Internews is an organization devoted to helping out people in areas not served by an independent media:
Internews is an international media development organization whose mission is to empower local media worldwide to give people the news and information they need, the ability to connect, and the means to make their voices heard.
This sounds like a laudable goal, but like many roads paved with good intentions…well, you know where that goes. In particular, this group has a curious idea of what “balanced” reporting means when it comes to global warming alarmism:
Climate change could be the biggest story of the twenty first century, affecting societies, economies and individuals on a grand scale. Equally enormous are the adjustments that will have to be made to our energy and transportation systems,economies and societies, if we are to mitigate climate change.
All journalists should understand the science of climate change – its causes, its controversies and its current and projected impacts. Start by doing your own research from established sources, such as reports from the Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change (IPCC), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or from local scientific experts you trust.
Read and report on the latest research from peer-reviewed scientific journals, or at the very least from reputable popular science publications.
OK, so it seems to be a given to these people that global warming is a proven fact. I suppose that doesn’t make them all that different from much of the rest of the media, but then there is this bit of advice for aspiring journalists:
Avoid false balance. Some journalists, trying to be fair and balanced, report the views of climate change sceptics as a counterweight to climate change stories. But this can be a false balance if minority views are given equal prominence to well-accepted science. For example, an overwhelming majority of climatologists believe that average global temperatures have risen compared to pre-1800s levels and that human activity is a significant factor in this.
Of course it’s good to air all sorts of views if they are placed into context. So if you report climate change sceptics’ views, also describe their credentials and whether theirs is a minority opinion.
Oh, so balance is not balance when it is “false” balance, that being when skeptics are given anything approaching equal time without caveats and qualifications designed to make their statements suspect.
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One of the posters on Climate Progress was explicit in that if we find there is no warming, the main deal is social justice. We have raped the planet he says by inventing and using cars, planes and trains and polluted the world. Poor people need to be paid for our indulgences and sins. Last time I checked, America has the cleanest waste water around.
Climate science, the only discipline where the science is actually settled, isn’t that convenient and reassuring and heart warming and…doesn’t need any opposing views, great !
Search for “settled science” in say Google (except #1) or Yahoo (except #1) or Bing, interesting result indeed.
This is just a rehash of the scientific consensus argument. Science is not determined by consensus of opinion. Consensus is meaningless in terms of science.
Being skeptic on the skeptics…
It’s obvious that “Internews” is a third world organization (from the pictures on their website) that has to promote global warming in order for the rich countries to forcibly send them money in the form of taxes.
Not only the money would not even go to them but instead to their governments and armies, and the fact that it would never be used to fix a non-problem, but those people will be made to believe that the earth is warming and so they won’t be prepared at all for when the temperatures will plummet and food crops will fail…
Quoting from the original article: “The global warming myth is so tied into vast sums of money that few people could afford to tell the truth, or at least challenge the alarmists.” Even the smartest people will act dumb when it is in their financial interest to do so. I have found it very difficult to persuade people, who do not have financial ties, of this basic fact. They are so convinced that it is the “deniers” who are well funded by “big oil” that they will not even look at contrary evidence. I believe that if we could get more people to examine the skeptical position – well presented here – the global warming industry would vanish overnight. This is a big “if”.
“But this can be a false balance if minority views are given equal prominence to well-accepted science.”
I guess that means that all minority views should be restricted – like the minority views of people in areas not served by an independent media.
Paul
That little blurb is very amateurish and rather contrived. This could be one of those “save the children” organizations that spends most of the donations on fancy modes of transportation, or worse, is a front that sends the money to nefarious organizations. As in, “send money to Nigeria to help me get my inheritance out of the bank and I will give you half”.
The BBC have been in overdrive with regards their “weather is not climate” message. They’re even brainwashing the children:
Biased-BBC skewers the hypocrisy pointing to when the BBC were very quick to claim weather is climate in foreign lands (as if Brits don’t know its hot and dry in Spain some parts of the year!):
http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/2010/01/david-shukman-on-weather-and-climate.html
1947, 1963, 1979, 1995 and 2010 were all very cold winters in the UK.
Is there something that could have a period of about 16-17 years?
Carddan,
I have two questions. To what extent do you believe you could be mistaken, and, what if anything would cause you to change your opinion?
“1947, 1963, 1979, 1995 and 2010 were all very cold winters in the UK.”
They all coincidence with solar minimums: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/Media/graphics/SolarCycle.gif
I see that the BBC (British Baloney Consensus) is doing its bit to spread the AGW gospel on its 10 o’clock news tonight – apparently the effect of this current cold spell in the Northern Hemisphere is dwarfed by extremely high temperatures elsewhere in the world, and the reporter actually referred to global warming and not climate change. He also dragged in the old “this is just weather, climate depends on 30 years of scientific measurement” canard.
Thank goodness for the blogosphere – if it wasn’t for that the truth wouldn’t get a look-in.
Cardann, my simple thoughts are these:
To argue that human emissions of CO2 are forcing global warming requires that all the known forces of nature together with their chaotic interwoven processes are fully understood and explained. This has never been done.
The warm climate of Greenland a thousand years ago allowed the Vikings to settle and farm the land. The conditions in this new green land could not have resulted from human emissions of CO2. 400 years later the when the Vikings had to abandon Greenland when the green turned to white also could not have had anything to do with human CO2 emissions.
For Mr Rudd to announce that human CO2 is the cause of global warming because Australia, according to the BOM, on average recorded its second highest temperature since 1910 is as delusional as trying to stop the tide.
If the world’s average temperature continues to increase for another 10 years and then decreases if CO2 decreases I will begin to sit up and take notice. And when just one of the thousands of catastrophes that have been predicted by alarmists eventuates I will start to be concerned. In the meantime CO2 cannot be used to explain everything from hot to cold from droughts to floods and from bush fires to snowstorms. If Australia’s temperature drops below a decadal average this year will Mr Rudd announce that CO2 induced global warming is a myth?
“To what extent do you believe you could be mistaken”
Personally, absolute zero
“and, what if anything would cause you to change your opinion?”
The climate actually did what the computer programs predicted it would do.
Just once.
When they stop lying, cheating, and adjusting them – after the fact – to make them appear to work.
and
When they stop adjusting the data they feed into the computer programs, to make the programs appear to predict.
Ireland facing potato crisis as frigid weather grips Nation
http://www.infowars.com/ireland-facing-potato-crisis-as-frigid-weather-grips-nation/
““and, what if anything would cause you to change your opinion?””
oh and one more thing
When someone convinces me that we are even smart enough to do this.
We are not, no where near, don’t even have a clue.
Extreme Weather: Why Has Mother Nature Gone Bonkers?
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/01/06/extreme-weather-mother-nature-gone-bonkers/?test=latestnews
Paul Martin – but beware – 1985 qnd 1986 were also cold ones, they are the winters that the media are currently saying that “this is the coldest since…”
And 1976, 1995 and 2003 were the hottest summers in the UK that I am aware of and they don’t seem to follow any periodicity.
#1. Beliefs has nothing to do with it. You want the raw data, confidence intervals, what?
#2. Nothing less than a global flood.
It seems to me that contrary views should be given more consideration than an established consensus, not less, because it is necessary to be absolutely sure that the contrarian really is wrong. Even if a contrarian is substantially wrong there is often something in his approach to help refine a (hopefully correct) consensus.
If the consensus is actually wrong then suppressing dissent just delays the date when the right answer is found.
The only conceivable purpose of giving priority to an established viewpoint and suppressing alternatives is propagandising for some separate agenda rather than a search for truth.
Dave Ward – is that James Cracknell the Olympic gold medal rower? Just one of many celebrity endorsers of the movement, probably a really nice, sincere guy only wanting to do good. The real tragedy of the CO2 obsession is that all this effort and human energy (not to mention money) is being wasted on one single goal: reduce man-made CO2 at any cost. There are so many more things we could usefully be doing …
Alan Haile
That David Shukman piece is very annoying. But at least the BBC now tell us that they will be happy with a 30 year trend. We’ll just hang on another 20 years and then we will see if we can convince them.
This “weather is not climate” thing. I understand that one extreme event does not make a climate, but when they start to happen more frequently than before, then maybe? We are now on our third “Britain in the freezer” episode in less than 12 months. (February, December, January)
Why not send a letter of complaint to Internews?
Dear Internews,
I am sorry but I really object to the advice given on this page:
http://www.internews.org/articles/2009/20090316_scidevnet_ejn.shtm
You are supporting a huge and unjustifiable bias on climate change, where minority views are to be written off. Science does not proceed by consensus (remember Copernicus? Remember Galileo?) I think you will find as time progresses and the climate models are dissected and fouind wanting, that climate sceptics’ opinions become less of a minority view.
I urge you to get a copy of Bjorn Lomborg’s book “Cool It” to correct some of your bias, and start to deliver fair and balanced reporting, not the travesty that you call “false balance”. Climate change scepticism does not equate to those who believe aliens landed at Roswell or that the face of Jesus appeared in a slice of toast. Please educate yourselves on this topic before you mislead a large part of the developing world.
Yours sincerely,
V Milvus
Carddan (13:43:31) :
In general, your observation is incorrect.
The prevailing opinion here is that the globe is warming or cooling, depending on the time frame you choose. Here is a good resource to show the cycles over the past century or so: click.
The central question in the debate is whether the CO2=CAGW hypothesis [a rise in human emitted CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming] is true or not.
Climate alarmists hypothesize that carbon dioxide is the primary factor controlling the Earth’s climate. They point to GCMs [computer climate models] as evidence. They also submit as evidence certain peer reviewed studies, although the authors refuse to disclose all of their raw and adjusted data, their methodologies, and their computer algorithms.
However, computer models, and studies using data and methods that cannot be replicated, are not empirical [real world] “evidence.” Computer models are not evidence of anything. They are only a tool. And the models are not accurate; by inputting all available, actual past climate data [hindcasting], the models cannot reproduce the current climate. In addition, not one of the two dozen or so GCMs was able to predict the flat to declining global temperatures over most of the past decade: click
I think most folks who follow this site generally agree that CO2 may have some effect on temperature. But it has never been shown by the alarmist side that CO2 has a significant, or even a measurable effect on the temperature. They use an unbelievably high sensitivity number, based on computer models, to arrive at their hypothetical conclusions. But if the climate was that sensitive to CO2, then the global temperature would be rising fast along with rising CO2. But it is not. The global temperature is very close to what it was thirty years ago: click
So there may be an insignificant amount of warming due to increased CO2. But its real world effect is so small that it can be disregarded for all practical purposes. Other factors have a much bigger, measurable effect on global temperatures.
Finally, it should be kept in mind that the main proponents of the CO2=CAGW hypothesis are extremely well compensated, and have extraordinary status [at least, until the CRU emails appeared]. Skeptical scientists, on the other hand, have been granted less than one one-thousandth of the funding that alarmists get. So naturally, there are plenty of alarmists submitting research papers on global warming. Fame and fortune are powerful motivators.
But is there really a crisis brewing? Decide for yourself. Here’s a 30 year global temperature chart that may help: click
Weird Orwellian site. I say whatever is on the site must the the opposite of truth. It is as reliable as winki.