Met Office Lies: December Was Not the ‘Wettest Month Evah’

The Associated Press

The UK Met Office has issued a statement claiming that December 2015 was the wettest month in the UK “since records* began.”

This is at best dishonest and at worst a blatant lie. Its only excuse is that cunning little asterisk, which leads you to the weasel get-out clause “*Data from the Met Office’s UK digitised records dating back to 1910.”

So not “since records began” then. But, rather, “since the records that suit our political purpose began.” Because, of course, as Paul Homewood notes the Met Office has records going much further back than 1910 – to 1776, in fact – which totally demolish this claim.

We know, for example, that the wettest December in England and Wales was in 1876. And that the wettest calendar month was in October 1903.

But of course it suits the Met Office’s purposes to pretend otherwise because it enables on-message environment correspondents like the BBC’s Warmist-In-Chief Roger Harrabin to continue the spurious narrative that there is a link between “extreme weather events” and “climate change.”

Storms propelled by the jet stream were mainly to blame, it says, with contributions from the El Nino weather phenomenon and man-made climate change.

That “and man-made climate change” appears to be a flourish of Harrabin’s. I can’t find any mention of this alleged fact in the Met Office’s original press release. If the BBC had any integrity it would have sacked this activist long ago. Harrabin is entitled to his religious beliefs but it is not for the BBC to indulge his flagrant bias at licence-fee payers’ expense.

The Met Office too is in clear breach of public standards codes here.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

I Totally Take Back Everything I’ve Ever Said about Queen’s Brian May…

Just a quick one: was anyone else as surprised and delighted as I was by Brian May’s performance on BBC Question Time last night?

I’ve been quite rude about him in the past. Yes, that distinctively shimmery, echoey, almost Venusian guitar of his did provide part of the soundtrack to my youth – I seem to remember getting to third base for the first time to the accompaniment of Night At The Opera – but what I’ve never quite forgiven are his politics.

As a countryman and nature lover, for example, I feel every bit as passionately about wildlife as he does. Which is one of the reasons I’m so much in very favour of the badger cull, as I argue in more detail here.

Apart from the Ford Mondeo the badger has no natural predator, so since in the early 1980s legislation made it illegal to kill badgers, their population has rocketed to unsustainable levels. The consequences have been disastrous: TB in both badgers and cattle has soared; hedgehog and ground-nesting bird populations have been devastated; farmers’ livelihoods have been destroyed; vast sums of taxpayers’ money — the figure last year was £100 million — have been squandered; and Britain is now at risk of having an EU ban on all its beef and dairy exports, at a cost to the economy of more than £2 billion a year.

May, on the other hand, has positioned himself at the forefront of the shrill and self-righteous anti-badger cull movement, which unfortunately has attracted the very worst elements of the animal rights movement, and appears to be motivated more by sentiment and cherry-picked data than it does by hard evidence.

But while I haven’t changed my views on badgers, I’ve definitely shifted my stance on May.

Last night, as the panel’s licensed jester – the token celebrity who can ride whatever hobby horses he wishes – he could all too easily have spouted the sub-Russell-Brand drivel we’ve come to expect on Question Time. Instead, he was a model of decency and sweet reasonableness.

This was especially noticeable in his behaviour towards fellow panelist Nigel Farage.

It really ought to have been a very tough evening for Farage. And it certainly began that way. Every question he had from the audience was hostile, starting of course with one about him being “snarling, thin-skinned, aggressive”. Even if you’re not a fan – which I still am – I think it would be hard to deny how well Farage acquitted himself – never showing signs of umbrage taken, cheerfully getting his political points in a way that, ever so slowly, began to win the audience round and earn him some actual claps.

None of this would have been possible, though, without the unlikely support he got from his fellow panelists. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt – most definitely not rhyming slang, on last night’s showing – led the way with some generous remarks. But what really clinched it was Brian May, who absolutely refused to pick on an easy target and instead took the opportunity to deplore the nastiness of politics in general and, by implication, the treatment of Farage in particular.

This, in turn, gave the audience the permission they needed to stop poking the chained up bear with their sticks.

If you haven’t watched it, you should. Question Time at its best. Almost restores your faith in human decency.

Almost.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

How the Blair Government Paid for the Subversion of Our State Broadcaster

BBC: Paid bias

BBC newsroom (Photo: BBC)

So now we know yet another reason why the BBC is so biased in its reporting on climate change: because in 2006 the Labour government effectively paid it to be so. It was a £67,000 grant from the Department for International Development (DFID) which paid for the notorious, secret high-level seminar at which the BBC was persuaded to abandon all pretence at neutrality on the global warming issue. I expect the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin just can’t wait to get his teeth into this major scandal.

Oh no, wait, I forgot: Harrabin was the seminar’s organiser. (Don’t worry, Rog. I promise not to remind anyone. We Oxbridge English Literature graduates must stick together, eh?)

Anyway, I notice one or two feathers have been ruffled by the Mail On Sunday’s suggestion that many of these revelations are new. Some of us were on to this stuff at least as far back as November 2012 (see eg this Spectator article and this Telegraph blogpost), while, of course, the real credit ought to go to the following:

Maurizio Morabito – who (despite heroic attempts by the BBC to keep it secret) managed to unearth the list of attendees at the seminar, many of them environmental activists.

Roger Tallbloke.

Andrew Orlowski. (Sorry for forgetting to include you earlier, mate. My bad. You were a star team member too and there’s really no excuse given that I used this excellent report you wrote at the time in one of my blogs….)

Christopher Booker, whose report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation – The BBC And Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal – put the scandal in its proper context.

Bishop Hill – who has provided the most thorough account of the affair in his pamphlet the Propaganda Bureau.

and, above all, to Tony Newbery, the heroic North Wales pensioner, whose indefatigable pursuit of the story and protracted struggle with the Information Tribunal brought all this stuff into the open.

I call that a brilliant team effort by 28Gate United and I for one am absolutely delighted by the contribution of our latest signing, top Mail On Sunday striker David Rose. This, after all, is a story which has been quite shamefully ignored by much of our mainstream media. Perhaps this will now change and, if we’re lucky, we might even see one or two heads rolling.

13 thoughts on “Jeremy Clarkson’s critics should be taken out and shot”

Paultracey says:2nd December 2011 at 11:48 amA beacon of sanity in a sea of stupidity.

Stuie Scott says:2nd December 2011 at 1:09 pmJust seen your interview on BBC. Well said! Perfectly put. Hit the nail right on the head. Will subsribe now! :o)

Russell says:2nd December 2011 at 2:17 pmThis is brilliant, I’ve been looking for a spoof blog taking the mick out of extreme right-wing nuts for so long, I’ve finally found it. Whoever the actor behind James Delingpole is, hats off to you

JimmyGiro says:2nd December 2011 at 5:50 pmGood post James.

Remeber the days when ‘Telly’ people, all had personalities?

Spanner says:2nd December 2011 at 6:23 pmI’m only sorry that 21000 people have now taken it upon themselves to complain to the BBC about Clarkson’s comments. Excellent articles James, thank you for having the courage to set out the mainstream view – most of us took Clarkson’s comments in the manner intended – humour, with a grain of intent!

Anonymous says:4th December 2011 at 8:38 amEverytime a leftie makes a comment likes this his/her allies hyperventilate about the lack of sense of humour among the critics (and also the right in general). Turn the argument against them.

Seanmcgowan9 says:4th December 2011 at 5:16 pmI am a union rep, and every time we upset the ignorant of society, like you, by taking legal industrial action, it warms my heart.
If you have ever done a day`s work, instead of living off your mother and father, you would understand the depth of feeling towards those that expect the working class to pay for the mistakes of your ilk.
I am also from Doncaster, birthplace of Jeremy, Up His Own Arse, Clarkson. I expect he will not be revisiting Doncaster in a while, nor would he be welcome to.
Comments like his are not said in jest by people like him. There is many a true word spoken under the guise of humour. He meant every word, and he should be sacked and jailed for it.
Far right cretins, like you and your ilk, have no understanding of the real world that the rest of us live in. You are so out of touch with reality that you may as well be living on a different planet.
I would love to meet the likes of you and Clarkson around a quiet, dark corner one time.
You are the scum of society, and deserve to be looked upon as such!

Nige Cook says:4th December 2011 at 8:13 pmDid your union stop Gordon Brown creating Britain’s financial debt, deregulating the banks, selling the gold at rock bottom, and everything else?
The thing about the pension pots is that medicine is making the average age of the population increase, so a small increase in contributions are needed from the public sector, unless you the taxpayer to effectively pay extra the public pensions, which are generous already.

By the way, the threats and intimidation from union stewards is all hot air; the only thing private sector unions do in the long-term is bankrupt your employers by pushing up your own wage packets and making the company fall foul of cheap foreign competition. If you want to stop cheap imports, you need to get behind Delingpoles anti-EUSSR campaign, and vote UKIP, not Labour. All these disasters for everybody are the fault of socialist strike and dissent, the same stuff that caused the USSR to go under.

If you want to meet these people “around a dark corner”, you’re in a pipe dream. Look what happened to Arthur Scargill, who has to be protected by an office like Fort Knox, only accessible by an underground car park with full time security. You end up making the workers unemployed by driving industry to China where wages are lower and unions are prohibited. Also John Prescott, with his working class credentials, two Jags, and a long so-called “eating disorder” consisting of going to top restaurants repeatedly each day to gorge, empty and re-gorge, in the Roman banquet manner.

Yeah, I’ve heard all this hard man union talk all my life, but you guys need to cut down on the beer bellies and try running instead of darts before you’re anything like a challenge to anyone.
1. Gordonrear says:5th December 2011 at 10:23 amNige, it was that neo-conservative climate denialist Lawson that was instrumental in deregulating the banks. He was also instrumental in deregulating the energy markets that provided us British consumers with above inflation price rises. Thanks Lawson!
Anonymous says:5th December 2011 at 2:41 pmUnion members should be free to go on strike, but bosses should be free to fire workers at whim.
The garbage strike in Southampton is dragging on because the council can’t fire the b*stards, even though hundreds of unemployed people have volunteered to take their place.

And people wonder why Britain is going down the toilet.
Paulgabbo says:15th December 2011 at 12:16 pmI am working class and proud of the fact. I also agree with the comments made by Jeremy Clarkson. Its people like you who think the world owes them a living that are the problem. I would love to meet you seanmcgowan9 around a quiet dark corner one time.
Richard Churchill says:11th January 2012 at 11:35 pmYou just made it obvious why your kind of nasty out look on life is so dangerous. Having no sense of humour is just plain psciatrically scary. all out brothers !

Comments are closed.

Lots of people have been asking me about tonight’s BBC Four documentary, Meet the Sceptics.

Murray: I thought I could trust him….

Lots of people have been asking me about tonight’s BBC Four documentary Meet The Sceptics. Is it going to be fair and balanced? Or another hatchet job?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. (*laughs darkly*)

Let me tell you the story so far:

Nine months ago, when I was at the Heartland conference in Chicago, I was approached by a louche, affable, dark-haired, public school charmer called Rupert Murray. With his friend Callum he was making a documentary about climate sceptics for the BBC and wondered if I’d like to take part.

“The BBC? Not bloody likely. You’ve come to stitch us up, haven’t you?” I said.

“Not at all,” said Murray. “Look, there’s something you need to realise. I’m an independent filmmaker, I have no big budget for this, so I’m dependent on my work being original and interesting. The very last thing the BBC wants to commission is another hatchet job on sceptics. How boring and predictable would that be?”

Very true, I thought. It really is about time the BBC examined the issue from the other side. They are a public service broadcaster, after all, not a green investment fund. (Ho ho).

Over the next few months I came to like and trust Murray. He was there filming Lord Lawson, Lord Monckton, Lord Leach and me when we debated at the Oxford Union. And he was there to capture our joy and surprise when we won – and to hang out drinking with us, afterwards, like he was our mate. By this stage, we’d all come to accept that Murray was genuinely interested in presenting our case sympathetically. In fact, I must admit, I was really looking forward to seeing the finished product. “God this is going to be fantastic!” I thought. “At long bloody last, the BBC is going to do the right thing – and at feature length too.”

The only reason I had cause to suspect Murray’s real motives was that he had made a campaigning eco documentary called The End Of The Line and that having spent a lot of time with Charles Clover he might well be biased towards the warmist cause. But I put this worry aside because, as I told him, I too am deeply concerned by rampant overfishing. And this was one of the reasons I eventually agreed to be interviewed by him. I wanted to explain to Murray that those of us on the sceptical side of the argument care as passionately about the environment as warmists do. That’s why, for example, we get so very very upset at the destruction of the landscape through biofuels and wind farms. Because we love nature and can’t bear to see it ruined for the sake of what is essentially a political cause not an environmental one.

Murray and his colleague Callum came round to my house (just like a certain Sir Paul Nurse) and I gave a long, interview about why it is that I’m a sceptic, what Climategate meant for the integrity of “climate science”, why there is now room for honest doubt, and what it is that the Green movement actually believes (as evidenced by the writings of The Club of Rome, Teddy Goldsmith, Maurice Strong, John Holdren et al). I was confident and pleased because, it seems to me at any rate, that the Climate Sceptics’ case is so watertight that once any reasonable person has been exposed to it he will be converted.

Murray asked me if he could film me some more, maybe with my children having a barbecue or driving a 4 x 4 in the country. But I was too busy.

Luckily.

Because, yes, you guessed it, Murray’s documentary is another hatchet job. This time the man designated for the chop is Lord Monckton. Except, knowing Monckton as I do, I don’t think he’s going to let this one lie. Sure he’ll probably be made to look a fool, but then as Richard North explains in this superb essay, this means nothing.

This is the practice of modern documentary makers, who can gather huge amounts of material and then edit and assemble the material in a way that they can present a message, the message the producer wishes to convey. This is irrespective of what is actually said, and what interviewees actually intended.

The process, North explains, works like this:

You write the script first, setting out what you want to say. Then you go out and find the talking heads that will say the words you need to fit the script. You (in this case I) interview them, collect up the words on the tape and then go back to the edit suite and pull out the words that fit.

Murray, it seems likely, had made up his mind what his angle was long, long before he inveigled his way into the sceptics’ circle and passed himself off as a decent fellow just trying to find out the truth. I’ll say one thing for him: he’s very plausible. I only twigged last week, when I rang him up to find out what his documentary would look like and how much I was in it.

“We’ve decided to concentrate on Monckton I’m afraid,” he said.

“Oh never mind,” I said. “I quite understand. Christopher is way more colourful and exciting than I am.”

We then had a chat about peer-to-peer review, in the course of which Murray quoted approvingly one “Dr Trenberth.” “Well Dr Trenberth says….” he began, in a way which suggested regular contact and great admiration.

Anyway, at least I’m not in it, I don’t think. When Callum asked me to sign the release form for my interview, I said that I would quite like to see the programme beforehand. Funny, I haven’t heard from them since.

Mark says:3rd February 2011 at 11:51 amI read your posts on climate change, please don’t offer an uneducated opinion when you know nothing about science.

Cheers

Sebaneau says:4th February 2011 at 11:53 amPlease keep telling the truth against those organized liars.

Mr Monzonite says:4th February 2011 at 5:32 pmI read your posts on climate change, please keep offering your extremely valid opinion on how we are being mis-led by activist scientists.

Cheers

Fearless Frank says:5th February 2011 at 4:37 amHey James, they never got in touch because they want informed sceptics, not mickey mouse denialists. Why don’t you make it easy on yourself and read a scientific paper on the subject before commenting, then perhaps you won’t be the laughing stock of the world.

Nige Cook says:5th February 2011 at 12:01 pmFearless Frank: James was featured several times in BBC4 “Meet the Sceptics”, which was edited it seems to exclude the real facts. Lord Monckton was presented as a straw man sceptic to knock down, but it was classic dump BBC TV, with physics being ignored in favour of the “credentials” of the skeptics. Joule was a brewer, not a PhD. Faraday was a bookbinder, then a test-tube washer for Davy, and never had a PhD. Newton (BA 1665 and MA 1668) never got a PhD. James Clerk Maxwell (BSc 1854) never received a PhD. Charles Darwin had no PhD. Oliver Heaviside, who predicted the ionosphere and transformed Maxwell’s equations from long-hand differential equations into compressed vector calculus, had only school education.

In fact, to get a PhD you need to work on a supervised groupthink project, which probably ensures that most people with PhD’s have originality sucked straight out of them (look up Orwell’s definition of “crimestop” in 1984). Einstein’s PhD is a case in point.

Einstein in October 1895 failed his entrance exam to the Swiss Polytechnic (ETH), only passing the exam and entering a year later after further study. His first PhD thesis was rejected in 1901 and he was only awarded a PhD for estimating Avogardo’s number theoretically in 1905.Smolin’s criterion of a scientist is very convenient but one problem is, as in Einstein’s case, that the important innovations may occur prior to someone taking a PhD. The PhD system has also changed since Einstein’s time: he was free to decide what to do his thesis on and merely had to send a cheque for 230 Swiss francs with his thesis. Another problem is obviously that the percentage of the scientifically literate world’s population which has a PhD is small, so you are thus blacklisting as crackpots billions of people from being taken seriously if they should come up with a useful scientific idea while outside ivory towers.

Fearless Frank says:6th February 2011 at 7:31 amWhat real facts can James present? He doesn’t even read scientific papers. I doubt he has even read the climategate emails in context preferring to be spoonfed by the likes of hate jockey Glenn Beck.

Whereas Monckton is just a PR guru hired by the oil industry to distort scientific papers. Notable example is he can’t even get the gender of professor Pinker correct let alone present her work correctly. Here’s her response to Monckton’s testimony to Congress.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/upload/2010/09/testimony_responseRachelPinker_05_18_2010.pdf

Nige Cook says:6th February 2011 at 9:03 amFearless Frank, she just ignores the facts, using the sunspot myth as a “straw man” to attack. I don’t understand why anyone claims that the sun’s radiation output is having a significant effect on climate. It isn’t. We know everything we need to know, and she ignores all the important evidence, presumably for reasons of political correctness, just like Dr Phil Jones and Sir Paul Nurse in the Horizon documentary.

An increase in temperature, for example, will generally cause an increase in the ratio of animal to plant biomass (since animals can adapt to temperature more easily by changing their location, than rainforests can, so the animals can migrate while the rainforests die off) which increases the level of CO2 in the atmosphere since animals emit CO2 while plants bind it up. Hence the assumption that CO2 is driving the temperature change in history is generally a mistake. The Quaternary ice age began a million years ago, during which there were half a dozen or so glacial periods during which the English Channel and most of the North Sea dried up as a result of an expansion of polar ice caps, and northern continents were covered by up to 1 km thick ice sheets. During some interglacial periods, the climate was warmer than it is today.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the last 600 million years have been studied with the GEOCARB model, which combines data on CO2 emissions from volcanic activity, weathering of calcium carbonate rocks, burial of carbon in calcium carbonate rock and in fossil fuels, plant uptake of CO2 and solar radiation flux.

The original version of GEOCARB suggested that the atmospheric CO2 abundance was over 15 times higher 460 million years ago than it is now, and at that time the mean global temperature was 7 C higher than now (22 C compared to an assumed global mean temperature now of 15 C). Some 210 million years ago, the CO2 level is estimated to have been 5 times the current level, and the mean global temperature was estimated to have been 5 C warmer than now (20 C compared to 15 C assumed as today’s global mean temperature). Even just 100 million years ago, there were no continuous ice caps at the poles (just winter snow): all the ice melted in the summer at the poles, and deciduous rain forests existed within 1,000 km of the poles.

One example of a climatic change caused by normal geological processes is the formation of the Tibetian plateau which effectively cooled the whole planet by strengthening the monsoon system in southern Asia and forming the Himalayas. Beginning about 50 million years ago (and continuing to the present day), the drift of the continental plates has caused the continents of India and Eurasia to collide, pushing up oceanic crust from the bottom of the sea to form the Himalayan mountain chain and the Tibetian plateau. Similarly, the Alps are the result of a collision beginning 120 million years ago between Africa and Eurasia, and also had an effect on global climate.

The temperature changes caused by such natural phenomena can cause CO2 levels to vary by killing off CO2-absorbing rainforests which can’t move, while CO2-emitting animals can migrate to compensate for the climatic change. Hence, there can be a true correlation between temperature and CO2 levels, even where there is no mechanism for CO2 levels to affect temperature: the opposite mechanism has occurred, in that a changing climatic temperature has resulted in a variation of CO2 levels!

Yet another example of a mechanism for natural climatic change is the Earth’s orbit which undergoes three cycles named after Milutin Milankovich, the Serbian astronomer who in 1941 worked out how the planets perturb one another’s orbits:

(1) the Earth’s tilt (which creates the opposite seasons in each hemisphere, and is currently 23.4 degrees and decreasing, so summers are becoming cooler and winters are becoming warmer) varies from 22.4 to 24.2 degrees over a 41,000 year cycle,

(2) the precession of the equinoxes, a cycle lasting 22,000 years (in 11,000 years time, the timing of the winter and summer seasons will have exactly reversed in each hemisphere), and

(3) the shape of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, i.e. the eccentricity, changes from a circle to a strong ellipse, over a combination of a very weak 400,000 year cycle and a stronger 100,000 year cycle that combine into an effective cycle lasting around 110,000 years.

A maximum elliptical eccentricity of 0.05 occurred 200,000 years ago, when both the 400,000 and 100,000 year cycles were at a maximum. Some 100,000 years ago, the 400,000 year cycle was no longer at maximum, but the 100,000 year cycle was at maximum, and the resulting eccentricity was 0.04. The eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit varies from 0.0034-0.058 as a result of gravitational forces between the planets, and it is currently only 0.0167 (we are 147 million km from the sun on at the perihelion on 3 January, and are 152 million km from the sun on Independence Day, the aphelion). Greater eccentricity tends to wipe out the normal seasons (which are due to the earth’s tilt, and which are opposite in opposite hemispheres), so that the entire earth (both hemispheres) will begin to freeze in winter and thaw in summer, causing very severe extremes of temperatures during the year simultaneously over most of the planet and thus preventing effective migration, by confining many species to areas much closer to the equator than they can venture seasonally today.

Again, the effect of the temperature variations caused naturally by the Milankovich cycles will be to vary CO2 levels: as eccentricity increases in the future, the Earth will cease orbiting in a nearly circular orbit and will orbit the sun more elliptically. This will cause the entire Earth to cool simultaneously to a significant extent when far from the sun each year (which doesn’t happen at present: we are nearest to the sun on 3 January and furthest from it on 4 July, but that distance effect is completely overwhelmed by the much larger effect of the 23.4 degree tilt of the earth’s spin to the plane of the its orbit around the sun, which seasonally varies the mean thickness of the atmosphere that sunlight must penetrate in each hemisphere). This change will affect vegetation, so that CO2 levels will vary. Over the past 18,000 years, the warming of the Earth and the expansion of the ocean water in consequence has increased sea levels by 120 metres, innundating low-lying vegetation and destroying it, while animals have migrated. This is a regular effect: over the past 400,000 years, there have been 4 peaks in sea level all within plus or minus about 10 metres of the current level, and four minimum sea levels of over 100 metres below the current level.

A politician or pseudo-scientist could plot the varying temperature and the varying CO2 level, and falsely do a correlation significance test before falsely claiming that statistical significance proves that CO2 levels drive temperature, when in fact the temperature variation can drive the change in CO2 levels! This is the danger of statistical pseudo-science: it is no substitute for understanding the physical mechanism. The fact that data manipulation is required by IPCC researchers to fake evidence for extreme global warming by suppressing the natural background temperature variation data, shows that the subject has fallen prey to politicians’s (tax-payer filled) wallets, and has lost rigorous, honest objectivity, sinking into the depths of mere propaganda.

Increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide cause a tiny temperature rise, increasing evaporation so there is more cloud cover, which in turn reflects more solar radiation back into space, nearly offsetting the “greenhouse” effect of the carbon dioxide so that global warming’s “extreme evidence” has to be manufactured by fudging the data. In short, the world is not like a greenhouse because of the evaporation of water which causes additional cloud cover which cools the earth by reflecting sunlight back into space. The evaporation of water was totally ignored altogether in the early IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) models that supported hyped disaster predictions from the “greenhouse” effect. Furthermore, they fiddled the historical data to make recent changes seem unprecedented using the false “hockey stick” diagram.

(1) CO2 is not a pollutant but is the vital source of carbon for all plant growth on land and in the sea on this planet, and rising levels of CO2 therefore promote life rather than destroying it – it is an essential gas for the life on Earth. It doesn’t lead to rapid temperature rises on any planet with large quantities of water, since any initial slight temperature rise causes more water to evaporate forming clouds, thus increasing cloud cover and protecting the planet against further temperature rises from the increasing level of atmospheric CO2. As Dr Lubos Motl points out, CO2 only becomes unpleasant for humans at concentrations of around 10,000 ppm while the current one is 388 ppm and with the depletion of fossil fuel reserves it cannot ever exceed 1,000 ppm. CO2 has a net positive impact on life on Earth.

(2) fossil fuels are not inexhaustible and are being depleted anyway, and as oil and coal supplies dwindle the remaining reserves are more expensive to tap and so the price rises, and people are pushed naturally away from using such fuels towards safe nuclear energy (which doesn’t produce collateral CO2 emissions if nuclear power is used to generate electricity to power the trains that deliver the fuel, etc.) and renewable biofuels (plants which lock up the same amount of CO2 while growing that they release on subsequent burning, so there is no net increase in global CO2), so global warming is not a long term doomsday problem anyway unless fossil fuels can be shown to be inexhaustible,

(3) the immense expenditure on trying to reduce CO2 emissions from existing sources and building wind power stations doesn’t cause a significant reduction in global carbon dioxide. For example, if the total fossil fuel reserve (oil, coal, etc.) is X tons, then supplementing it with wind power will simply mean that the carbon in the X tons of fuel is given out over a longer period of time, say 120 years instead of 100 years. Once all of the fossil fuels have been used up, all of the CO2 will be released and the “countermeasures” which consist of reducing the rate at which the CO2 is released will not affect the ultimate level of CO2 in the atmosphere. So it is a confidence trick to waste taxpayers money under false pretenses.

As I wrote in a comment on another post at this blog, the global atmosphere is not like a greenhouse, unless you have clouds in your greenhouse. Water evaporation forms warm moist air that rises to form clouds, which reduces the heating of biosphere air masses by direct shadowing. Thus, water evaporation has a negative feedback on increased CO2, reducing or eliminating future global warming, instead of amplifying it with the positive feedback assumed by IPCC. They ignore the proper buoyancy of warm moist air.

The whole approach of Sir Paul Nurse and others, in assuming that “so many experts surely can’t all be wrong” is just like the fear-mongered groupthink of the 1930s, when a majority of “experts” supported appeasement of Hitler, allowing the Nazis to rearm, invade, and plunder enough to start WWII. They weren’t all stupid. What actually happens in groupthink is very simple. People think “if we stop Hitler now with a limited preventative war, we’ll go down in history as horrible warmongers, so we’d be safe and side with the pacifists”. It’s the same with the exaggeration of CO2 risks.

Years ago, I started a wiki page about the New Scientist’s editor Jeremy Webb, a former BBC employee who led the liars on global warming, and also published non-ending anti-nuclear propaganda from Rob Edwards, ignoring the scientific facts of DNA repair enzymes on radiation damage, particularly at low dose rates, in favour of pseudoscientific propaganda. But it was deleted by wikipedia groupthink. There is no mechanism to answer him back, since editors to New Scientist aren’t published, and he is arrogant in meetings:

“Jeremy Webb, editor of the New Scientist, started by emphasising that human beings have ‘as much destructive potential’ as that which brought about former mass extinctions … First, global warming … Webb asked – after the presentations – whether there was anybody who still was not worried about the future. …

“When I pointed out that none of the speakers had presented any of the scientific evidence that challenged their doomsday scenarios, Webb just threw back at me, ‘But why take the risk?’ … You could equally say ‘… Why take the risk of not allowing optimum economic development?’”

-Dr Helene Guldberg, “Ecoevangelism”, Spiked Science, 26 April 2001.

Velocity says:8th February 2011 at 7:34 amFearless Frank

There’s a chart from the Vostok ice-core data that even a retarded thinker like yourself can follow (and most 7 year olds). It shows Earths temperature rising and 800 years later CO2 follows. Namely temperature change causes CO2 to rise. Cause and effect.

Effect (CO2 rise) has never caused temperature rise. The Vostok data also shows peak CO2 levels do not cause temperature to either rise or remain steady. Temperature falls right through peak CO2 levels.

Strangely the AGW ‘experts’ all ignore this factual and actual data that blows a hole right through their theory. One wonders why they ignore this while being funded by Govts worldwide to ‘find’ research contrary to known actual science. Like their jobs depended on it eh?

Velocity says:8th February 2011 at 8:20 amJames

Rupert Muppet, sorry Murray, still remains a personable likeable chappy but what he did was his job, as a documentary maker. His documentary was a hatchet job and deserves all the criticism this ‘professional’ incompetence deserves.
This is no different to the crony scientists, paid to play, who are probably (mostly) all very likeable (with the exceptions of Al Gore, Phil Jones, James Hansen, Dr Pachuari et al). Don’t descend into the bent AGW crews personal attacks on what is a professional topic under debate. Ignore any personal hurt or breach of trust, it has nothing to with it.
The documentary was professionally inept, scientifically incompetent and time will prove it to be another nail in the coffin of this corrupt poliitcal-media cabal. That’s enough isn’t it?

Fearless Frank says:8th February 2011 at 2:35 pmNige? Monckton incorrectly presents Pinker’s arguments and Pinker’s presenting strawman arguments??? Huh? Your argument makes no sense!! Then why did Monckton use Pinker’s work in the first place?? If Monckton had a brain he would have ignored her work and used someone else’s work to prove his point. Instead he made a hash of it to bolster his argument but wasn’t even able to get her gender correct.

Fearless Frank says:8th February 2011 at 2:45 pmOh no, Velocity using the thoroughly misinterpresented 800 year lag argument. If you bothered understanding into the interglacial cycle. When the earth comes out of the interglacial cycle, temps drive CO2. But as the cycle goes on, CO2 begins to drive temps. In total, CO2 drives 90% of the interglacial cycle.

Nige Cook says:8th February 2011 at 3:24 pmFearless Frank, CO2 only drives climate change in NASA and IPCC computer climate fantasies when positive-feedback from H2O water vapour is assumed. In the real world, there is negative feedback from H2O which cancels out the small effect of CO2 rises: the hot moist air rises to form clouds, so less sunlight gets through. Homeostasis! See:

http://nige.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/dr-miskolczi-nasa-resignation-letter-2005.pdf

and

http://nige.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/saturated-greenhouse-effect-fact.pdf

“Since the Earth’s atmosphere is not lacking in greenhouse gases, if the system could have increased its surface temperature it would have done so long before our emissions. It need not have waited for us to add CO2: another greenhouse gas, H2O, was already to hand in practically unlimited reservoirs in the oceans. … The Earth’s atmosphere maintains a constant effective greenhouse-gas content [although the percentage contributions to it from different greenhouse gases can vary greatly] and a constant, maximized, “saturated” greenhouse effect that cannot be increased further by CO2 emissions (or by any other emissions, for that matter). … During the 61-year period, in correspondence with the rise in CO2 concentration, the global average absolute humidity diminished about 1 per cent. This decrease in absolute humidity has exactly countered all of the warming effect that our CO2 emissions have had since 1948. … a hypothetical doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration in the air would cause a 3% decrease in the absolute humidity, keeping the total effective atmospheric greenhouse gas content constant, so that the greenhouse effect would merely continue to fluctuate around its equilibrium value. Therefore, a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause no net “global warming” at all.”

Climate changes do occur, and variations in CO2 in the atmosphere do occur: but CO2 variations don’t affect temperature, only cloud cover. Homeostasis involves an anti-greenhouse effect due to cloud cover that is ignored by natural climate change deniers!

Comments are closed.

A distinguished institution falters

Little known fact: there was an era when the Royal Society represented something more than the official scientific spokesman for Greenpeace

The new president of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse has been crowing to the Guardian’s environment pages about how he bested me in a documentary for the BBC on Climate Change. This isn’t how I remember it.

Nurse came to interview me at my home last summer, ostensibly – so his producer assured me – as a disinterested seeker-after-truth on a mission to discover why the public is losing its faith in scientists. “Not scientists,” I replied. “Just ‘climate scientists.'” But as is clear from the Horizon documentary Nurse had already made up his mind. That’s why about the only section he used out of at least three hours’ worth of footage is the one where he tosses what he clearly imagines is the killer question: Suppose you were ill with cancer would you wish to be treated by “consensus” medicine or something from the quack fringe?

As you’ll see in the programme, this took me rather by surprise. Nurse had come posing as an open-minded investigator eager to hear why Climategate had raised legitimate doubts about the reliability of the “consensus” on global warming. Instead, the man I met was a parti-pris bruiser so delighted with his own authority as a proper Nobel-prizewinning scientist that he knew what the truth was already. And to prove it, here was a brilliant analogy which would rubbish the evil climate deniers’ cause once and for all!

But Nurse’s analogy is shabby, dishonest and patently false. The “consensus” on Climate Change; and the “consensus” on medical care bear no similarity whatsoever.

In the field of medicine, treatments are tested in a semi-open market. Those with more favourable outcomes (the patient gets better) will quickly gain popularity over those with less favourable outcomes (the patient gets worse). Sure there are market distortions (eg the vast marketing budgets and rampant greed of the big drug companies; inefficiency and incompetence in the public healthcare sector), but generally in the field of medicine, the “consensus” on what constitutes good, bad or indeed “quack” treatment is a fair representation of the facts as they are currently known and empirically tested.

The “consensus” on ‘Climate Change’, by contrast, is a figment of Al Gore’s – and, I’m sorry to say, Sir Paul Nurse’s – imagination. It exaggerates the number of scientists who believe in Man Made Global Warming and it grotesquely underestimates the number who have many good reasons for suspecting that there is far, far more to “Climate Change” than anthropogenic CO2.

What’s more such “consensus” as there is is an artificial construct. It has not been subjected to the rigour of an open or even semi-open market. It is the creation, almost entirely, of politically-driven funding from US government, from various UN bodies, from the EU, from left-leaning charitable foundations on a scale unprecedented in the history of science. So far, in real terms, no less than five times the amount of the Manhattan Project has been squandered on research into AGW. For that kind of money you can buy an awful lot of scientists prepared to suspend any belief they might have that global warming is anything other than man-made. (I put this point to Nurse but he wasn’t having it. As a scientist he just “knew” that scientists didn’t behave like that.)

But you can’t say all that in a TV friendly sound bite. And even if I’d managed, it would no doubt have ended up with the rest of the three hours’ of reasonably cogent argument I made to Nurse – on the cutting room floor.

At the end of the programme, Nurse argues that it is vital that the quest for scientific truth should be divorced from politics. I don’t think he’ll find anyone in the ‘sceptic’ community who disagrees with him on that. What’s depressing is that he seems to have reached this conclusion in defiance of almost everything he has said in the previous hour.

In Nurse’s Weltanschauung, NASA’s temperature records must correct because, well just look at all those spiffy satellite charts this nice man from NASA is showing me and he’s a proper scientist so he should know; and Phil Jones is clearly a man more sinned against than sinning, because look here he is all broken and rueful (and he’s a proper scientist, you know, unlike all those deniers) telling me why Climategate was about how a few innocent emails were distorted by horrid deniers.

Meanwhile, according to Nurse and his execrable documentary, climate change “deniers” are on a par with people who don’t believe that AIDs is caused by the HIV virus and people who destroy GM crops (eh??? Since when did we have any truck with those eco-loons?). Is this really the level of intellectual sophistication we might have hoped for from the new president of the world’s most distinguished scientific association?

Or rather, of the world’s ex- most distinguished scientific association. As I’ve reported before, the Warmist bias of the Royal Society has become such a standing joke that last year 43 of its fellows wrote in to complain. Under its two previous presidents, Lord May and Lord Rees, it has tossed aside its traditions of lofty neutrality and eagerly embraced a new role as political activist for the green lobby.

Perhaps there was a time when this made some kind of warped sense. But with no ‘global warming’ since 1998, a succession of bitter winters, scandals cropping up every day about everything from Met Office incompetence to skullduggery in the EU carbon trading business, growing doubts in the scientific community about the validity of climate models, demands in the US for law suits against dodgy client scientists, and increasing public scepticism, it is only a matter of time before the AGW industry collapses and all those people who associated themselves with it suddenly look very foolish.

With his new documentary Nurse has sent out a signal that, bright boy though he thinks he is, he is happy to be taken for one of those fools. If he wants to join the Warmist lemmings on their final dash, that’s his look out. But what a pity for the rest of us that he’ll be taking the credibility of the Royal Society over the cliff with him.

12 thoughts on “Oh no, not another unbiased BBC documentary about ‘Climate Change’…”

R.N. Quayle says:26th January 2011 at 3:15 amNurse was a coward.
He should have taken on the MMR-deniers.

ie. the thousands of mothers of U.S. & UK children,
who developed autism & chronic bowell disease,
within hours/days of being MMRd.

Pure coincidence of course.
Steve Win says:26th January 2011 at 11:40 pmOh Mr Delingpole, how utterly and completely wrong you are.
Sir Paul Nurse made you look EXACTLY as you are. A complete and total ass. Clearly you don’t remember it because most of the time you were so interested in the only subject that interests you. I refer to you of course. Arrogant, self centred but best of all, ill informed which came across very clearly.
Groper says:27th January 2011 at 8:04 amHey Jimbo, no point in sour grapes. I think it’s the fault of BBC Horizon for using a mickey mouse denialist instead of an informed sceptic. Still, Jimbo, at least you provided a great comedy moment for the world to see… keep it up bon3head.
Ratty says:27th January 2011 at 1:22 pmJames, I thought that Nurse was far too easy on you. Perhaps that expression on his face was one of sad resignation, like you’d find when dealing with a child who just can’t grasp a basic idea.
Just because a whole range of people disagree with your point of view, doesn’t make it a conspiracy or a biased presentation. It just means you’re wrong! Maybe you should take stock of the things you write and see if you are really aiding the debate on climate science or just promoting a half-baked and ill-informed view of the world that you’ve formed for yourself without really understanding the bigger picture, or how to disseminate the information you trawl through. I can’t imagine you having the character to admit to your shortcomings or admit where you don’t know enough to make a valid comment. Please do the world a favour and either quietly slip away or brand all your output with the health warning “not qualified to comment”.

If that all sounds very patronising, it’s meant to be.
Keith Gale says:27th January 2011 at 5:57 pmUnfortunately James you’ve fallen into the trap of dignifying one of these intellectually challenged myopics with a response. The Dawkins method is more efficient. Treat them as lunatics and let them rant. I have no doubt that within a few years most of them will have disappeared back into the woodwork denying they ever said anything. Exactly like the eugenics fans. Monbiot seems to be heading that way.
It’s very sad that most people get all their information from the media and never question any of it. I’m including scientists in “most people”. We tend to think of them as brilliant academics who go around discovering wonderful things and indeed some of them are but the other 99% are very dull, unimaginative, quite thick and desperately trying to come up with an original thought. “Science”, our knowledge of the universe, is massive and populated by specialists. Experts in one small field with just a basic knowledge of the rest of it and no hope of ever catching up.
This Nursey chap seems to be a scientist on his mothers side. In fact to call yourself a scientist and deride the opinions of others is a form of fraud.
A debate exists if you look and looking objectively at both sides it becomes painfully obvious that we don’t have a clue what the climate will do. The statistics and numbers thrown around by the IPCC are desperate guesstimates to keep the funds coming and the pollies going. Just like the scientists there are very few of these who are aware of anything outside their own little worlds.
Nige Cook says:27th January 2011 at 10:09 pmHi James,
I’ve made a You Tube video pointing out the deceptions in Sir Paul Nurse’s climate documentary documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Un7u2AZnjw

(It’s also embedded at the top of my latest blog post about the lies on the physics of the effects of nuclear weapons: http://glasstone.blogspot.com/ )

Kind regards,

Nige Cook
Marco says:28th January 2011 at 9:36 pmJames I just saw the bbc horizon documentary. Do you really think that you need to tell a Nobel Laureate where science is going, as if you know more about these things than you? It makes you look like a total and utter muppet.
Nige Cook says:29th January 2011 at 6:02 pmMarco,
I think that the situation is actually the other way around.

If you watch the video carefully, it seems that the Nobel Laureate and Royal Society president, Sir Paul Nurse, was the one who visited James for a chat and asked his opinion.

The whole problem with the video is that he chose to visit critics and persuade them to change their mind by arguing that cancer is analogous to the question of whether humanity can adapt to climate change.

He ignores all of facts, and falsely claims that nobody knows why tree ring data fails to match air temperatures since 1960. Actually, tree ring growth is not directly related to air temperature alone, but depends on rainfall, humidity, smog (absorbing sunlight), cloud cover, etc., etc. You can verify this by looking at trees in the shade (on the northern slopes of hills) and trees in parched areas. The tree ring sizes only correlate to air temperature if all other factors are constant, which they never are (outside the lab).

Why did Sir Paul Nurse interview a journalist to find out about climate change? You must ask yourself that! Answer: it was a hatchet job, with pre-planned silly questions about consensus being science. Nurse goes wrong in defending status quo by showing off Newton’s Principia and Darwin’s Origin of Species in the library scene: these were revolutionary works which emerged not from “groupthink” consensus, but from individuals refuting groupthink consensus!

Evolution and the laws of motion were not the result of “stamp collecting” by a team effort, they were essentially the work of individuals, fighting against authority (Aristotle’s authority in Newton’s case, the Bible in Darwin’s).

All tree ring temperature data is false because it 1. fails to fit the records since 1960, 2. ignores cloud cover and shade variations over the years, 3. ignores dust and chemical smog, 4. ignores variations in rainfall rates, and 5. ignores variations in wind patterns over the years.

Dr Phil Jones can’t seriously believe tree ring data, and nor can Sir Paul Nurse. Similarly, cloud cover blocks reliable surface air temperature global averaging by satellite measurements, while weather station data can be affected by local sources of heat pollution (unrelated to global CO2 effects). If we look at the actual sea rise rate, it is 20 cm over the past century (0.20 cm/year) compared to 120 m over the past 18,000 years (0.67 cm/year average). This is misleading, because the a lot of the 120 m rise occurred over a shorter period of time, at an even faster rate than 0.67 cm/year.

Therefore, the current rate of global warming sea level rise is trivial compared to natural rates. We can adapt to it. The “big lie” of eco-evangelism is that we must try to fight global warming, not adapt to it. Physicist Dr John Baez points out that many simple solutions exist, like nuclear power. Some of the propaganda from New Scientist is neatly exposed by Dr Helene Guldberg (an Open University lecturer) in her 2001 article Eco-evangelism, http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/00000002D081.htm , states:

“Jeremy Webb, editor of the New Scientist, started by emphasising that human beings have ‘as much destructive potential’ as that which brought about former mass extinctions – where up to 90 percent of species were wiped out. Just look at BSE (What? How many bovine species have gone extinct as a result of BSE?), HIV (Again, what does this tell us about the human destructive potential?) and global warming (But, Jeremy, the history of the planet has been one of far greater temperature fluctuations than those predicted for the coming century). …

“When I pointed out that none of the speakers had presented any of the scientific evidence that challenged their doomsday scenarios, Webb just threw back at me, ‘But why take the risk?’ What did he mean: ‘Why take the risk of living?’ You could equally say ‘Why take the risk of not experimenting? Why take the risk of not allowing optimum economic development?’ But had I been able to ask these questions, I suppose I would have been accused of being in bed with Dubya.

“One of the speakers responded to my point, that there is evidence that the air is cleaner today than several decades ago (rather than ‘being turned into a sewer’). Yes, she said, that may be true, but clean air can also be a problem.”
David A says:29th January 2011 at 10:13 pmJames: I tried to post this on your Daily Telegraph blog, but without success:
Here is a short excerpt from the Horizon programme. I would be interested to learn how much editorial control Sir Paul had on the final programme. I can state categorically that I don’t trust the integrity of the BBC on any issue whatsoever and on any subject whatsoever, especially the biased so-called News.

Sir Paul Nurse:
“As a scientist, I find Tony’s [HIV does not CAUSE AIDS] views hard to understand.”

The following is slightly edited. He brilliantly (in my opinion) explains why correlation on its own is not the same as proof of causation and unwittingly (in my opinion) makes the case for the skeptics. Essentially, he is arguing against himself.

Sir Paul Nurse:
“However, there may be a link between how he approaches the evidence for the causes of AIDS, and how some climate skeptics may look at the causes of Global Warming. Problems arise when you are studying complex data and trying to distinguish cause from effect. Understanding what causes what in complex systems like biology that I study, or climate, can be really difficult. Let me illustrate that, here. Imagine that each of these poles [shows three poles] are different events ; events “A” “B” and “C” . . .
Event “A” causes event “B”. Event “A” also causes event “C”. But if you are a scientist [and] you don’t know anything about event “A” and you are simply studying “B” and “C”, then what you will see is that after a certain period of time you will see “B” and always (or nearly always) you will see “C” a certain time afterwards. It would be a natural consequence to think that “B” might CAUSE “C” when that is absolutely not the case. Here is a concrete example ; smoking and lung cancer. Let’s imagine that event “A” here [the cause] is smoking; let’s imagine that event “B” is yellow teeth that occurs after a certain amount of time and let’s imagine that event “C” is lung cancer. You could, perhaps, imagine, as a scientist, that you observe yellow teeth and then you observe lung cancer and maybe [conclude that] yellow teeth causes lung cancer. That’s obviously nonsense but if you didn’t know about smoking, then you could perhaps be led into that erroneous conclusion. So that’s the problem with complexity; that’s the problem with working out what causes what.”

“There’s an overwhelming body of evidence that says WE are warming our planet. But complexity allows for confusion and for alternative theories to develop. The only solution is to look at all the evidence as a whole. I think some extreme skeptics decide what to think first and then cherry-pick the data to support their case. We scientists have to acknowledge we now operate in a world where point-of-view, not peer review holds sway.”

The following is a GROSS simplification of the mechanism of CAGW. Sir Paul did NOT say the following but it follows his general argument about separating cause and correlation:

“Here is a concrete example ; the Sun and global temperature rise. Let’s imagine that event “A” here [the heat engine] is primarily the Sun; let’s imagine that event “B” is the increase in carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere after the consequent heating of the oceans by the increasing heat output from the Sun after a certain amount of time and let’s imagine that event “C” is the global atmospheric temperature rise caused by the Sun. You could, perhaps, imagine, as a scientist, that you observe increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere [increasing carbon dioxide is released from a warming ocean] and then you observe an increase in global temperatures and maybe [conclude that] carbon dioxide directly causes [large] temperature increases rather than the Sun. That’s obviously nonsense, but if you didn’t know that the heat from the Sun warms the oceans and indirectly increases the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then you could perhaps be led into that erroneous conclusion.”

It seems to me that Sir Paul is arguing that, if a consensus of scientists shows a good correlation between HIV and AIDS or else a good correlation between carbon dioxide and global temperature rise, then that correlation is proof of causation – a consensus of correlation is equivalent to proof of causation.

Again: the above analogy is a GROSS simplification of climate science as it is known by both believers and skeptics.
David A says:30th January 2011 at 10:38 amIn the event that any reader is interested, here are some links to articles describing “HIV is not the CAUSE of AIDS” skepticism.
The first is by Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Kary Mullis:
THE MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENT VS. THE TRUTH
Book Excerpt By Kary Mullis
http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/kmdancing.htm

The second is an interview with prominent HIV=AIDS ‘denialist’, Peter Duesberg:
AIDS; WORDS FROM THE FRONT
Interview with Peter Duesberg
By Bob Guccione, Jr.
Spin Sept. 1993
http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/bginterview.htm

The third is the opposite point of view, by Nicoli Nattrass. Notice how similar is the language she uses compared with the language used by warmists when denigrating climate change ‘deniers’. Just mentally change “AIDS” to “climate change” and “HIV” to “CO2” and “denier and denialist” to “denier and denialist” and you would be hard pressed to tell any difference.
AIDS Denialism vs. Science
Nicoli Nattrass
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/aids_denialism_vs._science/
Nige Cook says:30th January 2011 at 10:43 amDavid:
George Bernard Shaw opposed immunization statistical evidence, and distrusted the statistics purporting to show a fall in communicable diseases as immunization increased:

“He hired somebody to count up the telegraph poles erected in various years … and it turned out that telegraph poles were being increased in number. He said, ‘Therefore, this is clear evidence that the way to eliminate communicable diseases is to build a lot more telegraph poles’.

“All I would like to say here is that the important point is that if you really want to understand it, you have to look at the mechanism of the occurrence. I think this is where the emphasis should lie.”

– Dr H. L. Friedell, testimony to the Special Subcommittee on Radiation, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man, June 1959, page 1001.

Dr Phil Jones shies away from provable mechanisms in climatic science, such as homeostasis.

ct like Venus?

Dr Zagoni and Dr Miskolczi have proved that substantial further global warming may be prevented by a remarkably simple and provable mechanism: the existing temperature rise in the oceans has increased evaporation and thus cloud cover, reflecting back more sunlight into space, so that on balance evaporated water has an anti-greenhouse effect.

“Since the Earth’s atmosphere is not lacking in greenhouse gases [water vapor], if the system could have increased its surface temperature it would have done so long before our emissions. It need not have waited for us to add CO2: another greenhouse gas, H2O, was already to hand in practically unlimited reservoirs in the oceans. …” – Dr. Miklos Zagoni.

Unlike certain other planets in the solar system, our planet is uniquely UNLIKE a greenhouse because 70% of it’s surface is covered in oceans, seas and lakes, so any initial rise in temperature (once the deep water heats up, which takes years due to the high specific heat capacity of water) increases the evaporation rate, forming more cloud which thus reflects back a larger percentage of the incoming solar radiation, thereby regulating the Earth’s temperature like a thermostat!

If you actually make a greenhouse with an ocean and clouds in it, then you have a model for the earth. Without the ocean and clouds, sorry, the greenhouse is not a model for the earth.

“During the 61-year period [since 1948] … the global average absolute humidity diminished about 1 per cent.” (Dr. M. Zagoni.)

Hence, the increased evaporation has not turned into infrared-absorbing humid air, instead it has turned into increased cloud cover, which reflects back sunlight into space and keeps the temperature under control. This is why Dr Jones had to keep his data secret and fiddle it under orders from the World Meteorological Organization for their report. “Complicated” is the WMO euphemism for “politically correct”. Dr Jones made his data uncomplicated, and thus politically correct, on WMO orders. James should really go after the WMO bigots.
David A says:30th January 2011 at 4:41 pmJames: You might wish to remove the last one or possibly two paragraphs of this comment post if you consider them “over the top”. Please remove these first two sentences.
———————————————–

To Nige Cook:

Thank you for taking the trouble to reply to my post and for the interesting information you have included in your reply.

Before I had posted my comments, I had taken an inordinate amount of time in transcribing Sir Paul’s remarks about the relationships between cause, effect and correlation. Unfortunately, I didn’t leave much time for the rest of my post. In my defence, I did mention (twice) that my description of climate science was grossly simplified. As it happens, I don’t think that a heating (or cooling) of the atmosphere is directly or solely caused by the actual heating (or cooling) of the Sun, but I do think that the Sun is the main driver of both weather and climate and not the minor greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. The point that I was trying to make was that Sir Paul’s remarks could be turned around – the case for the prosecution (warmists) could be turned around to make a good case for the defence (skeptics), as it were.

I don’t think anyone would deny that climate science is complicated. The warmists magnify any heating effect (from multiple causes) by stressing the positive feedback effects whilst (in the main) ignoring the self-correcting (negative) feedback effects.
From the information that you have included in your post, it would seem that the negative feedback mechanisms of water vapour/ evaporation etc. can cope admirably in regulating the Earth’s atmospheric temperature.

Don’t get me started on that odious Fabian Socialist, George Bernard Shaw!
In addition to being a Leftist eugenicist, he was also an Holodomor (murder by starvation) denier. As most people know, the International Socialists under Josef Stalin intentionally and systematically starved to death millions of Ukrainians even though there had been a good harvest that year. Details can be found on Edvins Snore’s documentary, “The Soviet Story”.

When warmists imply that global warming skeptics are “deniers”, I rather resent the implication that skeptics are Holodomor deniers. I take it that that is the kind of Holocaust that they are referring to and not the one by the National Socialists?

Yes?

Comments are closed.

5 thoughts on “Why the BBC cannot be trusted on ‘Climate Change’: the full story”

Steve says:17th November 2010 at 2:10 pmWow… what an uneducated idiot! You’d think a journalist would at least understand the value of properly researching a topic instead of regurgitating the crap found smeared across right wing tabloids.

TIM says:18th November 2010 at 1:21 amWow Steve, what an “educated” idiot! You’d think a Steve would at least understand the value of properly posting a response without regurgitating the crap found inside the mind of a delusional left wing’d mind.

Mark says:18th November 2010 at 10:58 pm“Apologies that this post is so long.”

Why apologise for that? Are you the one responsible for the fact that the average human has the attention span of a gnat? You must be very powerful!

Velocity says:20th November 2010 at 1:17 amJames

1. The BBC has become what all Depts of Gov’t become: crones.

2. The BBC achieves what all depts of Gov’t achieve, the exact opposite of what they say they will achieve. In the BBC’s case, they claim to be a “public service” broadcaster but of course they become a Gov’t propaganda broadcaster. They also do not represent the public but the political elite. They also do not fulfill their mandate to be unbiased. They become biased.

3. Everything Gov’t touches (ie. manages, subsidises/funds etc) turns to crap.

Only freedom and the free (competitive) market works.

This is why we need the scum of society that is Gov’t and their monopolistic power structure out of broadcasting, healthcare, education, housing, the money supply, banking and central banking, transport and evrthing else Gov’t touches.

Freedom & Free Markets: the only mechanisms that work for the progress of humanity

Groper says:24th November 2010 at 11:49 amHey Delingpole, is it open season? You’ve poured hate on wildlife broadcasters/scientists/enviromentalists/World War 2 veterans? Who’s next for you to attack? Dentists? Mother in laws?

Comments are closed.

6 thoughts on “I’d rather stick my hand in a bag of amphetamine-injected rattlesnakes than put my trust in tonight’s BBC Panorama documentary on ‘Global Warming’”

James W says:29th June 2010 at 10:57 amThe BBC is a scandalous organisation crammed with partial leftists and PC-warriors all intent on spitting out the propaganda of their pet causes and denigrating rational arguments against such.

Whilst simultaneously bleeding the public purse to a huge degree. No doubt indulging in mutual sniggering sessions over the fact that the public is paying for their determination to brainwash them.

In the words of King Edward VIII, “Something must be done”.

Nick Mabbs says:29th June 2010 at 2:58 pmJames W

What do you mean – partial ? They’re fully paid up libtards !

Or they thought they were ‘fully paid up’; it’s nice to see that their Pension Scheme is crumbling too, as mine has, thanks to Broon’s pick-pocketing and Duncan-Dohnut’s
£6,000+ mugging.

forthurst says:29th June 2010 at 3:59 pmRudkin? Rudkin? Oh yes, wasn’t he the producer of two BBC programmes that ‘validated’ the NIST hypothesis that World Trade Centre 7 (Salamon building) collapsed spontaneously due to ‘fires’ without any additional assistance from demolition charges, an event reported by BBC World correspondent Jane Stanley a full 23 minutes before the event and with the aforementioned building still standing in the background?

I think you will need to concede victory to the new science as espoused by the BBC; either that or you will have to view many more of that ilk for punishment.

martin mcleod says:30th June 2010 at 5:41 pmAs someone who rarely bothers with the mainstream press, I was greatly heartened to hear your views on this Panorama programme.
Occasionally, I watch iPlayer to see how low the standards on the BBC have become.
I notice that Countryfile has been shifted to a primetime spot with many presenters and a focus on BS issues. Didn’t it use to come on at Sunday lunchtime featuring a man with a dog?

That Simon whatshisname of Springwatch fame almost looks embarrassed when he has to read his global warming agenda scripts.
A recent alarmist piece he did on the imminent disappearance of the Snow Hare due to global warming would have pleased the great Al Gore muchly.

cheers

JLK says:2nd July 2010 at 6:37 pmFor those of you who are worried that the momentum from the AGW fraud will allow govts, (especially the US) to pass economically devastating legislation, or those who just like to wallow in “schadenfreude”, Al Gore is now being investigated for an attempted rape charge in my home town.

The case was dropped in 2007 because the massage therapist, who unfortunately for Al was legit, did not show up for the hearings. It has now been reopened by the local police. Of course Fat Albert is protesting his innocence but the complainant has solid evidence she has saved including one of those nasty “stains” a la Monica on her clothes.
She did not pursue the prosecution at the time …get this….because her liberal friends (we few conservatives call my city “The People’s Republic of Portland”) convinced her that if Al was taken down Global Warming would consume the world.

Needless to say the MSM is doing their best to ignore this but it’s only a matter of time before they are forced to face the story. The local press is covering it big time because they were previously caught covering up stories about local Lib politicians.
JLK

John of Kent says:3rd July 2010 at 12:31 pmWell, Al Gore has done his best to rape tax payers and ordinary citizens everywhere for the past 20 years so why not rape his masseuse if he thinks he can get away with it. Being a sexual predator goes along with his delusions of grandeur, manipulating the media, general public and politicians and compulsive lying. He should be locked up.

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Tag: BBC bias

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