Global Warming Policy Foundation
7 July 2014
British Public Want BBC Licence Fee Scrapped
What explains the incredible intolerance, belligerance, and stunning dogmatism of the climate central planners? They really can’t allow a debate, because they will certainly and rightly lose. When that is certain, the only way forward is to rage. If you want tolerance and humility, and a willingness to defer to the evidence and gradual process of scientific discovery, you will find it among those who have no desire to manage the world from the top down. –Jeffrey Tucker, Liberty Me, 19 June 2014
1) Matt Ridley: The BBC Has Lost Its Balance Over Climate Change – The Times, 7 July 2014
2) British Public Want BBC Licence Fee Scrapped – The Daily Telegraph, 7 July 2014
3) The BBC’s Green Agenda & The New Censorship Mentality – Bishop Hill, 7 July 2014
4) Jeffrey Tucker: The Rage Of The Climate Central Planners – Liberty Me, 19 June 2014
5) Editorial: Climate Of Conformity – The Wall Street Journal, 6 July 2014
The BBC’s behaviour grows ever more bizarre. Committed by charter to balanced reporting, it has now decided formally that it was wrong to allow balance in a debate between rival guesses about the future. In rebuking itself for having had the gall to interview Nigel Lawson on the Today programme about climate change earlier this year, it issued a statement containing this gem: “Lord Lawson’s views are not supported by the evidence from computer modelling and scientific research.” The evidence from computer modelling? The phrase is an oxymoron. A model cannot, by definition, provide evidence: it can provide a prediction to test against real evidence. –Matt Ridley, The Times, 7 July 2014
The BBC bends over backwards to give air time to minority campaigners on matters such as fracking, genetically modified crops, and alternative medicine. Biologists who thinks GM crops are dangerous, doctors who thinks homeopathy works and engineers who think fracking has contaminated aquifers are far rarer than climate sceptics. Yet Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth spokesmen are seldom out of Broadcasting House. So the real reason for the BBC’s double standard becomes clear: dissent in the direction of more alarm is always encouraged; dissent in the direction of less alarm is to be suppressed. –Matt Ridley, The Times, 7 July 2014
More than half the British public think the television licence fee should be scrapped and the BBC forced to find new ways to fund itself, according to a poll published today. The broadcaster should generate income from advertising rather than relying on taxes or higher licence fee funds, the findings suggest. The results, from a survey of more than 2,000 people by ComRes, come as ministers and BBC executives prepare for the government’s review of the broadcaster’s charter in 2016. The new Culture Secretary, Sajid Javid, has indicated he is prepared to be radical in reconsidering the BBC’s funding. –Tim Ross, The Daily Telegraph, 7 July 2014
Climate sceptics are influencing government at the highest level, former energy secretary Chris Huhne argued this week. The likes of former Conservative chancellor Lord Nigel Lawson and his climate sceptic think-tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) are “fomenting dissent” on climate action, according to Huhne. This is holding prime minister and Conservative leader David Cameron back from delivering on his earlier green ambitions, Huhne implied. Addressing a solar industry conference on Monday, Huhne said: “Within the governing coalition, there are Tory supporters like the former chancellor Lord Lawson, who are actively fomenting dissent in this whole [green] agenda. And his Global Warming Policy Foundation believes that renewable subsidies are a waste of money. As a result of those snipers, the prime minister, who made his name hugging a husky and declaring that this would be ‘the greenest government ever,’ has put his tin hat on. He has yet to make a single major speech on renewable energy or on climate change.” –Megan Darby, Responding to Climate Change, 4 July 2014
The BBC has announced a series of measures to make it more difficult to challenge green narratives on the BBC, and this is obviously going to lead to new waves of ecodrivel on the national broadcaster’s output. Such liberal spirits! Couldn’t they just shortcut the process and silence everyone except the BBC and the Guardian? –Andrew Montford, Bishop Hill, 7 July 2014
As loyal left-wingers go, Caleb Rossiter is a trouper. He’s supported every left of center cause going back to the Cold War, but lately he’s become a partial dissenter against the new religion of climate change. And now he’s been put out in the cold. Mr. Rossiter’s fate is further evidence of the left’s climate of intellectual conformity. If you disagree with the orthodoxy on climate change, you aren’t merely wrong, you must be banished from public debate. –Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 6 July 2014
1) Matt Ridley: The BBC Has Lost Its Balance Over Climate Change
The Times, 7 July 2014
The corporation now seems to take its orders from the green lobby and is generating alarm over the environment
The BBC’s behaviour grows ever more bizarre. Committed by charter to balanced reporting, it has now decided formally that it was wrong to allow balance in a debate between rival guesses about the future. In rebuking itself for having had the gall to interview Nigel Lawson on the Today programme about climate change earlier this year, it issued a statement containing this gem: “Lord Lawson’s views are not supported by the evidence from computer modelling and scientific research.”
The evidence from computer modelling? The phrase is an oxymoron. A model cannot, by definition, provide evidence: it can provide a prediction to test against real evidence. In the debate in question, Lord Lawson said two things: it was not possible to attribute last winter’s heavy rain to climate change with any certainty, and the global surface temperature has not warmed in the past 15 to 17 years. He was right about both, as his debate opponent, Sir Brian Hoskins, confirmed.
As for the models, here is what Dr Vicky Pope of the Met Office said in 2007 about what their models predicted: “By 2014, we’re predicting that we’ll be 0.3 degrees warmer than 2004. Now just to put that into context, the warming over the past century and a half has only been 0.7 degrees, globally . . . So 0.3 degrees, over the next ten years, is pretty significant . . . These are very strong statements about what will happen over the next ten years.”
In fact, global surface temperature, far from accelerating upwards, has cooled slightly in the ten years since 2004 on most measures. The Met Office model was out by a country mile. But the BBC thinks that it was wrong even to allow somebody to challenge the models, even somebody who has written a bestselling book on climate policy, held one of the highest offices of state and founded a think-tank devoted to climate change policy. The BBC regrets even staging a live debate between him and somebody who disagrees with him, in which he was robustly challenged by the excellent Justin Webb (of these pages).
And why, pray, does the BBC think this? Because it had a complaint from a man it coyly describes as a “low-energy expert”, Mr Chit Chong, who accused Lord Lawson of saying on the programme that climate change was “all a conspiracy”.
Lawson said nothing of the kind, as a transcript shows. Mr Chong’s own curriculum vitae boasts that he “has been active in the Green party for 25 years and was the first Green councillor to be elected in London”, and that he “has a draught-proofing and insulation business in Dorset and also works as an environmental consultant”.
So let’s recap. On the inaccurate word of an activist politician with a vested financial and party interest, the BBC has decided that henceforth nobody must be allowed to criticise predictions of the future on which costly policies are based. No more appearances for Ed Balls, then, because George Osborne’s models must go unchallenged.
By the way, don’t bother to write and tell me that Lord Lawson is not a scientist. The BBC also rebuked itself last week for allowing an earth scientist with dissenting views on to Radio 4. Professor Bob Carter was head of the department of earth sciences at James Cook University in Australia for 17 years. He’s published more than 100 papers mainly in the field of paleoclimatology. So bang goes that theory.
The background to this is that the BBC recently spent five years fighting a pensioner named Tony Newbery, including four days in court with six lawyers, to prevent Mr Newbery seeing the list of 28 participants at a BBC seminar in 2006 of what it called “the best scientific experts” on climate change.
This was the seminar that persuaded the BBC it should no longer be balanced in its coverage of climate change. A blogger named Maurizio Morabito then found the list on the internet anyway. Far from consisting of the “best scientific experts” it included just three scientists, the rest being green activists, with a smattering of Dave Spart types from the church, the government and the insurance industry.
Following that debacle, the BBC commissioned a report from a geneticist, Steve Jones, which it revisited in a further report to the BBC Trust last week. The Jones report justified a policy of banning sceptics under the term “false balance”. This takes the entirely sensible proposition that reporters do not have to, say, interview a member of the Flat Earth Society every time they mention a round-the-world yacht race, and stretches it to the climate debate.
Which is barmy for two blindingly obvious reasons: first, the UN’s own climate projections contain a range of outcomes from harmless to catastrophic, so there is clearly room for debate; and second, this is an argument about the future not the present, and you cannot have certainty about the future.
The BBC bends over backwards to give air time to minority campaigners on matters such as fracking, genetically modified crops, and alternative medicine. Biologists who thinks GM crops are dangerous, doctors who thinks homeopathy works and engineers who think fracking has contaminated aquifers are far rarer than climate sceptics. Yet Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth spokesmen are seldom out of Broadcasting House.
So the real reason for the BBC’s double standard becomes clear: dissent in the direction of more alarm is always encouraged; dissent in the direction of less alarm is to be suppressed.
I sense that some presenters are growing irritated by their bosses’ willingness to take orders from the green movement.
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2) British Public Want BBC Licence Fee Scrapped
The Daily Telegraph, 7 July 2014
Tim Ross
More than half the public think the television licence fee should be scrapped and the BBC forced to find new ways to fund itself, according to a poll published today.
The broadcaster should generate income from advertising rather than relying on taxes or higher licence fee funds, the findings suggest.
There is also substantial support for replacing the licence fee with a subscription charge which is paid only by those wanting to view BBC programmes.
The results, from a survey of more than 2,000 people by ComRes, come as ministers and BBC executives prepare for the government’s review of the broadcaster’s charter in 2016.
The new Culture Secretary, Sajid Javid, has indicated he is prepared to be radical in reconsidering the BBC’s funding. He told the Telegraph in May that many families find the current £145.50 licence fee “a lot of money” to pay each year.
The poll, commissioned by the Whitehouse Consultancy media analysts, found 51 per cent would support the idea of abolishing the licence fee and making the BBC fund itself.
They backed the move even if it led to advertisements during programmes, a cut in the number of original programmes the BBC produces the abolition of the BBC’s “public service” broadcast duty.
A third of those questioned in the poll supported the idea of abolishing the licence fee in favour of a subscription model.
3) The BBC’s Green Agenda & The New Censorship Mentality
Bishop Hill, 7 July 2014
Andrew Montford
The BBC has announced a series of measures to make it more difficult to challenge green narratives on the BBC, and this is obviously going to lead to new waves of ecodrivel on the national broadcaster’s output.
Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the Guardian’s Catherine Bennett is exuding a certain cheeriness and general satisfaction with this state of affairs:
Following successful complaints, we should soon be hearing much less – on the BBC at least – from the climate change hobbyist Lord Lawson. An edition of the Today programme that treated the former chancellor’s outlandish hunches to the same sober consideration as the evidence-based conclusions of Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, of Imperial College London, has led to an apology – and a further reconsideration of editorial balance. Having assessed the Lawson v the Academic Mainstream dialogue, in which the former remarked that 2013 had been “unusually quiet” for tropical storms, the head of the BBC’s Complaints Unit said: “Minority opinions and sceptical views should not be treated as if it were on an equal footing with the scientific consensus.”
For the avoidance of doubt, tropical storms were indeed unusually low in 2013, so let I will just say charitably that Ms Bennett’s insinuation that it was otherwise suggests she may not be the sharpest tool in the box. But she wouldn’t be the first Guardian journalist to suffer from learning difficulties.
Ms Bennett is also turning her grey matter to the juicy question of who else might be excluded from the airwaves and concludes that religious people should be next.
But proponents of the slippery slope argument must be asking: where will it all end? Is irrationality itself at risk? If a man of Lord Lawson’s stature can be marginalised simply for promulgating obviously fanatical rubbish supported only by anecdote and untested assertions, what could this mean for, say, religious authorities who are deferred to far more regularly than he ever was? Must they, too, be denied their traditional platform, condemning the fashionable consensus on anything from gay marriage and abortion to Sunday trading and the right to die, for no better reason than these activities contravene some personal take on holy writ?
It does seem a little unfair, for example, that while Lawson is discouraged from airing opinions that occasionally had to do with actual weather conditions, a religious campaigner such as Andrea Williams, a member of the General Synod and chief spokesperson for her own pressure group, Christian Concern, should continue to be accepted as a respectable pundit……
Such liberal spirits! Couldn’t they just shortcut the process and silence everyone except the BBC and the Guardian?
Meanwhile, it’s interesting to observe in action the BBC’s new policy of sidelining views outwith the scientific consensus. On the World at One the other day we had a piece on fracking from David Shukman. This was moderately balanced, although not so balanced that Shukman didn’t bring up the old “taps on fire” story (which might be better renamed as the “pants on fire” story – it’s almost as if it’s simply too good a story for the “science” corps at the BBC to let go of). Nevertheless it’s interesting to see it given a completely uncritical airing by Shukman. I had thought that the BBC said that fringe views on science would be announced as such.
But perhaps there’s a get-out for BBC journalists.
4) Jeffrey Tucker: The Rage Of The Climate Central Planners
Liberty Me, 19 June 2014
What explains the incredible intolerance, belligerance, and stunning dogmatism of the climate central planners? They really can’t allow a debate, because they will certainly and rightly lose. When that is certain, the only way forward is to rage.
Then the other day that changed. For the first time ever, the topic of climate change and policy response came up. I casually dismissed the idea that mandatory steps away from industrialization plus global regulatory controls could accomplish anything. Plus, how can we really know the relation between cause and effect, cost and benefit, problem and solution?
These are not radical points. The same crew — tax-funded experts and functionaries — that claims to be able to fix global temperature and save humanity from melting ice caps decades from now also said 25 years ago that they would bring peace, happiness, and understanding to Iraq. They spent $2.4 trillion and smashed a civilization.
This is what bureaucrats do. They always pretend to know what they cannot really know, and are more than happy to squander other people’s money and liberty in order to realize their dreams. When they screw up, no one pays the price. This is why government almost always, make that always, gets it wrong.
Whatever the problem, government is not the answer. Hardly any proposition concerning life on earth strikes me as more obvious.
So, my tossed-off, slightly dismissive comments on the global warming crusade didn’t seem so outlandish to me. I was merely extending F.A. Hayek’s “knowledge problem.”
We can’t know with certainty whether, to what extent, and with what result, and in light of possible countervailing factors, how climate change (especially not 50 years from now) really affects life on earth. We can’t know the precise causal factors and their weight relative to the noise in our models, much less the kinds of coercive solutions to apply and whether they have been applied correctly and with what outcomes, much less the costs and benefits.
We can’t know any of that before or after such possible solutions have been applied. Science requires a process and unrelenting trial and error, learning and experimentation, the humility to admit error and the driving passion to discover truth. In other words, real science requires freedom, not central planning. The idea that any panel of experts can have the requisite knowledge to make such grand decisions for the globe is outlandish and contrary to pretty much everything we know.
Plus, throw politics into the mix and matters get worse. From everything I’ve read, I’m convinced that fear over climate change (the ultimate public goods “problem”) is the last and best hope for those lustful to rule the world by force. Some people just want to run the world, and this entire nightmare scenario that posits that our high standard of living is causing the world to heat up and burn is the latest and greatest excuse. And that remains true whether or not everything they claim to be true is all true or all nonsense.
In my conversation with my friend, I didn’t say all of this; I just hinted at it vaguely. It was enough. He began to shake. He turned white and began to pace. He called me a denialist. He was horrified to discover that his good friend turns out to be some kind of extremist weirdo who disparages science. He began to accuse me of believing in things I never said, of failing to read the science (though later admitting that he hadn’t read the science).
I stood there stunned that I could have so quickly and inadvertently changed the whole dynamic of our conversation and even friendship — all for having suggested that something seemed a bit out of whack with mainstream opinion on this topic.
This is not the first time this has happened. In fact, I should have come to expect it by now. Every time this subject comes up with anyone who favors government action on climate change, the result has been the same. We seem to be unable to have a rational conversation. It’s like an article of faith for them, and I’m suddenly the dangerous heretic who believes the world is flat.
Now, in light of this, I read Paul Krugman this morning. He writes in his column: “Read or watch any extended debate over climate policy and you’ll be struck by the venom, the sheer rage, of the denialists.”
The denialists? My whole experience has been the opposite. By denialists, I’m assuming he means people who doubt the merit of his grand central plan for the world economy. Among them, I’ve found a vast range of views, an open mindedness, and curiosity about the full range of opinion, and, quite often, an attitude that seems to me — if anything — to be far too quick to defer to all main conventions of this debate.
I have no interest in taking on the science of climatology but every time I’ve looked into this in depth, I’ve found that the consensus is far more loose than people like Krugman would suggest. Real scientists do not have the intensity of certainty that the politicians and pundits demand they have.
Discerning cause and effect, cost and benefit, problem and solution, in a field that touches on the whole of the social and natural science — come on. We are kidding ourselves if we think there is just one way to look at this.
If you want tolerance and humility, and a willingness to defer to the evidence and gradual process of scientific discovery, you will find it among those who have no desire to manage the world from the top down.
What can we say about those who want to empower a global coterie of elites to make the decision about what technologies we can use and how much under the guise of controlling something so gigantically amorphous and difficult to measure, detect, and precisely manage as earth’s surface temperature?
This is a level of chutzpah that surpasses the wildest fantasies of any socialist planner.
5) Editorial: Climate Of Conformity
The Wall Street Journal, 6 July 2014
Mr. Rossiter’s fate is further evidence of the left’s climate of intellectual conformity. If you disagree with the orthodoxy on climate change, you aren’t merely wrong, you must be banished from public debate.
The Institute for Policy Studies terminated Mr. Rossiter’s fellowship two days after he wrote a May 5 op-ed for these pages. Mr. Rossiter, who is also an American University adjunct professor of math and statistics, argued that the computer modeling used to support claims that the earth is headed for a climate catastrophe is far from definitive. But more important from a moral point of view, he wrote that limiting fossil fuels would make it harder for Africa to escape poverty.
In a May 7 email, IPS Director John Cavanagh and Foreign Policy in Focus co-director Emira Woods informed Mr. Rossiter that, “Unfortunately, we now feel that your views on key issues, including climate science, climate justice, and many aspects of U.S. policy to Africa, diverge so significantly from ours that a productive working relationship is untenable.”
So after a 23-year association, Mr. Rossiter got the boot. Some readers may recall IPS as a stalwart opponent of U.S. policy during the long twilight struggle with the Soviet Union. Mr. Rossiter says he agrees with the institute on almost everything and calls it “the only anti-imperialist think tank in D.C.”
Mr. Cavanagh says the termination was “a respect issue”: Mr. Rossiter “didn’t reach out to the people who work on those issues and he implied in the piece that if you didn’t agree with him you wanted Africans to be without electricity in the dark. That’s not our position.”
Mr. Rossiter says his support for fossil fuels for Africa was well known at IPS even before his fellowship began. There is a “right to development,” he told us, and when the developed world is “denying, even to South Africa which is a democratic government, that right, it strikes me as cultural imperialism.” He says his “biggest problem” with climate-change theory “is with the certainty that people express. For years I have tried to get people at IPS to come to my classes where I teach statistics. I think they don’t come because they think it lends credence to the other side if you debate the topic.”
When Mr. Rossiter pushed for a climate debate this spring, Mr. Cavanagh replied in an email: “My opposition to a future based on fossil fuels goes way beyond the math. It is rooted in one of Emira’s arguments, that as long as we’re dependent on fossil fuels, we’ll keep building bases in other countries to grab their oil. And, I’m watching what fossil fuel extraction has meant to indigenous peoples, to the people of Alberta.”
