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 »

Even Andrew Marr worries about groupthink at the BBC

Posted by TonyN on 29/08/2008 at 8:27 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Climate 8 Responses »
Aug 292008

BBC bashing is a favourite sport on the internet, and on blogs in particular. It’s easy, because no news organisation can please everyone all the time, and particularly not one that at least aspires to be impartial in its reporting. Most of us hold partisan opinions on a variety of subjects, so being confronted with arguments that suggest that we may be mistaken is likely to be disconcerting and annoying. This often leads to strenuous venting in the blogosphere along the lines of, ‘Trendy lefties are at it again. What do you expect from the BBC.’Such outbursts can easily be dismissed as knuckleheaded spleen, but you don’t have to look far to find confirmation that there is almost certainly some truth in them. For instance here is something rather startling that appeared in the BBC’s impartiality report last year:

Andrew Marr, former Political Editor, said that the BBC is ‘a publicly-funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people’ compared with the population at large.’ All this, he said, ‘creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC’.

From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, Page 66

It is not just the thrust of this quotation that is startling, Continue reading »

More tropical storms at the Met Office?

Posted by TonyN on 22/08/2008 at 9:46 am The Climate No Responses »
Aug 222008

In the early days of Harmless Sky, just a few months ago, I posted a couple of times about the Met Office’s habit of exaggerating ‘evidence’ of climate change: here and here. I’ve had no reason to visit the Media Centre on their website for a while now because there have been no apocalyptic stories about ‘warmest ever’, ‘wettest ever’ or ‘dryest ever’ in the media. But last night I noticed a link on another site I was looking at and clicked it just to see what they are up to these days. This is what I found.

Atlantic tropical storm season set to top the average

Now, when someone says that a thing is ‘set to top the average’, it’s reasonable to assume that the bulk of the data is already available, the trend is clear, and there is little doubt about what the final figures will be. But then I remembered that what is usually referred to as ‘the hurricane season’ runs from July to November, and we are now only in the middle of August, so the season has only just begun. Continue reading »

Climate Change, BBC Impartiality, and ‘Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer'

Posted by TonyN on 16/08/2008 at 1:45 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Climate 2 Responses »
Aug 162008

My last post, Jeremy Paxman, the BBC, Impartiality, and Freedom of Information, seems to have attracted a good deal of attention, but unfortunately it is unlikely that there will be any major developments in the near future. The Information Commissioner’s Office has warned me that, although they have begun to investigate, progress is likely to be slow.
In the meantime, here is something that I came across at about the same time that I made my Freedom of Information Act request about the BBC’s climate change seminar. The following transcript is taken from an edition of Radio4’s Talking Politics programme (broadcast on 4th August 2007) which was devoted to the Corporation’s problems with impartiality.

Presenter: One of Yes minister’s creators, Anthony Jay, has written a pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies entitled, Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer. Continue reading »

Jeremy Paxman, the BBC, Impartiality, and Freedom of Information

Posted by TonyN on 06/08/2008 at 11:03 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Climate 108 Responses »
Aug 062008

In February 2007, an article that Jeremy Paxman had originally written for Ariel, the BBC’s house magazine, was published on the Newsnight website. It included this remarkable statement about global warming:

I have neither the learning nor the experience to know whether the doomsayers are right about the human causes of climate change. But I am willing to acknowledge that people who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that it is the consequence of our own behaviour.

I assume that this is why the BBC’s coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago. But it strikes me as very odd indeed that an organisation which affects such a high moral tone cannot be more environmentally responsible. [My emphasis]

Jeremy Paxman, Newsnight Homepage 02/02/2007

This stark admission of partisan reporting by the BBC – coming from someone who has been at the centre of current affairs broadcasting for decades – was a surprise to me, not because I was unaware of bias on this subject, but because someone so highly placed in the organisation was prepared to make such a frank admission. Continue reading »

Ofcom's inconvenient truths and Al Gores swindle

Posted by TonyN on 23/07/2008 at 9:27 pm The Climate, Uncategorized 40 Responses »
Jul 232008
[Note: Ofcom is the UK broadcasting regulator]

The other night, BBC News was able to get it’s teeth into a story that combined two of the Corporation’s favourite hate figures. With the publication of Ofcom’s report based on a sixteen-month inquiry into ITV’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, they had the chance to attack both climate change sceptics and their most despised rival for audiences.

On the 10pm. News Roger Harrabin assured viewers that the inquiry had been brought about by a ‘deluge’ of complaints although, according to Ofcom, there were only 265 of these from the general public. The audience was estimated at 2.7 million. True, there was also a 176-page complaint from a group coordinated by someone called Dave Rado **, but this involved many of the usual suspects in the climate science community including Sir John Houghton, Robert Watson, Bob Ward, the late Bert Bolin and William Connolly*. Ofcom wisely seems to have kept this separate from the other complaints, as it was clearly more in the way of a lobby group campaign than a reflection of wider public disquiet. They argued that the film had mislead the public. Continue reading »

The Guardian: a tale of two polls

Posted by TonyN on 10/07/2008 at 11:25 pm The Climate 10 Responses »
Jul 102008

The other day I glanced at an article in The Guardian that made this rather startling claim.

Climate more urgent than economy, say voters

The Guardian 02/07/2008

This surprised me, as other polling evidence that I have seen suggests that the vast majority of the UK public are by no means convinced that human caused global warming is taking place. I’ve posted about Ipsos Mori opinion polls that show this here, here, and here.

Any suggestion that The Guardain’s startling headline had merely been the work of an overenthusiastic sub-editor in a hurry was dispelled by the first paragraph of the article.

Voters think that taking action against climate change matters more than tackling the global economic downturn, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today. The results, which will delight green campaigners, suggest that support for environmental action is not collapsing as feared in the face of possible recession.

At the end of the article there was a series of pie charts that seemed to bear out these claims, but again I did no more than glance at them. Knowing the enthusiasm with which The Guardian has embraced the cause of climate catastrophe, the unworthy thought crossed my mind that they might have rigged the question in order to get a predetermined answer, but only for a moment. ICM is a respectable company and The Guardian is not a down market tabloid. Instead of digging deeper I just made a mental note that there was now an opinion poll that seemed to be bucking the trend and moved on to other things.

About a week later I was involved in a discussion on the Climate Audit message board and happened to post a link to The Guarian’s article. A sharp-eyed commenter using the name ChrisWright drew my attention to a couple of things that I should have spotted.

Firstly, the captions of the all-important pie charts indicate that the questions used by ICM referred specifically to ‘the environment’ and not to climate change.

Secondly, when I returned to The Guardian article for a more careful look, I noticed that ‘Guardian/ICM poll‘ was a hot link. Clicking on it revealed what the poll questions actually were.

Q.1 Bearing in mind growing global economic problems on the one hand growing environmental problems including global warming on the other, where do you think the governments main priorities should now lie?Q.2 Generally speaking would you support or oppose the introduction of green taxes, designed to discourage things that are harmful to the environment?

Q.3 Do you think green taxes should be introduced irrespective of present economic problems or should the government delay the introduction of any green taxes, or not introduce them at all?

Q.4 Often consumers are faced with a choice between a more expensive but environmentally friendly choice, and a cheaper alternative that is not so environmentally friendly. Thinking about people you know, given the recent rise in the cost of living do you think they are now more likely to choose..? [list of options]

Climate change only gets one passing reference in the first question; the emphasis of the poll is entirely on the ‘the environment’. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that people see these two terms as being synonymous, and why would they do so? It is quite possible to be concerned about pollution or wasteful use of natural resources and still not be convinced that humans are now changing the climate.

If ICM’s questions had actually asked about climate change, do you think that the pollsters would have got the same response, or that there would have been any ‘delight’ among green campaigners at the results? I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this article – in a leading national broadsheet newspaper – is blatantly and cynically misleading, and why the editors might think that such deception is acceptable.

A shop-soiled messiah goes east: Tony Blair, the G8, oil prices, and an inconvenient opinion poll

Posted by TonyN on 07/07/2008 at 8:00 pm The Climate 11 Responses »
Jul 072008

Some time ago, I posted about the return of a shop-soiled messiah by the name of Tony Blair. Since being forced out of office, he has found various niches on the world scene from which to keep his name alive in the media. Acting as a roving ambassador for an organisation called The Climate Group is one of these, and it is in this capacity that he recently visited Japan. His mission was an attempt to salvage the road map for a drastic reduction in carbon emissions which was outlined at the Bali (son of Kyoto) Climate Conference last December.On the BBC Radio4 Today programme the following proposition was put to the ex-prime minister – in the form of a question – by James Naughty:

There was a poll here the other day which suggested, to the horror of some people in the environmental movement, that people don’t yet buy the seriousness, as you believe it to be, of the climate crisis. So politicians have not managed to persuade them.

The response was vintage Blair: Continue reading »

Kyoto, climate change, and the price of oil

Posted by TonyN on 29/06/2008 at 8:54 am The Climate 2 Responses »
Jun 292008

Last weekend, UK prime minister Gordon Brown visited Jiddah to plead with oil producers to increase supplies. This would seem to be a very strange thing for a politician with the declared intention of leading a worldwide crusade against climate change to do.

For years now we have been told that our addiction to fossil fuels is causing global warming, and that the only way to avert catastrophe is to reduce fossil fuel consumption to below 1990 levels. What better incentive to do this than a steep rise in oil prices? Surely the prime minister should be celebrating not whingeing.

Governments all over the world have at least paid lip service to the Kyoto Protocol. They have stated and re-stated their intention to reduce demand for oil, by whatever ruthless means may be necessary. So how is it that we now have a shortfall in production that has caused oil prices to double in just six months? Falling demand should be driving prices down by now, or at least keeping them stable. Continue reading »

FT: Global warming - don't despair

Posted by Robin Guenier on 22/06/2008 at 3:58 pm The Climate 10 Responses »
Jun 222008

On 19th June, the Financial Times published an article by Phillip Stephens entitled “Saving the planet will be difficult, but do not despair”. See: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/65b790f0-3e12-11dd-b16d-0000779fd2ac.html

Essentially, he’s worried that “denial” of man-made global warming is still a problem despite the “overwhelming weight of scientific knowledge” that, unless mankind’s emissions of CO2 are curtailed, we face dire consequences. He claims that opinion polls show that, although respondents in most countries think global warming is “a very serious problem”, that’s not true of the “two worst polluters” – the USA and China. He comments that emission control is no longer “cool” – the world now faces other short-term priorities. He notes how China and India have increasingly voracious appetites for fossil fuels. Hence the “despair” of the title. This, he says, is exacerbated by the problem of getting all nations to move to low-carbon economies – perhaps it’s just too difficult?

Stephens rejects despair. Instead, he supports the economist Nicholas Stern’s proposal that “market mechanisms, technological advances and behavioural changes” be used to share “the burden of adjustment” between rich and emerging nations. That would mean ceilings on emissions by the developed economies that “bite immediately” and a “new international trading system” imposing “binding” targets on developing countries after 2020.

I agree that despair is unnecessary. But there is so much that is unpleasant, misleading and wrong in Stephens’s analysis that that truth could be overlooked. Some examples: Continue reading »

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