August 21, 2009
Here is a deliciously watchable video of Gerd Leipold, the leader of Greenpeace, squirming like a stuck pig under cross-examination by the BBC’s Stephen Sackur when accused of putting out scaremongering misinformation. (Hat Tips: Not Evil Just Wrong and Watts Up With That)
In a July 15 press release entitled “Urgent Action Needed As Arctic Ice Melts”, Greenpeace shrieked that there will be an ice-free arctic by 2030 thanks to global warming. Interviewing Leipold on the BBC’s Hardtalk programme, Sackur pooh-poohs this risible claim by pointing out that the Greenland ice sheet is a mass of 1.6 million square kilometres with a depth in the middle of 3 kilometres; and that it had survived much warmer periods than the present. He accuses Leipold of “misleading information” and using “exaggeration and alarmism”.
After initially trying to brazen it out, Leipold is forced to surrender when Sackur tells him he’s just come back from the Greenland ice shelf so he knows whereof he speaks.
“I don’t think it will be melting by 2030,” Leipold reluctantly concedes. “That may have been a mistake.”
But it’s OK for Greenpeace to make these, ahem, “mistakes” Leipold suggests because “We as a pressure group have to emotionalise issues and we’re not ashamed of emotionalising issues.” Phew. So, absolutely no need to apologise then, for fomenting the kind of nonsense which nudges political leaders into making costly, wrongheaded decisions, which damage the global economy, which hurt consumers, and which divert scarce resources from areas where they are most needed.
Later in the interview, Leipold recovers his poise sufficiently to demand that US and the rest of the world – as I’d probably put it if I were adopting the techniques of a Greenpeace press release writer – bomb their economies back to the dark ages, return their populations to mud huts and restore the barter system.
“We will definitely have to move to a different concept of growth … The lifestyle of the rich in the world is not a sustainable model,” Leipold said. “If you take the lifestyle, its cost on the environment, and you multiply it with the billions of people and an increasing world population, you come up with numbers which are truly scary.”
I really can’t decide which is more enjoyable here. The humiliation of Greenpeace’s worrying lack of scruples when promoting the “Anthropogenic Global Warming” myth. Or the sterling performance – and by a man in the pay of the BBC, for heaven’s sake – of Stephen Sackur in exposing it.
I do definitely know one thing though. Stephen Sackur is most definitely this blog’s official Hero Of The Week.
Related posts:
- Free the Greenpeace 30! (And spare us any more whingeing from Damon Albarn, Jude Law and that bloke out of the Clash)
- Greenpeace and the IPCC: time, surely, for a Climate Masada?
- Greenpeace goes postal
- Climategate: Greenpeace hoist by its own petard