The BBC is not impartial or neutral - Andrew Marr
The idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s. Why not tax people for owning a washing machine to fund the manufacture of Persil? - Jeremy Paxman
The BBC's coverage ... abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago - Jeremy Paxman
We need to foster peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking - BBC drama commissioning controller, Ben Stephenson
Are we alone in noticing the efforts of the BBC to spread alarm and panic about global warming to coincide with the Copenhagen conference? Quietly sucking on a bottle of beer on the sofa the other evening, waiting for dinner, we were suddenly struck by the fact that the One Show gave us not one but THREE consecutive items that included the various threats posed by climate change. Surely this couldn't be a coincidence, we thought?
Later that week - on Wednesday 9th December to be precise - BBC2 gave us Horizon in which David Attenborough told of the perils of over-populating the planet, and later the same evening BBC1 had "Hot Planet", in which "the world's leading scientists ..." (well, a few of them. Those that are still prepared to maunder on about global warming. Not very leading, then. More, sort of ... available) "... provide an insight into the possible consequences of global warming". With the aid of clips from films like The Day After Tomorrow or 2012, the programme set out to scare us as much as it possibly could with nightmare scenarios of a world that will warm by three degrees before the end of the century. It didn't pull its punches either, with the news that in the last 250 years the world has already warmed by one degree, and it placed the blame squarely on us: apparently the bulk of world scientific opinion tells us that our massive production of greenhouse gases is entirely at fault.
There was a time when the BBC was trusted to deliver honest, unbiased reporting. Sadly, those days are gone. We wouldn't go so far as to suggest that Ed Millipede got his mobile out in the limousine on the way to Heathrow and a plane to Copenhagen and called up Mark Thompson to say that he'd appreciate it if the BBC could stir up a bit of hysteria to justify the 140 private jets, 1200 limousines and all those hotel rooms at £650 a night. I mean, he wouldn't do that, would he?
No, of course not. He'd get someone else to do it.
It is a bit odd, though, that the BBC's reportage of Copenhagen has so far omitted to mention that anyone there disputes man-made global warming. For instance, where is the item about the open letter to the UN signed by 141 leading international scientists who work in relevant fields? The letter challenges the UN to provide hard evidence on 10 questions relating to alleged man-made global warming, including whether CO2 rises are causing harm, whether surface station measurements are accurate, and whether there has been a threatening rise in sea levels due to 'climate change' or an increase in hurricanes.
You can see the ten questions here, together with the answers of the 141 scientists.
Secure in their self-righteous closed little minds, BBC Wales are even proud to be running a special "GW fraud season". Their website boasts that "during December 2009, our Green Wales season will be looking at how we're tackling the challenge of climate change in Wales. Programming across television, radio and online will look at what communities are doing to address the problem".
Strangely the bulk of the comments sent in to the website by viewers are just the tiniest bit sceptical. Many comment on the extravagance of the politicians and environmentalists and their hypocrisy, though as some correspondents pointed out: "You miss the point, gentlemen. Cuts, hardship, poverty, misery are all for the little people. The very important people are junketing in Copenhagen. One rule for us, no rules at all for them."
Meanwhile, scientist Peter Taylor has published a new book that suggest we may all be missing the point. The world isn't warming at all, it's cooling.
He suggests that the Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW) lobby have identified the wrong problem and the wrong solution. Global cooling threatens disaster for humanity in the developed and developing world alike, yet the media and the scientific consensus ignores this peril.
Cycles are involved, not short-term trends, and many respected scientists, especially those in Russia and China, think that a cooling cycle is coming. The AGW brigade have mistaken the current warm period for a trend caused by carbon emissions. But the detailed science says it could be natural and part of a cycle.
Behind the scenes at the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change there is no consensus – the dissenting views have been covered over in the summary documents for policy makers – and among UK and EU politicians it’s even worse, and criminally expensive for the British taxpayer.
The real science points to the sun’s magnetic cycle as the key driver by unknown mechanisms. Right now, NASA is throwing its hands up and saying ‘we’ve never seen anything like it and can’t tell what it is going to do next’. Many scientists expect a repeat of the Maunder Minimum of the 17th century when the Thames froze every winter – and famine spread through Europe and China. Natural climate change, especially cooling, is already dangerous for very large numbers of people who are vulnerable to climate changing - the urban poor in the developed world, including the UK, plus the poor nations currently dependent on food aid.
Cooling reduces food surpluses upon which we all depend. The biofuels programmes aimed at preventing climate change will expose them to greater risk by decreasing the amount of land available and raising costs of food, while this problem coupled with peak oil will affect everyone worldwide and drive up transport and manufacturing costs to levels even the super rich will struggle to afford.
Some dramatic changes are needed but not those proposed the EU, IPCC and UK politicians as they try to hunt down the will-of-the-wisp that is CO2 emissions. Business as usual is not an option since cooling actually does put humanity at risk. The apocalyptic scaremongering has made us weary and casual about such threats but we need to act if we are to maintain our humanity.
Our human ecosystems are threatened by the world development model and unintelligent economic growth. No one yet has found a way to develop economically without massive increase in demand for scarce resources – soil, water, timber, land and food. However, it can be done – with changes in developed economies, and restructuring development in poor countries – and it will require billions. We need to showcase the projects that work - the unglamorous grass-roots initiatives that enhance the quality of life – rather than indulge in the theatrical gestures about solving a AGW that doesn’t exist.
Copenhagen won’t broker a solution – not only has the IPCC hyped the warming and misrepresented the science with regard to CO2 and ‘warming’ – but it has also proposed a system of cap-and-trade and technology transfer that means huge profits for banks and brokers. These useless technology sales coupled with a massive global and unelected bureaucracy that decides which technology and which projects get funded – merely provide jobs for the boys rather than address the issues.
What we need is the creation of resilience – the rich world is unstable and will try to buy its way out of problems, by buying food on the world market – the rest of the world is at grave risk of starvation. Food not energy will be the big issue we urgently need to address in the next few years. In the developed world we need to systematically restructure and reduce demand and in the developing world, people need to stay in communities on the land and not be forced to seek work in unsustainable megacities.
Climategate does not just demonstrate the corruption of science and peer-review; it also demonstrates the incompetence of specialists who do not understand planetary ecology, especially its cycles. We’re being fatally led up the wrong garden path by green businesses, politicians, the IPCC and their computer geeks with their doctored spreadsheets and forecasts. They need to get out more and study the real world – not their virtual reality – because, like the asset bubbles of the financial crisis, the global warming bubble is about to burst.
Strong stuff, but it'll do no good. The powers-that-be are so deeply committed to the Big Lie of AGW that they'll fight tooth and nail to preserve it, whatever the facts prove. And the rest of us are so fed up with being told why we should be shivering in our shoes that we'll reject and resent any new scare stories - warming, cooling, tsunamis, starvation, plagues of locusts, death of the firstborn - you can stuff the lot of 'em.
Still, if you want to learn more about this latest warning of impending doom, the book is called "Chill, a reassessment of global warming theory: does climate change mean the world is cooling and if so what should we do about it?" and you can buy it here
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The GOS says: Do you know who the sponsors of the Copenhagen Conference are? They include SAS Scandinavian Airlines, Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, Honda and DHL. The one name significantly missing from the list of generous donors is The Al Gore Bloody Great Carbon Trading Rip-off Company.
Funny, that.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
Copyright © 2009 The GOS