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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Carddan
Congratulations on your experiment – I hope it shows you that we “deniers” are more interested in finding out the truth than in promoting a particular belief. I like to think that most commenters on this site have enquiring minds rather than fixed ideas and welcome information from many sources.
royfomr (15:22:57) mentioned Andrew Neill’s demolition of the highly-paid head of the Met Office on BBC’s “Daily Politics” today.
You can watch it here:
http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/?p=2746
Enjoy. Great stuff!
With the notable exception that 1979 (and also the famed 1982) is pretty much solar maximum.
Astroturfing…
UNEP=INEPT
Carddan,
An interesting experiment, although I am not surprised at the results. I have previously tried something similar over at Climate Progress, asking the hypothetical question what if the AGW theory proved to be incorrect? What would the consequences be for emerging green technologies, the environmental movement and science in general? The results were disappointing.
Carddan : You may have gotten yourself banned at RC .
The other side of the coin is that warmers are investing a lot of money, since the time when James Hansen was a young new age scientist, and they are expecting for a big, big profit, and they don´t seem to be tired of such an endless expenditure, perhaps due to the fact they are not investing their money but ours, however they consider this our money theirs, their speculative industry was built on the vacuum so naturally it sucks our bucks from our pockets easily, through banking, through plastics, etc., etc. and we are the fools who supply the labour, the “gammas” of their “Brave new world”.
While they expect for a soon reward we are awakening once again just to watch, we won´t need to do anything, their golden calf will break into pieces, once again (history likes to repeat itself),shattered by the thunderbolts of natural cycles, of these “interesting times”.
Well, I tried one more time with this post but it has been “waiting moderation” for a long time.
Carddan says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
January 7, 2010 at 8:05 pm
If anyone wants to hear the other side’s opinion, you can read the responses I received at wattsupwiththat.com when I asked the same questions challenging their opinion that global warming is not being caused by human activity.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/ 2010/ 01/ 07/ tax-support-of-approved-climate-news/ #more-14912
I believe we need more science and more discussion, not less.
OT, but you may find this interesting.
I’ve just spent a bit of my evening discussing AGW with Patrick Harvie – a Green Party MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament) on his blog.
As usual with AGW believers, he’s not interested in facts or science.
If you’re from Scotland, you may find the conversation enlightening as to the mindset of one of our elected representatives.
If you’d like to join the conversation, please be polite and respectful. He seems like a nice, if somewhat misguided, fellow.
http://www.patrickharviemsp.com/2010/01/snow-joke/comment-page-1/#comment-1621
Lefties support their own at home.
http://www.climategate.com/bbc-grills-uk-met-office-john-hirst-over-weather-forecasts-and-salary
Why not abroad, as well?
(Listen carefully to Hirst’s double talk – the guy is a pro.)
Besides, they need all the propagandists they can muster to drown out the voices of reason and sanity.
A 2003 (I think) story about Internews is at
http://www.northcoastjournal.com/091103/cover0911.html
and is more interesting than Internews’ website.
Nick (17:18:43) :
royfomr (15:22:57) mentioned Andrew Neill’s demolition of the highly-paid head of the Met Office on BBC’s “Daily Politics” today.
http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/?p=2746
Oh dear. I almost feel bad for this guy. “Paid more than the Prime Minister!”
Further to the quote from “1984” (15:22:39) here’s another sentiment that Internews might endorse:
“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.” Joe Stalin
Carddan (16:02:07) :
I posted the same question, without the word “not”, on Climate Progress and had the following discussion:
You posted a question at CP and you didn’t get sprayed by “tommy gun” dhogaza? My, how times change.
Is he still there?
robert (16:52:26) :
“…… as the temperatures have gone down even though CO2 has risen.”
The last decade saw a dramatic rise in the amount of CO2 released to the atmosphere through industrialization of developing countries, especially of China. So you should have stated “CO2 has presipitously risen” or the like.
Aaaaand right on topic: Very often this kind of “news” is just a prop for an agenda, and it is clearly worldwide, and very disturbing. Sometimes I think there is no hope.
WRT Carddan (13:43:31) :
My answer would be:
1. Temperature needs to verifyably rise, enough to matter… for say, more than 2 decades at 0.4C/Decade?
(Validating this requires free flowing disclosure of all raw data and calculations – and much more realistic calculations than we’ve seen (Certainly no adjustments labeled “artificial” or “fudge factor” ) Another marker here could be steadily increasing new highs around the world, warmer winters, etc. – Instead we’re seeing new Record Lows in great numbers right now, validating theories of oscillation.
2. The rise needs to be verifyably caused or meaningfully exacerbated by Man’s (miniscule) contribution of C02. – A tall order, since I suspect this is not possible.
A non-native mistake:
“presipitously” should read “precipitously”.
Carddan,
In the past I’ve attempted to post charts at realclimate, climateprogress, tamino, deltoid, etc., just like the ones I linked to above @15:00:13, but they were always censored out within a few minutes; usually they never even saw the light of day. I gave up long ago trying to debate the subject with them, and I don’t even follow their blogs any more.
So Joe Romm’s lame responses were astonishing to me.
Romm said:
First, the long accepted theory of climate change is summarized by climatologist Roy Spencer: “No one has falsified the theory that the observed temperature changes are a consequence of natural variability.”
In other words, it is the long held theory of natural climate variability that the new CO2=CAGW hypothesis must falsify in order to replace it, by explaining reality better than the current theory of natural climate variability. Normally this is done by the new hypothesis making better predictions. But the CO2=CAGW hypothesis doesn’t make any accurate predictions at all.
Romm mendaciously turns the Scientific Method on its head, by demanding that skeptical scientists must falsify his new hypothesis. If that were the Scientific Method, then every crackpot conjecture that came along would have to be falsified. Romm is demanding that skeptics prove a negative, by repeatedly using the argumentum ad ignorantiam: the fallacy of assuming that something must be true [CO2=CAGW] simply because it hasn’t been proven false.
You gave the right response to Romm when you said, “You are satisfied that science has proven recent warming is caused by human activity until ‘unproven’.”
And Romm agreed! He said:
Again, Romm assigns incredible certainty to his empirically baseless assumption that an increase in a tiny trace gas will cause catastrophic global warming. But the planet itself is falsifying his conjecture: click
Joe Romm can argue that way because he censors skeptical comments that refute his beliefs, making his blog an echo chamber of groupthink with others whose minds are similarly made up and closed tight. If Joe Romm was willing to come here and debate, or allow open, uncensored debate at his blog like this site does, his illogical arguments would be quickly deconstructed. That’s why climateprogress, realclimate and the other alarmist blogs must censor scientific skeptics. They have no other choice.
Anyway, that was an interesting little experiment you did, and you did it well. You got a lot of good responses here. And the contrast between the two sites was stark. I really thought Joe Romm would have had at least one or two plausible arguments. Apparently, I’ve been giving him way too much credit.
My final post at ClimateProgress inviting open minds to read these comments did not survive moderation. I had a hypothesis, the evidence supports it. The irony is not lost on me.
Carddan, I am sorry I am a a little late to the party, but here is my response. I am about 99% CO2 is not causing warming. As to what it would take to change my mind, I have it well documented. A few months ago I decided to test my knowledge so I took on all comers on a thread on another web site. I am providing a link to that web site, but after my last go around, the warmers stopped responding. If you look at my postings, you will see the arguments you need to deal with to change my mind.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=51313&nowrap=true#957891
A bit of Climate SciFI on History channel tonite: “Earth 2100”. All your favorite climate/population/resource/terrorism fantasies in one neat package. Tipping points, ice sheets collapsing, et al. It’s a hoot. 🙂 All part of Armageddon Week. http://www.history.com/
Internews is an organization devoted to helping out people in areas not served by an independent media:
So give them a dependent media?
Next, our progressive universities will be bringing in a course in gatekeeping. Very selective entry process but gaining gatekeeping credentials will offer graduates high monetary rewards and an open door into an elite coterie of power brokers. :-\
They say it is not a religion, but check this out:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8154586/The-Earth-Charter-Guide-to-Religion-and-Climate-Change
and this:
http://www.un-documents.net/earth-ch.htm
You tell me. This is frightening and sick.
Henry chance (13:45:43) :
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.
Sickening. Why bother with the last 400 years of technical and scientific progress. Let’s just retreat to high birth rates, high death rates, short lifespans and brutal ignorance.