GWPF | 7 Dec 2015
BBC Trust Finds Quentin Letts Guilty Of Climate Change Heresy
The BBC tried to prevent climate sceptics from taking part in a Radio 4 programme about the Met Office. Senior BBC editors discussed the programme before it was made and agreed that it “would not feature challenge to the majority scientific view on climate change”, according to a BBC Trust ruling. Quentin Letts, presenter of What’s the Point of…the Met Office, broadcast in August, was not informed of the editors’ decision. The trust ruled that the programme seriously breached the BBC’s editorial guidelines on accuracy and impartiality and ordered that it should be deleted from iPlayer, meaning the public can no longer hear it. Mr Letts said: “It’s a bit Orwellian. There’s an amateurishness to their sinister attempts to control thought.” –Ben Webster, The Times, 5 December 2015
1) BBC Trust Condemns BBC For Failure To Censor Climate Programme – The Times, 5 December 2015
2) Quentin Letts: How The BBC Trust Found Me Guilty Of Climate Change Heresy – The Spectator, 6 December 2015
3) Do Not Read This Post – Climate Scepticism, 6 December 2015
4) Left-Wing Bias And The Damage To Science – Quillette, 4 December 2015
5) Sunday Times Claims ‘Greenhouse Gases To Fall’ – The Sunday Times, 6 December 2015
6) Annual UN Climate Ritual: Rich vs Poor (Deadlock Coming Soon) – Business Standard, 5 December 2015
7) Paris Climate Summit: Constructive Conference Or A Waste Of Time? – Al Jazeera, 5 December 2015
In July I made a short Radio 4 programme with them called What’s the Point of the Met Office?, which accidentally sent orthodox warmists into a boiling tizzy. Amid jolly stuff about the history of weather predictions and the drippiness of today’s forecasters, we touched on parliamentary lobbying done by the state-funded Met Office. All hell broke out. Cataracts and hurricanoes! I was accused of not giving a proper airing to ‘prevailing scientific opinion’. Apostasy had occurred. I was duly flogged on the Feedback programme. That was the last I thought of it until last week, when I was sent an enormous draft report from the BBC Trust’s editorial standards committee. This said I was likely to be found guilty of a ‘serious breach’ of ‘impartiality and accuracy’. The tone was akin to something from the International Criminal Court at the Hague or the Vatican in Galileo’s day. Meanwhile, my ethics and religion mates have been sentenced to hard labour on the BBC Academy’s impartiality online training module, with ‘a substantial scenario on reporting climate-change science’. At school they call this detention. –Quentin Letts, The Spectator, 6 December 2015
The BBC Trust has decreed that a light-hearted Radio 4 programme by Quentin Letts, “What’s the point of the Met Office”, which included a brief section suggesting that global warming might be a bit exaggerated, broke its guidelines on impartiality. The programme has been removed from the BBC iPlayer. In order to respect the BBC ruling, let’s have no more laughing at the Met Office. So please, no more references to Michael Fish saying we are not going to have a hurricane, and no more mention of the Met Office prediction of a barbecue summer. Henceforth, it is not appropriate to mention the video of Vicky Pope confidently predicting that 2014 would be 0.3C warmer than 2004, a prediction that turned out to be completely wrong. And whatever you do, please do not read, publicise or distribute the following transcript of the Quentin Letts programme, produced by Alex Cull, who is now undertaking a re-education course conducted by Cardinal Harrabin. –Paul Matthews, Climate Scepticism, 6 December 2015
The BBC was once supposedly a fine, respected news organisation, a public body that attempted to maintain the highest standards of impartiality, balance and accuracy. All that, even the pretense of all that, has gone out of the window in these days of relativity when one man’s terrorist is the BBC’s freedom fighter and the insidious corrupting effect of political correctness, which is anything but, being more about lies and cover up than truth in order not to hurt the feelings of the guilty. If ever there was a time when a review of the BBC was needed it is now as the BBC sinks ever faster into self-reverence and hubris to protect the privileges of the gilded eilite who milk the BBC and its licence funds filling their own pockets whilst also exploiting the BBC’s reputation and facilities to peddle their own propaganda about politics, war and climate. A prime example would be the BBC’s climate change reporting, now as corrupt and untrustworthy as anything produced by the state-run news organisations of the Soviet Union. —Biased BBC, 6 December 2015
Lee Jussim’s talk began with one of the most egregious examples of bias in recent years. He drew the audience’s attention to the paper: “NASA faked the moon landing – therefore (climate) science is a hoax.” The study was lead by Stephan Lewandowsky, and published in Psychological Science in 2013. The paper argued that those who believed that the moon landing was a hoax also believed that climate science was a fraud. After describing the study and reading the abstract, Jussim paused. Something big was coming. “But out of 1145 participants, only ten agreed that the moon landing was a hoax!” he said. “Of the study’s participants, 97.8% who thought that climate science was a hoax, did not think that the moon landing also a hoax.” Jussim explained that within the field, those on the left outnumbered those on the right by a ratio of about 10:1. So it meant that even if left-leaning and right-leaning scientists were equal in their bias, there would be at least ten times more research biased towards validating left-wing narratives than conservative narratives. –Claire Lehman, Quillette, 4 December 2015
A full blown argument between the developed and developing countries over the application of principle of common but differentiated responsibilities to the Paris agreement rocked the summit as it drew closer to the end of the first week of negotiations. With developed countries blocking any proposal to operationalize the principle in the Paris agreement through the entire week, developing countries came out with scathing comments in public. Speaking for the Like Minded Developing Countries, which includes India and China, Gurdial Singh NIjar of Malaysia said, “You (the developed countries) grew to this level of prosperity because you burnt fossil fuel at an unabated rate. You created that situation which has created this problem for us. You created the problem and now you say that we want you to share—on an equal basis—the responsibility.” –Nitin Sethi, Business Standard, 5 December 2015
1) BBC Trust Condemns BBC For Failure To Censor Climate Programme
The Times, 5 December 2015
Ben Webster
The BBC tried to prevent climate sceptics from taking part in a Radio 4 programme about the Met Office.
Senior BBC editors discussed the programme before it was made and agreed that it “would not feature challenge to the majority scientific view on climate change”, according to a BBC Trust ruling.
Quentin Letts, presenter of What’s the Point of…the Met Office, broadcast in August, was not informed of the editors’ decision. He interviewed a Conservative MP and a weather forecaster who both accused the Met Office of overstating the risks from climate change.
The trust ruled that the programme seriously breached the BBC’s editorial guidelines on accuracy and impartiality and ordered that it should be deleted from iPlayer, meaning the public can no longer hear it.
Mr Letts said: “It’s a bit Orwellian. There’s an amateurishness to their sinister attempts to control thought.”
Peter Lilley, the Conservative MP interviewed, said the BBC was trying to silence people like him who, while not denying global warming, questioned whether the world would warm as fast as the Met Office claimed.
He condemned the decision to remove the programme from iPlayer: “[The BBC] tried to censor it in advance and failed so they have censored it retrospectively and succeeded.”
In the programme, Mr Letts asked Mr Lilley whether he was a “total sceptic on man-made climate change?”:
He replied: “No, I studied physics at Cambridge, so I accept the basic thesis that…a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere, will marginally warm up the earth but I’m what’s known as a luke-warmist, one who thinks that there won’t be much warming as a result of it and that’s the scientifically proven bit of theory.
“Anything going on the alarmist scale is pure speculation. The sad thing is that they’ve become committed to a particular pseudo-scientific doctrine and now are unwilling to change their doctrine when the facts refute it.”
2) Quentin Letts: How The BBC Trust Found Me Guilty Of Climate Change Heresy
The Spectator, 6 December 2015
In July I made a short Radio 4 programme with them called What’s the Point of the Met Office?, which accidentally sent orthodox warmists into a boiling tizzy. Amid jolly stuff about the history of weather predictions and the drippiness of today’s forecasters, we touched on parliamentary lobbying done by the state-funded Met Office. All hell broke out. Cataracts and hurricanoes! The Met Office itself was unfazed but the eco-lobby, stirred by BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin, went nuts. I was accused of not giving a proper airing to ‘prevailing scientific opinion’. Apostasy had occurred. I was duly flogged on the Feedback programme.
That was the last I thought of it until last week, when I was sent an enormous draft report from the BBC Trust’s editorial standards committee. This said I was likely to be found guilty of a ‘serious breach’ of ‘impartiality and accuracy’. The tone was akin to something from the International Criminal Court at the Hague or the Vatican in Galileo’s day. Did my little programme err? I certainly didn’t try to give listeners a reverential précis of ‘prevailing scientific opinion’ — didn’t think that was my remit.
But we did have some fun interviewing an engagingly untidy climate-change sceptic called Piers Corbyn. His brother is now leader of HM Opposition. The BBC hierarchy’s overreaction to all this has been an education, as has the activism of Harrabin. Meanwhile, my ethics and religion mates have been sentenced to hard labour on the BBC Academy’s impartiality online training module, with ‘a substantial scenario on reporting climate-change science’. At school they call this detention.
An enterprising newsdesk might enquire how much the BBC spends on politically correct courses and who runs them. As for Cardinal Harrabin — for that would have been his rank in Galileo’s day — times are good. He has landed a sideline with the Open University, doing a series of climate-change interviews. We are paying. The £1.5 million project is being funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, a quango run by scientists and ‘parented’ by Sajid Javid’s Business Department. Sajid will be proud to see his budget being used in this important way.
This is an extract from Quentin Letts’s diary in this week’s Spectator. Read the full thing here.
3) Do Not Read This Post
Climate Scepticism, 6 December 2015
Paul Matthews
The BBC Trust has decreed that a light-hearted Radio 4 programme by Quentin Letts, “What’s the point of the Met Office”, which included a brief section suggesting that global warming might be a bit exaggerated, broke its guidelines on impartiality. See the verdict here, Quentin Letts’s piece here and commentary from Biased BBChere. The programme has been removed from the BBC iPlayer.
In order to respect the BBC ruling, let’s have no more laughing at the Met Office. So please, no more references to Michael Fish saying we are not going to have a hurricane, and no more mention of the Met Office prediction of a barbecue summer. Henceforth, it is not appropriate to mention the video of Vicky Pope confidently predicting that 2014 would be 0.3C warmer than 2004, a prediction that turned out to be completely wrong. And any satirical comments along the lines of “Here come de heap big warmy” will not be tolerated.
All copies of the audio of the Quentin Letts programme should be deleted, in accordance with BBC guidelines, and if you have a transcript of the programme, please delete it.
And whatever you do, please do not read, publicise or distribute the following transcript of the Quentin Letts programme, produced by Alex Cull, who is now undertaking a re-education course conducted by Cardinal Harrabin.
Full transcript of the forbidden BBC programme: What’s the Point of…? The Met Office available here
4) Left-Wing Bias And The Damage To Science
Quillette, 4 December 2015
Claire Lehman
Scientific research is becoming an exercise in groupthink
At the back of a small room at Coogee Beach, Sydney, I sat watching as a psychologist I had never heard of paced the room gesticulating. His voice was loud. Over six feet tall, his presence was imposing. It was Lee Jussim. He had come to the Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology to talk about left-wing bias in social psychology.
Left-wing bias, he said, was undermining his field. Graduate students were entering the field in order to change the world rather than discover truths1. Because of this, he said, the field was riddled with flaky research and questionable theories.
Jussim’s talk began with one of the most egregious examples of bias in recent years. He drew the audience’s attention to the paper: “NASA faked the moon landing – therefore (climate) science is a hoax.” The study was lead by Stephan Lewandowsky, and published in Psychological Science in 2013. The paper argued that those who believed that the moon landing was a hoax also believed that climate science was a fraud. The abstract stated:
We…show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scientific findings above and beyond commitment to laissez-faire free markets. This provides confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science.
After describing the study and reading the abstract, Jussim paused. Something big was coming.
“But out of 1145 participants, only ten agreed that the moon landing was a hoax!” he said. “Of the study’s participants, 97.8% who thought that climate science was a hoax, did not think that the moon landing also a hoax.”
His fellow psychologists shifted in their seats. Jussim pointed out that the level of obfuscation the authors went to, in order to disguise their actual data, was intense. Statistical techniques appeared to have been chosen that would hide the study’s true results. And it appeared that no peer reviewers, or journal editors, took the time, or went to the effort of scrutinizing the study in a way that was sufficient to identify the bold misrepresentations.
While the authors’ political motivations for publishing the paper were obvious, it was the lax attitude on behalf of peer reviewers – Jussim suggested – that was at the heart of the problems within social psychology. The field had become a community in which political values and moral aims were shared, leading to an asymmetry in which studies that reinforced left-wing narratives had come to be disproportionately represented in the literature. And this was not, to quote Stephen Colbert, because “reality had a liberal bias”. It was because social psychology had a liberal bias.
Jussim explained that within the field, those on the left outnumbered those on the right by a ratio of about 10:1. So it meant that even if left-leaning and right-leaning scientists were equal in their bias, there would be at least ten times more research biased towards validating left-wing narratives than conservative narratives. Adding in the apparent double standards in the peer review process (where studies validating left-wing narratives seemed to be easier to publish) then the bias within the field could vastly exceed the ratio of 10:1. In other words, research was becoming an exercise in groupthink.
see also The man the Royal Society honoured not once but twice
5) Sunday Times Claims ‘Greenhouse Gases To Fall’
The Sunday Times, 6 December 2015
Jonathan Leake
The world’s once-surging greenhouse gas emissions, blamed for global warming, may have gone into decline. Figures to be published this week will show that global emissions neared a plateau last year and could fall this year — even as the world economy is growing.
Scientists will say this week that man-made emissions “nearly stalled” at 37bn tonnes of CO2 last year — and are on track to stabilise or drop slightly this year.
The new figures, which will be formally published tomorrow, come at a crucial time, with politicians from 195 countries attending the UN climate talks in Paris. Their aim is to cut emissions enough to limit global warming to below 2C by 2100.
Sir Brian Hoskins, who chairs the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London and is also a member of the government’s committee on climate change, welcomed the figures.
“The importance of this is that the earlier we hit peak emissions, then the less CO2 that will have accumulated in the air and the easier it is to stay below 2C of warming. If we peak later, say in 2025, then the cuts we have to make will be much greater and it is uncertain if we could actually do it.”
The significance of the figures, produced by The Global Carbon Project (GCP), is that they show, for the first time in the modern era, that greenhouse gas emissions could be falling even as the world economy is growing. Global economic growth is projected at 3.3% for 2015 by the International Monetary Fund.
For the past three decades emissions have largely tracked the global economy, typically rising at about 2-3% a year. Only in 2008-09, when the banking crisis pushed the world into recession, was there a dip in emissions.
Last year, however, emissions stalled at 0.6% and this year they are projected to show a small decline — even though energy demand has kept on rising, at 1-2% a year. […]
Scientists said such claims must be treated with care, partly because one or two years’ data was not enough to confirm a trend and because they were based on complex statistics derived by adding up the gas, oil and coal burnt by each country. China was recently forced to revise its own figures when it found it had “lost” 600m tonnes of coal burnt in industries other than the power sector. When burnt this would generate roughly 1.8bn tonnes of CO2 — three to four times the UK’s total emissions.
The GCP research, to be published by Nature, will make clear that controlling future consumption of coal in China is crucial.
However, between them, China and India plan 1,617 new coal-fired power plants by 2030. This could reverse the apparent gains — unless clean-burn technology is deployed and alternative renewable energy generation is expanded.
REALITY CHECK: According to NOAA’s 2015 data, atmospheric CO2 has risen this year from 397.78ppm to 400.37ppm, a rise that is even faster than the average annual rate of increase during the last 10 years.
6) Annual UN Climate Ritual: Rich vs Poor (Deadlock Coming Soon)
Business Standard, 5 December 2015
Nitin Sethi
A full blown argument between the developed and developing countries over the application of principle of common but differentiated responsibilities to the Paris agreement rocked the summit as it drew closer to the end of the first week of negotiations.
With developed countries blocking any proposal to operationalize the principle in the Paris agreement through the entire week, developing countries came out with scathing comments in public. The principle of differentiation is enshrined in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and distinguishes between obligations of the rich countries, based on their historical responsibility in causing climate change, and the less onerous obligations of the developing world. All countries had previously agreed that the Paris agreement would be stitched under the UN Convention, which implied following its provisions and principles. But, at Paris the developed countries have steadfastly pushed to do away with differentiation.
Speaking for the Like Minded Developing Countries, which includes India and China, Gurdial Singh NIjar of Malaysia said, “You (the developed countries) grew to this level of prosperity because you burnt fossil fuel at an unabated rate. You created that situation which has created this problem for us. You created the problem and now you say that we want you to share—on an equal basis—the responsibility.”
“You signed on the Convention (UNFCCC). It was in 1992. You acknowledged historical responsibility. You acknowledged differentiation. You acknowledged a way out of the situation, but now you are resiling from your obligations. You assumed legally binding obligations, which you have not fulfilled.”
The previous four days had seen the developed countries block any proposal on implementing differentiation through different elements of the proposed Paris agreement. These elements of the agreement are about reducing emissions, adapting to inevitable climate change and providing what is termed in climate jargon as means of implementation – technology, finance and capacity building.
“You are trying to freeze the development pace of developing countries. This is the message we want to give you. We don’t want to persuade you. You won’t be persuaded. You talk of countries like India, China. They are big countries. Even if they add a little, it will increase a lot. Do people stop industrialization that meets the needs of the country? Do people stop eating?” Nijar added.
7) Paris Climate Summit: Constructive Conference Or A Waste Of Time?
Al Jazeera, 5 December 2015
More than 40,000 delegates from 195 countries are attending COP21 in the French capital, Paris – tasked with reaching the first truly universal climate pact.
But will the summit lead to a meaningful agreement on carbon emissions?
On this week’s Counting the Cost we show you the effects of climate change around the world, and hear all sides of the argument.
Jennifer Morgan, the director of the Climate Program at the World Resources Institute, joins Counting the Cost to discuss whether a deal can be reached.
Benny Peiser, the director of the Global Warming Policy Forum and a critic of the conventional view on global warming, addresses the relevance of such a summit.
