Climategate: "The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering"

Dr Tim Ball:

It’s beyond belief that the mainstream media can’t see the devastating importance of the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) known as Climategate. The blindness cancels the claim they’re society’s watchdog. Left wing journalist Amy Goodman said when writing about the Bush administration, ”You know governments are going to lie, but not the media.” Now, with a new administration she is silent, proving there are lies of commission and omission.

Most haven’t read the emails or summarily dismiss them because of political bias. Journalist Clive Crook illustrated an open mind, albeit on second look. “In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back. The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”

Full article here.

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Guess who thinks Rudd's ocker-speak is normal?

Laurie Oakes.

 

Who does seem to feel that it is his job to make Rudd's excuses for him.

 

More here

 

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Sniff the Zeitgeist

The wind has shifted.

 

George Negus' pathetically soft interview about climate change with Lord Nicholas Stern on SBS has produced an interesting reaction even from SBS's own viewers.

 

Most are outraged about Negus' fawning over Stern and his inability to ask a single hard question.

 

He finishes the interview with this typically trite and shallow observation: Why do I get the idea that Lord Stern just might have been trying to tell us to grow up - politically, that is.

 

Here's a question that Negus could have asked, if he had been arsed enough to do some research:

 

Why did Stern use a social discount rate of only around 2% in finding that the costs of doing nothing now would be greater than acting now, when he knows full well that the accepted figure should have been around 4%?

 

Why, despite devoting not a few words in his review to the importance of the social discount rate, did he not mention in the review the rate he used? (People had to badger Her Majesty's Treasury to get the figure - so much for a supposedly "independent" review!)

 

What is is about climate change boosters and hiding stuff? Whether it's Stern or the Hockey Stick's Michael Mann, is the reason they act like they have something to hide the fact that they do have something to hide?

 

(Well, in the case of Michael Mann it turned out he did definitely have something hide.)

 

Now, Back to Senator Steve Fielding.

 

He's recently returned from a conference of sceptics in Washington and he's got some questions for Senator Penny Wong.

 

He hasn't made up his mind yet, but at least, unlike George Negus, he does appear to have an open mind.

 

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The island of Lohachara reappears!

It was always one of the lamest global warming/rising sea level scare stories ever, that is, the disappearance of the island of Lohachara in the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal.   Breathtaking in its studied refusal to look at the already long available evidence that the islands in this group come and go and move all the time in response to tidal flows and other factors.   It also confirmed the fact that Geoffrey Lean is possibly the most incompetent environment writer for any newspaper in the world, though his Amazon rain forest doomed by drought story, which actually got the results of a study completely arse about also stands out amongst his ignorant scaremongering!     Tim Blair Sunday, June 07, 2009 at 12:22am     Recall the tragic island of Lohachara, eaten by global warming some years ago: Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.   The story, by the Independent on Sunday‘s environment editor Geoffrey Lean, was a complete crock, omitting even a vague date of the island’s removal. And now, as Achintyarup Ray reports, Lohachara is back: The island is there in front of one’s eyes. Says boatman Mukunda Mondal (41), “Yes, the island is emerging. I have noticed it for the past one year. It’s clearly visible in winter.”   Judhisthir Bhuian, now a resident of Jibantala colony on the Sagar island, had his home on the Lohachara . He still goes back to the place where their house once stood. ”A huge landmass is coming up, covering Lohachara and Bedford,” he says.   Geoffrey Lean – a tilter by nature as well as by name – has been wanting for inspiration of late. Perhaps he could examine Lohachara’s revival, which marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists didn’t come true.   UPDATE. For no apparent reason, the Independent only a few hours ago republished Lean’s absurd 2006 piece.   UPDATE II. From the Times of India piece referenced by Ray: 2007. Kodak Theatre, Hollywood. The list of Oscar presenters includes Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lopez.   Instead of the usual million-dollar goodies, each of them receive a small glass model called the Lohachara sculpture after an island which “in December, 2006, became the first inhabited island to be lost to rising sea levels caused by global warming”.   A little more than two years later, Lohachara island is emerging again.   And the website for the holy Lohachara sculpture has vanished.

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The BBC, Mad Cows Disease and climate change

This is by David Whitehouse and is taken from the Greenie Watch blog:

 

It is very interesting to see today's story on BBC News Online about BSE/CJD "vCJD carrier risk overestimated.". It is the latest in a long line of similar assessments of the vCJD situation.

After many years of sporadic interest the BSE/vCJD story took off in 1996 after an admission in parliament by the health minister that there was a link between BSE contaminated meat and a new strain of the degenerative vCJD brain disease that had afflicted a handful of people. Initially, few people knew anything definite about the disease and its possible progression and, depending upon assumptions, computer models predicted anything from a small number of people being affected to a large fraction of the population. While such uncertainty existed it was right for journalists to reflect the scientific situation but as I was science correspondent for BBC Radio at the time, I soon began to realise the tension between science and journalism and the changing approach to science within BBC News at the time.

In terms of news the potential for a modern day catastrophic plague is a much 'better' story than the possibility that nothing much more will happen. So whilst the uncertainty persisted that was the story that was emphasised with the appropriate caveats. However, it soon became clear to most scientists at least that a major catastrophe was not in the making. The increase in numbers afflicted, despite the unknown incubation of the disease, was not increasing as some predicted, but that fact was inconvenient to some and did not impinge on our general approach to the story.

In such circumstances I took the view that journalists should stay close to the data and not let the scientific possibilities, however dramatic and 'newsworthy,' obscure what was actually happening, especially when those possibilities rested on a cascade of debateable assumptions being fed into a computer model that had been tweaked to hindcast previous data. It was not a point of view taken by other arms of the BBC one part of which was repeatedly promoting the same scare story coming out of one institution based on said computer models and predictions. I believed that taking a sober approach was the right one, especially for the BBC, which was looked to for responsible reporting. Wanting to get on air with a story and make an impression with editors and management was one thing, but I took the view that a journalist should not tailor the science to suit ones ambitions, or survival, that way. The political journalist John Sergeant summed it up when he said that there were many journalists who reported what they could get away with rather than what they know.

My approach was not favoured by the BBC at the time and I was severely criticised in 1998 and told I was wrong and not reporting the BSE/vCJD story correctly. But with hindsight I was correct in my approach. To date the total number of people afflicted with BSE/vCJD remains very small. In fact, far smaller than many illnesses that never get a mention in the media, and the scientific doom mongers have moved onto new pastures. But the attitude towards science still remains at the BBC and has been evident in its evangelical, inconsistent climate change reporting and its narrow, shallow and sparse reporting on other scientific issues.

Reporting the consensus about climate change (and we all know about the debate about what is a consensus in the IPCC era) is not synonymous with good science reporting. The BBC is at an important point. It has been narrow minded about climate change for many years and they have become at the very least a cliché and at worst lampooned as being predictable and biased by a public that doesn't believe them anymore.

Times are changing. New data is emerging, the world refuses to warm in the past decade, the sun becomes quiet, and scientists are beginning to study themselves investigating how entrenched positions become established and whether consensus is a realistic concept. History and science will always correct things in the end. It has done so with vCJD and it is not impossible that the judgement of history and science on current environmental reporting will be the same.

SOURCE

 

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