The BBC and GlobeScan: The Ben and Jerry's of international public opinion

A new BBC poll shows – big surprise – that pretty much the whole world wants to see Barack Obama elected President of the United States.

Allahpundit speculates that such findings might help McCain more than Obama, given how big a hit The One's performance in Germany proved to be with the folks back home, and points out that, either way, being rated unfavourably in a BBC poll should be seen as something of a badge of honour.

I wrote about the highly dubious polling produced by the BBC/GlobeScan partnership with regards to global warming climate change last year. GlobeScan and its fellow-travellers at the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes and World Public Opinion are focused almost exclusively on promoting leftist talking points, which of course chimes nicely with the BBC's own worldview.

In case you're in any doubt as to where their sympathies lie, here are a few other BBC/GlobeScan polls we've known and loved:

Iran is probably developing nuclear weapons, but we can talk them out of it, and anyway this isn’t about Iran, it’s a global problem

Pakistanis: Without Musharraf, Pakistan would look a lot like Rhode Island

Loss of innocent life generally preferable to torture

Too much free trade globalisation a bad thing

You can almost smell the funding from some Soros-linked operation. As for methodology, I'm guessing they sample roughly 50/50 from college campuses and slums.

Here's a message from GlobeScan president Doug Miller.

'At the same time, we consider ourselves part of the democratic process, "letting the people speak" to decision-makers on matters that affect them - at meetings of world leaders, expert forums, and the boardrooms of major companies.'

It's Saul Alinksy and community organising on a global scale. And we all know who the world's biggest and bestest community organiser is, don't we?

Update: A guy from GlobeScan has left a comment, and I've replied.

Short on global warming alarmism? Make some up!

The BBC has long been famous for passing off global warming fiction as news. And with dearth of fresh alarmist news to report, they've apparently decided that putting global warming propaganda into their fictional output is a more effective means of propagandising – they've resorted to making stuff up about people making stuff up. I have a piece up at Pajamas Media on Burn Up, the atrocious global warming drama that the Beeb screened last week. You can read it here.

Lean times for climate change alarmists

I have a piece up at Pajamas Media on how, slowly but surely, the tide is turning against the climate change alarmists and in favour of those who are either skeptical about the existence of man-made global warming, or who believe in taking a more responsible approach to any problems that might arise from climate change, whether natural or man-made.

Long story short: the alarmists have yet to produce a single shred of evidence to support their claims that man-made CO2 emissions are causing irreversible and catastrophic changes in the Earth's climate. There's no proof that the warming seen in the last century was outside the natural range of variation in the Earth's temperature, and no proof that it has been caused by man. All the alarmists can offer is wild speculation, based on guesswork which is itself based on the output of discredited and essentially worthless computer models.

There is, however, ample proof that 'global warming' is not happening in the way the alarmists have for years been predicting that it would: we have the graphs showing that CO2 emissions are continuing to rise steadily, and we have the temperature data showing that there's been no increase in global temperatures for ten years now – and that, indeed, in recent years the Earth has cooled slightly.

Contrary to what Al Gore says, the science isn't settled, and the debate isn't over.

"I'm a free human being in Europe, and I'm not a slave of the European Commission."

With this existential cry, Czech Republic interior minister Ivan Langer today ripped the electrodes out of his head and disconnected the downlink from Brussels, in his country's latest act of defiance against the Borg-like entity that is the European Union.

The BBC reports that the Czech government could face legal action after signing its own deal on visa-free travel with the US, having become fed up waiting while the EU haggled over a Europe-wide deal:

The European Commission fears the accord undercuts its own talks with the US on an EU-wide visa agreement.

But Czech interior minister Ivan Langer criticised the EU. "We've been waiting years and nothing happened," he said.

The report adds that Hungary, Lithuania and Estonia may now follow suit.

You have to love those Czechs. Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus is a lone but eloquent voice of sanity in the European madhouse on the subject of 'climate change'.

And Mr Langer's thumb in the eye of the EU follows hot on the heels of yesterday's announcement that his country is close to agreeing a deal on hosting elements of the US Missile Defence system.

The proposed anti-ballistic missile shield is another issue that has pitted 'new' European nations against 'old', with Germany leading the opposition, and several countries expressing concern that the project could undermine relations between the EU and Russia, from which Europe gets much of its energy.

It's no surprise to see Europeans fretting over their 'relationship' with a country that threatens, blackmails and attempts to destabilise its neighbours, as well as murdering opponents at home and abroad.

After all, the unreconstructed socialists now running the EU are the generation that marched against the deployment of Pershing IIs 25 years ago, preferring a Soviet takeover of Europe to a peace guaranteed by the Great Satan.

Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Czechs and several other newly independent states understandably turned to the EU for security guarantees and economic support. Now they're finding out that they were liberated from one dictatorship only to fall under another one that's marginally more civilised, but every bit as corrupt and intolerant of dissent.

It's good to see that they're still up for a fight.

It's official: global warming isn’t happening

Click image for full-size version

Someone get Al Gore on the phone, and tell him that debate he keeps saying is settled has just been blown wide open again.

There’s been a steady stream of evidence that global temperatures have been falling over the past year or so, capped by reports from around the globe of record cold temperatures and snowfall over the past couple of months.

And now data released by the four major temperature monitoring centres is showing that global temperatures fell by an unprecedented amount – more than half a degree Celsius – over the past 12 months.

Online science magazine Daily Tech reports:

The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C - a value large enough to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

'But hang on', the alarmists will say. 'Remember that a couple of years back, when we realised that global warming wasn’t keeping pace with our predictions, we started to talk about ‘climate change’ instead, and ‘climate change’ doesn’t necessarily mean hotter; it can mean colder, wetter, drier, or anything else we want it to mean.'

That’s true. But when they say that they’re talking about localised extreme weather conditions, all of which they claim are ultimately caused by steadily rising global temperatures, which in turn they claim are caused by rising CO2 emissions. Nowhere in the alarmists’ spin book is there provision for an entire year of such dramatic cooling over the planet as a whole. And last time I looked, those CO2 emissions were still increasing.

Why isn’t this huge news? Why isn’t this everywhere? It’s on many of the ‘skeptic’ blogs and websites, but it’s apparently yet to be picked up by the MSM.

We know why, of course. Too many environmental groups and trans-national bureaucracies, along with their lackies in the media, have too much invested in the biggest hoax of all time to admit that the game is up.

The BBC, for example, which has been acting as the unofficial PR outfit for the alarmists for years now, is far more interested in publicity stunts by environmental protestors (see this post, and they’re at it again today), than reporting evidence that pretty much proves that the threat the eco-warriors are protesting about doesn’t actually exist.

If the cooling continues eventually even the alarmists won’t be able to ignore it. And then they’ll either claim it’s down to ‘feedback mechanisms’ that we don’t fully understand (despite the fact that the 'science is settled') or they’ll tell us that this is exactly what they expected to see – some kind of correction before the runaway warming begins in earnest (hang on – they’re already doing that).

Maybe the International Conference on Climate Change, which opens on Sunday in New York and features many of the leading ‘skeptics’, will be able to get this development the coverage it deserves, although environmental groups are already spinning against the conference, and it won’t be a big surprise if the media largely ignores it.

Slowly but surely, however, the tide is turning, and eventually the alarmists’ position will become untenable. And when it does, someone will have to decide what we should do with those who have spent years abusing science and distorting truth for financial or political gain. Nuremberg-style trials anyone?

More at JammieWearingFool and Say Anything.

BBC happy to plug climate change stunt

If you’re thinking of staging a publicity stunt make sure you put in a call to the BBC, because they’ll give you all the publicity you want – on the condition, of course, that the cause you’re seeking to publicise is one to which the BBC is also sympathetic.

You’ll need to look elsewhere for exposure if you’re planning to protest atrocities committed against muslims by other muslims, rocket attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorists, or high levels of crime committed by illegal immigrants.

But if you want uncritical and disproportionate coverage of a pathetic little demonstration against ‘climate change’, then you can rely on the BBC to make sure that your message is heard loud and clear around the world.

If placement on its news website is a guide, then the BBC considers four Greenpeace ‘activists’ climbing on top of a plane at London’s Heathrow airport in a protest against plans for a new runway to be among the dozen or so most important stories in the world today – the story was on the front page for much of the day before being shunted off to the UK pages this evening.

The fact that security at one of the world’s busiest airports was breached so easily is certainly newsworthy, and it would make perfect sense to report the story from a security standpoint, while making a passing reference to the nature of the protest.

But because the BBC is a fully paid-up member of the global warming alarmist movement the security angle is secondary to the nature of the protest. So the headline is ‘Climate protest on Heathrow plane’, and a large part of the story is given over to quotes from the protestors:

Greenpeace said protesters put a banner reading "Climate Emergency - No Third Runway" over the plane's tailfin at about 0945 GMT.

It said two women and two men crossed the tarmac at the airport after the passengers had disembarked.

One protester, Anna Jones, said: "Our planet and the people who live on it are in danger.

"Climate change can be beaten but not by almost doubling the size of the airport.

"We are here to draw a line in the sand and tell Gordon Brown his new runway must not and will not be built."

Needless to say, because the BBC takes it as read that ‘climate change’ poses an imminent threat to the world, the unsubstantiated claims of the protestors go unchallenged, and the issues involved go unexamined.

The canard that ‘Our planet and the people who live on it are in danger’ is repeated in some form on an almost daily basis by the BBC, while it either plays down or ignores altogether the steady stream of articles and data suggesting otherwise.

The BBC doesn’t find it newsworthy that Antarctic ice coverage is at record levels, or that Arctic ice coverage has returned to normal seasonal levels after reaching a record low during the summer – an event on which the BBC provided almost weekly updates, or that large parts of North America and Asia are experiencing record cold temperatures and snowfall.

And it will be interesting to see how much coverage the BBC gives to this event (related thoughts from WSJ's John Fund here).

Aside from the BBC acting as PR merchants for global warming alarmists, there’s another issue here. There are plenty of lawful ways to make a protest, but sensational coverage of dangerous and criminal behaviour is bound to encourage more of the same from Greenpeace and their fellow eco-warriors.

But then again the odd broken leg, a night in the cells and disruption for air travellers are a small price to pay for saving the world.

An inconvenient sinking

File under 'Delicious irony'… Canada Free Press reports that the owner of the fault-ridden cruise ship that sank in Antarctica last Friday, causing untold environmental damage, is a disciple of Al Gore (hat tip: JammieWearingFool).

The MS Explorer, with 48,000 gallons of very environmentally unfriendly fuel on board, went down after hitting ice in the Antarctic Ocean. 154 passengers and crew were rescued after spending hours in lifeboats.

The Explorer was operated by G.A.P. Adventures, whose CEO Bruce Prune Tip spoke at an environmental conference alongside Gore in April. As CFP notes:

…Greenpeace believes tourism in Antarctica should be strictly limited because of the fate of MS Explorer, but the silence is deafening from Poon Tip and Gore about the huge carbon footprint left on the ocean floor.

The funny thing is, if you believe what Gore and his buddies keep telling us, it's amazing that there's any ice left down there for a boat to hit.

The opinion polls aren't settled either

The BBC is trumpeting the results of a poll it commissioned, which, it claims, shows that "most people are ready to make personal sacrifices to address climate change". Its report on the poll says:

Four out of five people indicated they were prepared to change their lifestyle – even in the US and China, the world's two biggest emitters of carbon dioxide.

and…

BBC environment reporter Matt McGrath says the poll suggests that in many countries people are more willing than their governments to contemplate serious changes to their lifestyles to combat global warming.

22,000 people in 21 countries were interviewed for the poll, and the figures given for the UK respondents were fairly representative of those for all countries, with more than 80 per cent agreeing that lifestyle changes were 'probably' or 'definitely' necessary.

Strange, then, that a separate poll conducted in Britain and reported on by Reuters a couple of days earlier produced very different findings:

Warnings about the effects of climate change have made most Britons aware of the crisis, but few are willing to make major changes to the way they live, a survey showed on Friday.

[…]

The survey, the sixth since 1986, found that six out of 10 people said they knew a lot or a fair amount about climate change and many were willing to do something to help.

But nearly half declared they would not make changes that impinged on their lifestyles and less than three in 10 said they had switched to using a more fuel-efficient car, cut car usage or taken fewer flights.

This doesn't quite square with "most people are ready to make personal sacrifices" does it? And here's a third poll on the same subject, reported in the same Reuters story:

A separate consumer survey found people over 50 – among the most climate-aware and affluent group – were deeply suspicious of any government move to raise green taxes, viewing it as a money-making mechanism.

[…]

The survey by Millennium, an agency specialising in marketing to the mature, found 84 percent believed the government was capitalising on climate fears to raise funds and also found little willingness among respondents to change lifestyles much – if at all – to benefit the environment.

Not only does the BBC's poll contradict two others taken at around the same time with regard to attitudes to 'climate change' in the UK, it also suggests there's been a dramatic change in opinion since the BBC reported on another independent poll back in July:

The public believes the effects of global warming on the climate are not as bad as politicians and scientists claim, a poll has suggested.

[…]

There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found.

But hang on a minute – here's yet another poll, which the BBC reported on in September, and which seems much more in tune with the findings of the BBC-commissioned poll we kicked off with – and funnily enough, it was also commissioned by the BBC:

Large majorities in many countries now believe human activity is causing global warming, a BBC World Service poll suggests.

[…]

An average of 79% of respondents to the BBC survey agreed that "human activity, including industry and transportation, is a significant cause of climate change".

Nine out of 10 people said action was necessary, with two-thirds of people going further, saying "it is necessary to take major steps starting very soon".

Again, while people in various countries were interviewed for this poll, the results for the British respondents were about par for the course.

In case you're becoming confused – I know I am – here's a quick recap: we have three independent polls suggesting that Britons are either ambivalent or skeptical about whether climate change is a real problem, and highly skeptical about the motives of those who demand action; and we have two polls commissioned by the BBC which suggest that Britons, along with the rest of the world, are not only fully on board with the threat of climate change, but are prepared to endure tough measures to tackle the problem.

Both BBC polls were conducted by GlobeScan and PIPA, The Program on International Policy Issues. And lest anyone be thinking that these must be independent organisations, with no axe to grind and no vested interest in the outcome of the polls they conduct, here's GlobeScan President Doug Miller commenting on the BBC's September poll:

…Miller said growing awareness of global warming had awoken people's self-interest.

"The impacts of erratic weather on their property, on their person, on their country is tangible and real to people across the world."

He said "the strength of the findings makes it difficult to imagine a more supportive public opinion environment for national leaders to commit to climate action".

Note that Miller isn't commenting on the findings of the poll, as a spokesman for Mori might, but is giving his personal opinion on the subject, making it clear that he regards global warming and its consequences as a given.

The 'Core Practice Areas' listed on GlobeScan's website include Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Community Affairs, and the site features a photo of the Earth taken from space. I think we get the message.

As for PIPA, the list of 'Recent Studies' displayed on its website tells you everything you need to know: when it's not producing anti-American, anti-war or pro-climate hysteria polls for the BBC, it's producing reports such as 'Less than Half of Pakistani Public Supports Attacking Al Qaeda, Cracking Down on Fundamentalists' (in collaboration with the US Institute of Peace), and 'Muslims Believe US Seeks to Undermine Islam'.

Far from employing politically neutral organisations to carry out its polls, the BBC is working with two groups which entirely share its soft-left, but potentially very dangerous, view of the world and its ills. Pollsters are, of course, masters in the art of manipulating both their subjects and their data to get the results they want – and in the unlikely event that the BBC doesn't get the results it wants, it's a master of twisting the facts to suit the narrative: witness the poll it commissioned which purported to show that most Iraqis thought the Surge had failed, the findings of which were released to coincide with the Petraeus/Crocker testimony to Congress.

It's possible that the findings of the BBC's polls are accurate, and that the independent polls mentioned above, along with others, are flawed, but it's a remarkable coincidence that the BBC is able to produce poll after poll which suggests that the whole world thinks exactly what its news reports tell them they should think. And if the whole world agrees with you, then you can't really be accused of being biased can you?

The snake oil economics of 'climate change'

Debra J. Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle on the Democrats' global warming rhetoric, as epitomised by Barbara Boxer:

According to Boxer, laws to curb greenhouse gases - this country would have to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half over 12 years to meet the latest international community goals - will do good things for the American economy and create lots of jobs. It's Nostradamus Science wedded to Santa Claus economics.

Saunders concludes:

Today, Democrats have abandoned all reason. They buy the worst-case scenarios and sell snake-oil economics. The air of unreality pervades the debate. It doesn't matter what you spew if you say you believe in global warming. You don't have to sacrifice. Fighting global warming will be easy and good for the economy. This isn't science. It's fantasy.

A short history of eco-fascism

A good piece from global warming 'denier' Philip Stott, explaining that the phenomenon of eco-fascism is not a new one, but is eerily reminiscent of Hitler's concept of 'blood and soil':

…(Hitler’s ‘green’ guru, Richard-Walther) Darré argued that it was the European farmer who had been the creator of European culture, and he proposed the formation of a Germanic ‘aristocracy of the soil’, rooted in the old agrarian community, which would be protected from, and be a bulwark against, the ‘capitalist’ (for which, read ‘wandering Jewish’) world, the “chaos of the market”, and industrialisation. The movement was to be ‘völkisch’ (nearly impossible to translate), with a romantic focus on folklore, the ‘organic’, and purity. Provocatively, he even placed the pig at the heart of this cult, a celebration of German peasant life, coupled with unsophisticated racism, and, above all, anti-Semitism.

Stott's piece was itself inspired by this article by James Delingpole of the UK's Spectator magazine, on the surprising amount of convergence between the views of conservatives and certain strains of modern Marxism, in particular with regard to their opposition to neo-fascist ideologies such as environmental extremism.

Any similarity between An Inconvenient Truth and Triumph of the Will is, of course, purely coincidental.

A Nobel Prize for fear-mongering?

In Oslo tomorrow the Nobel Institute will announce the winner of its 2007 Peace Prize. If, in a collective fit of madness, the committee is thinking of giving it to Al Gore for his efforts to alert the world to the 'threat' of 'global warming', they should have been given pause for thought by yesterday's ruling from a British High Court Judge.

By a delicious fluke of timing, Judge Michael Burton reminded the world that Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, on the back of which the inconsequential former VP has ridden from failure and obscurity to worldwide prominence, is nothing more than a slickly presented collection of exaggeration, half-truths and outright lies.

Expanding on comments he made last week, the judge ruled that the film contained nine 'key scientific errors'. Most of these falsehoods ('errors' is being far too kind) are by now well known not only to sceptics, but to the alarmist politicians, pressure groups, celebrities and companies who cynically continue to employ them for their particular ends.

The falsehoods include, of course, the infamous claim of an imminent 20ft sea level rise, which even the IPCC's most pessimistic computer models don't come close to substantiating. Judge Hudson, with a politeness most of Gore's critics find hard to muster in the face of such blatant dishonesty, noted that the claim was 'not in line with the scientific consensus'.

Then there are the claims of drowning polar bears, and inundated Pacific atolls, neither of which the UK government's lawyers could present evidence for; Gore's assertion that the snows of Kilimanjaro are melting as a direct result of global warming, when several studies have shown that deforestation and local weather patterns are the likely causes; the unproven link between climate change and Hurricane Katrina; that 'exact fit' between graphs for CO2 emissions and global temperature that's nothing of a sort. And a few others.

Of course, anyone with a vaguely inquiring mind would have been well aware of these 'errors' when Gore was nominated for the prize back in February. But if the two Norwegian MPs who nominated Gore knew, they didn't let it stop them. And nor did the facts prevent the Nobel committee from accepting the nomination.

But let's imagine that Gore's film wasn't so shamelessly dishonest, and was in fact, grounded in fact. Even if mankind is responsible for unprecedented warming that threatens to create environmental chaos, and assuming that global warming might create theoretical security problems, the suggestion that alerting us to the risk somehow makes Gore eligible for the Peace Prize is something of a stretch.

The prize has traditionally been awarded to those who have campaigned to end conflicts around the world. According to the rules of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the Peace Prize is awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”.

While the contributions of some past winners – notably Yasser Arafat and Jimmy Carter – to world peace were negligible, if not downright counterproductive, they did, at least, pay lip service to the idea of resolving a conflict that was, at least, taking place.

Gore, on the other hand, would be the first recipient to be honoured for his efforts to avert a hypothetical future conflict. Presumably he and his acolytes have in mind conflicts between states over dwindling resources. Then again they could be worrying about an all-out war between the penguins and the polar bears over choice slabs of iceberg.

So Gore shouldn't even have been nominated, and if he actually wins the thing it will be a slap in the face to other nominees who have genuinely worked for peace, such as Irena Sendler, a Pole who saved more than 2,500 Jewish children from the Holocaust in World War Two, and Finland's former President Martti Ahtisaari. And they, by the way, were acting out of genuine humanity, rather than being motivated by self-interest and conceit.

It would also be an insult to the memory of every past winner (Arafat, Carter and a couple of others excepted), including Jean Henry Dunant, Founder of the Red Cross, Theodore Roosevelt and Martin Luther King.

It would be a disgrace. It would be as if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had decided to award Gore the Oscar for best docu… Ah yes. There's a point. While we're on the subject of august bodies conferring illegitimate awards, and specifically conferring them on Al Gore, now that his magnum opus has been officially and spectacularly discredited I suppose it's too much to hope that the Academy might ask for their statue back. After all, my dictionary provides the following definition of 'documentary’:

(of a movie, a television or radio program, or photography) using pictures or interviews with people involved in real events to provide a factual record or report

Of course the Academy has much in common with the Peace Prize committee – both are largely staffed by left-leaning elites whose criteria for handing out prizes is the degree of hostility that nominees display towards America. But the Academy is already a joke, taken seriously only by itself and the rest of the self-absorbed Hollywood pack. The Nobel Peace Prize committee still has some credibility left – but tomorrow that could disappear as quickly as one of Al Gore’s icebergs.

Update: Jules Crittenden has some thoughts on the matter at Pajamas Media.

UK judge says Gore's film is biased

This is a great victory for opponents of climate change hysteria. A judge in the UK has said that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth promotes partisan views, and that teachers who show the film to their pupils must make it clear that there are opposing opinions on the subject.

Stewart Dimmock, a lorry driver from Dover in South-east England who has children aged 11 and 14, went to court after the government announced in February that DVDs of the film would be sent to all secondary schools in England, along with other global warming propaganda.

The Daily Mail reports that in a three-day hearing, the court was told the film contains a number of inaccuracies, exaggerations and statements about global warming for which there is currently insufficient scientific evidence. Mr Dimmock says Gore's film is "sentimental mush", and accused the government of "brainwashing" children. The Mail reports:

Mr Justice Burton is due to deliver a ruling on the case next week, but yesterday he said he would be saying that Gore's Oscar-winning film does promote 'partisan political views'.

This means that teachers will have to warn pupils that there are other opinions on global warming and they should not necessarily accept the views of the film.

Mr Dimmock said at the start of the hearing: "I wish my children to have the best education possible, free from bias and political spin, and Mr Gore's film falls far short of the standard required." He wants the film banned altogether, and his solicitor said "no amount of turgid guidance" could change the fact that the film is unfit for the classroom.

The film should certainly be banned from schools, but given that the global warming alarmists enjoy the full support of Britain's political, media and educational establishments, this is still a significant victory.

Those who believe we should have an open and honest debate on the subject should be grateful to Stewart Dimmock for standing up to the media/political global warming spin machine, and take encouragement from the fact that AIT has officially been labeled the lie-strewn piece of agitprop a lot of people have been calling it for years.

BBC gets its cold, hard facts wrong

The BBC News website is still giving prominence to this story, reporting that the North-west passage is fully clear of ice for the first time 'since records began', and linking the development, not surprisingly, to global warming.

However, as Freeborn John and others have pointed out, the significance of this news rather depends on when records began to be kept; in this case it was 1972. Historical evidence reveals that the passage has been ice-free in the past (possibly due to factors such as the methane emissions of Scott's and Amundsen's husky teams). And it was also ice-free as recently as 2000, according to report by – the BBC!

Living like Xerxes

Connection of the day: Brad Rourke at PJM on what the movie 300 can tell us about the global warming crowd. An excerpt:

According to The Times of London, one of [carbon offset company] Climate Care’s projects involves using human labor in the developing world to pump water for irrigation, using “treadle pumps” that look not unlike Stairmasters. People step for hours on these things, pumping merrily along. Climate Care puts it this way: “One person - man, woman or even child - can operate the pump by manipulating his/her body weight on two treadles and by holding a bamboo or wooden frame for support.”

Treadle pumps used to be in vogue in British prisons – and were finally outlawed, according to Spiked Magazine, having been deemed too cruel a punishment. Here, they are being touted as suitable labor for a third-world child. All, ironically, so that guilty consciences can be set at ease.

BBC scraps climate change bias-athon

The BBC has abandoned plans for Planet Relief, a 'telethon' to raise awareness about climate change, which was being touted as a cross between Comic Relief (an annual BBC cringe-fest in which people give money to various good causes because comedians tell them to) and Al Gore's mega-flop Live Earth. The report says:

The decision comes after executives said it was not the BBC's job to lead opinion on climate change.

Which is exactly what they’ve been doing for the past several years – so what’s changed? The report admits that:

…against the backdrop of intense internal debates about impartiality, senior news editors expressed misgivings that Planet Relief was too "campaigning" in nature and would have left the Corporation open to the charge of bias.

There has indeed been intense internal debate, with various senior BBC figures criticising the corporation for ‘editorialising’ on climate change – and this in the wake of a report by the BBC itself which essentially acknowledged that it was infected with a left-liberal culture.

The BBC claims it scrapped Planet Relief because audiences 'prefer factual output on climate change'. This is a non-sequitor of course, because the BBC’s factual programmes on climate change are every bit as biased as Planet Relief promised to be.

The real reason for the decision appears to be that the BBC realises the public is becoming sick of hysterical media coverage of the subject, as the failure of Live Earth demonstrated, so the BBC has decided it can have more influence on public opinion by dressing its editorialising up as ‘factual’ programming.

Not surprisingly, environmentalists have slammed the BBC’s decision as "cowardice", (damn, foiled by those pesky well-funded deniers again!). The report adds:

A number of right-wing commentators such as the Daily Mail's Keith Waterhouse also criticised the idea.

The writer, environment correspondent and global warming doomsayer Richard Black, is clearly allowing his frustration to get to him here. You’ll notice that you’ll rarely, if ever, see a commentator referred to as ‘left-wing’ by the BBC.

Interestingly, however, Black adds that ‘Many blogs run by climate skeptics groups regularly accuse the BBC of bias’, and I think this is the really interesting point in all of this. Bloggers, have, of course been at the forefront of the resistance to claims that the debate is over, and have enabled research by skeptical scientists, which previously would have been confined to science magazines and easily suppressed by a hostile media, to be seen by millions.

Another area where bloggers have led the way is in exposing media bias. A few years ago it was almost impossible for the public to complain about biased reporting by the BBC. You could write to them, or phone them, and your complaint would be duly noted before disappearing into the system. Only a few ‘right-wing’ journalists and Tory MPs were able to draw attention to dishonest or misleading reports with any effect.

Blogs have changed all that, and brought together thousands of people who have been quietly seething at the BBC for years, but felt they were powerless to do anything about it; complaints about bias now appear daily, both on dedicated 'Beeb-watch' sites and mainstream blogs, and every omission, half-truth and lie is quickly thrown back in the faces of those responsible.

There are clearly decent people in the BBC who are truly committed to impartiality, but I think we can chalk this one up to the bloggers.

UPDATE: Thanks to Junk Science for linking, and a warming welcome to all you well-funded deniers. I've only been going a month, so do check out some previous posts while you're here; the above piece doesn't fully articulate my admiration for Albert Gore Jr.

Ancient Gore-worshipping tribes discovered

It’s reassuring to know that there are remote corners of the earth that remain uncorrupted by the ravages or modernity; where the people live a simpler, more spiritual life, and where they still take Al Gore seriously.

In a gushing, uncritical story littered with generalisations and inaccuracies, the BBC reports that hill tribes in a remote part of India are honouring the world’s favourite hypocrite, fantasist and serial liar for his efforts to promote awareness of climate change.
The Khasi tribes in the Indian state of Meghalaya – a noble people renowned for their expertise in tropospheric temperature analysis and climate modelling – claim their way of life is under threat from global warming.

"We hope Mr Gore would be able to bring global attention to what we are facing in our part of the world," Meghalaya parliament member Robert Kharshing said.

"This whole thing called climate change is affecting us the most."

The report coos that ‘Meghalaya - literally "Abode of the Clouds" - is home to the towns of Cherrapunji and Mawsynram, which vie for the title of wettest place on earth’.

But rampant deforestation and global warming mean these areas are getting less rain, while the soil is not able to hold water that does arrive, environmentalists say.

Surely, if this is the wettest place on earth, they’re not going to miss a bit of rain – and anyway, aren’t the alarmists always telling us that global warming will mean more rain?

But there’s more:

The tribes people say that they are also at risk from a greater influx of migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh, where global warming has increased the demand for living space because large coastal regions have become submerged.

Of course no evidence is offered to support this claim. Bangladesh has always suffered from cyclones and other storms, and its geography makes it particularly vulnerable to flooding – I can remember regular appeals to alleviate such disasters at least 30 years ago. There’s no proof that global warming has led to an increase in the severity of storms, or in the rate of sea level rise, in Bangladesh or anywhere else.

But none of this is to take away from Gore’s achievement. A spokeswoman said the Goracle was "humbled" to hear of the award, but was unsure if he could attend the ceremony.

He is, after all a busy man – so little time, so much misinformation to disseminate! Then again, perhaps he won’t be going because he’s heard that the award will consist of traditional gifts, including local handicrafts, and a "small amount of money".

Don’t these peasants know who they’re dealing with? If you want Gore to come to town you’re going to need to find an extremely large amount of money.

Another day, another scare story

The BBC's global warming scare story of the day claims that climate change 'may carry a higher risk of flooding than was previously thought'. It's a particularly un-earth shattering piece about CO2 possibly affecting the ability of plants to release excess water into the atmosphere, causing the ground to become saturated – but it does contain a couple of interesting points.

For a start, the report says: "The findings suggest computer models of future climate change may need to be revised in order to plan for coming decades." What? Are they saying that existing computer models could be wrong?

Then, a few paragraphs later: "A team led by Dr Richard Betts from the Met Office has modelled how this will affect climate change predictions."

So let me get this straight: the current, hopelessly inaccurate and widely discredited climate change models may need to be revised based on assumptions reached via more computer modelling. A case of two plus two equalling five if ever there was one.

Even if the research proves correct, however, the scientists concede that the ground-saturation effect will have benefits, as well as causing problems:

"It's a double-edged sword," said Dr Betts, "it means that increases in drought due to climate change could be less severe as plants lose less water.

"On the other hand, if the land is saturated more often, you might expect that intense rainfall events are more likely to cause flooding."

This is a recurring theme in the climate change debate: even if warming beyond that caused by naturally occurring climate and solar cycles is happening (which hasn't been proven), and even if man is causing it (which hasn't been proven either), any warming will certainly have positive consequences which will mitigate, and possibly outweigh, the negative effects.

In this case the BBC's report only concedes this fact in a single line at the end of the story, while the headline focuses purely on the flooding risk – but even this is an improvement on most of its reporting, which relentlessly hammers home the 'we're all doomed' message, and refuses to report on the dozens of studies published in the last few months that suggest otherwise.

A case in point: the BBC has largely declined to report on a number of studies that suggest the Earth's climate is largely driven by the output of the Sun (although the fairly reliable Newsnight programme and its website did feature Nigel Calder and Henrik Svensmark's book The Chilling Stars).

However, when British researchers published an article claiming there was no link between the sun and global warming, the BBC, and in particular environment correspondent Richard Black, jumped all over it (the report was remarkably similar to this one from a couple of years ago), with Black crowing that the new research "appears to have put a large, probably fatal nail in this intriguing and elegant hypothesis".

Since then, the report that Black got so excited about has itself been debunked in several articles, including two published by the US-based Science and Public Policy Institute.

The first article concludes: 'The authors of the paper are reported to have been “galvanized” into writing it as a response to “misleading media reports” regarding the role of the Sun. Accordingly, there is evidence of political motivation rather than objective scientific research.' The second article concludes: 'This paper is so flawed that it is remarkable that it was published.'

The BBC hasn't, as yet, seen fit to report on either article.

Gore to spend $500 million on debate that's 'over'

Planet Gore at NRO reports that the world's leading advertising agencies are battling to win the account for eco-alarmists Alliance for Climate Protection, an organization formed last year by Al Gore and friends. ACP envisages spending over $100 million a year for the next three to five years.

These sums make the 'well-funded denial industry' that Gore regularly complains about look like a kitchen table operation – and that's before you start counting the hundreds of millions doled out every year by environmental charities, governments and the UN. And you have to wonder why Gore needs to spend $500 million to get his message across when the science is supposedly settled, and the debate 'over'.

Then again, it's not been a great couple of weeks for the alarmists.

Global warming takes a sabbatical

British scientists have come up with a great way of shutting down the debate on global warming for a few years – they say it's stopped for the time being, but will start again in 2010.

A major problem for the warming alarmists is that since 1998, when the global average temperature reached 14.54C (the highest figure since accurate records began, although of course it has been much higher in the past), temperatures have stubbornly refused to exceed that level; this is in spite of CO2 emissions continuing to increase – and as we all know, increased emissions are supposed to mean more warming.

Now researchers at the UK's Met Office – which famously has difficulty predicting the weather for next week, never mind next decade – are claiming that temperatures will remain stable until 2010, after which they'll rocket upwards. And how do they know this? Why, they created a computer model of course!

Undeterred by recent studies discrediting climate modeling, the Met Office scientists used "powerful computer simulations" (does anyone use feeble computer simulations?) to create "the world's first global warming forecast". So these guys were believers to start with, and, as has been well-documented, you can make a computer model show pretty much anything you want it to if you put the right data in, so if they set out to forecast global warming, it's no surprise that they found it.

According to the report, the scientists predict that "temperatures will stall because of natural climate effects that have seen the Southern Ocean and tropical Pacific cool over the past couple of years". After 2010 they will begin to rise steadily, and after 2014 they'll increase more rapidly.

So this allows at least three or four years for the alarmists to pedal their wares; for governments to levy taxes on travel and all manner of other things "for the sake of the planet"; and for businesses to push us towards buying more expensive 'eco-friendly' products. And if anyone points out that temperatures aren't actually rising they can say: "We know that, but they will."

For anyone who still thinks the science is 'settled', here's a video of some real scientists, as opposed to weathermen, working with actual evidence, as opposed to computer predictions:



Update: This just in from Tim Blair – Nasa has been checking its figures, and has revealed that the hottest year on record is not, in fact, 1998 but 1934. Yet another setback for the alarmists. All bets are off!

Daily Show on Live Earth

This just about covers all the bases of stupidity and hypocrisy…