Watching BBC Breakfast this morning I had to have a little chuckle to myself.
Strange, you might think, because BBC Breakfast is a serious programme but I did find occasion to laugh during an interview with the stars of a documentary on nomadic Scandinavian reindeer herders.
So what was so funny about the reindeer herders? Nothing really but what I found immensely funny was when one of the presenters asked one of the guests “And have you noticed a change in the climate recently?” and she replied “Errrrm, no, not really. It’s been more cold in the last 2 years actually”.
Oh how I laughed. There he was with a smug grin plastered all over his face thinking he was in line for a gold star for promoting global warming propaganda but then this nomadic woman who actually spends all day, every day (apart from when she’s on the telly) out and about north of the arctic circle tells him that it’s all normal. He just hesitated and moved on to something else.
Real Life 1, Climate Change Propagandists 0.
Technorati Tags: Climate Change, Propaganda, BBC Bias
I wonder what Allie makes of such evidence?
An off-the-cuff remark from a non-scientist with no data is hardly ‘evidence’, is it?
Still waiting for answers to my questions on other threads, by the way. Hope springs eternal.
No, the opinions of a scientist analysing someone else’s data is much more important than someone who lives in the arctic circle.
What answers are you after Allie?
They’re not opinions, they’re findings. And wouldn’t you rather have proper data than just ask someone whether they need to put their gloves on? I think that’s my answer to your point, but it’s hard to tell when you’re being sarcastic.
Oh, loads; the ones on the Sandwell councillor thread, for starters, and some kind of insight as to why any mention of climate change, or the idea of doing something about it, makes some people so wildly indignant.
Here you go then Allie..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/04/10/eaclimate110.xml
Thank you, Keith. I was particularly struck by the passages from that article which I’ve cut and pasted below. They leave me even more mystified as to why some people are so opposed to trying to limit the damage from climate change.
These are the passages in question:
The consensus among scientists is that long-term temperature rises since 1880 can only be explained by greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, caused by human activity.
Experts say climate change is likely to lead to more flooding in temperate regions and in the tropics while droughts in arid areas will get even worse.
The warning came from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which said there would be serious environmental consequences because of a shortage of fresh water supplies.
“The frequency of heavy precipitation events (or proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls) will very likely increase over most areas during the 21st century, with consequences to the risk of rain-generated floods,” according to a report, released at the IPCC’s annual meeting in Budapest.
“At the same time, the proportion of land surface in extreme drought at any one time is projected to increase,” it said.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said that unless action was taken 250m people in Africa would be short of water for drinking and for crops by 2020.
“The risk is that these people can no longer sustain themselves and they have to find somewhere else to go,” he said warning that the problem would create a major challenge for governments around the world.
The report comes at a time when the price of food staples such as rice and wheat are increasing sharply due to rising demand from Asia and poor harvests due to bad weather.
Allie, you’re confused. I agree that we should be looking to minimise the risks of climate change, I just don’t think we should be destroying the global economy and legislating ourselves into the dark ages under the guise of stopping the causes of climate change. Climate change is naturally occurring, we are in a period of natural climate change and unscientific, paid propagandist climatologists (or in the case of some, such as Al Gore, self proclaimed experts) coming up with largely baseless guesses about the how the climate is going to change on a tiny, irrelevant, minuscule amount of data is just damaging to the entire human race.
If you only use the 20 years of data preceding 1998 when the earths temperature last peaked (it’s cooled in the last 10 years) and after the data that convinced scientists 30 years ago we were heading for an ice age then of course you can “prove” that the earth is warming. If you actually go back over hundreds or thousands of years, the micro-changes in the climate we are experiencing now are shown up as a complete red herring. It’s a tiny, tiny blip in the continuous trend of climate change that has occurred on this planet for millions of years. The variances in the climate are not a smooth line, there will be tiny changes like the one we are experiencing now constantly as part of the overall natural trend.
I almost forgot to remind you that the lead author of the IPPC report on climate change is a liar and a fraud. Wilkins Ice Shelf, remember? Hanging on by a thread and on the verge of collapse even though it collapsed 10 years ago?
Surely is there’s even a chance of – for example – 250 million people being short of drinking water within ten years, we have a moral obligation to do all we can, even at the cost of some of our disproportionate prosperity, to alleviate that? Christ, there are a billion people right now without clean water to drink. Shouldn’t we be doing something about that too?
Still waiting for those other answers, by the way.