I see Roger Harrabin and Richard Black – both main environment reporters at the BBC – as a rather sinister version of a modern-day Box and Cox act. Roger does his bit, then up pops Richard, spouting from the same hymn sheet. And here, in type, and on time, is Richard Black – aided by BBC weatherman Darren Bett (and Met Office slave), who, in his own words, became an “environmental scientist” because he didn’t have the grades to become a doctor – softening us up to tell us that despite December being the coldest for a century, we are at the end of the warmest year on record. Actually, Mr Black and Mr Bett, despite your certainty that cold swallows don’t make summers, that’s not as open and shut as you so strongly claim. Try here, here, , here and here. Of course, reporters such as Mr Black and so-called scientists like Mr Bett don’t do such humble research or mention such doubts; they already know – in their greenie fervour and lofty towers – what the narrative is and will invariably be. A ray of hope, though, is here. Climate scare stories are on the decline. Could our very own Box and Cox be for the chop?
(Picture of a production of C19 production of Box and Cox from Wikipedia)
I’ve been most intrigued by how the bBC reports on worldwide weather conditions which surreptitiously points at so called GW/CC. Take for example this report from India:
Cold snap forces closure of Delhi schools
A continuing cold snap has forced authorities in the Indian capital to keep schools closed till Sunday. Delhi has been badly hit by the cold, along with Indian-administered Kashmir, and the states of Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. Temperatures have been hovering around 4C after dipping to 3.7C on Tuesday morning, the city’s lowest this winter. The death toll in the cold snap that has disrupted life across northern India has reportedly risen to 47.
Now, because we believe that India is only a tropical country the above could and does come across as very scary. Yet what the bBC doesn’t mention is that Delhi is only 100Kms from a certain mountain range known as the Himalayas. That the current temperatures are only around 3-4 degrees below normal and the primary reason for that is the sun hasn’t shone for the past few days because the area has been blanketed by fog.
“It could be due to high humidity level in the area coupled with some other reasons. Temperatures in Delhi have gone down drastically. The sun has not shone for days. So, overall temperature has fallen. In the other areas, the temperatures have gone down but the atmosphere is conducive to fog. There could also be other natural disturbances causing this,” said a weatherman in Delhi.
All in all this is nothing new, but in leaving out certain snippets such as its winter/close proximity to Mountain ranges/Only 3 degrees below normal the bBC promotes a different story than the actual one. I mean what’s with this:
“The wind just numbs your hands and feet when you travel in auto-rickshaws or on a two-wheeler,” Kanika Madan, a student, told The Hindu newspaper.
I went out on my push-bike along the riverbank last week, froze my bollocks off now I wonder why that is?
Then there’s this snippet:
“Meanwhile, 12 more people died in the cold snap in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh state.”
Wow its so cold in UP and here’s what the bBC doesn’t tell you about this state which is situated in the Himalayas:
Snowfall: In the Himalayan region of the State, annual snowfall averaging 3 to 5 metres (10 to 15 feet) is common between December and March.
Darren Bett, ex- University of East Anglia. Enough said !
Slightly OT, but does go to the power of broadcast (which the BBC has in unique abundance) when combined with competence, accuracy and factual impartiality.
A move to digital now means my PC PiP only gets the feed from the SKY Box, so BBC Breakfast Ne… er.. ‘Send US Your Views to be Selected & Editted’ is now much harder to sample. So to be clear, this was not on BBC. I’ll simply leave experience for others to decide if it gets mentioned anywhere, at all, or is ‘omitted’… or ‘explained’.
Today there was a review with a professional ratings ranter that raised the size of the Pacific Garbage patch being grossly exagerated.
‘But,’ intoned the Irish bloke and the peroxide moppet, ”…even if it’s only half the size of Texas, that is too much’.
And I had to say, i totally agreed with that view.
Now I have read it however, I find we are talking a factor of 200x smaller. Oddly not mentioned by the ranter or his thick counter talking heads, who either were dopey of misrepresented facts to assist their point. My faith in SKY as a ‘news’ source of value now sliding even lower as a consequence. And if have told them so. Eyeballs on ads can count.
Because this put a different complexion on the issue. As commenters on the blog have patiently explained to shrieking advocates of total (impractical and impossible to enforce outside of Notting Hill and Cornwall, much less globally) bannings, etc, many other factors DO come into play, from the funding actually being required on the basis of the claimed size (which does make it matter) to the costs of clean up kit to be built-in as contingency or even plastic mining ops. Like a Met Office prediction, it’s £ millions down the drain if they only tell a few gullible folk who sign off on wild over-estimates or total factual misfires.
Making up numbers to score vast resources from inept pols simply by screaming green serves no good purpose. On top of the public getting yet another chicken little story to erode all faith in the actual, tangible, sensible issues that are (over)-promoted daily.
This is the danger of science-inept and social agenda-corrupted media such as the 3 NGO PR-reprinting Whores of the Apocalypse, Harrabin, Shuckman and Black.
All of whom remain the sole core messengers of environmental issues on the world’s largest media gathering and disseminating entity, despite being shown to be at best unqualified, dogmatic and, at the very least, some a bit partial through odd associations and financial linkages.
Unique.
I find Sky is not much better than bBC except for Jeff Randall,
Is this “Pacific garbage patch” bigger than the ones in Exeter and Birmingham? I expect the binmen couldn’t reach it because of the weather…
Harrabin and Black are just following normal BBC (and most public sector) practice which is to have more people on a job than is necessary.
BBC newsreaders tell us some news and then we are passed either to a ‘correspondent’ sat next to them or at the scene of the event who repeats the same news almost word for word – usually dressed in an outdoorsy person style anorak from Millets.
When you have £3.5 billion per year to spend why bother controlling staff costs?
Newsreaders are sometimes allowed to tell us some news without someone else repeating it. In these cases we often get those helpful silent videos. When petrol prices go up we are shown people filling up at a petrol station. When schools are in the news we are shown a teacher teaching her class.
“…When schools are in the news we are shown a teacher teaching her class….”
Bloody hell, that must have some rarity value….
Surely you mean “indoctrinating” her class?
“But earlier this week the University of Alabama at Huntsville in the US, which collates temperature data gathered by satellites, declared it to be the second warmest year since the satellite record began in 1979.”
Remember satellite data is not independent of surface temperatures. If the surface temperatures are corrupt so are the satellite data.
Satellite data are calibrated from surface temperatures given by Hansen’s GISS temperature set. And as Black knows this data is often being manipulated.
http://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/giss-falsifies-record-at-mount-isa/
http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/giss
http://amlibpub.blogspot.com/2009/01/nasa-rigs-data-reports-false-global.html
Temperature data from the Met or GISS is as reliable as New Labours crime statistics.
Notice how Black draws attention to data from the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Yet never quotes the Professor of atmospheric science, John Christy.
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/14/christy-and-mckittrick-in-the-uk-times-doubts-on-station-data/
One of the many reasons why the Cameron Government is reluctant to admit any doubt about man made global warming must be what has been taught about climate and the environment to a generation of British school children over the last fifteen years, which is basically, lies. The same applies to anyone with a degree in “Climate Science” who should be asking for a refund of their tuition fees. Never mind the fraud commited by many British University Departments on DECC , DoE and EU grant funding.
The whole edifice is remarkably reluctant to crumble, despite being entirely hollow and without substance, because so many people have invested in it or hope to get rich by it. The only people not tainted by this scam are the “uniquely un-funded”, the blogsphere.
Which is why activists funded by guilt-ridden US Hedge Fund billionaire charitable foundations (Bob Ward are you listening?) are piling into the Comments sections of people like Dellingpole (1000+ comments on any article would you believe?). Keyboard eco-nazis, you cannot win. You are lost, because you are wrong.
Interesting article from the bbC where they give succor to the far left climate change brigade by finding an ‘expert’ in which to declare to the world that those idiots who wanted to close down a power station the other year but were arrested before they did so (they were all arrested at a central meeting point which was to be used as a launch pad) shouldn’t have been arrested before they closed the power station down but rather should have been arrested only when they set foot in the place. I quote:
“But Dr Clifford Stott, a policing tactics expert from the University of Liverpool, believes the use of a pre-emptive raid raised serious questions.
He said: “Clearly the police were in their rights to intervene but we also need to bear in mind that at that point of intervention, there had been no breaches of the law.
“There were only people engaging in peaceful protest and peaceful protest is protected under the European Convention on Human Rights and to prevent peaceful protest is, in itself, illegal.
So it really is on the edge of that borderline between what’s legal and what isn’t, and who was in the right and who was in the wrong.”
The bbC then go into overdrive into how much it cost to arrest 114 people at Iona School in Sneinton, Nottingham, I actually don’t know where they are going with that but if those 114 idiots had closed down Ratcliffe power station O’m pretty sure it would have cost even a lot more. Well seeing as the school is situated in what looks like a really rough area, the police could have saved the tax payer a lot of money by spreading the message around that the those folks where going to cut off their electricity for as long as possible. I’m sure a few people with guns would have made those people change their minds.