By Paul Homewood
h/t Oliver King
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0c48xfm/beyond-100-days-series-1-26022019
There is a programme on the BBC News Channel called Beyond 100 Days, which is hosted by Katty Kay in Washington and Christian Fraser in London.
The day before yesterday they interviewed Obama's ex-EPA chief, Gina McCarthy, at about 48 mins in. I say "interview", but it was really a love-in, but more on that later.
That whole section of the programme perfectly sums up everything which is wrong about the BBC's coverage of climate change.
The interview was really about Trump's appointment of renowned physicist, William Happer, to head up a new Climate Change Committee. Now, you might have thought that the BBC would want to interview Happer, to get his side of the story. But oh no, he's a denier isn't he, can't have him on!
Instead they mention that he compared the media's treatment of CO2, to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. This comment by Fraser was surely intended to equate Happer's climate scepticism with holocaust denial. In fact, Happer had simply wanted to highlight how much CO2 is demonised nowadays.
Fraser then continues:
And yet it seems so obvious to all of us that the climate is changing, and in some places is becoming more erratic.
Right now the UK is in a winter heatwave. Hard to think that just a year ago, the country was bracing for the Beast from the East.
Then Katty Kay adds:
Indeed, is it too simplistic to say it's a direct result of climate change, but it is getting harder and harder to ignore the mounting evidence from scientists and weather watchers worldwide.
There is so much wrong in just these three sentences.
For a start, it is nonsensical to suggest we can all see the climate changing, as the first line implies. Whatever warming either the UK or the world as a whole has experienced in the last century is so tiny on a year to year basis as to be unnoticeable, if we did not have official temperature records.
The implication, of course, is that people look at weather events, and incorrectly interpret them as climate, something the BBC continually encourages.
Then we have the comment about "more erratic". Well, I dare say, some places are experiencing more erratic weather, just as other places did in the past. There is no evidence, however, that this phenomenon is on the rise, or caused by global warming.
The next line about the winter heatwave is, of course, designed to reinforce this message. But the facts show that there is nothing unusual at all about year-to-year variations of this sort.
The chart below shows monthly mean temperatures for February, according to CET.
As can be seen, big year-to-year swings are common.
For instance, February 1947 is the coldest February in the whole record going back to 1659, with a temperature of minus 1.9C. Two years earlier, February 1945 averaged 7.1C, making it the 4th warmest at the time.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/index.html
Heaven knows where Kay gets her "mounting evidence" from, because there is none to prove that weather is getting more erratic or extreme. Even the IPCC accept this.
Her commentary is purely planting her own bias on listeners.
We then move on to the interview with a rather smug looking Gina McCarthy, who starts out by condemning Happer's appointment as a political ploy. (She of course does not have a political bone in her body!)
She is then allowed to get away without any challenge with some highly dubious, generalised statements, such as:
Migration and insecurity happens when you start running out of food and water [as an example of the effects of climate change].
I know climate change threatens me, I know it threatens the health of my family, I know it threatens our troops, I know it threatens the military.
She is even egged on by the interviewers, with Fraser actually labelling the US as the world's biggest polluter. [FACT – US CO2 emissions in 2017 were 5087 MtCO2, while China's were 9232 MtCO2]
None of this patently absurd tosh was challenged by the interviewers.
But what on earth were the BBC thinking, when they decided not to interview William Happer himself or one of Trump's team.
The last time I checked, the BBC still had a duty to ensure controversial subjects are treated with due impartiality. Moreover the BBC Agreement forbids our output from expressing the opinion of the BBC on current affairs or matters of public policy.
Not for the first time, they have brazenly ignored their statutory duty.
from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader https://ift.tt/2tHV9c8
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