BBC + Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal

[Teddy Bear]

The conclusion by Christopher Booker in this excellent article dealing with the skewed climate change agenda of the BBC, while applied by him for those reasons, is just one of the areas where the BBC not only fail its public, but betray them as well.

All this is why I am far from alone in concluding that the BBC’s coverage has, on this key issue of our time, gone hopelessly off the rails. The Corporation has been guilty of three separate betrayals.

By making its coverage so flagrantly one-sided on the environment issue, it has betrayed its statutory duty to report on world events impartially.

Second, it has betrayed the basic principles of science by giving such unquestioning support to a theory which the evidence has increasingly called into doubt.

Above all, however, the BBC has betrayed the trust of its audience, by failing to give a fair and balanced picture.

This has become a national scandal. It is time we called this pampered, self-important organisation to account for having misinformed us for too long.

The BBC and an inconvenient truth about climate change: A devastating report lays bare the BBC's endemic bias on global warming

By Christopher Booker

From its breathtaking footage of killer whales hunting in packs to the scenes of penguins swimming with balletic grace under the sea ice, Sir David Attenborough’s BBC series Frozen Planet has been acclaimed as perhaps the most riveting sequence of natural history programmes ever produced.

The sophistication of the photography, the extraordinary endeavour of the film crews to get the best shots and Sir David’s breathily authoritative commentary have had viewers entranced in their millions.

Last night’s was the final part of this landmark series, and it set a very different tone from his usual celebration of the natural world. This was because Sir David and the BBC decided to use the last programme to put over a particular message that has become all too familiar from the Corporation in recent years.

Sir David used the awesome shots of the frozen polar wastes to hammer home his belief that the world is facing disaster from man-made global warming.

No one can doubt the passion of his belief. But in putting across his apocalyptic message so forcefully, too many important questions on this hugely important subject were last night neither asked nor answered.
Distorted

In short, it was a deeply disappointing end to the series — for it was the latest one of countless examples of how, in recent years, the BBC has chosen to make its coverage of one of the most crucial issues of our time quite deliberately, even defiantly one-sided.

The BBC is committed by its charter to report with ‘accuracy and impartiality’. Yet on climate change, it has adopted a clear ‘party line’, which has run through almost every aspect of its broadcasting.

Earlier this year, when the Mail serialised the memoirs of the respected former BBC news reporter and anchorman Peter Sissons, his insider’s view explained how the BBC had become ‘a propaganda machine for climate-change zealots’.

So distorted has the BBC’s coverage become that I produced a detailed report on the subject for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the ‘sceptical’ think-tank run by former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, which is published today.

My disturbing findings show that the problem began a few years ago when the alarm over global warming was at its height. Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth — a sensationalist documentary warning of the imminent destruction of our planet because of climate change — was packing in vast audiences and being circulated to our schools to show to children.

Tony Blair was putting global warming at the top of his government’s agenda. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) was producing its scariest report to date.

At a secret ‘high-level seminar’ in January 2006, 30 of the BBC’s most senior staff listened as a former president of the Royal Society, Lord May, told them that ‘the scientific debate over climate change’ was over, and that the BBC must ‘stop reporting the sceptics’.

As a result, the BBC adopted a new editorial policy line, throwing any obligation to impartiality to the winds.

The BBC’s journalists and producers were let off the leash — to line up with the more extreme environmental pressure groups, such as Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and Friends of the Earth, in pushing their global warming agenda for all it was worth.

This bias was soon evident across the whole of the BBC’s output. Not just in the news and current affairs coverage, but from children’s programmes such as Blue Peter —which titled one show Green Peter, with top tips to save the planet — to story-lines in The Archers, one of which involved a farmer planting trees to combat climate change.

Even producers of the BBC Proms got in on the act. In 2007 they commissioned a ‘music drama’ centred on a group of children who had lost their homes through floods caused by climate change.

Programme after programme promoted the climate change gospel, including a two-part documentary series by David Attenborough in 2006, which featured practically every scare story ever dreamed up.

These included predictions that hurricane disasters, such as the previous year’s Katrina, would soon be commonplace, as well as familiar claims that the polar ice caps were melting, threatening the world with a catastrophic rise in sea levels.

The only trouble was that, even then, almost every claim Attenborough made was not supported by serious scientific evidence. The truth is that since the New Orleans flood of 2005, hurricane activity has, in fact, dropped to a historic low.

Despite all the scary claims about the vanishing Arctic ice, its modest retreat has been counter-balanced by a striking increase in ice around Antarctica (a fact not exactly highlighted on Frozen Planet last night).
Preaching

The irony is that just when the BBC was going into overdrive with its propaganda, the real ‘global warming’ story was beginning to take a very different turn: none of the predictions made by the doom-mongers were coming true.

Temperatures were not continuing to rise as the IPCC’s computer models had predicted they should. The ice caps were not seriously melting; polar bears were not vanishing; sea levels were not dangerously rising; heatwaves, hurricanes and droughts were not becoming more frequent, as those Nobel Prize-winners Gore and the IPCC panel had insisted they must.

And ever more scientists questioned publicly the theory that the world was dangerously heating up as a result of greater amounts of man-made CO2.

Blithely oblivious to all this, the BBC carried on preaching the same old message, assuring us things were ‘even worse than predicted’, and that the only way to save the planet was to pile ever higher taxes on all emissions of CO2 and to build thousands more wind turbines (without, of course, telling us how ludicrously inefficient and expensive they are).

In 2009, the BBC’s journalists could scarcely hide their dismay at the collapse of the UN’s great Copenhagen climate conference, which planned to cut the world’s ‘carbon emissions’ to such an extent it would have landed mankind with the biggest bill in history, at an estimated cost of hundreds of trillions of pounds.

They tried to brush aside the huge embarrassment of the so-called ‘Climategate’ row in 2009 when hundreds of emails from the Climate Research Unit in Norwich were posted online and which revealed how some of the top scientists had been fiddling their data.

They downplayed scandals erupting round the IPCC when it was revealed that many of its more alarming predictions had not been based on proper science at all, but only on scare stories dreamed up by environmental lobby groups.
Betrayals

Then, last summer, in a bid to justify its conduct, the BBC Trust commissioned one of the Corporation’s regular contributors, the geneticist Professor Steve Jones, to review its science coverage, notably on climate change.

Professor Jones made the astonishing claim that the only problem with the coverage of climate change was not that it was too biased, but that it wasn’t biased enough.

All this is why I am far from alone in concluding that the BBC’s coverage has, on this key issue of our time, gone hopelessly off the rails. The Corporation has been guilty of three separate betrayals.

By making its coverage so flagrantly one-sided on the environment issue, it has betrayed its statutory duty to report on world events impartially.

Second, it has betrayed the basic principles of science by giving such unquestioning support to a theory which the evidence has increasingly called into doubt.

Above all, however, the BBC has betrayed the trust of its audience, by failing to give a fair and balanced picture.

This has become a national scandal. It is time we called this pampered, self-important organisation to account for having misinformed us for too long.

Christopher Booker’s report, The BBC And Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal, is available online today from the Global Warming Policy Foundation

[Teddy Bear]

James Delingpole makes a glowing tribute to Christopher Booker's report, as well as picking up the continuing CC bias by the BBC as evidenced in one of their articles today on cannibal polar bears.

The fact that a scientist seeing a male polar bear eating a cub, attributes this to 'being food deprived by loss of habitat due to climate-change', is not only bias but completely misinforming the public. I'm not a scientist but I know there are many male species of animals that will kill the infants of a female to get her to mate with him. This factor is not even mentioned by this 'scientist' or the BBC's 'science journalist' writing the story.

The BBC: less trustworthy, more dangerous than a cannibal polar bear
By James Delingpole Environment Last updated: December 8th, 2011

Today's endangered polar bear story du jour comes, you won't be at all surprised to hear, from the BBC's news website. An "environmental photojournalist" named Jenny E Ross took a photograph of a polar bear eating a cub – and concluded, as of course any self-respecting environmental photojournalist would, that this was probably the result of "climate change".

"This type of intraspecific predation has always occurred to some extent," she told BBC News.
"However, there are increasing numbers of observations of it occurring, particularly on land where polar bears are trapped ashore, completely food-deprived for extended periods of time due to the loss of sea ice as a result of climate change."

Don't you just love that having-it-both-ways fudge? On the one hand, she concedes that polar bears have been doing this kind of thing since time immemorial. On the other, for all that, it's just gotta be climate change hasn't it – because, well, isn't just about everything the result of climate change these days?

Certainly is if you work for the BBC as we were reminded yet again last night on the final episode of Frozen Planet. This was the episode so tendentious that it wasn't even included in the package sent for broadcast in the US. But apparently here in Britain we've been simply too naughty to deserve such a let-off. No, like POWs captured at the Imjin River, we have to sit there and be indoctrinated by the Commissars at our Re-education camp.

What's particularly depressing is that the Chief Re-education Commissar in this case was none other than David Attenborough. Cosy, nice, whispery, reverend, sensitive, super-dooper, brother of Dickie, gorilla-hugging doyen of all that was ever wonderful about the BBC David Attenborough.
Depressing and also dangerous – for when a man of Attenborough's stature, popularity and apparent reasonableness trots out a line on television many of his audience will be inclined to believe him, regardless of whether what he's saying is gospel truth or nonsense on stilts. And in the case of last night's Frozen Planet it was mostly the latter.

Though Attenborough was rarely explicit about anthropogenic influences on the "climate change" he kept lamenting, he didn't need to be. For one thing, in the interviews he has given to promote the programme, he has made it abundantly clear that he is a fully paid up member of the Great Green Religion of ManPolarBearPig. For another, the debate has long since been framed in such a way by environmental propagandists that the anthropogenic connection doesn't need to be stated any more. Merely to show a melting glacier or a lonely polar bear, is more than enough these days. It's shorthand for: "And it's all your fault, you bastard, for your selfishness, your greed and your persistent habit of taking holidays on Ryanair and EasyJet when really the only people who should be allowed to use aircraft ever again are Al Gore, Prince Charles, COP17 delegates, and members of the BBC or the British Antarctic Survey racking up the carbon airmiles in order to show just how dangerous carbon is."

Which brings us to thing I've been dying to write about for two weeks: Christopher Booker's magisterial report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation on the BBC's role in promulgating the Great Man Made Global Warming Myth. It's brilliant.

So brilliant that I'm going to have to run its damning conclusion at considerable length. Here he is, summing up what he calls the BBC's "three betrayals":

The first was the BBC’s betrayal of its statutory obligation to report on the world with ‘impartially’. In its own mind it got round this by creating its own definition of the meaning of the word. The IPCC, the scientific and political establishments, Al Gore, the developers of wind turbines and heaven knows who else were all so unanimously convinced that man-made global warming was an unchallengeable fact that the BBC decreed that these were the only people who should be listened to. Anyone who dissented from this orthodoxy could be ignored as belonging to just a tiny minority of cranks, or venally corrupted hirelings of Big Oil, whose views it would be improper for the BBC to publicise.

The problem was that, outside the ‘bubble’, all sorts of things were beginning to contradict this cosy scenario. Ever more serious scientists were beginning to question the orthodox theory of what was influencing the world’s climate. It emerged ever more clearly that the projections made by over-simplistic computer models no longer matched up with the observed evidence of what was actually happening to the climate. Ever more evidence came to light to suggest that the IPCC was not the unimpeachably objective and honest scientific body it was claimed to be.

It was all this which helped to illuminate the extent of the second ‘betrayal’ in the BBC’s coverage of the story, the way it betrayed the principles of professional journalism. So committed to the cause were its journalists that, when important questions began to be raised as to whether the story was really as unarguable as it was claimed to be, their only real response was simply to dig in their toes to defend it. They could no longer step outside the ‘bubble’, as independent-minded journalists should have been able to do, to consider all these questions in their own right. They could only stay within the mindset they knew, talking only to those within the orthodoxy who could provide them with the answers they needed to fend off all these tiresome ‘deniers’ appearing from outside the ‘bubble’ to ask awkward questions – such as how genuinely scientific were the methods used to create the ‘hockey stick’ graph?

One of the impressions it is hard to avoid in reviewing the BBC’s coverage of this story is that its journalists, and those shadowy figures behind them in the BBC hierarchy, are not particularly well-informed about many of the issues they report on. This point was made as long ago as 2006 by the journalist Richard D. North, when he described his experience in attending that day-long seminar organised by Roger Harrabin, As North observed:
I was frankly appalled by the level of ignorance of the issue which the BBC people showed …I heard nothing which made me think any of them read any broadsheet newspaper coverage of the topic (except maybe the Guardian and that lazily) … it seemed to me that none of them had shown even a modicum of professional curiosity on the subject … I spent the day discussing the subject and I don’t recall anyone showing any sign of having read anything serious at all.

This may help to explain the third of the three ‘betrayals’ to which I referred at the start, the consistency with which the BBC’s coverage of this story has shown so little understanding of the basic principles of science. We have seen how again and again they have put out programmes designed to promote their cause which have contained quite rudimentary scientific errors. They have loved to wheel on front men such as Sir David Attenborough, Dr Iain Stewart or Sir Paul Nurse, claiming to speak with all the authority of being ‘a scientist’ – but who have then been shown, on matters outside their own disciplines, to be out of their depth. These people have been used to lend the prestige of ‘science’ for the purposes of what amounted to no more than clumsy exercises in propaganda.

Perhaps the most revealing example of all of this misuse of the prestige of science was that truly bizarre report produced in 2011 for the BBC Trust by Professor Jones, arguing that, far from being too biassed, the BBC’s coverage of the story should in future become even more biassed still.
The sheer Alice in Wonderland dottiness of this report might serve as a suitable epitaph on what has been one of the saddest chapters in the BBC’s history. Here is a hugely important and far-reaching issue on which for years it has been comprehensively misleading the audience from which it derives its funding. Yet the tragedy is that it seems so incapable of recognising just how badly it has failed us that there is little realistic prospect of it ever being likely to change its ways.

The one body which in theory has the power to call the BBC to account when it is failing in its journalistic and statutory responsibilities is the BBC Trust (which in 2008 succeeded the old Board of Governors). But the Trust’s present chairman Lord Patten, a former EU Commissioner and fervent Europhile, has been an unquestioning supporter of the ‘consensus’ on climate change ever since the days when he was Secretary of State for the Environment back In 1990. He has more recently described it as ‘the only really existential issue confronting the world today’ and as ‘’the biggest issue we face’.[1]

His ‘vice-chair’, Diane Coyle, married to the BBC’s Technology Editor and a former economics editor of the Independent, has similarly parroted the mantras of the orthodoxy (just as in former times, like Patten, she was a fervent supporter of the campaign for Britain to join the euro, scorning those opposed to it as being driven only by a visceral ‘anti-Europeanism and ‘Little England-ism’).

It is hardly surprising that in such hands the Trust should have both commissioned and warmly endorsed Jones’s report calling for the BBC to show even more bias than hitherto. So the BBC’s position is therefore likely to remain – until that time when the great scare over global warming may come to be looked back on as having been one of the most significant examples in history of how easily human beings can be carried away by what the author of a famous book once long ago called ‘extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds’.

I highly recommend Sir Antony Jay's foreword too, which offers an equally brilliant ex-insider's insight into the BBC mentality which made these betrayals possible. Perhaps I'll find time to reprint it in another post. Not in this one, where the lofty scorn of the Booker on tip top form is more than treat enough.

[Teddy Bear]

Some further REAL information that shows just how misinformed or intentionally skewed the BBC polar bear article really is.

The BBC article tells us

Olgastretet is a passage of water that divides the two main islands of Svalbard. Traditionally, it has been an area that has stayed ice-covered throughout the year.

But the recent dramatic retreat of Arctic sea ice in summer months has seen open water appear in the area for extended periods.

According to Wiki:

The climate of Svalbard is dominated by its high latitude, with the average summer temperature at 4 °C (39 °F) to 6 °C (43 °F) and January averages at −16 °C (3 °F) to −12 °C (10 °F).[94] The North Atlantic Current moderates Svalbard's temperatures, particularly during winter, giving it up to 20 °C (36 °F) higher winter temperature than similar latitudes in Russia and Canada. This keeps the surrounding waters open and navigable most of the year.

And from another site:

Weather and Climate in Svalbard Though generally cold, the weather in Svalbard is actually milder than comparable places at the same latitude in the Arctic or the Antarctic. The average temperature over a year is only –4ºC "+25ºF". Average temperature for January is -16ºC "+3ºF", and in July it is +6ºC "43ºF". The northern arm of the Gulf Stream reaches the west coast of Svalbard. This brings a massive movement of relatively warm water and warm air from the south to Svalbard.

Then to see just how much HUNGER is the cause for the cannibalism in these polar bears, here's an article from The National Geographic Explorer from a year ago on Olgastretet and polar bears. Doesn't seem to be any shortage of polar bears, or other species, from what they saw - which would completely contradict the impression the BBC wants to paint. This is how the article might read if the BBC didn't have their climate change agenda.

Arctic Cruise Report: Olgastretet, off Edgeøya
AUG 3
Posted by deconspray
From the National Geographic Explorer in the Arctic July 21, 2010

To be in the High Arctic in the later part of July does mean that day and night blur together in our usual way to measuring time. With 24 hours of daylight through the summer it is, in fact, endless day between May to late August. Some of us had a hard time departing from the bridge in the very early morning as the scenery was breathtaking. Still we knew from the evening’s briefing about the next day – it would be in ice and the program was TBA.

During the early hours of July 21 the ship sailed south and by 6 AM we were in sea ice off the southeastern side to Barentsøya, ideal for watching wildlife. The area is named Olgastretet after the queen Olga of Würtenberg. Two different German expeditions sailed into the High Arctic waters in 1868 and 1870 and Dr. Petermann, a German cartographer was behind the scene, to use the results and put several German places names on the map to Svalbard.

By 6AM the first call came through the PA system and soon we had three different polar bears near the ship. This announcement was later to become more or less ever repeating itself, “Three polar bears”…“THREE POLAR BEARS”…

Before breakfast we made a closer approach to one bear and, right after, made a second approach to more bears. In fact, before 10AM we had already seen 5 different polar bears, although not every one close up, but still a magical start of a great day to come.

The setting over the Olgastretet was almost perfect. Yesterday, a cold northern wind had blown crystal clear air from the frozen ocean further north. The ocean we sailed in was cluttered with drifting pack-ice and, for keen photographers, we had clouds, no wind and crisp air. Blue sky with sparkling sunshine is not the perfect conditions here on these far north latitudes for any camera. It is just too much light!

As our day made progress we continued to move the ship slowly through the pack-ice, more or less going from one bear to the next bear. By 6PM, the official list of polar bear sightings had reached 21 and we had, throughout the day, sailed about 21 nautical miles north! Almost one polar bear per every nautical mile north!

Just as recap was to be announced, three more were spotted. Our Captain and his bridge officers really had a busy day to navigate through thick ice and also approach bears. Huge thanks to them for making this day outstanding for polar bears sightings!

One of the more remarkable sightings was a female with a cub of this year, resting on the ice. Suddenly as the ship approached, both jumped up. Maybe many onboard thought it was us scaring the bears? This was NOT the case. Having a young cub of this year, any female polar bear always has to be on high alert. Large male polar bears do sometimes try to attack the female with the hope of killing the cub.

This time it was a younger male polar bear approaching her kill and of course catching her attention. As soon as she saw it was a younger male she relaxed and fell to sleep again after her large seal fiesta. The young male had to try to get out the last remains of the seal.

The magic number “three” tells us there has been a remarkably good survival rate for cubs over the last year. Many of the females had two cubs, one year old. In fact, near the area Olgastretet, you find one major breeding area for polar bears, Kung Karls Land but also the eastern slopes at Edgeøya and Barentsøya.

In the very late afternoon between polar bears, our Expedition Leader at last was able to squeeze in a nice photo presentation by National Geographic Photographer Norbet Rosing.

As dinner was announced the ship had slowly, through this magical polar bear adventure, made it north to Nordaustlandet. During dinner we still continued to see polar bears as we were trying to recharge our batteries.

Right after dinner it was time to try to focus on the great ice-cliff made by the glacier Austfonna along the south coast to Nordaustlandet. The ice-cliff runs for more than 100 nautical miles and along the edge you find large waterfalls spouting out tons of water. The setting is almost surrealistic!

Of course we saw more polar bears on ice flows along the icecap. Also our hotel department had set up a wine glue station at the bow for anyone who got cold.

As we slowly sailed west along Austfonna and the midnight sun reached its lowest elevation, we still saw more polar bears on the iceflows but also walrus and bearded seals. To summarize the day is easy, polar bear, Polar Bear and more POLAR BEAR! Exactly how many is hard to tell. We can at least arrive home and tell our friends we saw a few and will remember this day as the polar bear heyday.

It is time for us to do like many of the polar bears, catch some sleep to be ready for new Arctic adventures.

[Teddy Bear]

Christopher Booker again. this time reviewing the controversial final episode of David Attenborough's Frozen Planet series, and setting some things straight about what was attempted to imply by it.

Frozen Planet' gave us beautiful images, but an unbalanced picture
Sir David Attenborough's latest series went off course when it came to the state of the poles.

By Christopher Booker

I took something of a personal interest in the last instalment of Sir David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet series, billed by the BBC as yet another grim warning of the dangers of global warming. Next day I was due to launch a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation on the BBC’s notorious bias on this issue.

In fact, Sir David played it rather more cleverly than in previous forays. Accompanied by the usual breathtaking photography, he didn’t make his message too explicit. Instead he just conveyed that the polar ice caps are melting at an unprecedented rate, suggesting that this will cause a disastrous rise in sea levels.

In each case, however, he arranged his evidence in a notably loaded way, carefully omitting much of the information a less selective picture would have included. Like so many before him, his sequence on Antarctica – with 90 per cent of the ice on the planet – focused almost entirely on the Antarctic Peninsula, the one small part of that continent where ice is significantly melting – not because of atmospheric warming, but because a shift in ocean currents has brought in a flood of warmer water. Not mentioned, of course, was that most of Antarctica has if anything got colder in the past 50 years, its growth in sea ice counterbalancing the modest shrinkage of ice in the Arctic.

This too has probably been caused not by rising global temperatures, but by changing wind patterns, and warmer water coming in from the Pacific. Great play has been made of the new ability of ships to sail through ice-free Arctic waters. But ships were sailing freely along the northern coast of Russia 70 years ago. Meanwhile, winter ice further south, in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Baltic has increased markedly in recent years.
Sir David’s dramatic shots of Greenland may have tried to convey that its huge ice cap is rapidly melting. But a detailed study five years ago estimated the proportion of its ice lost by melting around its periphery at only seven thousandths of 1 per cent of the total, suggesting that it could make little significant difference to sea levels for thousands of years. All we might have asked for, to go with those stunning film sequences, was a rather more balanced picture of what is happening. That Sir David and the BBC did not give us.

[cherenkov]

Well I'm glad that my assertion that for the first time in a long time 'the hand of Man' was not implicated directly. However the observations Sir David described are real enough, and though the Milankovitch cycles provide a significant extraterrestrial and thus non-anthropogenic involvement, as well as the solar cycles the longer trends of which we are still studying, I think the programme was using a tactic of guilt by omission.

I don't care whether the BBC or anyone else believes in anthropogenic global warming or not. As a species we are all too corrupted in one way or another to ever form the necessary consensus of agreement.
If this leads to human extinction because we couldn't understand the meaning of a simple word 'FINITE' as per the resources of this planet and the limits on our ability to exploit it's resources, such that our population goes on replicating exponentially due to our collective inability or unwillingness to face up to the meaning of such a simple word, then so much the better-we deserve nothing else.
This planet has billions more years to produce another intelligent species who, on realising they were not the first, will stand a much better chance of making the decisions necessary to create a stable platform on which population and resource availability are held in balance.
Anyone possessed of a crumb of insight can see that this can never be us, so our our Easter Island-style extinction by resource depletion is to me inevitable. Sad yes, but I think I got over it around the time of Chernobyl. It doesn't matter to me.

What matters is that scientific probabilities of the sort I've just alluded to are not promoted by the BBC and others as scientific certainties. In the days I subscribed to the Nature journal I recall an editorial that said if the scientists project too pessimistic a picture then people won't bother to make the changes and sacrifices that are necessary to avoid extinction. Unlike Nature I actually think we've been in that phase already for some time.
No wonder the custodians at the BBC are confused- it's not nice when your whole life you were the kind of asshole that thought they knew all the answers, only to have to face up to a truly cosmic, existential problem that all your arrogance and sanctimony just haven't prepared you for!

[Teddy Bear]

I can feel you're quite passionate about this subject Cher, and it's an interesting subject to discuss. I don't know if mankind will become extinct, and whether if we do, it will be as a direct result of our actions or a natural occurrence - like dinosaurs. Since you express the possibility that it will more likely be a result of our actions, we can examine some of the dynamics involved.

One is the certainty that whether or not mankind becomes extinct, each one of us will die as individuals anyway. This raises the question of how much should we deny ourselves in the present for the benefit of those in the future. For example, following the discovery that salt preserved meat, and the resulting change to the way mankind interacted, from being hunter gatherers and working together as a team, sharing food, - to individualists and selfish beings, that there would have been those that also predicted our extinction. Though the cause is different, there are similar qualities involved.

Another dynamic is that while we are capable of great stupidity and the most evil and vile acts, we are also capable of real greatness, love and beauty. If we didn't advance, would we have developed this greatness?

Another is that as a species we are very young - only four and a half million years. In relative terms, if we said the age of the planet was one year old, beginning on January 1st, then Man comes along around midday December 31st. What I'm saying is perhaps we make all the mistakes we do because we need to learn a better way forward. We lack the wisdom that a few more million years might give us - assuming we survive that long.

I know the world is going through a very tough time right now, with a lot of complicated issues dominating. Certainly those in power are predominantly low grade beings, and perhaps the world has to go through a time where this power will be destroyed. History has done it many times. We might not be around to see it, but the seeds of its own destruction are visible. For mankind to become extinct would be a waste. Is life so wasteful?

[cherenkov]

"Is life so wasteful?"

It would certainly appear to be just that. Mass extinction events are well recorded over the Earth's history. The good thing is that up to now at least, such events mark sea changes in evolution that allow different species new opportunities. The demise of the dinosaurs and the advent of the ascent of mammals being the classic example.

Thankfully one thing is certain- human extinction can never happen in any one's lifetime!

[Teddy Bear]

Quite clearly, masquerading as 'the protector of the planet', even though there is no evidence that it is necessary for the reasons given, is far more important to David Attenborough's image than maintaining a scientific objectivity.

This shows the big difference between the personal integrity of those like David Bellamy, who can't now work for the BBC because he refused to sacrifice his ethics to promote nonsense unlike Attenborough.

As he said in this article today:

As the face of natural history on the BBC and a science academic, they wanted to enrol me in their cause. But when I read the so-called evidence, I realised it was flawed and refused to ‘sign up’.

I rapidly found myself cast out from the BBC and the wider scientific community. When I helped some children campaign against a wind farm as part of a Blue Peter programme, I was publicly vilified. Abusive emails criticised me. I realised my career at the BBC was over.

But scientific theory should be tested. That’s why I question the science which casts carbon as the villain that will bring about the end of the world.

Christopher Booker presents the facts to show the scam Attenborough, clearly nudged by the BBC, has engaged in.

Attenborough should check his facts on polar bears
Sir David was wrong to join the chorus on global warming

By Christopher Booker

De rigueur though it may be to describe Sir David Attenborough as a “national treasure” and our “greatest living naturalist”, it really is time he was called to account for the shameless way in which he has allowed himself to be made the front-man for one particular propaganda campaign that has stood all genuine scientific evidence on its head. Last week yet another report picked up on the part Sir David has played in promoting what the facts show to have been no more than a colossal scare story.

It is now seven years since Sir David was first wheeled out by the BBC as the main cheerleader in its campaign to whip up panic over man-made global warming. In two documentaries, he presented himself as a one-time “climate sceptic” who had now been convinced by the evidence. The only problem was that, as he repeated a series of familiar alarmist mantras, there was little sign that he had checked the evidence for any of them: not least his claim that, thanks to the melting of Arctic ice, the world’s polar bear population, already down by a quarter, could be facing extinction.

Pressure groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth had already made polar bears the most iconic image for their crusade to save the planet. WWF, in its relentless pursuit of funds, was moving on from pandas to appealing to the public to “pay £3 a month to adopt a polar bear”.

Vainly, in the face of this avalanche of propaganda, did an array of experts and bodies such as the US National Biological Service and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature point out that, thanks to curbs on hunting in the Seventies, the world’s polar bear population had, in fact, risen from 10,000 in 1966 to 25,000 or more in 2006; that all but one of their 19 main groups were significantly increasing in numbers; and that, based on observed data rather than highly questionable computer models, there was not a shred of evidence of any threat to the bears from climate change.

Al Gore twice famously fell flat on his face in promoting the cause, first when his film An Inconvenient Truth focused on the fate of four bears that were later shown just to have drowned in a storm; then when he made big play with a picture of two bears on a half-melted iceberg, which the photographer later protested she had only taken because it was a striking image, unconnected in any way with climate change.

But although Al Gore may have been notoriously reckless in misusing evidence, he has no pretensions to being a scientist. Sir David’s reputation, on the other hand, is that of a man with respect for science, although this did not prevent him in 2009 from supporting a ridiculous BBC publicity stunt involving a giant blow-up plastic polar bear floating down the Thames, or making polar bears a key feature of his Frozen Planet series in 2011, ending in a propaganda pitch for global-warming alarmism that somehow managed to overlook the fact that polar sea ice had recently been greater in extent than at any time in 30 years.

When, last week, the Global Warming Policy Foundation published a new report, Ten Good Reasons Not to Worry About Polar Bears, Matt (now Lord) Ridley referred in his foreword to Sir David’s bizarre determination to ignore the evidence. The report’s author, Susan Crockford, an experienced Canadian polar bear expert, explains just why there is no connection between the thriving polar bear population and climate change, and how this has been concocted into one of the great urban myths of our time.

Nothing is going to stand in the way of Sir David’s reputation as a national treasure, even though it rests so largely on the extraordinary skill of the cameramen who make his documentaries so memorable. But for his readiness to lend his immense prestige to a scare story that defies all the evidence he deserves no respect at all.