Comments
BBC Bias Part 2 – ‘Earth:The Climate Wars’ Programme 3 – A Viewer’s View
The third programme began by stating that the previous two programmes had shown that climate change was a fact, that humans were causing it and that there was nowhere to hide from the science.
This episode was to consider the science of climate modelling to predict the likely magnitude and effects of this climate change.
What followed was a lesson in why the warmers don’t present rational arguments to support their position very often. The can’t do it without contradicting themselves. You needed to know something about the subject to pick holes in the first two programmes – this time the contradictions were obvious in three areas:
1 Warming – more or less ice in Greenland?
They started by talking about glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland, claiming that the increased calving of bergs raised the flow of the glacier and even started a “dormant” glacier moving again, and this was likely to accelerate the loss of ice from the land based ice sheets and so raise sea levels. Later in the programme they went to Greenland (nice work if you can get it) and looked at ice cores for 11,000 years ago when there was a sudden climate change. This showed that 5 degrees of warming happened in less than 3 years – and the snowfall in the warmer period was double that in the cooler one. So does warming cause more ice or less? Tell the truth, they don’t rightly know! However there is a paper on this which the Independent misreported as “three degrees to meltdown” which said that the Greenland ice sheet would thicken for up to three degrees of warming, which funnily enough is the prediction for climate change that the programme was so keen on quoting. That would be more ice, then!
2 Are the models accurate or not?
They presented an interesting history of climate modelling – and cited the eruption of mount Pinatubo in 1990 as the vindication of climate models as they predicted the exact magnitude and distribution of the resultant cooling. These models “showed 3 degrees of warming” for a doubling of CO2, just like the really simplistic ones they used 30 years ago. However, they then had to explain why the current arctic warming was greater than the models predicted (not mentioned was the cooler antarctic plateau!). In rode “chaos theory” to the rescue. You couldnt predict things accurately for this reason which meant things could be much worse than the models said (strangely not much better!) Of course the fact that 3 degrees is simply the mid point of the 1-5 degrees of warming the models show was not mentioned – looks far too uncertain! So, like the ice, the models start off telling one story and then the opposite turns out to be true.
3 Medieval Warm Period Resurrected
Then he went to South Western USA and showed a lost civilisation of desert dwellers who abandoned their homes in the thirteenth century after sudden climate change forced wars over water and eventually destroyed the civilisation. The same thing was predicted for Las Vegas and Los Angeles! Must be God’s wrath on these places for all that gambling, sexual perversion and car use….
But wait a minute – the thirteenth century?? Was that not the medieval warm period? And didn’t the second Climate Wars programme state that there had been no significant climate change at this time because the great Michael Mann had cut down some pine trees and decreed that the last thousand years had been a climate garden of eden until the wicked co2 emissions commenced? Was this not a key argument used by the programme makers to establish that there was nowhere to hide from the science of man made climate change? Just so! Seems that natural climate change can be acknowledged when it is needed to back up scaremongering as the to the effects of warming, but is denied when assessing the causes, leaving mankinds activities as a default. And they call this science.
The bottom line is that natural climate change has happened throughout the earth’s history. Sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly, but its been there all along. And the programme claimed that we have no clue as to why these changes, especially the sudden ones, happen. If a 5 degree warming in Greenland 11,000 years ago was caused by a butterfly, then I’m Arnold Schwarzernegger! So if they have no idea as to the causes of natural climate change, and so expunge it from recent history, how can climate models possibly be calibrated to take account of it and to reveal the human warming signal???
September 23rd, 2008 at 10:47 am
The botton line sir this statements like this “The media have largely adopted the official intergovernmental view of climate science and tend to ignore peer reviewed scientific papers that fail to support the ‘consensus,’” are bullshit and so is any of the biased crap at Icecap a collection of paid lobbyists and shills for fossil fuel companies. I don;t detect the first sign of understanding issue at even an undergraduate level.
Here are the people who do: realclimate Real is the keyword here. It’s what your analysis bears no resemblance to.
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your comment, which I will approve. The media ignoring non-alarmist peer reviewed science is demonstrable e.g. Roy Spencer’s recent paper on Cirrus clouds and negative feedback – didn’t get reported despite sending out a PR. His latest on climate models and feedback, in the Journal of Climate, won’t get reported either. The BBC, for example, are very quick to pick up the resurrected ‘hockey stick’ and present it as proof that there was no MWP.
As far as funding is concerned – there is much more money available to the consensus or alarmist side than to realists. IIRC – $50 billion has been spent on climate research by Governments, which dwarfs the amount money from other sources.
As for Realclimate – this was set up by the likes of Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt of GISS, William Connolly (Green Party) to defend the fatally flawed Hockey Stick and the consensus – it does not therefore tend present an objective view of climate science.
Climate Research News exists mainly to scan climate journals and report papers that the media doesn’t report and is funded out of my own pocket. I may add ‘google ads’ and a ‘donate’ button, but that’s it!
I set up a temporary site http://www.climaterealist.blogspot.com while CRN.com was being set up, where there are some recent papers of interest.
Valid science requires research to objective and for a hypothesis to be tested to destruction – not protected by trying to shut down or suppress alternative views or research.
I have a much better understanding of climate than the likes of Al Gore, approved of by Realclimate, who has tried to link every weather event with ‘global warming’ and made himself $100 million, so far.
Regards,
Paul Biggs
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Irrespective of any particular scientific fact the whole program was little more than an hour of subliminal advertising (for whatever cause). If you have the time or inclination I would recommend viewing without sound to appreciate my point. Advertising being in terms of a particular view to the point of being a Party Political Broadcast. It was obviously far more obvious with sound on and almost laughable in it’s sheer single mindedness. The point where the presenter claimed ‘Because Data Modellers accurately predict the future..’ I just had to laugh. Why does the BBC now take us for being gullible fools and what generation are they trying to convince?
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Good points Wiliam.
I climate alarmism was based on sound science, then there would be no need for such a blatant BBC propaganda excercise.
October 24th, 2008 at 4:59 am
IF you watch most of the BBC’s and Skys output , everyday there is a green lecture, its truly appaling. Frequently these are not news items but nothing more than green propoganda, and so often they get things so wrong , for example they praise electric cars saying how green they are— do they not realise that the electricty generated comes from burning fossil fuels usually unless its the small amount of nuclear or wind powwer that we have in the UK.
Climate change may be happening to a small degree, but we need to think carefully before comitting economic suicide for no real gains. Bjorn Lomborg writes convincely on these points— you wont see him featured on SKY or the BBC