How idiotic has the advocacy of climate alarmism by the BBC become?
Last month, as was reported on TCW, BBC News Director Fran Unsworth issued a formal directive stating, in effect, that alarmism is proven and cannot be challenged on the BBC airwaves.
One of her key minions, James Stephenson, the BBC’s overall editor of News and Current Affairs, has now appeared on the latest edition of BBC Radio 4’s Feedback to ram home the message.
Full reading of the transcript is recommended to to appreciate the jaw-dropping scale of the bias involved, but in essence, he declared that, despite viewer concerns the Corporation was adopting a partisan approach, ‘the science’ is beyond doubt and the IPCC’s word on the subject must be considered gospel.
His stance amounts to a total junking by the Corporation of basic scientific empiricism, which – since Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus in 1267 – has been based on the premise that one new set of verifiable data can sweep away any theory.
In that context, the alleged existence of ‘consensus’ between climate scientists on which Stephenson relies for justifying his propaganda position, matters not one jot.
In fact – despite all the IPCC’s posturing, politicking and blustering – the study of workings of the globe’s climate is in its infancy, not least because measurement of variables is so unreliable and incomplete.
Leading anti-alarmist scientist (and true empiricist), the Australian Jo Nova, excoriatingly reports that the world’s major climate ‘record’ – on which are anchored many of the IPCC’s alarmist predictions – is riddled with massive errors, gaps and assumptions.
So extreme was Stephenson’s partisanship in favour of the climate alarmist stance on Feedback that he bloody-mindedly defended a major mistake in the Corporation’s IPCC-related coverage.
Presenters John Humphrys and Sarah Montague both wrongly said the IPCC report was warning about a 1.5 per cent rise in global temperatures when the reality was that it referred to 1.5 degrees. Whoops, but in the BBC’s manual of climate change reporting, who cares? Stephenson accepted this was inaccurate, but claimed it did not matter because ‘audiences would have recognised it was a slip’.
Eh? In other words, in the BBC’s climate change universe, never let the facts get in the way of a good scare story.
Ironically, perhaps, the BBC position on alarmism can also be compared to that of the Catholic Church as imagined in Bertolt Brecht’s 1938 play The Life of Galileo. This in the 1960s was a ‘must see’ drama for all those on the left. They wanted to ridicule the play’s projection of the unreason and unbending conservatism of Catholicism, then one of the biggest targets of every left-winger. Ultra Marxist Brecht represented Galileo as the voice of ‘reason’ against the Church’s defence of bigoted religious orthodoxy. The BBC, of course, would love to see themselves as Galileo in the climate change debate.
In reality, though, they are not. The BBC, the IPCC and other bodies such as the EU, politicians and governments who have swallowed the IPCC agenda, the multi-national companies benefitting from ‘green’ energy, and academia are now all the vested interests defending the ‘warmist’ status quo at any and every cost – including the rejection of reason itself.
Every man (and woman) jack of them, like the Catholic Church in Brecht’s projection, is pitched against true scientific inquiry. Those who question alarmism are not ‘deniers’ as the BBC now so insultingly calls them. Rather, it is they, the ‘deniers’, the anti-alarmists, who are heroes and heroines fighting to smash the corrupt billions-of-dollars alarmist scam, which, on some estimates, is costing trillions of dollars.
My lead letter in today’s The Australian newspaper in response to an article on climate change in a geological time perspective:
While I fully endorse the article, the problem remains that this was never about climate, since the 1980s it was always a vehicle for political change from a radical leftist, anti-Western perspective. As the Earth stubbornly refuses to warm even at the lowest bound of the IPCC models and there is no evidence of increased cyclonic activity or unusual sea-level rise, the proponents of doom rely more and more on unfounded scares and gaining political support from those too ignorant to examine the scientific facts of climate change. Essentially, we still have limited understanding of our vastly complex climate system, although we do know enough to know that economic devastation through extreme emissions-reduction policies will damage our capacity to deal with present and (unknown) future issues while having little if any impact on future climate. The fight is on the political level, and the extreme alarmists are winning. Simple presentation of the facts, as here, will not be enough.