…
Ponder the irony — MediaWatch is meant to be a media auditor, but it starts from the assumption that every government run collective is 100% accurate (at least on climate change). And unaudited UN committees are infallible too. Indeed newspapers have a duty to repeat what these committees say without questioning them. Host Paul Barry actually uses the word duty.
Once upon a time, the duty of investigative reporters was to to investigate, now their job is to be glorified marketing hacks advertising the latest government scheme to change the weather. What could possibly go wrong?
How about if governments set up all their institutes to find problems with CO2 and asked none of them to audit the others? What if whole government departments were tasked to slay the carbon dragon, and while exactly no groups anywhere were funded to find out if the sun controlled the climate instead? Using the MediaWatch Wand of Truth, only government scientists can criticize government scientists (and only then for five minutes until their uni trawls through their emails and sacks them). Thus and verily IPCC scientists should be obeyed.
MediaWatch marvels that the Australian Newscorp media can’t be bothered repeating the same overdone fake scare campaign for the 20th time. Could it be that, unlike the ABC, they can’t afford to bore their audience with a teachy-preachy zombie hypothesis?
Let’s vote for our laws of science then?
MediaWatch think science is done by counting papers and government paid scientists. After $100 billion in science funding it’s not hard to come up with 91 supportive scientists who haven’t been sacked yet.
So is McLean to be believed ahead of 91 leading experts and 6,000 peer reviewed scientific papers,…
On the other hand, there are 30,000 independent scientists, thousands of papers, millions of radiosondes and 4.5 billion years of history that show the IPCC is wrong. Skeptics include people with Nobel Prizes in physics, and men who walked on the moon. If Barry had done some investigating he would know that, and he could’ve phoned Ivar Giavar instead of giving the Union of Concerned Nobody’s time to discuss something that happened six years ago. Without any government funding, skeptics outrank and outnumber believers, but we don’t pretend that means something scientific because we know what science is.
Leaving no stone-age-trick unturned, MediaWatch are not just using ad homs, but inconsistent and cherry picked ad homs supported by strawmen and argument by authority. That’s what you get with Big Government funding. Stacked fallacies.
I’m delighted to be featured in the MediaWatch weekly propaganda minute. (at 4mins)
The IPCC demands for cash rest on freak data, empty fields, Fahrenheit temps recorded as Celsius, mistakes in longitude and latitude, brutal adjustments and even spelling errors. — says Jo Nova
Presumably, the MediaWatch team thought this quote looks bad for skeptics. Keep it coming, thinks Jo. Anyone watching with half a brain would notice that these mistakes sound detailed and not good, and that MediaWatch couldn’t find anyone to say that that these errors weren’t there. The meteorology experts got Fahrenheit mixed up with Celsius, can’t spell, and got the long-and-lat wrong? But this is OK because Steven Sherwood, UNSW, says we know about the problems already:
“turns up little if anything new, seems specifically motivated to discredit global warming…
Which only makes us wonder, if they knew — why didn’t they fix it? Don’t expect a government funded audit group to ask a government funded institute. Hadley gets £226 million a year to leave errors intact for 40 years but that’s OK according to MediaWatch. The real failing here is that some people question it. How dare they?
MediaWatch fooled by Hadley bait and switch
McLean found 70 problems, but according to Paul Barry, this is neutralized, because the dataset has 7 million datapoints. Nevermind that problems like site moves and quality control can apply to millions of points. One number is big and the other small and who cares about the units. That’s about as advanced as ABC investigation goes. Apples are oranges and the team with the most oranges gets $446 million to stop a problem that doesn’t exist or something like that…
Being functionally innumerate is practically a part of the ABC job description these days.
Would you like a character attack with that?
The MediaWatch strategy is and has long been essentially selective “Ad Hom” — they attack John McLean for something he said 7 years ago on a different topic. It’s the pagan Ad Hom Rule of Reasoning: if anyone gets any prediction wrong ever, then everything they say after that is automatically also wrong. By that reasoning the IPCC is toast. Climate models have failed for 24 years in a row on rain, humidity, clouds, Antarctica, the upper troposphere and global trends, but John McLean got one prediction wrong about the temperature of 2011, and therefore he can’t be trusted. Shall we talk about the time the Met Office predicted a BBQ summer and got torrential rain?
To sum up the MediaWatch analysis, two thousand Hadley employees rely on frozen tropical islands and junk data but we already knew about that apparently, which makes any problem OK. They junk-data-guys predict global doom and their predictions are right because McLean was wrong on a different topic 7 years ago and his audit was supervised by a man who was sacked and dedicated to one who said the IPCC was a farce? (Vale Bob Carter).
If only McLean had dedicated his audit to Kevin Rudd.
Beat up those Strawmen
To give it a wash of “sciencey” authority, they bring in some experts like Steven Sherwood to blandly declare McLean is wrong without showing any sign that Sherwood has even read the blog posts on it, let alone looked at McLean’s 135 page audit. After dismissing the findings as old news, he discusses something entirely different and waffles about the laws of physics.
“…its naive claims of alternative causes of global warming do not consider the relevant laws of physics and do not make sense.”
Which Law of Physics would that be? The Second Law of Data Collection? Conservation of Thermometer Units?
McLean’s audit was about the data, it was not about the flaws in their climate models. (That’s another story).
Associate Prof Nerilie Abram
“Regardless of whether the PhD thesis work has any merit, the claims that this falsifies IPCC findings is wrong.”
Abram doesn’t seem to realize that the IPCC findings rely on climate models which in turn are trained on the Hadley data. If Hadley exaggerates the warming, so will the models. But then it’s not like she’s a climate expert... oh wait.
MediaWatch could’ve asked Sherwood if we should trust the IPCC when the temperature trends consistently fall below even their lowest estimates. MediaWatch could’ve asked Sherwood if it’s OK to change the scale on temperature graphs to pretend the hot spot was found when it wasn’t. Can we trust him, or, to paraphrase his own words: is he “specifically motivated to believe global warming“?
Hadley Meteorology Office:
…the long term increase in global temperature is unequivocal. This is backed up by other globally recognised datasets all of which are run independently and find very similar warming.
They might be run independently, but they’re all dependent on BigGovernment. As I said yesterday:
They claim they are backed up by other datasets. but all the worlds temperature sets are juggling the same pool of measurements. If the shonky site-move adjustments start with national met bureaus, then get sent out around the world, all the global datasets combine the same mistakes and make similar overestimations.
Look who’s making a conspiracy theory…
News corp treats climate science and the threat to our planet with contempt, why is it so, presumably because Rupert Murdoch is a non-believer.
Naturally, the doubts of thousands of journalists are not because the IPCC keeps getting things wrong, or that climate change causes everything under the sun except “normal weather”, or that we’re perpetually tripping over tipping points, and it’s the last chance to save the world, again. Apparently, thousands of journalists and editors don’t obey the Met Bureau because they obey Rupert Murdoch instead. It’s all projection of the ABC’s failings. Maybe thousands of journalists just think for themselves.
See this weeks MediaWatch coverup for failing institutions
Soon, children won’t know what journalism is.
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