BBC coverage of sceptics

Ben Pile has a must-read post about the BBC's coverage of climate sceptics, and in particular Roger Harrabin's latest pieces claiming that sceptics have been moving towards mainstream views and Iain Stewart's Climate Wars, which reached similar conclusions:

The only ‘surprising’ thing revealed — as the punchline — by the second of three episodes of Climate Wars is that Stewart was ignorant of the debate he was reporting on. He had begun his film with a preconceived idea about the climate debate, as one divided into two camps — sceptics and deniers — disagreeing about a single proposition: “climate change is happening”. And then, when he encountered the more nuanced reality, he imagined that it was sceptics who had changed their position. It was Stewart’s desire to frame the debate that led to his misreporting.

Read the whole thing.

Made up science - Josh 300

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Update on Nov 3, 2014 by Josh

Thanks for the requests - you can buy a T-shirt here

The human rights of Professor Wadhams

This is a guest post by David Holland.

I recently received the Information Tribunal decision in respect of my request to the University of Cambridge for Peter Wadhams' AR5 Review Editors’ reports.  It is short and to the point. The Tribunal dismissed my appeal on two separate grounds. As I read the decision, if unchallenged, it means that no employee of a public authority participating in any IPCC assessment, even if entirely at the public’s expense, can be required under the EIR to disclose environmental information created or received in connection with it, if their work was entirely voluntary.

Firstly, the Tribunal decided, based solely on Aarhus article 5(1)(a) that the Commissioner was entitled to re-interpret what I thought were the clear plain English definitions of “information held” in the Convention, Directive and Regulations to mean the opposite of what the Secretary the State’s statutory code of practice states.

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All together now - Josh 299

Another day and another metaphor, this time from Roger Harrabin on BBC Radio 4 about climate debaters now 'all singing from the same hymnbook' - see yesterday's post below.

It sounded like Roger thought sceptics were now changing their tune but clearly, with lower sensitivity, The Pause and no hope of any global policy harmony on the horizon, the strains that are coming from the alarmist camp now have much more of a sceptic air.

Cartoons by Josh

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Sceptics on Radio 4

I gather that there was a segment on Radio 4 about climate sceptics this morning, with an interview with Nic Lewis. I'm going out shortly so I can't record it for you, but you should be able to listen again here in a few hours' time.

Update on Nov 1, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Nic Lewis emails:

As you know, Roger Harrabin's piece on global warming that included excerpts of his interview with me aired at 7.15 this morning on Radio 4.

Unfortunately, his piece confusingly muddled up both CO₂ emissions with CO₂ concentrations and equilibrium climate sensitivity with the transient climate response level. Both equilibrium climate sensitivity and the transient climate response relate to a doubling of atmospheric CO₂ concentration, but the equilibrium sensitivity is higher because the transient response refers to the global warming that occurs over decades rather than the centuries it takes for the ocean to fully warm up and equilibrium to be reached.

Harrabin said "if we double CO₂ emissions - which we are likely to do later this century - we are likely to provoke a temperature rise of about 1.7°C", or similar words. What I had told him was that, based on instrumental observations, I estimated the equilibrium climate sensitivity to be 1.7°C warming for a doubling of CO₂ concentration.