That ‘Settled Science’…BBC’s Approach ‘Ignorant and Medieval’ To Debate

 

The long pause in global warming is known to be caused by…..what?  No one knows.

The recent floods….caused by a global warming that hasn’t happened for over 16 years?  No  one knows.

Extreme weather is increasing…due to global warming?  Actually it’s not increasing.

CO2 is driving global warming?  There’s absolutely no proof of that…the ‘proof’ in fact says any warming causes the release of CO2 rather than the other way round.

Global warming is man-made?  There’s no proof of that….no direct link at all.

Global warming is catastrophic?  Not so far…quite the opposite.

Islands sinking under rising seas?  Kiribati?  Maldives?  No.

Arctic ice loss will be disastrous?  Greenland is called Greenland because it wasn’t always covered in ice…and that wasn’t  so long ago.

The Medieval Warm Period was just as warm as today’s temperatures……did the world end?  No.

The Roman warm period ditto.

In 100 years time we know exactly what the climate will be?  Do me a favour.

 

 

 

So the ‘science’ is settled.

No, it is.  How do I know?  The BBC says conclusively that the debate is over...via Bishop Hill:

The BBC’s Feedback programme decided that environmentalist dismay at Lord Lawson’s appearance on the Today programme needed a bit of an airing. Alex Cull has prepared a transcript here.

Jamie Angus: The BBC’s reviewed its coverage of climate change and climate science, and it’s set out some admirably clear guidelines for us to follow. We are able to put on air people who take a differing view from the majority view of climate science. However, that coverage should be proportional, and I think that any reasonable listener who listened to Today’s coverage of climate change, across the past three months, would probably find that Lord Lawson was the only climate sceptic, if you like, who’d appeared in that period. And I think, you know, when Justin and I and the programme team discussed that interview, we thought we’d allowed it to drift too much into a straight yes-no argument about the science. And of course the settled view of the expert scientists is just that – settled, and I believe that our coverage reflects that, over the long term.

 

 

So the BBC has only had one climate sceptic on in 3 months?  The BBC has clearly decided that journalism is no longer required of it and will solely be providing hype, propaganda and free publicity for the climate lobbyists regardless of the science, or lack of.

 

Rather at odds with this:

The BBC’s great confidence trick

The Australian Attorney General George Brandis, a confirmed upholder of the climate change consensus, has lashed out at the large numbers of his fellow-travellers who seek to silence dissenters.

He said one of the main motivators for his passionate defence of free speech has been the “deplorable” way climate change has been debated and he was “really shocked by the sheer authoritarianism of those who would have excluded from the debate the point of view of people who were climate-change deniers”.

“One side [has] the orthodoxy on its side and delegitimises the views of those who disagree, rather than engaging with them intellectually and showing them why they are wrong,” he said.

He referred to [Opposition leader Penny Wong] as standing up in the Senate and saying the science is settled as an example of climate change believers trying to shut down the debate.

“In other words, ‘I am not even going to engage in a debate with you.’ It was ignorant, it was medieval, the approach of these true believers in climate change,” he said.

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13 Responses to That ‘Settled Science’…BBC’s Approach ‘Ignorant and Medieval’ To Debate

  1. uncle bup says:

    Post here by regular guest on the BBC, Anthony Watts.

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/16/a-clear-example-of-ipcc-ideology-trumping-fact/#more-107650

    Did I say ‘regular guest’?

    I meant ‘persona non grata’.

    My bad.

       30 likes

  2. thoughtful says:

    It was settled science that the Earth was flat some few hundred years ago until that inconvenient man Nicholas Copernicus told them the truth, and look what happened to him.
    The Fascists might like to think they have ‘progressed’ but they have in fact gone backwards and continue to do so.

       30 likes

  3. DP111 says:

    Is Quantum theory settled? No.

    Is the general theory of Relativity settled? No.

    These are two sciences that can be regarded as proper sciences. Yet these two cant agree with each other. But when it comes to Climate “science”, it is settled. CS is not even a discipline, as there is no recognised disciplined approach in the field.

    I would agree though that Climate “science” is a subset political science, where positions can be held with conviction and those who don’t, regarded as heretics..

       24 likes

    • Richard Pinder says:

      The evidence shows that the BBC’s best scientific experts are environmental activists without relevant scientific qualifications if any. So the settled science statements by the BBC, are needed by the BBC, as a cover for widespread ignorance of even the basics of Climate science and Atmospheric Physics, which would be revealed by debate, even with non-scientists like Lord Lawson.

         20 likes

  4. Wild says:

    Dr. William M. Briggs (Paraphrase)

    Suppose (for the sake of argument) that significant human caused climate change is false. Now put yourself in the place of a climatologist, one of the many hundreds for example who was involved with the IPCC. You have made a career out of of arguing that humans have significantly influenced the climate, and are causing temperatures to grow out of control. Your team, at a major university, has built and contributed to various global climate models. Your graduate students have worked on these models. Team members have traveled the world and lectured on their results. Many, many papers were written about their output, and so forth.

    But something has gone wrong. The actual temperature, predicted to go up and up, has not cooperated and has instead stayed the same and even has gone down. Do you:

    1. Abandon the model and seek a new career

    2. Discover where the model went wrong; publish results admitting why and how you were wrong

    3. Sit and wait: after all, the temperature is bound to increase sooner or later, hence validating your model

    4. Believe that the model cannot be wrong, else so many people wouldn’t believe it, and posit some new source that is “holding back” warming, and if that new source weren’t there, your model would be perfect.

    The correct answer is (2), though (1) is an option for graduate students or professors reaching emeritus status.

    Would anybody opt for (3)? Certainly, because it’s the easiest thing to do.

    The slide begins with choosing (4). Nobody would, or should, abandon a well-developed model because an observation or two is not consonant with that model. Some time has to pass for enough failed predictions to mount up. But how much time?

    If the best climate models over-predict global temperature for a year, this is not cause for concern. For two years, no big deal. Even three to five years would not cause undue suspicion. But more than that, then something has gone wrong.

    No climate scientist yet has opted for answers (1) or (2); several have opted for (3), saying five to ten years isn’t enough and that “more time” is needed. Nobody, that I know of, has said how much more time.

    Has anybody gone for answer (4)? Yes. Already we are seeing papers-peer-reviewed that posit sources that are “masking” the true warming. So far, these papers have generally concentrated on aerosols, particles, caused by mankind of course, that can, through various mechanisms, block incoming solar radiation and lead to cooling. Aerosol cooling only gets you so far, however, because their effects are actually easy to measure.

    The warning signs are when scientists pitch their “claim directly to the media” and say that big oil is trying to suppress his or her work. They offer anecdotal evidence and propose ever more complicated new laws of nature to explain the apparent lack of warming. At that point the science of climatology starts to become a pseudo-science.

    Don’t laugh, because this sort of thing happens all the time. Some will be old enough to remember when paranormal research was the rage in the 1970s. Peer-reviewed papers appeared on the subject, even in prestigious journals like Science. Just around the corner, mankind would be able harness untold power by just using his mind. Goats, for example, could be killed just by staring at them (yes, really). It was an exciting time. Early on in the work, it was obvious that man only used 10% of his brain, and that psychic events were real. Experiments were run, but most failed. New experiments, toning down the original claims were run, but these failed too. Various physical and biological mechanisms to explain psychic abilities were proposed, but none could be validated.

    Test after test failed, until by the mid-1980s, most people wised up and left the field. But not all did. Some used “sophisticated” statistics, to find the signal that nobody else could see.

    Of course, it might turn out mankind really does significantly influence climate, so the fact the we now see model patching is not proof that mankind has no influence. But it should give us pause and should lead us to examine, the deviation of model forecasts from actual observations.

       32 likes

    • Richard Pinder says:

      I suppose that all scientists from 1997 onwards, who read and understood the paper (Carbon cycle modelling and the residence time of natural and anthropogenic atmospheric CO2, Segalstad) where not fooled from the start, but stuck with the Arrhenius method because there was no alternative, even though the Arrhenius method only fit’s the atmosphere of Mars and the Earth with positive feedback for the Earth’s Atmosphere, but then the Arrhenius method has been discredited by the fact that feedback is negative as well as the fact that the Arrhenius method was always unusable for Venus, but then bingo, in 2011 we got the paper (Unified Theory of Climate, Ned Nikolov & Karl Zeller) and all is now solved.

      But then the environmental religion would fall apart, if the above science was not censored by the BBC, because it proves that the basic facts behind the computer models are bullshit.

      Its like producing a computer model from data collected in the last three months, to show that we will all be frying by December.

         15 likes

  5. Richard Pinder says:

    The debate is not over yet because.

    (1) Most new findings in science come from a minority of one single scientist.

    (2) Lord Lawson was not a scientist, we need scientists to dominate debate, not politicians and environmental activists, or in the case of the environmental activists at the BBC, shutting down debate.

    (3) The settled science dogma comes from the BBC’s best scientific experts, who are environmental activists without scientific qualifications, but whose employment is dependant upon censorship of the science, scientists and scientific debate.

    (1) 4 percent of the CO2 in the atmosphere is either Volcanic or Man-made, but the exact ratio has not yet been worked out yet, although we are told that there are scientists working on the isotopic fingerprints.

    (3) Ian Wilson’s work on Planetary wobble induced speed of plasma induced Solar magnetism, is not yet widely known yet, due to widespread censorship of debate by those who are wilfully ignorant or environmental activists.

    (2) Corbyn and Svensmark must resolve their differences, which hardly exist, anyway.

       10 likes

  6. Graham Cunningham says:

    Global Hot Air From The BBC
    http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/01/global_hot_air_from_the_bbc.html
    “Billions of people now ‘know’ about global warming and how it threatens the planet. They ‘know’ that it is all the fault of decades of irresponsible, profligate industry and capitalism. And yet, what exactly do they really know? Have they delved in to the research data? Have they made it their business to acquire a thorough understanding of atmospheric processes and of climatology? Or have they simply heard it ad nauseam on the news. Heard it so insistently, emphatically and endlessly repeated that it must be true.”

       15 likes

  7. Fred Sage says:

    The BBC is going into overdrive on climate change. Start the week, this morning, had a very one sided debate on the subject. Not a very nice thing to wake up to. I think it is the approaching summer with a few hot days they think they can get away with the deciet.

       10 likes

    • chrisH says:

      Lovelock was, though, the great man that he is.(Start the Week)
      Funnily enough he considers himself an inventor as much as he does a scientist.
      Went down rather badly with our UCL poppet and Professor Moonbat of the Uni of WallyMagoo though.
      It`s as if the climate change cretins HATE the idea of fabrication, synthetics and INVENTION …and especially when their old hero and mentor highlights it in error!
      Only the BBC would consider putting Monbiot on against a qualified scientist like Lovelock.
      Do you think Feedback will be visiting this one, given all their synthetic, fabricated invention of “outrage” at Lord Lawsons heresies, re “climate catastrophies”? Three weeks running thus far I think!
      For Lawson seems to be unqualified to speak, whereas Monbiot is.
      Beeb Roolz…strange things, but all in one direction only.
      Monbiots got a new book out in June about releasing tigers from Longleat to mend vending machines.
      Or something like that…I`d put a copyright on that name “wild”, before the name gets dragged through the lion dung in the Bowland Forest!

         5 likes

  8. starfish says:

    Missed an opportunity today on the skin cancer increase story

    Amazingly they have not worked in a climate change angle – blaming it on suntanning machines and package holidays

       6 likes

  9. Sceptical scientist says:

    In the now rather too distant days when I was doing A level physics at school (1959), the theory of Plate Tectonics was ridiculed by most scientists. The settled science said that continents could not move as energy requirements were too great. Eventually the evidence became overwhelming and the “settled science” was rejected, but it took nearly fifty years from the original theory of Continental Drift proposed in 1912.

       5 likes

    • DP111 says:

      Very true. The difference with CS is that the Left and the BBC, are asking to raise taxes, and destroy Western economies, all on the basis of a faulty model.

         0 likes