Over-selling West African ‘megadroughts’

Posted by TonyN on 27/04/2009 at 11:49 am The Climate 4 Responses »
Apr 272009

A recent report by Richard Black on the BBC’s Science & Environment website is headed ‘West Africa faces ‘megadroughts’. Most climate sceptics who visit blogs like Harmless Sky will anticipate what is coming next – but in this case things aren’t quite so simple.

The article refers to a new research paper published in Science by a team from the University of Texas. They have been sampling sediments from Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana which indicate that this area is regularly subject to severe droughts which last not just for years, or even decades, but for centuries.  The most recent one ended about 250 years ago, comfortably before human activity can be blamed for climate change.

Apparently the researchers are baffled about what causes these phenomena. Recurrent droughts lasting a decade of so are thought to be associated with variations in ocean currents, which in turn influence the intensity of rainfall. But these ‘megadroughts’ are on an altogether different scale and no explanation of the cause is being offered.

Such events should not be confused with the appalling drought in the Sahel during the 1970s and 1980s which is estimated to have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

Here is what one of the scientists has to say: Continue reading »

BBC Newsnight - complaint to the Editorial Standards Unit

Posted by TonyN on 18/04/2009 at 10:56 am BBC and Freedom of Information 10 Responses »
Apr 182009

It’s now nearly three months since Susan Watts’ extraordinary report for Newsnight about President Obama’s inaugural speech. After jumping through a multitude of hoops (here, here, and here) as part of the BBC complaints process, I have finally received a letter from the Editorial Complaints Unit with some kind of substantive content. This is what they have to say:

I’m writing to notify you that your complaint about Susan Watts’ report for Newsnight on the environmental challenges faced by President Obama is being entertained by this unit. I would also like to sincerely apologise for the delay in doing so as a result of having mislaid your letter.

To ensure that we have a correct understanding of the basis for your complaint, the BBC’S complaints procedure requires that, at this stage, we set out the main points of complaint as we understand them, and the elements of the Editorial Guidelines that we believe to be most relevant to them. In this instance we understand your complaint to be that the editing of excerpts from President Obama’s inaugural speech in this report distorted their intended meaning. The relevant section of the guidelines is that on Accuracy which says, in a section headed Misleading Audiences:

We should not distort known facts, present invented material as fact or knowingly do anything to mislead our audiences. We may need to label material to avoid doing so.

If you have any comments on this summary of your complaint and the relevant guidelines, please let us have them by 22 April so that we can take them into consideration in the course of our investigation, the outcome of which we’ll aim to let you know by 6 May.

For information, the full Editorial Guidelines can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/

And the BBC’s complaints process is explained at http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/handle.shtml

Yours sincerely

Complaints Manager

Editorial Complaints Unit

There is something positively Dickensian about the use of the word ‘entertain’ in the first paragraph, but as the last paragraph refers to an impending ‘investigation’, we seem to be on roughly the right track at last. What comes in the middle is a little more worrying. Continue reading »

BBC Newsnight - Susan Watts tries to get all the right answers

Posted by TonyN on 10/04/2009 at 1:37 pm BBC and Freedom of Information 8 Responses »
Apr 102009

At the end of last month, Newsnight returned to the delicate subject of what President Obama said – or did not say – about science in his inaugural speech. For anyone new to this topic see: BBC Newsnight – Warming up President Obama’s inaugural speech?Here’s what happened in the most recent episode which was broadcasted on 26th March 2009:

Lead-in from Emily Maitlis, the programme presenter: In his policies, George Bush never disguised the fact that he put God many rungs higher than science. So how will life change now there is a US president who believes passionately in the subject. In a wide ranging interview, Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize winning cancer specialist charged with the task of restoring science to its rightful place talks to our Science Editor Susan Watts.

Ms Watts’ report started with a sound bite from the inaugural speech, part of which will be familiar to many Harmless Sky readers:

President Obama: We’ll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technologies wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.

The last time we heard, ‘We’ll restore science to its rightful place ….’ on Newsnight, the rest of the sentence seemed to be, ‘[and] roll back the spectre of a warming planet’. Unless you happened to have a very good memory, or had just read a transcript of the speech, you would have thought that was exactly what the president had said. Not at all the same thing as the complete sentence accurately quoted above. But where climate science is concerned, can we expect the BBC to concern itself about a trivial matter like misquotation provided that the message is ‘correct’? Using the same seven-word phrase twice in little over a month in such very different contexts leaves one a little breathless.

Evidently Newsnight were not prepared to risk repeating the so-called ‘montage’ that they used in their original coverage of the inaugural speech, in spite of claiming that there was nothing wrong with it.

This is Susan Watts’ introduction to her interview with Professor Varmus: Continue reading »

© 2011 Harmless Sky Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha