Bob Ward has thrown his toys out of the pram, after he had yet another complaint rejected by IPSO.
This time he complained about Booker’s article in the Mail last summer about the heatwave. Below are the segments he complained about: […]
Ward has made a habit of making vexatious complaints about articles, which don’t kowtow to his extreme views on climate. His aim is to discourage editors from publishing such views because of the hassle they will face.
I gather that Ward has lost every complaint made against Booker over the years, except for one minor technical point.
I have been fully involved in rebutting the last three, including this latest one. It was only a few months ago that his previous complaint against Booker was thrown out. That was the article which correctly claimed the US had experienced some exceptionally cold winters in recent years.
Following his latest loss, Ward has written this characteristically rambling, incoherent rant, demanding that IPSO change their rules: […]
Threat to the press
Ward rambles on about the “error–filled” online version, but he has failed to actually convince IPSO that there were any errors at all. After all that is IPSO’s job, to ensure factual accuracy.
He calls for IPSO to use “expert advice” in future, but which experts? The Met Office, or sceptics like Judith Curry and John Christy? Science is never settled. It would indeed be dangerous if we were to have only the officially approved version of science.
We can, of course, laugh at Bob Ward’s incompetence. But his attempt to interfere with IPSO’s independence has sinister overtones.
What he is proposing is that the press should not be allowed to report the facts, unless they interpret them in the officially approved manner.
Where will this road lead?
Will newspapers be forced to report the government’s version of events, every time a set of economic data is published, rather than being allowed to offer their own analysis?
Will they be forced to limit their reporting of European affairs to the EU’s official line, at the risk of being fined if they dare to offer their own interpretation?
If Bob Ward gets his way, this will be a very slippery slope we find ourselves on.
h/t to The GWPF
For the newbies to the Climate Change food-fights in the UK:
“Bob Ward has served as policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics since 2008.[1]
He worked at the Royal Society, where he headed the media team, for eight years until 2006. He has a first degree in geology and an unfinished PhD thesis on palaeopiezometry.[2][3] He once worked at HECSU. “
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Ward_(communications_director).
Again, we find another communications director in Bob Ward simply engaged in nothing more than good old fashioned propaganda in pursuit of socialism.
An aside.
You said that for the “newbies”.
It may be helpful for commenters to remember that we have international readers also.
I made this comment https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/23/new-paper-petm-was-caused-by-climate-change-ancient-climate-change-caused-climate-change-aeuhhh/#comment-2601673 that may have been lost on those not familiar with “The Flintstones”.
A recent survey showed that the people of Saudi Arabia don’t like “The Flintstones,” but the people of Abu Dhabi do.
Maybe the people in Saudi Arabia have something against organic garbage disposals but the people in Abu Dhabi do not?
PS To follow my own advice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flintstones.
PPS Their garbage disposal was some type of dino scavenger … just waiting there under the sink.
(I’m sure that Ingrid Oldkirk had conniptions at the time.)
Isn’t an “unfinished PhD thesis” the same thing as “no PhD”?
Also, how does an undergrad degree in geology qualify this blowhard’s attacks on real scientists with real PhD’s doing real science?
Apart from some brave individuals the MSM seem to be happy printing one extreme pro AGW story after another.
anybody paying attention sees that CAGW is a sociopolitical movement fueled by propagandists paid by world governments to advance a vary narrow scientific perspective.
Any deviation from the narrow path will result in severe consequences and possibly deadly consequences in the future once total authority has been established. In their mind this later isn’t a question of if but rather when.
Bill Powers,
FIFY.
Bill P
I am not sure how narrow that perspective is. Anything and everything humans do causes global warming (aka climate change) and anything and everything imaginable results from climate change. That is a pretty broad perspective, n’est pas?
The heaviest member of the atomic table is the human element, apparently.
As usual when the alarmists can’t win by the rules they demand the rules be changed.
Vexatious litigant Bob Ward’s obsession with Christopher Booker is becoming extreme.
In the UK we have laws against stalking.
He may need some time at Her Majesty’s leisure to cool off.
Or at least have to pay the expenses himself.
Don’t even begin to kid yourself. The UK is now a police state which would have had Orwell’s jaw on his shoes.
Cephus0
I’ll thank you to not refer to my former colleagues in such a derogatory manner. You have no concept of what a ‘police state’ is really like. We have fewer street police per head of population now than possibly any time in the past in the UK. The vast majority unarmed, thankfully, and a precious attribute. Truly courageous officers leaving their families every day to face God knows what with some body armour and a stick for defence.
Part of that is budgetary, part of it technical and part of it the handing over responsibility for behaviour to the public themselves. It has, perceptibly, been remarkably successful, by accident or design.
The UK still operates a ‘policing by consent’ policy. That necessarily means where crime is seen to fall, the requirement for a police presence also falls. That is the opposite of a police state. The emphasis may well have turned to technical surveillance i.e. online detection of sexual predators and terrorists but we are far from being restricted from expressing ourselves freely on sites like WUWT or any other more contentious sites.
Whilst not perfect, this is a hugely successful policy and one adhered to in accordance with the fundamental principal of policing by consent which few police forces in the world can grasp.
We are as far from a police state as can possibly be. That may jar with your conjured beliefs but much like climate science one must examine the facts before announcing outrageous contentions, in public, on an international medium.
Whatever we might say about our political system there is one indisputable fact, our civil law is maintained by a system higher than even politics. No one is above the law.
It is the global gold standard of judicial systems and we are damn lucky to enjoy it.
HotScot,
Have people been arrested for what they say in Social Media or Email or any other Online Forum? If yes, and they were not trying to bring physical harm to someone then many would see that as a form of “police state”.
John Dilks
Online abuse and threats are used as evidence. Police states do not demand evidence.
Thankfully there have been occasions where those deliberately inciting, planning and perpetrating terrorism or racial/cultural hatred have been arrested and their online behaviour used as evidence to convict them.
And what you need to learn is that there is a world of difference between being arrested and being convicted.
The UK upholds the convention of Habeas corpus which is the first consideration of a court if the defendant questions his arrest. Police states do not respect Habeas corpus. An adequate description is available here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus
The question of what a crime is, and how the police deal with it is not up to the police, at least not in the UK. Laws are passed by Parliament, the police then enforce those laws in a manner consistent with the restrictions under which they operate.
Police states rarely conform to laws passed by Parliament, if there is one at all.
Hotscot how do you square that with the count dankula case where the guy was convicted of a “hate crime” for a joke video with a Nazi saluting pug – with jail time have been a possibility (he was “fortunate” to only get a fine).
You don’t measure a police state by the number of them on the streets
So, you’re suggesting the UK is a Police state then?
Go away until you know what you’re talking about.
It’s not there yet, but it’s worryingly getting closer all that time.
I have nothing but praise for the UK’s police force.
Even when I have been a little naughty, they have been really polite and reasonable. When it wasn’t me being naughty, they were attentive and understanding.
MangoChutney
Cops in the UK are civilians afforded the power of arrest only under the strictest of conditions.
They live in the community and answer to the community they serve. 99% of them are hard working, honest and fiercely loyal to the public they serve. I talk from a position of considerable experience.
Their judgement is forensically examined every day in courts of law across the country and whilst the courts may be shackled by public opinion on sentences they hand down to criminals, rarely are applications for conviction overturned.
British courts hold no power over the police other than said daily examination of their honesty, integrity and ability. A criminal may only face a court once in his life, police officers face the courts multiple times a month and make no mistake, they are on trial every single time. Get things wrong and they are at least as likely to be incarcerated as any criminal.
They are trained to be polite and impartial and invariably are often under extremely difficult circumstances.
I’m glad your experiences have been positive even if you were in the wrong.
Cephus. It should be patently obvious to any sane and sensible person that the UK IS NOT a police state and is a long way from it. Just because a few laws passed by a democratically elected parliament annoy you, that does not equate to a police state.
Yes, it’s not yet a police state. However, it’s so-called justice system certainly can be seen moving closer to it when a person can be arrested and convicted of a “hate crime” simply for making and posting a (tasteless) joke video.
Totalitarians are never in favor of independent thought or action.
Others would be endlessly frustrated if they were thrown out over and over again. Not so Bob Ward. Is that just masochism or is there someone -or a pressure group- in the background sweetening his defeats with big lumps of money, just to have a useful idiot promoting weird ideas far from reality? Follow the money…
What he is proposing is that the press should not be allowed to report the facts, unless they interpret them in the officially approved manner.
Really, when I turn on the MSM “news” now (which is a rare occasion when my stomach is up for it) I think we are already well down the slippery slope of media compliance with the Green Blob.
Ward is in good company with S. Rahmstorf also telling the press what to write and what not.
search the link in google for tranlate the article
Booker’s story is simple and clear.
Ward’s complaint is long and convoluted because he can’t come up with a simple clear rebuttal.
I listened to a podcast in which Thomas Sowell was interviewed the other day. The interviewer asked him what turned him from being a Marxist to being conservative. The answer, “Facts.”
What’s wrong with Ward’s complaint? Facts.
“Where will this road lead?”
An article from The Guardian back in 2016 is worth sharing with anyone who needs to know how science really works in practice. It’s about John Yudkin, a leading British nutritionist who contradicted the idea that we should have a low-fat diet to ensure good health. He was professionally destroyed, and his idea were marginalized. As a result, we’ve had almost 50 years of low-fat diets, and low-fat formulations in food products, spawning an obesity epidemic that is still resulting in premature deaths.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-sugar-conspiracy
good stories; lots o parallels
Apropos of nothing, the race horse named “Griff” is getting ready to run in the 10th race at Gulfstream Park.
Morning line was 8-1, current odds 15-1.
13 minutes to post at this writing.
Finished 4th.
Please tell us there were only four in the race that would be so appropriate.
Can’t do that…there were 8 or so, it ran pretty well.
Just a “tightener” for its next race ??
” as there also is with that other heatwave summer of 2003 when the highest single temperature ever recorded in Britain was set.”
Wasn’t that proved false
As I understand it 1975 still holds that record
IPSO Facto, Bob Ward Loses…. Again!
How much does it cost him to lose?
Personally, I doubt he’s paying his own bills for those filings.
Can we get IPSO to take a look at the U.S.?
NPR and Chuckie Todd (of NBC’s “Meet The Press”) could use some scrutiny.
But why stop there? It would be a fertile field for IPSO. There’s “Pravda” (a/k/a the New York Times), the WaPo, Seth Bernstein, the La-La Times, PBS, etc., etc.
Don’t know what “IPSO” is.
Too lazy to google?
A well-written article would explain its own little-known jargon.
I found it, I like research….
The IPSO referenced stands for:
Independent Press Standards Organisation
=======
Spell check is not happy with my copy and paste directly out of the article, but I refuse to dig any deeper.
Just for context , for those uninvolved or distant, what IPSO is.
They realize it. That’s why they chose him in the first place.
He also seems to spend a lot of time internet-stalking certain individuals. David Appell seems to do the same thing to Roy Spencer, often ruining his blog posts.
Mr Robert E.T. Ward, PhD (failed)
“What he is proposing is that the press should not be allowed to report the facts, unless they interpret them in the officially approved manner.”
I despise people who want their political agenda to determine the facts instead of the facts determining their agenda. But these are precisely the people who seek for power so they can force their agenda on everyone else.