Tactical change of climate

>> Sunday, October 11, 2009



The above video shows what could be called the power of nightmares- a form of Governmental abuse. The BBC yesterday published an article questioning the reality of global warming. One of the sickening things about the BBC is its ability both to change the climate of opinion, and use its journalistic license and political antennae to change course and retain its reputation. When will we get the apology for the rush to declare the debate on warming over? When will they admit they played a part in creating the hysteria which politicians like eager and brainless vampires feed on? Is it ever right to "abandon the pretence of impartiality" as Paxman claimed the BBC had? Now will they be returning to a semblance of impartiality? Why was this only a "pretence" in the first place? Will they not now still hanker after being proved right and keep pushing the MMGW hypothesis as "news"? The BBC's coverage of climate, and its consequences in the political discourse of this country, represent one of the most powerful arguments against the BBC's existence.

19 comments:

banned 4:05 AM, October 11, 2009  

I saved that BBC page in case they quietly remove it.
What did the Coronation St. crowd make of being told that " climate change is real and it's all your fault " ?

Bob 6:08 AM, October 11, 2009  

how can you quietly remove the most read story?

anyway, I was intrigued to see how this one would be spun here - damned if you do, damned if you don't, it would seem

Anonymous 6:52 AM, October 11, 2009  

I turned the central heating up a degree, and threw open a window.

Kanburi 9:55 AM, October 11, 2009  

Bob,

It's a very small step in the right direction. But the piece still oozes bias. Those who question AGW are referred to by the pejorative<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:PunctuationKerning /> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas /> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables /> <w:SnapToGridInCell /> <w:WrapTextWithPunct /> <w:UseAsianBreakRules /> <w:DontGrowAutofit /> </w:Compatibility> <w:BrowserLevel>MicrosoftInternetExplorer4</w:BrowserLevel> </w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" LatentStyleCount="156"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:35.4pt; mso-footer-margin:35.4pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> <!--[if gte mso 10]>
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<![endif]--> label "climate change sceptics" (except in one case, where Piers Corbyn is called a solar scientist). Those who believe in AGW are labelled "scientists".

Kanburi 9:56 AM, October 11, 2009  

wow, sorry all about that last post - mods, please remove

Larry Dart 10:07 AM, October 11, 2009  

Kanburi

You can delete your own posts if you are logged in.

Larry Dart 10:11 AM, October 11, 2009  

<span style=" color: #3a3a3a; line-height: 16px;">Kanburi 
 
You can delete your own posts if you are logged in.</span>

Click on the Delete after Flag - Reply

Opinionated More Than Educated 10:15 AM, October 11, 2009  

Please leave it. Makes more sense than most of the stuff here.

Roland Deschain 10:30 AM, October 11, 2009  

I don't think Ed is damning the BBC for publishing this. It's the previous denial that there is a debate about global warming that's the problem. If it is accepted that a debate does exist then it bears out our past criticism. (Although I have to say that one article alone does not convince me that the BBC mindset may have changed.)

However if the BBC now accepts there is a debate, it must accept that there has been a breach of its charter obligation to be impartial. Unless it deals with this openly, we must ask ourselves how it monitors this obligation, how effective this monitoring is and where else the charter is being breached.

Asuka Langley Soryu 10:32 AM, October 11, 2009  

I, for one, welcome our new big black carbon monster overlords. I never liked anthropomorphic bunnyrabbits anyway. Always prostituting themselves for some pseudo-scientific leftfag agenda. Disgusting.

Kanburi 10:53 AM, October 11, 2009  

Thanks for the advice Larry

Kanburi 11:14 AM, October 11, 2009  

Bob,

It's a small step in the right direction, but the article still oozes bias. Those who express doubts about AGW are referred to by the pejorative label "climate change sceptics" (except in one case, where Dr Piers Corbyn is called a solar scientist). Those who support AGW are called "scientists".

The subtext is that scientists are convinced of the AGW theory, but there are some "sceptics" who don't agree with them.

TooTrue 11:16 AM, October 11, 2009  

Well, here's at least one BBC PC idiot who hasn't heard that the debate is not over:

Part 1:

<p style="text-align: left; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span>I’m not clued up on the climate change debate but it was instructive to listen on the World Service on Thursday to a typical BBC hack conducting an "interview" complete with his neatly arranged prejudices and his eagerness to accept the views of his interviewee, prof whatshisname from Wales who was part of the team awarded the Nobel Prize for Propaganda along with Al Gore – who could probably light and heat half of Ethiopia with the electricity consumed in his mansion.</span>
<p style="text-align: left; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--></span>
<p style="text-align: left; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span>Paying lip service to the requirement to challenge his interviewee, the hack did ask one or two mildly-controversial questions, such as, "What does the Nobel Peace Prize have to do with climate change?" But it soon became apparent that he was simply collecting ammunition to fire at the man-made climate change sceptics with the following give-away question:</span>
<p style="text-align: left; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--></span>
<p style="text-align: left; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span>I paraphrase – "Every day the BBC gets e-mails doubting man-made climate change and stating that the science is not proven. WHAT DO I TELL THEM?"</span>

TooTrue 11:18 AM, October 11, 2009  

<p style="text-align: left; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--></span>Part 2:
<p style="text-align: left; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed;"> 
<p style="text-align: left; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span>Evidently he wants to know not how he can best inform his audience about differing views on climate change but how he can best indoctrinate them in the BBC position on the matter. Yet another BBC campaigner masquerading as a journalist.</span><span></span>
<p style="text-align: left; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span>This was part of a climate change campaigning hour: America and China both need to reduce emissions but America's efforts are not good enough (bad, bad America) while China's promises to reduce look so rosy and positive (Hooray China we’re with you before you even accomplish anything.)</span>
<p style="text-align: left; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span>Then they drag the listener off to some remote community where an ancient farmer relates how the snow on a nearby mountain has been steadily receding upwards in the last 57 years to the extent that in coming generations there will be no run-off of water to irrigate the crops.</span>
<p style="text-align: left; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed;"><span>The BBC-sanctioned "professor" said sea levels would rise one metre this century and half a metre the next. How does he work that one out? Or is he, along with so many other "professors" in the academic world, simply an idiot - or is he just pushing the line he's been paid to push?</span>
<span style="">They say that higher education broadens the mind. Maybe so, but it helps if you have a mind to begin with.</span>

Ben 11:24 AM, October 11, 2009  

It is encouraging to see that a proper weatherman with a first in geophysics and planetary physics has been recruited as a climate correspondent.

Ben 11:28 AM, October 11, 2009  

By the way - if you look at the Wikipedia entry for Roger Harrabin you can find this gem:

"the media, he believes, ... have given the wrong level of prominence to a range of risks including including MMR, dirty bombs, child abduction, transport safety, exotic diseases, UK National Health Service “crisis”, the Brent Spar oil platform, nuclear power and genetic modification."

Comedy gold.

Guest 12:20 PM, October 11, 2009  

Meanwhile, co-science and eco genius Richard Black and his moderators seem to have given over, Jo Abbess/Harrabinning-styly, his 'blog' to an interesting cabal of folk who see no problem with using it first as a meeting place to 'get together' in the first instance, but then try to drive away any voices that do not suit their narrative with what a appears to be an 'off-piste' site to discuss how best to crush dissenting voices.

And OK in the view of the BBC's merry band are notions that those who do not share their views, and are impudent enough to question them, should be jailed.

Oddly, when the subject of this BBC piece was raised, and dark muttering took place between the junta about the home team being 'off message', various posts were whipped off quick smart.

Possibly the BBC grasping, a bit late, that if you get in bed with the wrong kind of itch-scratchers, you can also end up with fleas.

Guest 12:31 PM, October 11, 2009  

It reads to me as a grudging acknowledgement, recognised as an attempt to look at other aspects, if a very lone one in the firmament.

And some here are accepting it as such. Damned if you do...

Trying to call any opinions generated on that as 'how it gets spun' says a shed load more about where you are coming from.

Not everyone is part of a tribal group that coordinates its actions before jerking its knees to a pre-ordained script.

Much as some seem only to rationalise it. Or try and make out... in a very, at best, clunky way.

Bob 1:56 AM, October 12, 2009  

I'd say how it gets spun is a fair comment when we have rather a lot of suggestion - an unrelated video referred to as 'the power of nightmares', words like 'sickening' and the usual general assumptions that the BBC says the debate is over - I'd call that spinning

the reason I say 'damned if you do' is because critics lambast the BBC for not giving them any space, and I have yet to see any comprehensive evidence of this (it may well be the case, but I like to have proper evidence) - then of course when they actually do show critics' opinions they are legitimising your claims further
- it's a win/win for you, Ally Campbell would be proud

Antony Jay

"But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place, you name it, we were anti it."
Antony Jay, Telegraph, July 2007

Andrew Marr

"..the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress. It may be my Presbyterian background, but I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain 'natural' beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off."
Andrew Marr, The Guardian Feb. 1999

Jeremy Paxman

"But the bigger question is whether the BBC itself has a future. Working for it has always been a bit like living in Stalin’s Russia, with one five-year-plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another. One BBC, Making it Happen, Creative Futures, they all blur into one great vacuous blur. I can’t even recall what the current one is. Rather like Stalin’s Russia, they express a belief that the system will go on forever."
Jeremy Paxman, The James McTaggart Memorial, 24th August 2007

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