The BBC has told staff they no longer need to invite climate-change skeptics on to its program.
It instructs staff:
“Be aware of ‘false balance’: as climate change is accepted as happening, you do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate.”
“There may be occasions to hear from a denier” but only “with appropriate challenge from a knowledgeable interviewer”.
BBC journalists “need to be aware of the guest’s viewpoint and how to challenge it effectively.”
“To achieve impartiality you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage.”
A section of the new policy entitled ‘What’s the BBC’s position’ asserts that “man-made climate change exists.”
So much for the myth of ‘balanced news.’
https://www.thegwpf.com/bbc-freezes-out-climate-sceptics/
Thanks to Jimmy Walter for this link
“This BBC memo puts in writing what most people have known for the past ten years, which is that anyone sceptical of climate alarmism isn’t allowed on the BBC.” — Benny Peiser
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We have the same, sad situation in Sweden. Sweden’s state Tv (SVT) and radio (SR) also funded by mandatory license fees is just a big megaphone for the alarmist – in addition, they peddle all the “politically correct” opinions on other issues. All the other traditional media just follow suite.
Rolf, you are right, and currently they cannot even form a government after this election, because they censor out the right wing Sweden Democrats. It is socially incorrect in Sweden to listen to climate skeptics and non socialists.
Where are they going to get the “knowledgeable interviewer” from to challenge the “denier”?
I doubt there are any really knowledgeable interviewers in the UK. Plenty of interviewers with cotton wool in their heads, and some fixed ideas about climate, who know little or no science.
This will come back to haunt the BBC (if it still exists in a few years time).
They are digging a hole for themselves.
Climate does change! It will do so in a way that will make all of this look incredibly silly.
Let the BBC preach their gospel of impending doom.
Let them gather on the hill for the end of the world.
The rest of us will just live our lives and laugh at them.
‘The rest of us will just live our lives and laugh at them.’
I doubt that will be allowed. If you will not run off the ledge with the other lemmings, you will be beaten off it.
In case you haven’t noticed, Progressives have not been ASKING.
But almost all of us here know that man can and has changed the local climate in many places, so all of us should be allowed to speak on the BBC.
The question to be addressed is “Does CO2 have anything to do with global climate change?”
Try to get THAT broadcast on the BBC, or indeed printed in MSM apart from in a few papers which allow freelance commentators to write what they like.
From the memo:
“The climate science community is clear that humans have changed the climate, but specifically how is more difficult to evidence.”
The BBC are saying that it isn’t really known what has caused the changes in climate that humans are, nevertheless, clearlly responsible for. Make sense of that if you can.
We are now in a period of very low solar activity. We will see how the jet stream will behave now.
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/AR_CH_20180926.png
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/250hPa/equirectangular=-46.51,0.00,188
I agree, climate is changing.
So do most, if not all, of you.
There are probably no real climate change deniers.
Climate is doing what it always does: changing.
Thank you, BBC, for pointing that out.
Don132
+10
If anything, the posters and readers of this site are much more open to the idea that the climate does change, and is changing as we speak. Michael Mann gained fame with the BBC types by composting an esoteric collection of natural observations, using his contorted, super-secret, linear regression procedure, to demonstrate that the climate had been constant for a thousand years. Tyrannies, even when run by faceless bureaucrats, seem to always fall prey to such ideological mind-traps.
Climate change believers have corrupted nearly every aspect of civilization.
And they have accomplished nothing at all, despite the vast sums and increasing power they are given.
All they do in reality is provide a weary, derivative, costly punchline to an old scary story.
That the world rational freedom seeking people made is being destroyed by such a shallow transparent scary story dressed up in a lab coat is pathetic.
It must be a corollary to the idea that the world will not end in fire, but rather end in ice.
The BBC make no distinction between those who deny that climate change is happening ( a small set equivalent to those who believe the earth is flat) and those who question whether the hypothesis that human CO2 emissions are the primary driver of the changing climate is proven or not.
Easy mistake to make.
Not.
Climate Imperialism is a Royal Perogative, par for the course.
A Royal Charter is the constitutional basis for the BBC (not to mention other dominion channels).
British, Canadian and Aussie subjects take a knee.
Once there were Pravda and Izvestia, now there are ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, NBC …and ZDF. Sometimes I wonder if the cold war was actually won by USSR.
The Fourth Estate thought they won.
… and to think … even his own supporters were a bit uncomfortable at first when Donald Trump unleashed the crude and biting aphorism — “Fake News”.
Turns out he is a stable genius who managed to convey a difficult concept in the simplest of language, in an era where everyone else kept stringing increasingly intricate phrases together. Placing themselves at the mercy of the Merchants of Obfuscation who walk among us.
It is no mystery then that the Merchants of Obfuscation consider him a threat.
‘Turns out he is a stable genius who managed to convey a difficult concept in the simplest of language.’
And the guts to say so – at the possible cost of everything he has spent his lifetime building.
Oh, sorry – I forgot Obama/Warren – ‘you didn’t build that’.
As the evidence degrades, they want to talk about it less and less.
What about the strategy? Can we debate the strategy? Even if we accept everything the alarmists say about the danger, the only important question is what should we do about it? Is raising taxes, enacting wealth transfers and expending money (and CO2) to build windmills really a rational strategy?
Free speech requires free listening.
The BBC collects, with the force of the British gov’t, a fee if you receive a signal with any kind of device.
That effectively means you must pay to listen. By censoring what you hear and enforcing that censorship with the power of the government, you are restricting what may be heard, and therefore you are restricting effectively that which is said.
If the BBC can restrict and control the topic of climate, it can restrict whatever it wants.
The BBC *presently* has a monopoly of routine news distribution in the UK which by some measures exceeds 90%. The organisation is absolutely infested with partisan players and lefty driven political correctness.
They have legal barricades against scrutiny and oversight that they have spent extraordinary amounts of (our) money on defending. (see 28gate and The Balen Report)
What is exasperating is that the political and ideological partisanship has developed / been driven into something of a monoculture over the last 40 years where independent, evidenced points of view have been frozen out by desperately trendy ideologues who are absolutely immersed in groupthink. Any worker who doesn’t subscribe is endangering the bulk of employment opportunities – so pervasive and enforced is the dogma.
The pressure of groupthink has passed the stage of farce – American readers might be amused at the tale (a few years ago) of one national TV news anchor who wanted to read a UK national newspaper (the regularly awful Daily Mail) – but was so intimidated by the likely reaction of his colleagues that he put it inside a copy of The Guardian (The BBC’s printed arm).
If “hydraulic groupthink” is a thing – then the BBC epitomise it.
For those who can’t accept that the BBC is biased, just Google balen report.
The BBC has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of UK taxpayer money to keep it secret. His highest court has allowed them to keep it secret.
One would think that if the report declared the BBC unbiased on Israel they would publish it!!!
BBC are formally accepting the language of hate speech, by demonizing their critics with the term denier in this memo.
Sounds like the CBC in Canada and the Winnipeg Free Press
The description of ‘climate denier’ is misunderstood by most. Every ‘climate skeptic’ realizes that climate is always changing, so there is no denial of climate change at all. The ONLY point of contention is whether CO2 is responsible for any ‘discernable’ climate change. Most people don’t get that difference. Even the media sources, such as BBC, do not get that difference.
‘Climate deniers’ are thought of as flat-earthers, because MOST people think that they deny climate change. Not so, obviously. History shows us that climate is always changing, but logic tells us that we should not try to take credit for it.
When they say ‘climate change’ we say ‘global warming’. Problem solved.
This is another daily win for the internet as a freedom of information and choice miracle. The economics of Freedom to Choose is compelling.
The BBC ensures that the message gets out — The long march of Fabian Socialism and it’s ongoing corruption of human endeavor… see http://freebritainnow.org/0/fabiansociety.htm
The BBC’s programming depends on viewers being open-minded:
You know your country is in trouble when your news media starts using “skeptic” as an ad hominem and mentioning “far right” and “hate speech” as a real things. The BBC could just as well be an American Main Stream News company.
American News Company? – huh … in its dreams …
Although the USA team are completely – as we say on the eastern side of the Atlantic – utterly up themselves.
I’d add that in a small way they are – just look at a Mark Thompson the ex BBC chief who ran away…
Impartiality.
They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
Goebbels methodology is ‘progressing’ well on the left, thank you.
They’ve got all these great historical models to base their philosophy on.
The greater misrepresentation is the unwritten one: that the climate debate is about whether “climate change is happening.”
Climate change has always happened. That is not what the arguments are about. The arguments are about its attribution, and its effects.
The best evidence is that a large part of the slight warming which the Earth has experienced since the mid-20th century was caused by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels, but the net effects are positive, rather than negative. In other words, anthropogenic climate change is real, but modest and benign, and the effects of higher CO2 levels are positive, rather than negative.
Where’s the evidence that man is largely responsible for the slight and beneficial warming of the late 20th century?
We still haven’t reached the temperatures enjoyed during the Medieval, Roman and Minoan warm periods.
For about 90% of the last 10K years, it has been warmer than it is at present.
Once again I ask, where’s the evidence that the current warming is due to man and is not natural?
MarkW, we know from the physics of what happens when atmospheric GHG levels increase that the Earth’s climate should warm.
Here are some good resources about it. See, especially, the three links under “Physics,” and the link under “Amicus brief in Calif v. BP lawsuit, by 3 top scientists.”
https://www.sealevel.info/learnmore.html
Indeed, as expected, the climate has warmed slightly as GHG levels have risen. Exactly how much of the warming we’ve enjoyed since the mid-20th century is attributable to human influence is an open question, but it is certain that it’s not 0%.
According to the most recent AMS survey of broadcast meteorologists, their “average” opinion is that about 57% of the warming over the last fifty years is attributable to human activity (and most of that they would presumably attribute to GHGs, esp. CO2):
http://sealevel.info/AMS_meteorologists-survey_2017.png
Every year the so-called “greenhouse forcing” from rising CO2 levels increases. A naive glance at a typical CO2 level graph might lead you to think that the forcing is exponentially increasing, causing you to fear that temperatures might also increase exponential. But, in fact, since CO2’s warming effect is logarithmically diminishing, the so-called “greenhouse forcing” trend has been only barely more than linear for about forty years, and there’s no good reason to expect that to increase much. You can see that near-linearity in a log-scale plot of CO2 level:
https://www.sealevel.info/co2.html?co2scale=2
So, even if you accept that the temperature increase over the last 1/3 or 1/2 century is largely due to human activity, there’s no reason to expect much acceleration in that trend.
What’s more, natural feedbacks are already removing the equivalent of about 2.5 ppmv CO2 per year from the atmosphere, and as CO2 levels increase that rate also increase (due to negative feedbacks). So, when mankind transitions away from fossil fuel dependence, as must surely happen within a century, due to resource constraints, there’s every reason to expect atmospheric CO2 level increases to slow, and then plateau, and then finally decline.
That means the current temperature trend is a reasonable high-end projection for the temperature trend over the rest of the century.
That current trend is small. Depending on whose temperature index you trust, over the last thirty years temperatures have risen somewhere between about 0.25°C (UAH) and 0.45°C (GISS):
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah6/from:1987.5/mean:12/offset:1.4/to:2018.75/plot/rss/from:1987.5/mean:12/offset:0.9/to:2018.75/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1987.5/mean:12/offset:0.4/to:2018.75/plot/gistemp/from:1987.5/mean:12/offset/to:2018.75
Projecting that trend to 2100 would yield just 0.65 to 1.25 °C of additional warming.
That’s very slow compared to the alarmists scary predictions (both past predictions and current predictions). 1°C of warming is what Hansen et al 1988 predicted for just 20 years, for their their “business as usual” Scenario A, as part of their lobbying for creation of the IPCC:
http://sealevel.info/hansen1988_retrospective.html
1°C of warming would cause only a 50-90 mile average shift in isotherms & growing zones. It can be compensated for at mid-latitudes (away from the coasts) by advancing planting dates by ≈1 week:
https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Kansas/Places/wichita-temperatures-by-month-average.php
It is possible to estimate the warming effect of GHGs (mainly CO2), a/k/a “sensitivity,” by examining the result of the “experiment” which we’ve performed on the Earth’s climate, by raising the atmospheric CO2 level from about 311 ppmv in 1950 (or 285 ppmv in 1850, if you prefer) to about 408 ppmv in 2018. Here’s how you can do that:
https://sealevel.info/sensitivity.html