UPDATE2: “404 Page not found” now at the BBC for this video on Monday Feb16th. It seems they’ve pulled it. Too much “negative feedback” I suppose. Readers be on the alert for any retractions.
UPDATE: BBC Can’t even get their reporting correct. The reporter in this video report that accompanies the web article says that “The fear is that increased global warming could set off what’s called negative feedback…..” and that now we are in “scenarios unexplored by the models”. No kidding, it’s that bad. For those of you that don’t know, some alarmists claim that “negative climate feedback is as real as the Easter Bunny, which is what makes this BBC factual error so hilarious.
Readers please let the BBC know that they have no idea what they are talking about. Just click here. – Anthony
Click above to watch the BBC video
Guest post by Steven Goddard
On Wednesday, normally stalwart UK global warming promoter – The Guardian, ran this remarkable headline, which was also covered here on WUWT:
‘Apocalyptic climate predictions’ mislead the public, say experts’
The Met Office Hadley Centre, one of the most prestigious research facilities in the world, says recent “apocalyptic predictions” about Arctic ice melt and soaring temperatures are as bad as claims that global warming does not exist. Such statements, however well-intentioned, distort the science and could undermine efforts to tackle carbon emissions, it says.
Undaunted and defiant, their comrades in global warming arms at the BBC, chose this as the lead story for Sunday morning:
‘Global warming ‘underestimated’
The severity of global warming over the next century will be much worse than previously believed, a leading climate scientist has warned.
….
“We are basically looking now at a future climate that is beyond anything that we’ve considered seriously in climate policy,” he said. Prof Field said the 2007 report, which predicted temperature rises between 1.1C and 6.4C over the next century, seriously underestimated the scale of the problem. “
BBC employs the old standby icon - a polar bear
Prof Field said rising temperatures could thaw Arctic permafrost
One fatal flaw with the BBC story is that Chris Field is not a climate scientist, as they claimed. He is actually a Professor of Biology in an Ecology Department. So how does the BBC choose their headlines? In matters of global warming, apparently the apocalyptic words of one American ecologist overrule those of the UK’s own government climate scientists at The Met Office. Chris Field clearly does not have any credentials to be making the climate claims the BBC reported. This looks more and more like a Shakespearean comedy every day.For them all together; which maintained so politica state of evil that they will not admit any goodpart to intermingle with them.William Shakespeare – from ‘Much Ado About Nothing’
This is essentially another “they’ve got it wrong” paper (UHI this time)”
Dismissive, arrogant, decidedly unnuanced. As is your characterization of the arguments as merely A or not A.
I have nothing more to say except perhaps to thank you for the opportunity of presenting the link to the readers.
Have a nice day.
Brendan H
February 16, 2009 11:18 pm
Jeff Alberts: “Therefore they become biased in what they report and how they report it, sensationalizing the mundane in order to get and keep people watching.”
News organisations have their own values, which include shock and horror. However, media organisations that have a wide and varied audience and a brand to protect also have an incentive to get it right. They don’t always get it right, but the diverse readership and the public nature of the mainstream media acts as a brake on unbridled speculation.
And journalistic news practice usually requires the checking of at least the major facts underlying any issue – a constraint that is absent on, say, blogs, which usually don’t bother to go to the source for confirmation.
This is not to diss blogs, which have their own strengths, and are not so different from the mainstream. They are somewhat similar to the opinion and features pages of the MSM, which permit, and indeed require, an individual point of view.
Jeff Alberts:
From what I have read, geothermal energy is part of the reason why there is liquid water (even at times underwater lakes) at the bottom of glaciers. But the movement of the ice itself generates friction, which means heat, which means melting water.
A similar process occurs when people ice skate or move sleds or sleighs over ice.
Harleigh Kyson Jr.
Part of the BBC problem stems from 2004, they did a weeks programming on the the UK’s Chief Scientist Sir David King who allegedly was the author of the risk assessment “climate change was a greater threat than terrorism”.
He wasn’t I was. It was part of an anti war post in December 2002 for a UN report commissioned by the UK Government. The BBC accepted I was the original author and was better informed than Sir David, but despite knowing he was not the original author, they went ahead promoting him as the author. The BBC news planning editor said I wasn’t a media celebrity or personality and news was about ratings.
Hence everyone has been misinformed by a subtle but official case of “Chinese whispers”. The UN group did summarise my work correctly but the UK Government and BBC put a different spin on it.
Anyone who wants a link to the original assessment, please contact me through our site. Celtic Lion
Thanks
Roger
PS I think the BBC have got their feedbacks wrong. NEGATIVE feedback is a homeostatic self regulating mechanism. POSITIVE feedback is the runaway mechanism
Jeff Alberts:
Please excuse me for saying in my last message that “there is liquid water (even at times underwater lakes) at the bottom of glaciers.”
I wish I could re-edit this post to say “there is liquid water, even lakes here and there, at the bottom of glaciers.”
(I read about them–I forget where–in an article about Antarctic glaciers. I don’t know how the existence of these lakes was verified–perhaps by analyzing seismic activity in the area of the glaciers. Obviously the evidence had to be indirect.)
Harleigh Kyson Jr.
hkyson (00:51:39) :
From what I have read, geothermal energy is part of the reason why there is liquid water (even at times underwater lakes) at the bottom of glaciers. But the movement of the ice itself generates friction, which means heat, which means melting water.
A similar process occurs when people ice skate or move sleds or sleighs over ice.
So then this would have nothing to do with ambient air temperature, correct?
Jeff Alberts
February 17, 2009 8:48 am
Brendan H (23:18:46) :
News organisations have their own values, which include shock and horror. However, media organisations that have a wide and varied audience and a brand to protect also have an incentive to get it right. They don’t always get it right, but the diverse readership and the public nature of the mainstream media acts as a brake on unbridled speculation.
Really? Do we see equally prominent retractions when they get it wrong? Or are they buried in comments attached to letters to the editor? This particular story is a case in point. They apparently just took the story down instead of posting a retraction.
Steven Goddard
February 17, 2009 9:41 am
hkyson,
You can take “sledding glaciers” in Greenland off your list of disasters to worry about
FALL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION:
Galloping Glaciers of Greenland Have Reined Themselves In
Richard A. Kerr
Ice loss in Greenland has had some climatologists speculating that global warming might have brought on a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level. But glaciologists reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting that Greenland ice’s Armageddon has come to an end. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/323/5913/458a
Temperatures in the interior of the Greenland ice sheet rarely if ever get above freezing.
Mr Green Genes
February 17, 2009 1:06 pm
Steven Goddard (05:46:38):-
More on stupidity, from Frank Zappa.
Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.
and
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
No-one should be taken in by the BBC. As many others have already posted, the BBC doesn’t have a huge amount of credibility any more. It certainly acts like the mouthpiece of a discredited (in more ways than one) government which is getting more extreme by the day.
In the UK, it is now illegal to take a photograph of a police officer.
George E. Smith
February 17, 2009 2:42 pm
“”” Jeff Alberts (19:44:07) :
hkyson (18:54:44) :
The general scientific consensus is that global warming is real and that it is accelerating. What is scary is that glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica are lubricated by liquid water where they touch the earth–which could accelerate their rate of calving into the sea. If all our planet’s landlocked water melts into the sea, our coastal cities will be flooded.
How exactly do you get liquid water under hundreds of meters of ice due to a minor increase in air temp? I’ve heard this hypothesis, but have seen no evidence to back it up. The only way I can think of where this would be possible would be due to plate tectonics/vulcanism, but that would be pretty localized. “””
Well under pressure, the freezing point of water goes down, so under enough ice pressure, the freezing point could be depressed so much that it is below the ice temperqature which would then melt.
Now at a place like Vostok Station, as you get deeper, and the freezing point is depressed, you also start running into thermal energy coming from the rocks below, so the ambient temperature rises as you go down, while the freezing point is dropping, so eventually you get water.
Vostok station is sitting on top of Lake Vostok, so they can’t drill any deeper, without breaking through the ice, and into the lake; and they don’t want to break into the lake, until they have some scientific reason to do that, because they don’t want to contaminate the lake water.
But you are correct the air temperature isn’t going to do diddley to the bottom of the ice
George
Good to see that the level of climate change reporting is at the same low levels in the U.K and it is here in Australia. Sadly people are using the terrible bushfires we have had to push their climate change agenda’s. In Australalia the standard “polar bear” is replaced by a dry creek bed.
Brendan H
February 17, 2009 10:50 pm
Jeff Alberts: “Really? Do we see equally prominent retractions when they get it wrong?”
Admittedly, the media tends to bury their mistakes. But how many people dwell on their own? For all its faults, the mainstream media makes an effort to verify its information.
A lot of people think that ‘objective’ reporting is old hat, that the ‘he-said/she-said’ style illuminates nothing. But I believe it’s important to retain this format for straight news because it prevents the reporter from taking too many liberties with the facts and, importantly, allows the reader to make up his own mind.
Op-eds have their place, and can be a more interesting read, but their primary purpose is to persuade, and I think a commitment to inform is vital to the integrity of the media.
Tommy
February 18, 2009 12:30 pm
Not sure if this has been brought up – the link in the first post 404’d as noted, however it seems they just changed the link as it is up here (without the polar bear). http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7890988.stm
George E. Smith:
Thank you very much for your recent post. I did not know that under pressure the freezing point of water goes down.
Harleigh Kyson Jr.
Jeff Alberts (08:44:08) :
Dear Mr. Alberts:
In an earlier post, you quoted me as follows:
“From what I have read, geothermal energy is part of the reason why there is liquid water (even at times underwater lakes) at the bottom of glaciers. But the movement of the ice itself generates friction, which means heat, which means melting water.
“A similar process occurs when people ice skate or move sleds or sleighs over ice.”
………………………………………….
After citing this text of mine, you made the following comment::
“So then this would have nothing to do with ambient air temperature, correct?”
………………………………………….
At this point, I would like to extend my remarks further:
According to what I read, the surface of the Antarctic glaciers is melting at a faster rate. This water then goes through cracks in the glacial ice to the bottom of the glaciers, where it joins other liquid water generated apparently both through geothermal heat and from heat caused by the friction of the moving glaciers, adding to the quantity of liquid water below the glaciers and making the ground much more slippery for them.
If this is true, then the slight increase in ambient air temperatures in Antarctica would indeed increase the amount of liquid water lubricating the glaciers where they touched the ground.
One other thing I have read: The glaciers in Switzerland are shrinking rather rapidly, worrying the Swiss authorities greatly because they generate a lot of their electricity in hydroelectric plants fed by these glaciers. Once they disappear, there will be no water to feed the turbines of these plants, and they will stop generating electricity.
Harleigh Kyson Jr.
For your information, Dr. Chris Field, is a co-chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a world-recognized expert in climate science. You don’t have to be a formally-named climatologist to be an expert in the science of climate change, and biology has a LOT to do with climate change in terms of biodiversity, extinction, and what life will survive the changes we will undergo in our climate. This site and its criticism of the BBC is totally inaccurate. Oh, yes, and Chris Field is also director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institute. Qualified enough to interpret climate data? Obviously. He’s no weather man. He knows what he’s talking about, much more than a “blogger” does. REPLY: It’s important that you feel comfortable with your own beliefs. – Anthony
film izle
February 24, 2009 8:14 am
The BBC report stating: “The fear is that increased global warming could set off what’s called negative feedback…..” could be correct, in which case their climate alarmism should be pointing to the risks of a new ice age, surely?
bedava film izle
February 24, 2009 8:15 am
The BBC report stating: “The fear is that increased global warming could set off what’s called negative feedback…..” could be correct, in which case their climate alarmism should be pointing to the risks of a new ice age, surely?_?
film seyret
February 24, 2009 8:15 am
Thank you very much for your recent post. I did not know that under pressure the freezing point of water goes down…
Looks like they have pulled the video now. It’s a dead link.
Wyle_E
April 3, 2009 12:51 pm
Er… Systems with negative feedback tend to stabilize. Another illustration of an old problem: news reporters who *literally* don’t know what they’re talking about.
This is essentially another “they’ve got it wrong” paper (UHI this time)”
Dismissive, arrogant, decidedly unnuanced. As is your characterization of the arguments as merely A or not A.
I have nothing more to say except perhaps to thank you for the opportunity of presenting the link to the readers.
Have a nice day.
Jeff Alberts: “Therefore they become biased in what they report and how they report it, sensationalizing the mundane in order to get and keep people watching.”
News organisations have their own values, which include shock and horror. However, media organisations that have a wide and varied audience and a brand to protect also have an incentive to get it right. They don’t always get it right, but the diverse readership and the public nature of the mainstream media acts as a brake on unbridled speculation.
And journalistic news practice usually requires the checking of at least the major facts underlying any issue – a constraint that is absent on, say, blogs, which usually don’t bother to go to the source for confirmation.
This is not to diss blogs, which have their own strengths, and are not so different from the mainstream. They are somewhat similar to the opinion and features pages of the MSM, which permit, and indeed require, an individual point of view.
Jeff Alberts:
From what I have read, geothermal energy is part of the reason why there is liquid water (even at times underwater lakes) at the bottom of glaciers. But the movement of the ice itself generates friction, which means heat, which means melting water.
A similar process occurs when people ice skate or move sleds or sleighs over ice.
Harleigh Kyson Jr.
Part of the BBC problem stems from 2004, they did a weeks programming on the the UK’s Chief Scientist Sir David King who allegedly was the author of the risk assessment “climate change was a greater threat than terrorism”.
He wasn’t I was. It was part of an anti war post in December 2002 for a UN report commissioned by the UK Government. The BBC accepted I was the original author and was better informed than Sir David, but despite knowing he was not the original author, they went ahead promoting him as the author. The BBC news planning editor said I wasn’t a media celebrity or personality and news was about ratings.
Hence everyone has been misinformed by a subtle but official case of “Chinese whispers”. The UN group did summarise my work correctly but the UK Government and BBC put a different spin on it.
Anyone who wants a link to the original assessment, please contact me through our site. Celtic Lion
Thanks
Roger
PS I think the BBC have got their feedbacks wrong. NEGATIVE feedback is a homeostatic self regulating mechanism. POSITIVE feedback is the runaway mechanism
Jeff Alberts:
Please excuse me for saying in my last message that “there is liquid water (even at times underwater lakes) at the bottom of glaciers.”
I wish I could re-edit this post to say “there is liquid water, even lakes here and there, at the bottom of glaciers.”
(I read about them–I forget where–in an article about Antarctic glaciers. I don’t know how the existence of these lakes was verified–perhaps by analyzing seismic activity in the area of the glaciers. Obviously the evidence had to be indirect.)
Harleigh Kyson Jr.
The Realist media on the internet
http://www.youwont.tv
So then this would have nothing to do with ambient air temperature, correct?
Really? Do we see equally prominent retractions when they get it wrong? Or are they buried in comments attached to letters to the editor? This particular story is a case in point. They apparently just took the story down instead of posting a retraction.
hkyson,
You can take “sledding glaciers” in Greenland off your list of disasters to worry about
FALL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION:
Galloping Glaciers of Greenland Have Reined Themselves In
Richard A. Kerr
Ice loss in Greenland has had some climatologists speculating that global warming might have brought on a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level. But glaciologists reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting that Greenland ice’s Armageddon has come to an end.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/323/5913/458a
Temperatures in the interior of the Greenland ice sheet rarely if ever get above freezing.
Steven Goddard (05:46:38):-
More on stupidity, from Frank Zappa.
Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.
and
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.
No-one should be taken in by the BBC. As many others have already posted, the BBC doesn’t have a huge amount of credibility any more. It certainly acts like the mouthpiece of a discredited (in more ways than one) government which is getting more extreme by the day.
In the UK, it is now illegal to take a photograph of a police officer.
“”” Jeff Alberts (19:44:07) :
hkyson (18:54:44) :
The general scientific consensus is that global warming is real and that it is accelerating. What is scary is that glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica are lubricated by liquid water where they touch the earth–which could accelerate their rate of calving into the sea. If all our planet’s landlocked water melts into the sea, our coastal cities will be flooded.
How exactly do you get liquid water under hundreds of meters of ice due to a minor increase in air temp? I’ve heard this hypothesis, but have seen no evidence to back it up. The only way I can think of where this would be possible would be due to plate tectonics/vulcanism, but that would be pretty localized. “””
Well under pressure, the freezing point of water goes down, so under enough ice pressure, the freezing point could be depressed so much that it is below the ice temperqature which would then melt.
Now at a place like Vostok Station, as you get deeper, and the freezing point is depressed, you also start running into thermal energy coming from the rocks below, so the ambient temperature rises as you go down, while the freezing point is dropping, so eventually you get water.
Vostok station is sitting on top of Lake Vostok, so they can’t drill any deeper, without breaking through the ice, and into the lake; and they don’t want to break into the lake, until they have some scientific reason to do that, because they don’t want to contaminate the lake water.
But you are correct the air temperature isn’t going to do diddley to the bottom of the ice
George
Good to see that the level of climate change reporting is at the same low levels in the U.K and it is here in Australia. Sadly people are using the terrible bushfires we have had to push their climate change agenda’s. In Australalia the standard “polar bear” is replaced by a dry creek bed.
Jeff Alberts: “Really? Do we see equally prominent retractions when they get it wrong?”
Admittedly, the media tends to bury their mistakes. But how many people dwell on their own? For all its faults, the mainstream media makes an effort to verify its information.
A lot of people think that ‘objective’ reporting is old hat, that the ‘he-said/she-said’ style illuminates nothing. But I believe it’s important to retain this format for straight news because it prevents the reporter from taking too many liberties with the facts and, importantly, allows the reader to make up his own mind.
Op-eds have their place, and can be a more interesting read, but their primary purpose is to persuade, and I think a commitment to inform is vital to the integrity of the media.
Not sure if this has been brought up – the link in the first post 404’d as noted, however it seems they just changed the link as it is up here (without the polar bear).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7890988.stm
George E. Smith:
Thank you very much for your recent post. I did not know that under pressure the freezing point of water goes down.
Harleigh Kyson Jr.
Jeff Alberts (08:44:08) :
Dear Mr. Alberts:
In an earlier post, you quoted me as follows:
“From what I have read, geothermal energy is part of the reason why there is liquid water (even at times underwater lakes) at the bottom of glaciers. But the movement of the ice itself generates friction, which means heat, which means melting water.
“A similar process occurs when people ice skate or move sleds or sleighs over ice.”
………………………………………….
After citing this text of mine, you made the following comment::
“So then this would have nothing to do with ambient air temperature, correct?”
………………………………………….
At this point, I would like to extend my remarks further:
According to what I read, the surface of the Antarctic glaciers is melting at a faster rate. This water then goes through cracks in the glacial ice to the bottom of the glaciers, where it joins other liquid water generated apparently both through geothermal heat and from heat caused by the friction of the moving glaciers, adding to the quantity of liquid water below the glaciers and making the ground much more slippery for them.
If this is true, then the slight increase in ambient air temperatures in Antarctica would indeed increase the amount of liquid water lubricating the glaciers where they touched the ground.
One other thing I have read: The glaciers in Switzerland are shrinking rather rapidly, worrying the Swiss authorities greatly because they generate a lot of their electricity in hydroelectric plants fed by these glaciers. Once they disappear, there will be no water to feed the turbines of these plants, and they will stop generating electricity.
Harleigh Kyson Jr.
For your information, Dr. Chris Field, is a co-chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a world-recognized expert in climate science. You don’t have to be a formally-named climatologist to be an expert in the science of climate change, and biology has a LOT to do with climate change in terms of biodiversity, extinction, and what life will survive the changes we will undergo in our climate. This site and its criticism of the BBC is totally inaccurate. Oh, yes, and Chris Field is also director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institute. Qualified enough to interpret climate data? Obviously. He’s no weather man. He knows what he’s talking about, much more than a “blogger” does.
REPLY: It’s important that you feel comfortable with your own beliefs. – Anthony
The BBC report stating: “The fear is that increased global warming could set off what’s called negative feedback…..” could be correct, in which case their climate alarmism should be pointing to the risks of a new ice age, surely?
The BBC report stating: “The fear is that increased global warming could set off what’s called negative feedback…..” could be correct, in which case their climate alarmism should be pointing to the risks of a new ice age, surely?_?
Thank you very much for your recent post. I did not know that under pressure the freezing point of water goes down…
Looks like they have pulled the video now. It’s a dead link.
Er… Systems with negative feedback tend to stabilize. Another illustration of an old problem: news reporters who *literally* don’t know what they’re talking about.
The BBC have been pushing that one a while – Even on their “science” program.
They are fatally biased towards any “left wing” agenda you can think of…