Resisting The Consensus: A Climate Change Thread

Cal wrote:So the IPCC are wrong when it suits the pro-CAGW brigade? .

andretmzt wrote:strawberry float you, you ignorant dogmatic shitbag, I was talking to Alvin which answers your question.

Oliver Stone - that darling of the liberal left glitterati - once again displays his embarrassing grip of 'climate science' (and committed CAGW propagandists at The Huffington Post are there, naturally enough, to lend him a hand)...

"I was a little disappointed at the third debate when neither of them talked about climate control and the nature of the situation on Earth. I think there's kind of a weird statement coming right after ... this is a punishment ... Mother Nature cannot be ignored. That's all I thought about."

The poverty of environmentalism



In a manifesto too ridiculous to spoof, Mark Boyle argues that we should all live without money to help save the planet. No thanks.

by Rob Lyons

A few years ago, spiked had a spoof ethical columnist called Ethan Greenhart. However, the trouble with writing the column (and the accompanying book) was that greens are just so hard to satirise. Humour by exaggeration is nearly impossible because no matter what misanthropic and irrational idea one could think of that would be just one notch too far, just too bizarre and anti-human, along would come some environmentalist wingnut who sincerely wanted to go further. Mark Boyle is one such wingnut.

Money, argues Boyle, reduces social interactions to the exchange of wealth. This is not a concern about the fact that those who lack money are deprived of goods and services. Everyone can recognise that poverty is a problem. No, Boyle thinks that money itself destroys communities because what should be freely given is now the subject of interpersonal bean-counting. Boyle thinks we should have a ‘gift economy’, because giving something freely, while trusting that some reciprocation will come at some point, is a better way to live than putting a price on every interaction.

Boyle is entitled to live as he sees fit. Personally, I find his lifestyle choice bizarre and illogical, based on living parasitically on a society that can afford to treat caravans, oil cans and so on as waste. Much more concerning is the way that ideas and stories like his get taken up as inspiring examples of how we should all make do with less. In the face of humanity’s greed, it is argued, we should all be like the Moneyless Man and forego modern conveniences. More gallingly, this is an idea usually put forward by people who are among the wealthiest few per cent of the planet’s population and know nothing but comfort.

In an economy that is failing to move forward materially, dismissing economic growth and material wealth is becoming ever more fashionable among the movers and shakers of modern society. We should aim, we are told, for a ‘steady state’ economy where we minimise our ‘ecological footprint’. Figures like Mark Boyle are useful idiots that allow the elite to dress up this inability of society to provide for the rest of us in the fluffy clothes of environmentalism and spiritual enlightenment. In truth, these moneyless ideas are bankrupt.

Revealed: who decides the BBC’s climate change policy

Just when you thought the BBC had no more scandals, Guido Fawkes has revealed what the Beeb tried very hard to cover up: the 28 mysterious individuals who have been informing its climate change reporting policy. As a state-funded broadcaster, the BBC has a duty to provide balance. It rejected this on its environmental coverage after taking advice from people in a now-infamous 2006 seminar from people whose identity the BBC was keen to keep secret.

I wrote on Sunday how it had refused FoI requests to reveal those names. But Maurizio Morabito has revealed a list which the BBC cannot describe as a bunch of dispassionate scientists: it’s a veritable who’s who of the green lobby:

Robert May, Oxford University and Imperial College London
Mike Hulme, Director, Tyndall Centre, UEA
Blake Lee-Harwood, Head of Campaigns, Greenpeace
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen
Michael Bravo, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Andrew Dlugolecki, Insurance industry consultant
Trevor Evans, US Embassy
Colin Challen MP, Chair, All Party Group on Climate Change
Anuradha Vittachi, Director, Oneworld.net
Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation
Claire Foster, Church of England
Saleemul Huq, IIED
Poshendra
Satyal Pravat, Open University
Li Moxuan, Climate campaigner, Greenpeace China
Tadesse Dadi, Tearfund Ethiopia
Iain Wright, CO2 Project Manager, BP International
Ashok Sinha, Stop Climate Chaos
Andy Atkins, Advocacy Director, Tearfund
Matthew Farrow, CBI
Rafael Hidalgo, TV/multimedia producer
Cheryl Campbell, Executive Director, Television for the Environment
Kevin McCullough, Director, Npower Renewables
Richard D North, Institute of Economic Affairs
Steve Widdicombe, Plymouth Marine Labs
Joe Smith, The Open University
Mark Galloway, Director, IBT
Anita Neville, E3G
Eleni Andreadis, Harvard University
Jos Wheatley, Global Environment Assets Team, DFID
Tessa Tennant, Chair, AsRia

Handpicking this selected group to decide an important policy is certainly not the best way to provide balanced reporting. Had the BBC decided any other major editorial matter on the advice of special interest groups, there would have been outrage because it is the very opposite of what public sector broadcasting ought to be about.

So now we know the names, the remaining question is: why did the BBC feel it was so important to cover the identities up? Their official explanation — protecting journalistic sources — simply does not stand up.

Cal wrote: As a state-funded broadcaster, the BBC has a duty to provide balance.

Skarjo wrote:Balance is suggesting that young Earth Creationism deserves the same coverage as The Big Bang Theory and Evolution. Fairness to the evidence means that rival theories without the data to back them up do not get airtime.

Cal wrote:

Skarjo wrote:Balance is suggesting that young Earth Creationism deserves the same coverage as The Big Bang Theory and Evolution. Fairness to the evidence means that rival theories without the data to back them up do not get airtime.

I'm guessing that's what the BBC decides is 'due impartiality' (their term, not mine). Isn't it great when you can decide just how impartial you're going to be on any given subject?

Cal wrote:

Skarjo wrote:Balance is suggesting that young Earth Creationism deserves the same coverage as The Big Bang Theory and Evolution. Fairness to the evidence means that rival theories without the data to back them up do not get airtime.

I'm guessing that's what the BBC decides is 'due impartiality' (their term, not mine). Isn't it great when you can decide just how impartial you're going to be on any given subject?

Skarjo wrote:Do you think they are failing in their duty to approach all theories with due impartiality if they don't give these ideas a platform?

Cal wrote:As far as I'm concerned, the BBC can air as much pro-creationism and pro-MMR vaccination propaganda as it wants, as long as it makes sure to broadcast an equal amount of pro-evolution, anti-MMR content.