Telegraph blogger James Delingpole wins Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism

By Damian Thompson

At an awards ceremony in New York last night, James Delingpole was announced as the winner of the 2010 Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism for his Telegraph blog.

This is great news. James’s posts on the Climategate scandal made a huge international impact on the debate over global warming, raising serious questions about the scientific basis of some of the more extravagant predictions of environmental apocalypse.

Also,  it is fair to say, the scandal gravely damaged the reputation of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which was accused – on the basis of leaked emails – of manipulating data in order to exaggerate the extent of global warming.

After James’s posts appeared, generating in some cases over a million page views each, the scientific consensus over climate suddenly appeared a good deal more fragile than it had previously, as even some supporters of the global warming thesis concede. (Others, in contrast, splutter with rage at the mere mention of Delingpole’s name.)

A word about the Bastiat Prize: it’s a heavy-hitting award by the free-market International Politics Network, given for both print and online journalism. This is the second year running that a Telegraph blogger has won the digital prize: Daniel Hannan was the 2009 winner. Judges in previous years have included the Nobel Prize Winners James Buchanan and Milton Friedman, and also Margaret Thatcher; this year they included Douglas Ginsburg of the US Court of Appeals and the science writer Matt Ridley.

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal won the 2010 Bastiat print award; also shortlisted in the two categories were Mark Perry of the Carpe Diem blog, Martin Wolf of the FT and Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe.

Anyway, many congratulations to James. I’m sure he will be too modest to mention his achievement – or, heaven forbid, to rub it in.

Source:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100063465/telegraph-blogger-james-delingpole-wins-bastiat-prize-for-online-journalism/

Why the BBC cannot be trusted on 'Climate Change': the full story

By : James Delingpole

                                                         "Watermelon? Me? But I'm such a lovely old man..."


When the history of the greatest pseudoscience fraud in history -aka “Climate Change” – comes to be written, no media organisation, not even the Guardian or the New York Times, will deserve greater censure than the steaming cess pit of ecofascist bias that is the BBC. That’s because, of all the numerous MSM outlets which have been acting as the green movement’s useful idiots, the BBC is the only one which is taxpayer funded and which is required by its charter to adopt an ideologically neutral position.
How then has it managed to breach its social responsibility so frequently and flagrantly?
Thanks to the combined efforts of the great Bishop Hill and the similarly wondrous Tony Newbery at the Harmless Sky blog, we now have the most comprehensive and thoroughly damning account yet of how the BBC became such an important part of a sinister political campaign to promote climate change alarmism. I recommend reading their report in full at either of their sites linked above. But here below are some of the highlights.
The story begins in autumn 2004 when the government’s hysterically warmist chief scientific adviser Sir David King successfully persuaded the then Prime Minister Tony Blair to put action on global warming at the heart of UK government policy. This resulted in the creation of a propaganda body called The Climate Change Working Group which in turn sought PR advice from a company called Futerra communications.
Futerra – Britain’s answer to Fenton communications in the US – recommended the following policy:
Many of the existing approaches to climate change communications clearly seem unproductive. And it is not enough simply to produce yet more messages, based on rational argument and top-down persuasion, aimed at convincing people of the reality of climate change and urging them to act. Instead, we need to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement.
To help address the chaotic nature of the climate change discourse in the UK today, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won, at least for popular communications. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken. (emphasis added)
Government policy soon became BBC policy too. In Feb 2007, Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman had this to say about BBC “impartiality” on Climate Change:
I have neither the learning nor the experience to know whether the doomsayers are right about the human causes of climate change. But I am willing to acknowledge that people who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that it is the consequence of our own behaviour.
I assume that this is why the BBC’s coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago.
So when did naked bias on AGW become official BBC policy? Newbery and the Bishop trace to the notorious seminar mentioned before in this blog. (Can anyone find the link? I can’t yet….)
This was the one where the keynote speaker was Lord May whose warmist bias is elegantly encapsulated in this paragraph of the Bishop/Newbery report.
Although Lord May is unquestionably a distinguished scientist, he is not a climate scientist, and he has been a dedicated and vociferous environmental activist throughout his career. In recent years he has expressed strong opinions on global warming. He has been a trustee of the World Wildlife Fund a leading environmental pressure group and during his presidency of the Royal Society an attempt was made to disrupt funding to climate sceptics. It would not be reasonable to suppose that Lord May could provide the seminar with either an authoritative or impartial assessment of the current state of the scientific evidence supporting the AGW hypothesis.
The BBC has done its level best to keep the details of the seminar under wraps. But we know that “30 key BBC staff” attended; that it was hosted by Jana Bennett and Helen Boaden and chaired by Fergal Keane. We also know that the seminar effected a distinct shift in BBC policy, because the BBC admitted as much in its June 2007 report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century.
The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus.
As the Newbery/Bishop report drily notes:
There is abundant evidence that this is not an accurate description of the seminar.
No indeed. But this hasn’t stopped the BBC going ahead as if it were. The report details just a few of the more notable examples of the BBC’s flagrant pursuit of the Warmist political agenda:
(a) Climate Wars was a four part television programme which purported to describe sceptic arguments. It could best be described as a four-part ‘hit piece’, with sceptic arguments caricatured by a confirmed ‘warmist’ presenter and in one case, some serious misrepresentation of widely agreed scientific evidence. Despite this, a member of the BBC Trust has described this programme to one of us as representing coverage that balanced the more normal mainstream coverage of global warming, suggesting that the BBC Trust have been misled about how unbalanced the corporation’s coverage has been. We are unaware of any BBC programme that has allowed sceptics to present their own arguments without being filtered through a ‘green’ presenter or being subject to immediate rebuttal.
(b) David Attenborough’s two part series The Truth about Climate Change was broadcast in May and June 2006 as part of the Climate Chaos season. At no point in the series was there any suggestion that there are scientists, albeit a minority, who do not support the majority view on this subject, or that scientific understanding of the climate system remains very limited with major uncertainties still unresolved. Therefore the use of the term ‘Truth’ in the title of the series suggests an exercise in indoctrination rather than education. No claim could reasonably be made that this series was impartial about the science of climate change, but the DVD of this series is still being offered for sale on the BBC Shop website.
(c) The BBC’s partisan coverage of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was particularly egregious.
When the Summary for Policy Makers of the Working Group 1 (The Physical Science Basis) was launched on 2ndFebruary 2007, the 10pm News devoted most of the programme to this story. At no point was there any suggestion that anthropogenic Co2 emissions may not be entirely responsible for climate change, a claim that the IPCC report did not make. All those interviewed on the subject, as ‘experts’, expressed complete certainty about this.
On the same evening, Newsnight went much further, with an assertion by Susan Watts that scientists were being offered thousands of pounds to challenge the IPCC report, and this claim was reiterated by the presenter, Martha Kearney. This was based on a report that had appeared inThe Guardian on the same day. It later emerged that the story had no basis in fact and had probably originated from an environmental advocacy group in the US. The BBC would have discovered this if it checked out the story before using it; an example of very sloppy and inaccurate reporting or worse, a willingness to use a third party report because it appeared to confirm the BBC’s position on climate change. During the programme Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, and an authority on the physics of clouds, was introduced as a climate sceptic. He was then shown smoking a cigarette while a voice over explained that he had a lot of contrarian beliefs including on smoking. It is most unusual for anyone to be shown smoking on BBC programmes now and the sequence was clearly intended to discredit his sceptical views on climate change.
(d) It is also worth noting that the BBC website has a dedicated area for environmentalists: The Green Room. Searching its archives papers related to climate change gives the following list of contributors: Prof Mike Hulme (Tyndall Centre), Bryony Worthington (from an NGO involved in emissions trading, ‘EU is not doing enough to deliver meaningful cuts’), Chris Smith ‘Climate change is very real’, Sir David King (green activist), Malini Mehra (green NGO), Andrew Simms (‘economic growth cannot continue’), Richard Betts (Met Office), Greig Whitehead (NGO, ‘For millions of people in Africa, climate change is a reality’), Tim Aldred (NGO. World leaders must listen to the people who put them in power and quickly make amends for failing to deliver a binding climate deal’). We have been unable to identify any sceptics invited to contradict mainstream environmentalist views on this site. The Green Room appears to exist only as an outlet for propaganda pieces by environmentalists.
Apologies that this post is so long. And there’s plenty more where this came, not least on the key role played by the BBC’s Chief Guardian of the Warmist Flame Roger Harrabin which surely deserves a post of its own.
In the meantime, I would appeal to the wisdom and scientific integrity of the geneticist Steve Jones who besides being one of this newspaper’s most distinguished and readable science columnists happens to be chairing the official investigation into bias within BBC’s science covering.
It is to Professor Jones that Newbery and the Bishop have addressed their submission.
They conclude:
It would appear that, through the activities of CMEP [Cambridge Media and Environment Programme - the Harrabin outfit which deserves a blog of its own...] BBC Newsgathering has got very much too close to government, environmental activism, and the climate research community for its reputation for impartiality and accuracy to be preserved with regard to the science of climate change.
I don’t believe any responsible scientist, journalist or indeed human being could read this detailed, thorough report and conclude otherwise. Over to you Professor Jones. We shall all be awaiting your verdict – in Spring 2011 – with keen interest.


Source:


http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100063937/why-the-bbc-cannot-be-trusted-on-climate-change-the-full-story/

CLIMATE FOOLS DAY 28TH OCT 2010


Piers Corbyn from Weather Action continues to expose the fraud science of Anthropogenic Climate Change.


See the Weather Action forecast for UK/IRL November here:
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews09No75.pdf

Global Warming Scam

 Global Warming Scam

Professor Emiritus Hal Lewis Resigns from American Physical Society  -  

"It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists"

The following is a letter to the American Physical Society released to the public by Professor Emiritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

source http://my.telegraph.co.uk/reasonmclucus/reasonmclucus/15835660/professor-emiritus-hal-lewis-resigns-from-american-physical-society/

Sinking 'Climate Change'

By: Cal Thomas 
Examiner Columnist
June 3, 2010

Three modern myths have been sold to the American people: the promise of a transparent administration (President Obama); the promise of a more ethical Congress (Speaker Pelosi); and the myth of "global warming," or climate change.

The first two are daily proving suspect and now the third is sinking with greater force than melting icebergs -- if they were melting, which many believe they are not.

After spending years promoting "global warming," the media are beginning to turn in the face of growing evidence that they have been wrong. The London Times recently reported: "Britain's premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind's contribution to rising temperatures."

It gets worse, or better, depending on your perspective. Newsweek magazine, which more than 30 years ago promoted global cooling and a new ice age -- and more recently has been drinking the global warming Kool-Aid -- headlined a story, "Uncertain Science: Bickering and Defensive, Climate Researchers Have Lost the Public's Trust." Newsweek does its best to cling to its increasingly discredited doctrine, but the growing body of contrary evidence only adds to the public's disbelief.

In Canada, the polar bear -- which has been used by global warming promoters to put a cuddly face on the issue -- is in danger of not being endangered any longer. CBC News reported that the polar bear's designation as a "species of special concern" has been suspended "while the government reviews the polar bear's status and decides whether to renew the classification or change it."

The New York Times recently lamented "global warmism's loss of credibility" in a story about hundreds of "environmental activists who met to ponder this question: "If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?"

The "consensus" never was a consensus. Most of us may not have gotten an "A" in science, but we can sense when we are being bamboozled.

The German online news magazine Focus recently carried a story, "Warm Times Will Soon Be Over!" Commenting on the "new NASA high temperature record," which may be set, the magazine blames it on El Nino.

Meteorologists, like Joe D'Aleo of the Weather Channel, are publicly distancing themselves from the false doctrine of global warming. D'Aleo says, "We'll have La Nina conditions before the summer is over, and it will intensify further through the fall and winter. Thus we'll have cooler temperatures for the next couple of years."

Remember the scare ignited in 2007 by supposed melting Arctic ice caps? The Star Canada says a new analysis shows that the apparent change was the result of "shifting winds," while an expedition last year to the North Pole discovered the ice "100 percent thicker than expected."

Much of this information -- and more -- is available at the useful Web site www.climatedepot.com.

It is a given that America needs new sources of energy. Environmentalists have inhibited efforts at exploration by supporting policies that have forced some domestic exploration too far offshore (thus increasing chances of an ecological disaster as is occurring in the Gulf of Mexico).

Instead of trying to sell us a dubious doctrine at an estimated cost of $100 billion a year worldwide (so far), environmentalists would have done themselves and the world more good had they chosen a different strategy, such as not sending oil money to countries that want to destroy us. This would have increased our patriotic spirit and had the additional benefit of not only diversifying our energy supply, but also depriving our enemies of money they use to underwrite terrorism.

Watch for the hard-core "global warming" cultists to continue clinging to their beliefs; but also watch increasing numbers of scientists and eventually politicians to abandon this once "certain" faith and to look for other ways to control our lives. In that pursuit, the left never quits.Rather than acknowledge their error, they will go on to make new mistakes, knowing they will never be held accountable.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sinking-_climate-change_-95418754.html#ixzz0sPkdKwrO