Alarmist BBC’s ‘Climate Change and Me’ Series Blasted By Facts
Christopher Booker exposes the BBC’s lamentable series, Climate Change and Me, this week:
In its drearily unscientific obsession with climate change, the BBC plumbed further depths last week when Radio 4 gave over its Book of the Week slot to a five-day series entitled “Climate Change and Me”, in which we were told that “scientists” would describe their personal experiences of global warming.
Proper experts had long since shown that climate change and this far-from-unprecedented drought had not caused the civil war in any way.
This began with a marine biologist rehearsing the familiar scare story of how rising sea temperatures are destroying that wonder of the natural world, the Great Barrier Reef.
He recalled seeing how the exceptional El Nino of 1998 produced a scene of “complete devastation”, when “99 percent of the corals were dead”. But he then went on to admit, without a blush, that after a year or two they “had bounced back to almost complete recovery.”
The El Nino of 2016 wrought similar devastation. But again, on revisiting the Reef this year, he “found the corals springing back fast”.
This was followed by similarly muddled and unconvincing attempts to scare us from an ornithologist, wanting to blame global warming for the decline in so many bird species; a geographer on the dangerous warming of the Arctic (seemingly unaware that temperatures there are now no higher than they were 80 years ago, according to data from Denmark); and a civil engineer talking about the need for action to save us from those supposedly increasing “extreme weather events”.
The cream on the BBC cake, however, was a “human rights lawyer” (not exactly a scientist) who on Thursday riffed on the long-exploded claim that an unprecedented drought in 2008 had led to Syria’s civil war.
As I explained in 2015, when Prince Charles repeated this scare story, proper experts had long since shown that climate change and this far-from-unprecedented drought had not caused the civil war in any way.
But, when it comes to global warming, Prince Charles is no more concerned with scientific facts than the BBC.
If the BBC had been the slightest bit concerned about balance and giving listeners the full story, they could have interviewed the Australian barrier reef expert, Peter Ridd, who would have told them that we have only really been monitoring the reef since 1970, we have no idea whether recent bleaching is in any way unusual, and that the reef quickly recovers from these bleaching events.
They might have asked their bird expert just what evidence he has that bird populations are declining because of climate change, as opposed to habitat loss, insecticides etc.
They might have pointed out to the “Arctic expert”, who complains about the loss of Arctic sea ice since 1979, that the 1970s marked the coldest period in the Arctic since the 19thC, and that current temperatures are no higher than in the 1930s and 40s:
They might have reminded their human rights lawyer, who claims that climate change is leading to mass migration from Africa, that droughts across the Sahel were much worse in the 1970s when the Earth was getting colder.
UNESCO Courier Magazine September 1973
And they might also have challenged the civil engineer to back up his assertion that extreme weather is getting worse.
However, this is the BBC, so you are more likely to see pigs flying over your house!
FOOTNOTE
Booker had an article in the Mail during the week, about wood burning stoves, which I reported on here.
The article contained references to the health effects of air pollution, for instance:
Now we learn that wood-burning is the single biggest source of tiny soot particles called PM2.5s — they are also emitted by burning coal and diesel — which go into our lungs and are said to be responsible for an estimated 37,800 premature deaths a year.
This attracted criticism from some, both here and elsewhere, as such estimates have been shown to be highly controversial and exaggerated.
Booker, however, has informed me that he did not write any of those specific references and that they were inserted by the Mail without reference to him.
Understandably, he is none too pleased!!
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tom0mason
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A new low in broadcasting.
I heard as much as I could stand of this overemotional clap-trap, truly dire radio at it’s worse.
Researchers (often young) intoning that ‘it’s worse than we thought’, and all too often being surprised that the natural world undergoes change. None of them (that I heard) appeared to understand evolution. All of them appeared to believe what is happening now was outside normal natural variation, yet gave no substantive evidence for this assumption.
The underlying assumption running through the broadcast was that change is bad in the natural world, and everyone must help (pay?) to ensure nature stays in stasis. Dumb and foolish.
BBC broadcasting for the gullible and the differently intelligent 🙂 .
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aido
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I don’t know why anyoneis surprised at the BBC’s one-sided approach to climate change.
The BBC’s charter requires it to be impartial and objective in presenting the news. When it comes to reporting on Climate Change, the charter has been torn up and thrown out the window.
On January 6th 2006, the BBC held a meeting of ‘leading scientists’ to decide on its future policy on reporting Climate Change.
Present were:
28 BBC employees
17 Environmentalists
10 Others (politicians, civil servants, aid workers, etc)
3 Scientists Mike Hulme, climatologist
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Danish ice climatologist
Robert McCredie, physicist, zoology
The meeting decided that since there was a worldwide ‘consensus’ that Climate Change is largely man-made and dangerous, the BBC should no longer provide any airtime to people with dissenting views.
The founder of the BBC, Lord Reith must be spinning in his grave.
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Steve C
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I have to agree with both previous comments. The programmes were as awful as we’d all expected them to be, and showed only that the BBC continues about its propaganda regardless of reality. However, it was poor Lord Reith who drew my attention.
When I was young, a dead person who was assumed to be outraged by the modernity of his successors was said to turn in his grave. The image was one in which the affront caused only a moment’s restlessness in the late individual’s eternal sleep, making him turn over.
But now – everywhere, nothing personal, Aido! – we only ever hear of the dead spinning in their graves, an odd image which I admit I have trouble visualising. Even Death, it seems, can no longer protect us from the relentlessly accelerating hyperactivity of the modern world …
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