The Freedom of Information Act and the BBC's willing little helpers

Posted by TonyN on 29/09/2008 at 2:15 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Climate 13 Responses »
Sep 292008

At the beginning of this month I put up a post about a Freedom of Information Act request that I had made to the BBC: Jeremy Paxman, the BBC, Impartiality, and Freedom of Information .The information I requested referred to a seminar on climate change that the BBC had mentioned in a major report on impartiality published last year: From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel. This is how they described it:

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].

From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, Page 40

As the BBC seem most unwilling to tell me who the ‘best scientific experts’ who attended the seminar where, I’ve spent some time googling in the hope that the internet might yield more information. It did, and what I found is rather astonishing.

My first hit was on the International Broadcasting Trust’s site, where I found this: Continue reading »

Return from holiday round up: Michael Mann, the BBC and holiday-snaps

Posted by TonyN on 25/09/2008 at 8:01 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Landscape, The Wind 2 Responses »
Sep 252008

I’ve been away for about three weeks, and the last few days have been devoted to trying to catch up. Anyone who tries to persuade us that the climate debate is over for all reasonable people should try reading their way back into the subject after even such a short break.At Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre and others are dismembering a new climate reconstruction from Michael Mann of Hockey Stick fame – here. It would seem that, once again, there are many questions to be asked about strange statistical techniques that palaeoclimatologists love, and real statisticians find surprising.

On the three Sundays when I was out of the country, the BBC broadcast a series of programmes on climate change presented by Dr Ian Stewart. I’ve only seen one short clip from this that was posted on YouTube. In this sequence the Hockey Stick is presented as a courageous piece of ground-breaking research that has been successfully defended against unwarranted attacks by ignorant and unscrupulous sceptics. Unfortunately, while Dr Mann is given ample screen time to defend his work, the BBC found it quite unnecessary to allow any sceptic to explain why they have doubts about the Hockey Stick.

Closer to home, there has been the usual backlog of mail to deal with, and this contained at least one interesting item; Continue reading »

If I was a politician, I'd believe in global warming too!

Posted by TonyN on 18/09/2008 at 9:00 am The Climate, Uncategorized 13 Responses »
Sep 182008

A well-informed sceptic recently asked me if I understood why politicians are so keen on global warming. He said that he found this hard to explain. So although Harmless Sky’s blog rules say that party politics are out of bounds, and its impossible to discuss this subject without breaking those rules just a little, I’m going to set down a few reasons why, if I were a politician, I would believe in anthropogenic climate change too.

  1. Talking about climate change is the nearest a politician will ever come to risk free politics. If you don’t believe me, just name one politician whose career has been damaged by joining the crusade against global warming. Proclaiming your intention to cut greenhouse gases by 99.9% before the end of next millennium is so much safer than suggesting a date for troop withdrawals from Iraq, or promising to sort out problems in the National Health Service.
  2. For the last decade, the government and the opposition in the UK have been competing to create the most ‘concerned’ image, and climate change is by far the safest thing to be ‘concerned’ about. If you are ‘concerned’ about street crime or social deprivation, the electorate will expect you to come up with some sensible policies and then they will notice if nothing happens. This does not apply to climate change. Continue reading »

Llanbedr Airfield, Kembles plans and the Snowdonia Society's petition

Posted by TonyN on 11/09/2008 at 9:00 am Llanbedr Airfield, Uncategorized 2 Responses »
Sep 112008

Very soon after the Snowdonia Society’s opposition to Kemble Air Services plans to restart flying operations at Llanbedr Airfield became known, a petition with the title, ‘Llanbedr Airfield yes, yes, yes!’ was circulated in the area. The subtitle was, ‘We who have signed below are in favour of developing Llanbedr Airfield in order to bring jobs to the area, increase tourism and boost the local economy’, so no one was in any doubt about what they were signing up to.Petitions canvasing support for some local issue are not unusual in this area, and one often sees rather dog-eared forms lying on shop counters with a few signatures scrawled on them. What made the airfield petition different was the number of signatures that it attracted in this sparsely populated rural area: over 1200 in little more than a week.

As the Snowdonia Society seemed to be under the impression that they would receive widespread public support for their campaign this must have come as rather a surprise to them.

Not to be outdone, the society launched their own petition Against Llanbedr Airport on the Welsh Assembly web site. Being an internet based operation, this had the potential to attract tens of thousands of signatures. The result was interesting. Continue reading »

How many people has ‘climate change’ killed?

Posted by TonyN on 04/09/2008 at 9:00 am The Climate, Uncategorized 101 Responses »
Sep 042008

A post by Steve Milloy of Junkscience has turned up some interesting figures about the ‘Population Bomb’. Here they are:

Per capita global food production has […] increased by 26.5 percent between 1968 and 2005, according to the World Resources Institute. The number of people who starve to death daily declined from 41,000 in 1977 to 24,000 today, according to The Hunger Project, an organization combating global hunger
http://junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/2008082108.html

If you multiply 24,000 by the number of days in a year, this works out at about 8.7 million deaths from starvation per annum; a million more than the whole population of Greater London.

Later in his article, Milloy mentions that:

According to U.N. statistics, the number of people in the developing world who were considered to be undernourished in 1968 was estimated at about 900 million. That estimate is on track to be reduced by more than 50 per cent by 2015, according to the U.N.

The United Nations is an organisation that loves to take credit for any improvement in the human condition, and it has no shame about self-administered pats on the back. But looking more closely at these figures, we find some rather nasty facts that we should all be ashamed about. Continue reading »

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