Story submitted by Eric Worrall.
The BBC, the UK Government Broadcaster, has banned former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson from appearing on BBC programmes to talk about climate change.
According to a spokesman for the BBC, a series of complaints about an interview in which Lord Lawson expressed climate skepticism, led to a ruling in favour of the complainants by the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Board.
“This ruling found a false balance was created in that the item implied Lord Lawson’s views on climate science were on the same footing as those of Sir Brian Hoskins.”
However, this is not the first time the BBC has gagged unfashionable views.
Sir Winston Churchill, the WW2 leader of Britain, openly expressed the opinion that his views on NAZI Germany were gagged by the BBC, because his concerns about Germany were not what the BBC wanted the British people to hear.
History suggests the tactic will backfire:
According to the article on Churchill’s “gagging” by the BBC;
“There is no written evidence that Churchill asked the BBC for the opportunity to speak out against appeasement. However, he did complain to a young BBC producer who visited him on the day after Chamberlain returned home from Munich. A memo records their meeting. They spent hours discussing the Nazi threat and “Churchill complained that he had been very badly treated… and that he was always muzzled by the BBC”.
The BBC producer who tried to reassure Churchill about BBC bias was Guy Burgess. Burgess was the man who would later become Britain’s most infamous traitor, when he defected to Moscow with fellow spy Donald Maclean.
Story Title: BBC Bans Lord Lawson for Climate Skepticism
One line summary of story: A previous gagging led to disaster
h/t to Jo Nova
James Abbott, the Green Party are anti-free speech and are every bit as dispicable as the BNP. See this piece of Stalinism and hate speech from Natalie Bennett:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26187711
My view is that Lawson, Bennett, Griffin should be allowed to speak & debate in an open forum. Let them shoot themselves in the foot if they are talking rubbish – let the public decide. I want to know and make up my own mind. Not be dictated too by Green groups.
No surprises here that Chit Chong is a green party activist:
http://westandsouthdorset.greenparty.org.uk/people/chit-chong.html
RAH says:
July 10, 2014 at 9:13 am (Edit)
Yes, that would include Anthony (long story) — in spite of the fact that he has 4 climate papers published.
Jack Cowper:
Thankyou for your post at July 11, 2014 at 1:59 am which says
Yes! Hear, hear!
These extremist totalitarians rightly need to be treated with the distrust afforded to them by MI5. They are a threat.
Richard
I am really surprised at the reaction to my complaint. After all, Nigel Lawson has not been banned from the BBC – a bleat of “Wolf!” if ever there was one. The truth is that the BBC would have to scrap the bottom of the scientific barrel to find scientists to say that climate change is not going on. Instead, they go for the people like Lawson who draw in the crowd. Fine if the discussion were about the policy reaction to climate change but not if it is about what the scientific position on the link if any between climate change and the floods as was the programme I and many others complained about.
That said, I think that the Lawson economic legacy is not as rose tinted as he would like us to remember since his policies probably laid the foundations of the 90s property crash. Also, the energy policy that he thinks is wonderful has us paying for Saudi oil, so that Saudi people can donate a portion to Al Qaeda. The policy also fritted away our own natural gas for little recompense from oil companies, so much so that we are now at the beck and call of President Putin. A truly unpatriotic energy policy.
I find it really sad how much anger is coming through on many of the posts here. It seems to be to be the case of hollow vessels talk louder, but strangely, we are all using the abundant fruits of science to do our loud talking. I think that we all laud the mathematicians who have come up with the algorithms which enable us to buy things safety on Ebay or the physicist, chemists and engineers who cram such an unbelievable number of transistors on a pinhead. But when these eggheads go over to become climate scientists their findings are pilloried.
Why? I suspect that it is because their message undermines some of our most cherished foundations of our society. Our lawful activities like driving an overpowered car or flying off to Australia at a drop of a hat are harming people – principally our children, grand children and their kids to come. The message from the scientists is that we must change and seriously reduce our emissions, but like a teenager glued to Call of Duty too many are digging our feet in.
But things change, it was not long ago that smokers would think little of blowing smoke in your face in train carriages. Also it was not long ago that cat calls to women and slaps on bottoms were commonplace – now many men must be looking back at their lives and thinking, Did I go too far? or fearing that the threshold of prosecution will be steadily whittled down from the clear reprehensible wrong Rolf Harris to our own bit of “naughtiness” at that Christmas party in ’83.
What we once thought was legal or sanction by custom changes with time and rightly so. So too with climate change. Can you look into the eyes of your children and grandchild if climate change proves as bad as the scientists say. I can’t.
Chit
Chit Chong
I am really surprised at the reaction to my complaint. After all, Nigel Lawson has not been banned from the BBC – a bleat of “Wolf!” if ever there was one. The truth is that the BBC would have to scrap the bottom of the scientific barrel to find scientists to say that climate change is not going on.
Nobody here is suggesting climate change is not happening, and most skeptics thing humans contribute to some degree.
The question is whether climate change is a global emergency, or whether the money that is currently wasted chasing the climate dragon is better spent on schools and hospitals.
As for “scraping the bottom of the scientific barrel”, there are serious, well credentialed scientists who dispute the urgency of the climate issue, as well you know.
Instead, they go for the people like Lawson who draw in the crowd. Fine if the discussion were about the policy reaction to climate change but not if it is about what the scientific position on the link if any between climate change and the floods as was the programme I and many others complained about.
BBC management have made it very clear they consider presenting a one sided view of climate science to be “balanced”. Editors who step out of line get censured, as appears to have happened in this case.
That said, I think that the Lawson economic legacy is not as rose tinted as he would like us to remember since his policies probably laid the foundations of the 90s property crash.
Lawson acknowledges mistakes, according to his Wikipedia article. I suspect though you would find few economies who suggested that the Thatcher Era, of which Lawson was an important part, left Britain poorer than she found it.
Also, the energy policy that he thinks is wonderful has us paying for Saudi oil, so that Saudi people can donate a portion to Al Qaeda. The policy also fritted away our own natural gas for little recompense from oil companies, so much so that we are now at the beck and call of President Putin. A truly unpatriotic energy policy.
Only because greens like yourself tend to be so vehemently opposed to fracking. And you will find there are low carbon sources of energy which many on this blog support, such as nuclear power – which if adopted has the potential to virtually eliminate CO2 emissions, in a way renewables never will – a position supported by Dr. James Hansen.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/31/a-conversation-with-dr-james-hansen-on-nuclear-power/
I find it really sad how much anger is coming through on many of the posts here. It seems to be to be the case of hollow vessels talk louder, but strangely, we are all using the abundant fruits of science to do our loud talking. I think that we all laud the mathematicians who have come up with the algorithms which enable us to buy things safety on Ebay or the physicist, chemists and engineers who cram such an unbelievable number of transistors on a pinhead. But when these eggheads go over to become climate scientists their findings are pilloried.
Why?
Climategate.
I suspect that it is because their message undermines some of our most cherished foundations of our society. Our lawful activities like driving an overpowered car or flying off to Australia at a drop of a hat are harming people – principally our children, grand children and their kids to come. The message from the scientists is that we must change and seriously reduce our emissions, but like a teenager glued to Call of Duty too many are digging our feet in.
We are not opposed to reducing CO2 emissions, what we object to are green efforts to use CO2 and climate issues as an excuse to try to restructure society. Given that there are options, such as nuclear power, which would appear to give us all what we want, we are puzzled that many greens appear to put imposing socialism and subsidised renewables, ahead of cutting CO2 emissions.
If there is any anger, its from watching hypocrites like Al watzisname buying beachfront properties and flying about everywhere, while preaching we should all make sacrifices to help save the planet.
But things change, it was not long ago that smokers would think little of blowing smoke in your face in train carriages. Also it was not long ago that cat calls to women and slaps on bottoms were commonplace – now many men must be looking back at their lives and thinking, Did I go too far? or fearing that the threshold of prosecution will be steadily whittled down from the clear reprehensible wrong Rolf Harris to our own bit of “naughtiness” at that Christmas party in ’83.
Climate change = Rolf Harris? And you wonder why you are losing your audience.
What we once thought was legal or sanction by custom changes with time and rightly so. So too with climate change. Can you look into the eyes of your children and grandchild if climate change proves as bad as the scientists say. I can’t.
I will look into the eyes of my beautiful daughter, and any children she has, and say with pride that Dad did his bit to ensure she inherited the same freedom and opportunities that I enjoyed.
It’s against nuclear?
If all the BBC Trust is requiring is that future interviews with contrarians must be prefaced with an announcement that they’re in the minority, that isn’t really a gag. It’s more like a sop thrown to alarmists.
It would be interesting to hear the human rights take on those imprisoned for not paying the licence fee.The compulsory levy was justified in that it was supposed to be an impartial presenter of information. Now it is clearly a mouthpiece for “I don’t care who dies from fuel poverty as long as we save the planet” and the “I make a packet from the subsidies so don’t you dare say a word against them” groups this levy is no longer justified. They are no longer even pretending otherwise.
It surely should be considered a violation of human rights to have to pay for ones own brainwashing against ones own interests, and on top of that not even be allowed to hear why what you are told is total lies.
On a digfferent point
Chit Chong says
I am really surprised at the reaction to my complaint. After all, Nigel Lawson has not been banned from the BBC – a bleat of “Wolf!” if ever there was one. The truth is that the BBC would have to scrap the bottom of the scientific barrel to find scientists to say that climate change is not going on.
Since the claim is that the climate has changed because of CO2 the climate scientists are not the experts on that question, so what does it matter what they think. The experts on whether a signal follows a given pattern are signal analyst who are mostly engineers with a few from marketing. They have shown at least fifty years ago the structure of the temperature waveform and it has to a greater degree than ever conformed to that same pattern since.The fact that the pattern in a far more complex one than used by climate scientists just rubs in what a load of narrowly educated, self centred clique they are. They also fail to listen to historians and literature specialist who point out the error of their claims from diaries of literary figures of the time.
If they had a real case surely all it would take is to publish the figures for the temperature rises firstly minus any adjustments and secondly after the adjustments with reasons for those done and not done when questioned out by proper experts from data collection engineers, not the jobbing builder jack of all trades master of none, climate scientists.
When it comes to their computer models surely it should be obvious even to the dullest witted of the public that a computer model that does not model the natural biological and geological inputs and outputs of the main variable it is hardly a model that is beyond question. In fact it in a normal QA assessment would not get even junk rating. It would get how dare you waste my time on rubbish like this.
The years BC ( Before Computer) models showed clearly that fossil fuels actually reduce and narrow the band of temperatures as seems to be likely from the southern V northern industrial changes. A proviso on this also from the work BC using physical chambers was that SO2 removal provided a step increase of nearly a degree..
Eric Worrall:
I agree much of what you say in your post at July 11, 2014 at 5:20 pm.
Also, to be clear, I agree with Lord Lawson’s views on climate and climate-related issues. I have shared platform as a Conference speaker with him.
But I write to warn against being side-tracked onto debate of his time in government long ago because he was Chancellor in the 1980s Thatcher era.
Contrary to your assertion and contrary to right-wing myth, that period was an economic disaster for the UK. Thatcher deliberately switched the UK economy from having a productive base to having a service base. 20% of the entire UK economy was destroyed, and this was only possible because the losses were made up by North Sea oil revenues which were then coming on stream. The effects were long-term. ‘All eggs in one basket’ is risky and the service industry was mostly banking. A generation passed before a hole in the basket had its inevitable effect. When America had a banking crises the UK had an economic disaster because 40% of the UK economy was financial services: the UK is still to recover from that disaster.
So, it is wise to stick to supporting Lord Lawson’s present actions concerning climate. His actions in the Thatcher government were long ago and best forgotten.
Richard
Just a few words before i close down on this – if only to show that I am not frit. Eric you said “Nobody here is suggesting climate change is not happening, and most skeptics thing humans contribute to some degree.” reading the posts on this blog gives me and I am sure you as well that a good few of your compatriots think exactly that.
As for Climategate, as I recall, they were cleared of cooking the books, but it strikes me as odd why no one has hacked into Exxon or the Heritage mob that pays for a lot of skeptic organisations. Or that even more important question, who paid the hackers to go for the University of East Anglia to find that pittance of wrong doing – more like swiping a few paper clips from the office rather than the smoking gun that the people who paid the hackers wanted of misleading the scientific community, governments and the public.
As far as fracking is concerned, I think you will find that the strongest opposition is from Telegraph reading nimbyist in Hampshire, that said I think we should be thinking long-term and I doubt that the British Geological Survey covered the integrity of borehole casings for 100 year plus periods. Indeed to the drilling engineers know how long a capped and decomissioned well will last? In which case our descendants will loose some of the aquifers we depend on now. Its not just entrapped methane which is relatively easy to deal with but the carcinogenic aromatic hydrocarbons that I worry about. And all for what? Listening to Cameron on this issue is like finding North Sea oil again. Its not as the Americans are finding out. Some of their fracking wells halve their output in a year. This quote from an article in Business Week – U.S. Shale-Oil Boom May Not Last as Fracking Wells Lack Staying Power, here a geologist says “I look at shale as more of a retirement party than a revolution. It’s the last gasp.” If so we should be looking at the few years of shale gas as time to get out of under Al Qaeda and Putin’s thumb and establish our low carbon economy, that is if we think it is worth stealing our grandchildren’s water for.
As for nuclear, low carbon solutions must be applicable worldwide because CO2 knows no boundaries, so are you happy to give the Taliban a few nuclear power stations to set-up their low carbon economy when Afghanistan goes the way of Iraq?
Finally Rogers point: “If all the BBC Trust is requiring is that future interviews with contrarians must be prefaced with an announcement that they’re in the minority, that isn’t really a gag. It’s more like a sop thrown to alarmists.” Exactly right, its a sop, so lets explore why there has been such a fuss over it. Not much digging needed – Hollow vessels sound louder.
Chit
Chit Chong:
I do not know why you suggest that anybody thinks you are “frit” when you write at July 12, 2014 at 12:55 am. Your writings here do not suggest that: they suggest that you are very misled about the issues.
Firstly, and to clear the air, climate realists do NOT get funded by energy companies but climate alarmists do. For example, the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia Uni, was established using funding from oil companies and still obtains funds from oil companies: one of the issues revealed by ‘climategate’ was the effort they expend to maintain their funding from the oil industry. Please tell me how I could get such funding because I would take every penny.
Most scientists refute the warmunists’ claims and tens of thousands have signed declarations to say they do. Attempts to obtain similar numbers of signatories from scientists supporting the climate-scare have all failed abysmally.
Importantly, climate realists support science and that is why they oppose the nonsense from warmunists. In attempt to help you understand this, I again explain the Null Hypothesis.
The Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed a system has not experienced a change unless there is evidence of a change.
The Null Hypothesis is a fundamental scientific principle and forms the basis of all scientific understanding, investigation and interpretation. Indeed, it is the basic principle of experimental procedure where an input to a system is altered to discern a change: if the system is not observed to respond to the alteration then it has to be assumed the system did not respond to the alteration.
In the case of climate science there is a hypothesis that increased greenhouse gases (GHGs, notably CO2) in the air will increase global temperature. There are good reasons to suppose this hypothesis may be true, but the Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed the GHG changes have no effect unless and until increased GHGs are observed to increase global temperature. That is what the scientific method decrees. It does not matter how certain some people may be that the hypothesis is right because observation of reality (i.e. empiricism) trumps all opinions.
Please note that the Null Hypothesis is a hypothesis which exists to be refuted by empirical observation. It is a rejection of the scientific method to assert that one can “choose” any subjective Null Hypothesis one likes. There is only one Null Hypothesis: i.e. it has to be assumed a system has not changed unless it is observed that the system has changed.
However, deciding a method which would discern a change may require a detailed statistical specification.
In the case of global climate no unprecedented climate behaviours are observed so the Null Hypothesis decrees that the climate system has not changed.
Importantly, an effect may be real but not overcome the Null Hypothesis because it is too trivial for the effect to be observable. Human activities have some effect on global temperature for several reasons. An example of an anthropogenic effect on global temperature is the urban heat island (UHI). Cities are warmer than the land around them, so cities cause some warming. But the temperature rise from cities is too small to be detected when averaged over the entire surface of the planet, although this global warming from cities can be estimated by measuring the warming of all cities and their areas.
Clearly, the Null Hypothesis decrees that UHI is not affecting global temperature although there are good reasons to think UHI has some effect. Similarly, it is very probable that AGW from GHG emissions are too trivial to have observable effects.
The feedbacks in the climate system are negative and, therefore, any effect of increased CO2 will be probably too small to discern because natural climate variability is much, much larger. This concurs with the empirically determined values of low climate sensitivity.
Empirical – n.b. not model-derived – determinations indicate climate sensitivity is less than 1.0°C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 equivalent. This is indicated by the studies of
Idso from surface measurements
http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/Idso_CR_1998.pdf
and Lindzen & Choi from ERBE satellite data
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf
and Gregory from balloon radiosonde data
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/OLR&NGF_June2011.pdf
Indeed, because climate sensitivity is less than 1.0°C for a doubling of CO2 equivalent, it is physically impossible for the man-made global warming to be large enough to be detected (just as the global warming from UHI is too small to be detected). If something exists but is too small to be detected then it only has an abstract existence; it does not have a discernible existence that has effects (observation of the effects would be its detection).
To date there are no discernible effects of AGW. Hence, the Null Hypothesis decrees that AGW does not affect global climate to a discernible degree. That is the ONLY scientific conclusion possible at present.
Richard
Very telling that Mr Chong does not deal with the freedom of speech issues raised here and the hateful stance of Natalie Bennett, I quote the BBC article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-26187711
“The Green Party of England and Wales has called for a purge of government advisers and ministers who do not share its views on climate change.”
If this is not the sort of thing done by dictatorships then I do not know what is. I am concerned that the UK is walking in to this blindly. Mr Chong talks about Climategate and how nothing incriminating was found, we now know for sure he has not done his homework – he can read here what Jonathon Jones a Professor of Physics at Oxford University thought of climategate:
http://unsettledclimate.org/2011/02/25/hide-the-decline-2-pictures-for-2000-comments/
Thank you Richard Courtney.
Jack
For a little historical perspective on internal BBC culture and staffing:
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?118107-Confessions-of-a-BBC-liberal