Brian Cox on AGW = 'Clap Trap on Global Scale'

[Teddy Bear]

It appears to me that in recent weeks the BBC is influencing as many Telegraph journalists as they can to produce as positive a story, or even non story, on their behalf.

One of those a few days ago concerned Brian Cox, and the article was doing what it could to big him up, which makes me shudder.

So I was pleased to read this excellent article in the Mail today by Christopher Stevens, examining Cox's views in a more discerning and intelligent light.

Brian Cox on climate change? It was clap-trap on a cosmic scale: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV

By Christopher Stevens for Daily Mail

More piffle has been spouted over the past ten years about climate change than any other topic. Conspiracy nuts on one side, end-of-the-world doom-mongers on the other, all competing to see who can get away with the biggest load of clap-trap.

Attention-seeking scientists claimed the other day that by the end of this century, Alaska will be as warm as Florida. That’s hysterical nonsense, of course, but it has two serious effects — either people run around panicking, like extras in a disaster movie, or they cease listening to any evidence at all, however credible.

So Professor Brian Cox’s central argument on Human Universe (BBC2) didn’t make much sense. He claimed mankind’s intelligence evolved as a direct response to repeated climate change. Every time the temperature slumped or soared, we developed another ten IQ points to cope with the challenges.

The evidence for this seemed not so much scanty as non-existent. Professor Brian took us to Tanzania and showed us four hominid skulls, the fossils of our ancestors. The skulls got bigger, and that was about it. There was nothing to connect this growth with climate change.

You wouldn’t think it was possible to be condescending to a fossil, but Brian managed it. Holding up the biggest one, he said smugly: ‘This one was almost as intelligent as me.’

Looking at the pandemic of stupidity provoked by global warming, it seems likely that the professor had those skulls in the wrong order. Every bout of climate change must send our intelligence plummeting.

The Beeb has touted Human Universe as its flagship science series for the autumn, but it was stuffed with romantic and eccentric notions only true inside Brian’s imagination.

He repeatedly called us a ‘space- faring civilisation’, and talked of us ‘living among the stars’. That’s comic-book drivel, the chatter of a man who can’t tell the difference between Star Trek and The Sky At Night.

We managed, a long time ago, to put men on the moon — but that’s not ‘spacefaring’. In intergalactic terms, it’s like popping next-door for a pint of milk.

It’s a shame Brian makes such a poor job of stringing together a narrative, because he was supported by the kind of camera-work that is the BBC’s finest asset. Segments of this were breathtaking, simply wonderful to watch — fishermen riding the Indian Ocean under a jewelled night sky, baboons surveying their kingdom in the Ethiopian Heights, the Inter-national Space Station floating above a cosmic dawn.

But the images were ruined by Brian’s awful script. ‘Writing created a cultural ratchet, an exponentiation of the known which ultimately led us to the stars,’ he gibbered.

Perhaps the kindest conclusion is that the professor has had a bit too much climate change lately.

[thehighlandrebel]

The effects of global warming in the Highlands this week.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-32973067

[Teddy Bear]

i notice the BBC avoids any mention of climate change propaganda to go with this story. Probably because they can't quite justify it.

James Delingpole has a story in a similar vein that I doubt the BBC will be covering.

TERRIBLE NEWS FOR CLIMATE CATASTROPHISTS: THE SAHARA IS GETTING GREENER

by JAMES DELINGPOLE
Good news: the Sahara desert is getting greener because of “climate change.”

Climate change has achieved what Bob Geldof and Live Aid failed to do by ending the drought in the Sahel region of Africa that killed more than 100,000 people in the 1980s, a study has found. Rising greenhouse gases caused rains to return to the region south of the Sahara, from Senegal to Sudan, boosting crop yields since the 1990s and helping the population to feed itself without relying on foreign donations. The study, in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that Sahel summer rainfall was about 10 per cent, or 0.3mm, higher per day in 1996-2011 than in the drought period of 1964-93.

Well, I say “good news”, which obviously it is for the starving Africans scraping a marginal and precarious living on the edge of the desert, and, indeed, for those of us who prefer to see Africa as an economic success story waiting to happen rather than a looming demographic threat.

But I predict that there will some people who are going to take this news very amiss. The sphincter-poppingly furious crew of greenie activists at the George-Soros-funded website DeSmog blog, for example. As Bishop Hill notes, when, a few years back, the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Phillip Mueller produced a paper predicting this very thing, the red-faced greenies of DeSmog rushed angrily to poo-poo it:

It is wild speculation to assert that any recovery in the Sahel is a result of global warming and to dangle the prospect of a future green Sahara is the exact opposite of the message provided by Mueller’s reference on the matter. However welcome the re-greening of parts of the Sahel, it cannot be relied on.

This is how the left rolls, as a very astute Times article once noted in a different but parallel context, when describing how apologists for the European Union enable it to enlarge its powers first by ridiculing their opponents, then by slily – but not apologetically – conceding that they were right all along.

It is at first denied that any radical new plan exists; it is then conceded that it exists but ministers swear blind that it is not even on the political agenda; it is then noted that it might well be on the agenda but is not a serious proposition; it is later conceded that it is a serious proposition but that it will never be implemented; after that it is acknowledged that it will be implemented but in such diluted form that it will make no difference to the lives of ordinary people; at some point it is finally recognised that it has made such a difference, but it was always known that it would and voters were told so from the outset.

I’m very much looking forward to the bit where the greenies get to the final stage of historical revisionism. “But, of course, we knew that global cooling was the real problem and that we were heading towards a new ice age,” all the usual suspects – from the once-distinguished heights of NASA and the Royal Society to the stygian depths of DeSmog – will all chorus. “Why we were all predicting as much as long ago as the 1970s…”