Propelled by the Climategate email scandal, cooling global temperatures, total failure of the Copenhagen climate conference, many false and otherwise erroneous reports in the IPCC 4th report on Climate Change, etc. the public is becoming aware of the bill of goods that has been feed to them in recent years by the mainstream media, Al Gore, and politicians of all stripes who want to tax and regulate you. Polls show waning support for draconian taxes and regulation in order to cut fossil fuel CO2 emissions.
This past week, the BBC aired a program they produced titled “Science Under Attack”. The objective of the program was to bolster the man-made global warming theory (AGW).
So how good was the BBC’s “Science Under Attack”?
A desperate and sleazy program according to Christopher Booker as told in his posting “How BBC warmists abuse the science”:
The formula the BBC uses in its forlorn attempts to counterattack has been familiar ever since its 2008 series Climate Wars. First, a presenter with some scientific credentials comes on, apparently to look impartially at the evidence. Supporters of the cause are allowed to put their case without challenge. Hours of film of climate-change “deniers” are cherrypicked for soundbites that can be shown, out of context, to make them look ridiculous. The presenter can then conclude that the “deniers” are a tiny handful of eccentrics standing out against an overwhelming scientific “consensus”.
The scientist picked to front the progamme was Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, now President of the Royal Society (which has been promoting warmist orthodoxy even longer than the BBC). The cue to justify the programme’s title was all the criticism which greeted those Climategate emails leaked from Sir Paul’s old university, East Anglia, showing how scientists had been manipulating their data to support the claim that temperatures have recently risen to unprecedented levels.
One of the two “deniers” chosen to be stitched up, in classic BBC fashion, was the Telegraph’s James Delingpole. He has spoken for his own experience on our website. Still worse, however, was the treatment of Professor Fred Singer, the distinguished 86-year-old atmospheric physicist who set up the satellite system for the US National Weather Bureau. We saw Nurse cosying up to Singer in a coffee house, then a brief clip of the professor explaining how a particular stalagmite study had shown temperature fluctuations correlating much more neatly with solar activity than with levels of CO2. This snippet enabled Nurse to imply that Singer’s scepticism is based on one tiny local example, whereas real scientists look at the overall big picture. No mention of the 800-page report edited by Singer in which dozens of expert scientists challenge the CO2 orthodoxy from every angle.
For those that attend to the Climate Change Sanity postings routinely (see) will instantly spot how poor the programming was and how little about the subject, Sir Paul Nurse knows when your read the following Booker comments:
The most telling moment, however, came in an interview between Nurse and a computer-modelling scientist from Nasa, presented as a general climate expert although he is only a specialist in ice studies. Asked to quantify the relative contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere by human and natural causes, his seemingly devastating reply was that 7 gigatons (billion tons) are emitted each year by human activity while only 1 gigaton comes from natural sources such as the oceans. This was so much the message they wanted that Nurse invited him to confirm that human emissions are seven times greater than those from all natural sources.
This was mind-boggling. It is generally agreed that the 7 billion tonnes of CO2 due to human activity represent just over 3 per cent of the total emitted. That given off by natural sources, such as the oceans, is vastly greater than this, more than 96 per cent of the total. One may argue about the “carbon cycle” and how much CO2 the oceans and plants reabsorb. But, as baldly stated, the point was simply a grotesque misrepresentation, serving, like many of the programme’s other assertions, only to give viewers a wholly misleading impression.
You can read James Delingpoles discussion of the Nurse “gotcha interview” here.
For 10 years Peter Sissons was the BBC evening news anchor. In his recently published memoirs, he says:
“The BBC became a propaganda machine for climate change zealots, and I was treated as a lunatic for daring to dissent”.
The BBC and the Warmists desperation in producing a program like this is palpable and it argues strongly that the BBC has lost its integrity.
cbdakota
Climate Change Sanity 