The new McCarthys in the US
While I have been travelling over the last week, the IPCC Durban circus has been performing to dwindling audiences.
The Climategate 1 and 2 emails that have been released so far (about 1,000 + 5,000) are focused mainly on a 3-way nexus between a group of rather mediocre scientists, a few willing (and gullible) reporters and some of the bureaucrats/politicians who have seized on the advantages of fear-mongering.
The mediocrity of the so-called climate scientists is palpable. Michael Mann leaves out data whwnever he feels like it, Phil Jones can’t fathom the intricacies of an Excel table, Tom Wigley (appropriate name) tries to get the PhD’s of his opponents retracted, etc …….. . And all for “The Cause”.
We have seen the blatant lobbying activities of Harrabin and Revkin undermine the reputation of the BBC and the New York Times. At least George Monbiot does not pretend to be anything other than a lobbyist. Harrabin’s pompous defence of his blinkered view is particularly nauseating.
Now we find that the IPCC itself was not averse to falsifying data when it felt the message needed strengthening.
The Global warming fraternity have been busy defending themselves, denying that what they have been engaged in has been bad science or bad journalism. But the politicians and bureaucrats have escaped scrutiny — at least so far.
But there are 200,000 further emails waiting to be un-encrypted by the release of a decrypting phrase (the emails themselves have already been released). And some bureaucrats, some IPCC functionaries, some carbon trading entrepreneurs and some amoral, fear-mongering politicians have to wait their turn.
But they will probably not have to wait very long!!!!
As if the lopsided reporting by Roger Harrabin and Richard Black was not bad enough, the email exchange between Phil Jones and Alex Kirby of the BBC puts the BBC’s “impartiality” about global warming firmly in the dock.
Incidentally Kirby’s publicity blurb has this to say about him:
Alex has no scientific education, and is convinced that the widespread distrust and misunderstanding of scientists in industrial societies is a threat to human development.
Alex Kirby
Climategate 2.0 email 4894.txt shows just what Alex Kirby of BBC thinks of climate skeptics as he conveys it to Dr. Phil Jones. Clearly, there an incestuous relationship between climate science and the BBC.
date: Wed Dec 8 08:25:30 2004
from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.xx.xx>
subject: RE: something on new online.
to: “Alex Kirby” <alex.kirby@bbc.xxx.xx>At 17:27 07/12/2004, you wrote:
Yes, glad you stopped this — I was sent it too, and decided to
spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can
well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we
are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any
coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and
being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an
expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them
say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it
clear that we think they are talking through their hats.
—–Original Message—–Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit
Another gem in the comments by FrancisT reveals that the BBC was in bed with the global warming fanatics but note that Kirby was considered to be not too expensive(!!??)
2011 Email #2403 (1)
Regarding ECF and a media person. You could try Alex Kirby if Roger Harrabin is not free. Joe Smith will have other contacts. The other possibility is for a European link, possibly via a German magazine. Finally, if we try, we could penetrate The Economist as I have contacts there.
2011 Email #3935 (1)1. Media involvement. I would suggest Roger Harrabin might be a better (alternate?) invitee to Alex Kirby. Simon Torok has recently had contact with him about media coverage of Jo’berg and he is also on the Advisory Board of Tyndall.
2011 Email #4028 (1)>> > > phone
>> > > > chat with Alex Kirby, BBC, some time before the conference, where we
>> may2011 Email #4655 (1)
For more mainstream people, I agree that Alex Kirby would make a good job
and is probably first choice. He would certainly come cheaper than Humphreys
I am not sure if this says more about those being surveyed or about the media channels or about those doing the surveying! But it should give social psychologists endless opportunities for analysis.
A new survey of New Jersey voters comes to a provocative conclusion: Fox News viewers tend to be less informed about current events than those who don’t watch any news at all.
Perhaps it has to do with New Jersey.
But what may be even more profound is that
On Occupy Wall Street, the survey found viewers of “The Daily Show” were 12 percentage points more likely to say protesters were predominantly Democratic. MSNBC viewers were the most likely to say the protesters were mainly Republicans.
I am not quite sure who put this together but its appearance within about 24 hours of the original data dump on a Russian server is pretty impressive.
Climategate 2 | FOIA 2011 Searchable Database
ReadMe:
This website is provided as a research resource for mining the recently leaked climate communications. Every effort has been made to redact personal contact information such as email addresses and telephone numbers. The redaction algorithms are currently tuned to be quite stringent, and they will inadvertantly obfuscate other details as well. We will continue to tune the software to improve the quality of the results.
This database was assembled in a very short space of time, and at present only provides the most rudimentary tools for exploring this vast trove of material. We will be improving the quality of the search tools and adding further metadata to the database over the course of the next few weeks.
The investigative capabilities of the on-line community when engaged is quite formidable (as I have remarked on earlier).
Image via Wikipedia
I had posted earlier about the revelations that the BBC’s Roger Harrabin (with the help of his pal Joe Smith) had been acting as a mole within the BBC to lobby on behalf of the global warming orthodoxy in which he had a vested interest.
Well, it would seem that he gave up being an objective journalist and became a lobbyist some time ago. He has been lobbying hard since at least 1997. The CIES web page from August 18th, 2000:
Media & Environment Programme
Developed by Dr Joe Smith and Roger Harrabin (BBC Today Programme), the programme consists of a series of indepth seminars designed to broaden and deepen media thinking about global environmental change and sustainable development issues and to improve the academic and policy communities’ understanding of the setting and constraints of media reporting.
Programme co-directors:
Dr Joe Smith
Mr Roger HarrabinProgramme contact details:
Email: jhs125@cam.ac.uk or tel: +44 (0)1223 740135Details of previous seminars:
The Changing Environmental Agenda – BBC Editors (1997)
Climate Change Meeting – senior editors (1997)
Reporting Sustainable Development:
The Challenge to the Media – BBC Editors (1997)The Kyoto Outcome: Implications for UK Business (1997)
Reporting Sustainable Development:
The Challenge to the Media – BBC Editor’s Seminar (1998)
The less than objective “reporting” on global warming from the BBC was always fairly obvious but the role of Roger Harrabin, one of its senior environmental correspondents in driving that policy is now becoming clear. Christopher Booker has a long article in The Telegraph:
The BBC’s hidden ‘warmist’ agenda is rapidly unravelling
Since 2006, the BBC has relentlessly promoted the global warming orthodoxy as a pressure group in its own right.
The story of the BBC’s bias on global warming gets ever murkier. Last week there was quite a stir over a new report for the BBC Trust which criticised several programmes for having been improperly funded or sponsored by outside bodies. One, for instance, lauded the work of Envirotrade, a Mauritius-based firm cashing in on the global warming scare by selling “carbon offsets”, which it turned out had given the BBC money to make the programme. ……
….
The irony is, however, that just as the BBC adopted its new hard line on climate change, in the real world the story was beginning to shift. Ever more searching questions have come to be asked about the supposed “consensus” on man-made warming, and the BBC’s coverage has come to look ever more one-sidedly absurd.
Last week, even Richard Black, another BBC proselytiser for man-made warming, was gloomily having to reveal the conclusion of a new IPCC report: that, over the next few decades, “climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variabilty”. In plain English, that means the great scare story is over. What a shame. But at what a price. …
Meanwhile the Daily Mail carries the following headline:
(Update! The Daily Mail article has been removed but has been reported here).
(Update 2! The Daily Mail article has now been restored)
BBC’s Mr Climate Change accepted £15,000 in grants from university rocked by global warning scandal
Alarmism is lucrative.
Many supposedly unbiased, objective BBC documentary programs have been sponsored by vested interests.
Programs about development were sponsored by the Malaysian government to the tune of £17 million. During the Arab spring a program was sponsored by Mubarak’s government. Another program about climate change was sponsored by Envirotrade – a carbon trading company based safely for taxes in Mauritius. The BBC’s alarmist bias about climate change is notorious but sponsorship by organisations making millions from carbon trading goes a long way to explaining their “objectivity”. The broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, is to investigate.
One media company which made partisan programs for the BBC, FBC Media (UK), has gone into administration. “FBC, incorporated in 1998, was a vehicle for high-profile figures led by founder and chairman Alan Friedman.”
The BBC has owned up to a “nominal fee” programming scandal in which viewers of 15 editorial programmes were hoodwinked by “serious” conflicts of interest of programme makers and a failure to declare that documentaries had outside sponsors.
It seems like an exercise of common sense:
The Local – Germany’s highest civil court has set out a process by which web hosts can avoid liability for libellous blog posts, in a decision which Google described as striking a blow for freedom of expression and information in the internet.
… The Federal Court of Justice …. also set out a process which web hosts should follow to avoid any liability.
Someone who believes a blog entry violates the law must inform the hosting company – but allegations of illegality must be “concrete” enough that they can be affirmed “without detailed legal and factual review,” the court ruled.The allegations must be passed onto the blogger who must respond within a reasonable period – or the blog can simply be deleted. If the blogger decides to defend their entry, the complainant must prove that it is illegal, and if this cannot be done, the entry must remain.
But as regards anonymity this requires that the identity of the blog poster must be known to the host.
The k2p blog 