. I think we'll have to wait for a response from Svensmark himself for enlightenment here.

The Armstrong paper which claims that the IPCC couldn't forecast the arrival of next Christmas, let alone the climate next century, continues to get a lot of attention. IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth attempts a rebuttal at Nature Climate Feedback. His argument seems to be that the IPCC deals in scenarios, not forecasts and so Armstrong's points don't apply. We might characterise this as the "I did not have sex with that woman" argument. 

Eske Willerslev, described in Science how he and his team had used recovered DNA to show that the Greenland ice sheet was forested in the past, but that the ice sheet made it through the last interglacial when temperatures were up to 5^oC higher than today, the implication being that we may not be doomed after all. Real Climate responded with a piece analysing the press releases which followed the paper's publication.

The latest evidence that global warming causes both madness and unemployment was found in a story from worsethanfailure.com. Man switches off office air conditioning to save the planet. Writes pompous letter to colleagues to tell them what he has done. Discovers on Monday morning that he has destroyed the office IT infrastructure. Takes early retirement.

Inspired by the example of Al Gore, Oxford University decides to go into the global warming movie business.

Retiring boss of the British Antarctic Survey, Chris Rapley is interviewed in the THES. He raises once again Monbiot's idea of Nuremburg-style trials for skeptics. Nice.

And lastly, inspired no doubt by the success of these Climate Cuttings posts (readers in the hundreds, you know) Real Climate has started its own weekly round up of climate stories. 

BBC accidentally misses the facts again

Via Jock Coats, the BBC reports that a "wealthy laird" is going to evict tenants from "the tiny Fife mining village of Coaltown of Wemyss.

Apparently these despicable actions are being compared to the highland clearances - all those miners, working class heroes every man jack of them - being turfed out onto the streets by the heartless laird who is probably going to use their miserable hovels to house his flocks of sheep. Strangely, the only source for the "highland clearances" line appears to be the BBC themselves, but we'll let that pass.

There's nothing like setting the scene properly is there? Wicked laird, poverty stricken working class heroes cast out into the cold. I can almost feel the empathy welling up inside me.

Erm, except that Coaltown of Wemyss hasn't had a mine since 1970. It's now a rather cute conservation area. These facts kind of spoil the story though, don't they? Trust the BBC to miss them.

Update: Melanie Phillips notes the BBC sexing up another story today. It's because of the unique way they're funded. 

Constitutional change

Constitutional change seems to be the flavour of the day. Radford Mann throws a few ideas into the ring at Labour Home - he's in favour of a republic and proportional representation. The problem with Labour proposing PR is that it makes it look as if they're nervous about the result of the next election.

Meanwhile the LSE has started a constitutional reform programme. The launch is going to be addressed by lots of political bigwigs including Jack Straw.

Of course they need to get me to address them too, as the blogosphere's constitutional founding father. Unfortunately the invitation appears to have been lost in the post. 

Great cludges I have known

Amit Varma at India Uncut is calling for entries for his competition to find the worlds' finest public conveniences. My suggestion is the gothic fantasy of the public dunny at Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. A true treat for your todger.

 

Because you're worth it. 

Posts you wish you had written

Have you ever written something useful in a comment to a blog post, and later regretted not having expanded it into a full post?  Especially when someone writes it up into a much better story than you ever could? It's just happened to me.

Some time ago, the legendary Neil Harding wrote a post about how marvellous the NHS was and how the UN had ranked the UK 26th in the world and the US 37th. I pointed out to him that this was a complete nonsense because the UN biased the metric towards tax funded systems. As I explained in a later post, I refrained from writing a full post on it because fisking Neil seems somehow unsporting - to the dextrosphere he occupies a position somewhat akin to that of Ming Campbell to the Conservatives. He's their man, but he's scoring goals for us.

Anyway, having regretted my weakness once, I now find that Glen Whitman at Agoraphilia has written a widely-cited series of postings on the strange left-wing bias of the UN's healthcare metrics. Good to see this story getting the wider readership it deserves, particularly as the UN numbers are being used by Michael Moore in his film, Sicko.

And in a final twist to the story, Tim Worstall has a posting up today which shows that Neil H is still trying to tout the UN ranking as evidence that the NHS is better than the alternatives! When I've already shown him that the metric is a nonsense! What an extraordinary bit of shamelessness. Neil becomes more of an asset every day, doesn't he?

Al Gore, climate boffin

DK notes that the BBC has been pushing Al Gore as a climate scientist. This puffing of one of their favourites reminded me of their boosting of Will Hutton, who they described as an economist. This, I observed, was an odd description for someone who had been a stockbroker and journalist.

Is this a coincidence or is there a pattern here? 

Climate cuttings 4

Welcome to the latest episode of Climate Cuttings, in which I try to do a roundup of interesting postings on the subject of climate change.

The good news this week was that NOAA have reinstated contact details for their climate station network. Readers may remember that they had tried to block the surfacestations.org survey by hiding this information. The surveys are now rolling in thick and fast with over 10% of the US network covered, including all of the state of Indiana. Plenty more problem sites in there too.

Steve McIntyre returned from a break fully refreshed and posted a jaw-dropping article on the weather station in New York's Central Park. Thomas Karl has managed to adjust for urban warming by, believe it or not, raising the temperature record for the station. McIntyre then adds insult to injury by reverse engineering the UHI adjustment to show that this implies that Karl seems to believe that the population of New York has declined by 15 million in the last couple of decades. Hilarious, and a must-read.

Freeborn John notices an article from the Centre for Alternative Energy in Wales. Apparently the race to become a zero-carbon economy is going to involve the issuing of carbon allowances to all (should we call this Carbon Communism?). Their idea is heartily endorsed by well-known detatched scientist, Sir John "We're all going to die" Houghton, former head of the IPCC.

Schwartz et al, writing on the Nature Climate Reports site, say that the IPCC is exagerrating the predictive power of its computer models. As I observed some weeks ago, Kevin Trenberth - an IPCC lead author - says they're not forecasts but scenarios.  The semantics involved turn out to be quite interesting, as some of the comments in this Climate Audit thread show. The confusion over just what the model outputs represent does seem to allow the AGW industry to demand drastic action (and no doubt funding too) while having a convenient excuse ("they were only scenarios") if they ever get found out.

Oh yes, and some people, whose egos are shaded only by the size of their carbon footprints, flew off to exotic locations in their private jets, from where they lectured us all on the sacrifices we are going to have to make in the face of global warming. Even AGW enthusiasts weren't impressed. 

T in the Park

The village's annual assault from the T in the Park festival is now upon us, bringing the delights of loud music, recreational drugs and alfresco urination to this quiet corner of rural Scotland.

The BBC covers the mud (which must be truly awe-inspiring after the summer we've been having) and the motorway tailbacks (seven hours if rumour is correct), but they may have missed something.

A spokesman for the festival said: "There have been major traffic queues due to the wet weather conditions which has made parking on site extremely difficult."

However, word in the pub last night was that the real reason for the tailbacks were that police were checking every single vehicle heading for the festival. No mention of this on the Beeb. Do the polis know something or is this just backside covering? 

Send an email to the Taliban

If email correspondence with nutters is your thing, this post at the Jawa report has the contact details for the Taliban.

Alan Johnson

The news of Alan Johnson's release from captivity is obviously very welcome. However the BBC's blanket coverage, while understandable, was horrible and made my toes curl. The BBC rather revealed their discomfort at their own excesses by the embarrassed mention of the five British hostages in Iraq at the end of the Johnson piece. This was probably the first that most people had heard of them since the day they were seized.

When you think about it, isn't it just wrong that Alan Johnson got a slot on the BBC news and on the front of the website, pretty much every day for the last four months, while the other hostages were all but forgotten? It rather nicely encapsulates the problem with the BBC, or even the public sector as a whole.

It's run for the benefit of its staff, rather than for the public who pay for it. 

Harrassment of bloggers

Lurch, the author of a blog called Gun Culture has been visited by the police as part of the renewal for his firearms licence. During the visit they raised the subject of his blog:

It seems that my crappy little corner of the blogosphere has come to the attention of the police, and they don’t like it.  Specifically mentioned was the piece regarding the British Association of Women in Policing, where the woman wanted smaller guns for women officers, this didn’t go down well apparently despite my admission in the piece that my comments were flippant.

[...] 

The officers (who were very polite) were quick to point out that they couldn’t force me to remove posts or dictate my freedom of speech but the fact is that I am being watched. 

It's worth taking a look at the original post which must rank as one of the most innocuous imaginable.

It's hard to comprehend just how daft this makes the police look. I've no idea which force Lurch has the misfortune to be harrassed by, but it is absolutely staggering that they have time to monitor postings on obscure blogs for people making fun of them. The Chief Constable wants to have his priorities pointed out to him in no uncertain terms by someone in power. This kind of threat must be illegal, surely.

It just looks like another example of the police taking the easy option of harrassing the innocent rather than dealing with criminals. 

Via The England Project 

Lonely Libdem voice of sanity

Today's must-read post is by Tom Papworth of Liberal Polemic.

Democracy is not an end in itself, but a tool we created to promote freedom. 

A fact that is now largely forgotten. 

Climate cuttings 3

In the last edition of Climate Cuttings, I noted that NOAA was trying to stop the Surfacestations project by hiding the names of the volunteer station managers in the reference database. They now appear foolish as well as disingenuous as it's been revealed that they already publish photos and names of many volunteers, thus ruling out any claim that the data was hidden on privacy grounds.

Over at Real Climate, Gavin Schmidt is all in favour of Surfacestations and documenting how well the stations are sited. He just thinks that people are jumping to conclusions (who? where?). We also learn that the models don't need to square with the temperature record because they've got physics in, and that even if the stations are sited next to AC exhaust outlets, it won't materially affect the temperature record. Roger Pielke Sr shoots back.

Al Gore was in town to deliver a gentle reminder, just in case we'd forgotten that we're all about to burn. Nobody believes him though. 

Henrik Svensmark, a bad man who reckons that climate change is all caused by cosmic rays, is interviewed in Discover.