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UPDATE: For those who can’t see the ABC footage we have a copy at dropbox, thanks to Panda.
UPDATE #2: This episode has now been pulled from the ABC website 13 days early. The ABC, with its billion dollar budget, has a website to show all its programs for 14 days after they run. But for no stated reason this one has been deleted after just one day. Did the ABC not like us discussing it? (H/t to Panda). Thank goodness we have a copy. [Screencap of current ABC page here.]
h/t to Peter Q. Thanks to Andrew M as well.
Dennis Jensen has a lot to say on matters of national importance, but the ABC doesn’t ask him very often about those.
Tonight Dr Dennis Jensen was just the “Climate denier” target who had stepped over the line on another topic — breaking a sacred taboo. He might lose pre-selection. He might be out of a job. The ABC seem to think we care about the party political machinations more than the suffering of Australian citizens, which Jensen had been trying to get us to discuss. Instead the ABC went into great details of […]
The media hype and the story of the false Penguin Panic
Image: UNSW/Chris Turney
Much fuss was made of 150,000 missing penguins in Antarctica as if climate change had killed them. A monster iceberg had washed in, stopping the cute swimming tuxedos from getting to dinner and the colony of 160,000 suddenly shrank to 10,000. Where did all those penguins go? In previous tough times, when they could be tracked they just split up and went to different colonies.
Given that the penguins have survived repeated ice ages and warming for millions of years who would have thought that they would have a strategy for dealing with the odd big iceberg?
The penguin catastrophe:
[Grist] Researchers found that a colony of Adélie penguins in Antartica’s Cape Denison has decreased from 160,000 to just 10,000 since 2011, when a huge iceberg ominously named B09B became grounded in nearby Commonwealth Bay. The penguins were once a short waddle from their food source, but the arrival of the iceberg — which is nearly the size of Rhode Island — has turned that jaunt into a 75-mile round trip. Talk about a long lunch.
Cry for those penguins:
“It’s […]
It’s taken five years to figure it out, but apparently climate change is even worse than the last time we thought it was worse. Who knew? Once upon a time, glaciers were at a constant perfect position. Life was paradise on Earth and all the animals were happy. But then mankind built that first planet-destroying coal powered station in 1880 and now mountains are being moved, the Earth is changing.
Or at least, that’s sort of what the press release implies. What this tale is really about is the way the media hyperbole is just another excuse to repeat The Climate Mantra even if has nothing much to do with what the paper. What were those observations again?
If Nature, the formerly esteemed journal, was half what it used to be, it would have helped young Michele Koppes keep a longer term perspective, and not lace the press release with baseless speculation. Probably she’s seen a few too many Greenpeace-BBC specials and thinks Antarctica is warming (when the satellites show it isn’t). And curiously, the part that is warming happens to be right over the edges of the tectonic plates where the volcanoes are. She might think climate models work […]
Imagine the crime of trying to audit the BOM?
Last year, Graham Lloyd wrote in The Australian about how the BOM had made whopping two degree adjustments to data which turned cooling trends to warming trends and instead of improving the data, it created discontinuities. The BOM’s eventual explanation lamely exclaimed that the stations “might” have moved. (And they might not, too. Who knows, but remember this is what 95% certainty looks like.) Lloyd wrote about how historical records of extreme heat at Bourke had effectively been thrown in the trash. Who cares about historical records?
In response to the embarrassment and revealing questions, Tony Abbott wanted an investigation. But Greg Hunt, and The Dept of Environment opposed the investigation and opposed doing “due diligence”. What are they afraid of? Instead, Hunt helped the BOM set up a one-day-wonder investigation with hand-picked statisticians that wasted another nine months before admitting that the BOM methods would never be publicly available or able to be replicated. If it can’t be replicated, it isn’t science.
The BOM’s defense is always that their mystery method is considered “best practice” by other agencies around the world — who share the same incentives to exaggerate warming, […]
What to do with the public broadcasters? ABC BBC CBC (Can anyone explain public media in NZ?)
Big-government fans forcibly take funds from all citizens to support big-government propaganda by journalists who predominantly vote left or very-left (see here or here). The question is not whether or not they should do this but whether to privatize the public broadcasters, or to split them in two. I say, let’s forget the submissive plea to get one conservative commentator among a monoculture of “progressives”. Chop the current one in half and call it what it is: pro big-government. Then set up a new counter half to match — the pro-small-government broadcaster with the same funds but new staff. (Game on — let the best team win that ratings war.) Abbott could keep ABC funding promises. ABC-L plus ABC-R equals current ABC-LL+ funding.
Obviously, true free-market libertarians want public broadcasters 100% sold — their incentives are always going to run counter to unbiased reporting and the hunt for the truth. On the other hand, among the populace, the ground is not remotely laid for a big-sell. Many voters remain blind to the bias, and have no idea how filtered the half-truths are: […]
In years to come when people wonder how so much money came to be wasted in a frivolous attempt to stop the storms, people will marvel at the failure of parts of the free press. The Guardian will rise above that pack, standing out as the one that dressed itself in the color of gullible.
There are more than 31,000 whistleblowers inside science, 9,000 with PhD’s, 2 with Nobel Physics prizes, and 3 men who walked on the moon. There are meteorologists who won prizes in Meteorology, and physicists who studied with the greats — and they’re warning that the science is not settled, but the journalists at The Guardian know better.
Instead of asking hard questions of both skeptics and believers, the writers saw the passion and energy of namecalling activists and were swept off their feet to join the march. Now they dish out their infinite wisdom on science, on national policy and finance. If only the rest of us could be as genius and kind as Alan Rusbridger, eh?
But what are the Guardian guarding these days? They want to silence skeptics, and push a committee consensus. It isn’t free speech, and it isn’t science. If there […]
The wall of money is enormous, and the media oblivious to the real flow from taxpayers to corporate welfare freeloaders.
The wall of money, part 23
Citigroup promised to spend, invest and loan $50 billion in 2007 and found it so easy, it managed to do it by 2013, three years ahead of schedule. This month it promised to send another $100 billion more towards “sustainability”.
How much of this is about being a green corporate citizen? Not much apparently. Citigroup are making the Citigroup buildings energy efficient, but what they didn’t say was whether they would stop investing in or taking money and profits from their fossil fuel customers. As it happens Citigroup might Big-Green, but they are also Big-Ungreen too, they were one of “the top providers of funding for the most damaging practices of the U.S. coal industry last year. “ Not that any journalist mentioned that when they repeated the press release.
The banks can sniff out a good subsidy — it’s money for jam, and they are happy to feed the machine that feeds them.
Easy money for “sustainability” will also generate thousands of scary press releases from each and every sub-project as they […]
People are bored of the sermons, the half-truths, and carefully filtered messages. Who wants to be told what to think?
The ABC lost nearly 4% of its audience last year. Australians are tuning out the $1.1 billion ABC public broadcaster, and it has nothing to do with the small 5% efficiency cuts. The fall in popularity occured before the cuts. The three commercial TV channels in Australia all did much better at maintaining their popularity — despite suffering larger cuts to their budgets.
The ABC share is down to 10.08 per cent of 16 – 54 year olds. Nearly 90% of working age Australians are paying for the ABC but not watching much. The losses in the over-55 age group, traditionally the ABC stronghold, were almost as large as the younger groups.
Is the ABC biased towards Green politics?
Christine Milne leader of The Greens, at a rally outside Parliament House. Photo: Daily Telegraph.
“Only” 40% of ABC journalists vote Green.
The Australian, last week: Older viewers abandon the ABC
THE ABC was the worst performing television broadcaster last year, losing 3.95 per cent of group audience across all the channels before the government announced budget […]
I said the vaguest scientists in the world lie by omission, and it’s what they don’t say that gives them away. The “hottest ever” press release didn’t tell us how much hotter the hottest year supposedly was, nor how big the error bars were. David Rose of the Daily Mail pinned down Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS to ask a few questions that bloggers and voters want answered but almost no other journalist seems to want to ask.
Finally…
Nasa climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record… but we’re only 38% sure we were right
Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all
Does that mean 97% of climate experts are 62% sure they are wrong?*
The thing with half-truths is that they generate a glorious fog, but it has no substance. Ask the spin-cloud of a couple of sensible questions and the narrative collapses. This is the kind of analysis that would have stopped the rot 25 years ago if most news outlets had investigative reporters instead of science communicators trained to “raise awareness”. (The media IS the problem). If there was […]
What’s better than Pravda? When Pravda is controlled by big government but masquerades as “commercial” and, even better, when it competes with and sucks money from independent competitors–making it harder for journalists who do ask the government hard questions to be heard at all.
Who needs the ABC? The BBC has arrived to provide the propaganda for free and wants to compete with commercial news outlets. They’ve appointed the most gullible journalists they could find (who’ll believe any official edict). Their new Australian Editor, Wendy Frew, accidentally revealed that while she’s good at rearranging a press release and calling it news, she is not too good with numbers.
In a BBC article yesterday by Wendy Frew titled “Australia has hottest spring on record as temperatures soar” comes the extraordinary news that Australia has warmed by 90C since 1910.
“Australia has been warming up by about 0.9C [a year] since 1910,” Dr Braganza told the BBC.
The online article was fixed this morning (with no mention of the mistake), though copies of the error appear elsewhere. It says something that Frew went out of her way to add “[a year]” into Braganza’s quote without doing the numbers and […]
What’s almost as good as an actual record? A could-be-a-record Headline!
“2014 could become the hottest year on record” — said CBS, The Guardian, Time, Washington Post, Discover Magazine, The Japan News, Wired, and 319 other outlets.
None of the investigative hardened editors or science reporters knew enough to ask the question, “what do the satellites say?” Which would have been interesting because the satellites say “bollocks”. h/t SPPI
On his site, Dr Roy Spencer explains that 2014 won’t be the warmest year on record. Satellites track almost all of the Earth for 24 hours a day and the data shows that we don’t need to go back to the Medieval Warm Period to find a hotter year, just back to 2010.
….
It might be the hottest year if you live in a white louvered box above a carpark, next to a concrete-heat-sink-superstructure, and not far from a runway. Though even then you might need to be homogenized and adjusted to really feel the heat. But for the rest of the surface of the Earth, 2010 is not a record, not even close.
It’s all pretty pointless anyway Roy points out — we’re arguing over […]
A new report shows ABC journalists are fond of renewables and overlook their dismal economic value, while putting out bad news on coal, and ignoring the benefits of vast cheap profitable energy. Who could have seen that coming: a large public funded institution attracts employees who like large public funding?
The IPA arranged for a media analysis firm to compare the ABC reporting on coal and renewables.
ABC gives the green light to renewables, and the red light to Australia’s largest export industry and provider of 75% of our electricity.
ABC accused of bias against coalmining
Andrew Fraser, The Australian
The analysis of 2359 reports broadcast on the ABC over six months before March 15 this year found 15.9 per cent of stories on coalmining and 12.1 per cent of those about coal-seam gas mining were favourable, while 53 per cent of those on renewable energy were favourable.
It also found 31.6 per cent of stories on coal mining and 43.6 per cent of stories on coal-seam gas were unfavourable, while only 10.8 per cent of stories on renewable energy were unfavourable.
The ABC has become its own best case for privatizing the ABC. How much could we get? […]
We’re all doomed:
West Antarctic ice sheet collapse ‘unstoppable’ [ABC]
Irreversible Changes Now Affect Antarctica and the World [Live-science]
‘Nothing can stop retreat’ of West Antarctic glaciers [BBC, By Jonathan Amos]
West Antarctic ice collapse ‘could drown Middle East and Asia crops’ [The Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg]
Antarctica’s ice collapse threatens metres of sea level rise within decades [The Ecologist]
Global warming: it’s a point of no return in West Antarctica. [The Guardian Eric Rignot]
“Last week saw a ‘holy shit’ moment in climate change science. A landmark report revealed that the collapse of a large part of Antarctica is now unstoppable”
What else is going on in West Antarctica? Oh. Look where those volcanoes are…
Guess which science correspondent mentioned the word “volcano”? None of the above. Did any of those responsible publicly funded climate scientists mentioned it in their press releases? (A gold star to anyone who can find one). Lucky Antarctic volcanoes are not hot.
Thanks especially to Janama, Jaypac, John, Sophocles and Tom. That is what comments are for!
Locations of volcanoes in Antarctica known to have been active since […]
Look out, Australia might trim a tiny slice from the Tithe to the Gods of Weather (protest coming)
The Australian budget is in dire straits after the Rudd-Gillard years of promised surpluses but exploding arithmetic. The Commission of Audit is here to test public reaction to all the possible ways of paying off the Labor debt. Somehow, it missed the biggest cherry waiting to be plucked. We could save billions if the the Abbott Government become more rigorously scientific. Abbott should cut funding to any scientists who are using models that don’t work, and only fund ones that do.
“Abbott should cut funding to any scientists who are using models that don’t work, and only fund ones that do.”
I expect the Greens will join me in declaring that if the Abbott government cared about the environment it would immediately launch a royal commission, a real audit, or an independent investigation into the effect of carbon dioxide. Only the best science for the planet, right? All funding to environmental programs dependent on unverified research should be frozen until the audit is finished. Easy eh? Let me be PM for a day. :- )
But apparently the sacred carbon cow must […]
The bias is obvious in what they don’t say. Reporters are supposed to seek out and promote the most rational, well argued positions they can find. Instead they elevate themselves to defacto “science judges” and decide which scientists deserve to be heard. It could be called arrogance, or it could be called “lying by omission”.
COLD SHOULDER: ABC, CBS Exclude Scientists Critical of Global Warming for More Than 1,300 Days | NewsBusters
Like a simple parlor trick, the networks are able to make skeptical scientists vanish, at least from the eyes of their viewers.
In some cases, the broadcast networks have failed to include such scientists for years, while including alarmist scientists within the past six months. ABC, CBS and NBC’s lengthy omission of scientists critical of global warming alarmism propped up the myth of a scientific consensus, despite the fact that many scientists and thousands of peer-reviewed studies disagree.
Neither CBS nor ABC have included a skeptical scientist in their news shows within the past 1,300 days, but both networks included alarmists within the past 160 days — CBS as recently as 22 days ago. When the networks did include other viewpoints, the experts were dismissed as “out […]
This really has been a PR debacle of amazing proportions. The ship stuck in ice has captured something larger than I would have expected. Methinks the timing must be apropos.
Good scientists are distancing themselves from the publicity hungry climate lightweights and commentators on both sides of the fence are agreeing in their criticism.
A third effect we are barely starting to see may ripple on for months — that’s when mass-media victims realize that the “Russian Tourist ship” was really a boat load of Australian and New Zealander scientists, paid for mostly by taxpayers and loaded and advised by supposedly “expert” climate scientists. This misinformation was despite the boat having BBC, and Guardian media on board, and Fairfax press in one of the rescue icebreakers. Today I see evidence of the first two effects.
From Skynews. The French chief of polar science calls the Spirit of Mawson trip “pseudo-scientific” and laments the effect it is having on real research.
The head of France’s polar science institute has voiced fury at the misadventures of a Russian ship trapped in Antarctic ice, deriding what he called a tourists’ trip that had diverted resources from real science.
In an interview with AFP, […]
LATEST NEWS: Aurora Australis abandons attempt to save Akademik Shokalskiy in Antarctica. The SMH headline could’ve said “Another icebreaker abandons attempt to save climate scientist’s boat in Antarctica.” UPDATE: Russia says 54 of 74 passengers to be helicoptered off if weather permits. (h/ tPeter Miller) The Polar Star icebreaker has left from the US to come help. It will take 8 -9 days to arrive. (Guardian)
Welcome to Media-Sport, where we score points watching a part of the media dance around the hysterical folly of an Antarctic climate science expedition trapped in sea ice for six nights (and counting). The Art of Propaganda is not just in the telling of one-sided lines, but is crafted through parts left unsaid.
More global warming, it is everywhere you look. View from Akademik Shokalskiy
With three ice-breaker rescue ships trying to reach them, the latest news is that the scientists and media entourage may have to abandon ship and be helicoptered to safety (though right now even that is not possible due to the very rough weather). The ABC news home page at time of posting this has zero references to “Antarctica”, but does say there are cracks in ice around a […]
…
As I keep saying, it’s not that the media has a problem, the truth is the media IS the problem.
If we had accurate and balanced reporting the global warming meme would have crashed and burned long ago, voters would have said “No thanks”; politicians would have wasted less money; scientists would be researching useful things; universities would have to fire professors who can’t reason, and we would all be richer.
So when the budget office says our ABC costs us $1 billion, I say No, the cost is measured in national GDP.
No wonder most of us have given up watching the old media.
Here’s a study, by the Media Research Centre, reported in the Wall St Journal. Hat tip to the HockeySchtick blog and Tom Nelson. It refers to US networks so “ABC” means the American variety. Curiously, the New York Times looks good in comparison to the network news. It told its readers about the global pause only six months after its foreign competitors did. It was only a few years behind the bloggers.
Networks Do 92 Climate Change Stories; Fail to Mention ‘Lull’ in Warming All 92 Times
ABC, CBS and NBC ignore ‘mystery’ […]
[See our one-page version of this whole issue.]
Finally two hours of entertainment unlike any you’ve seen on TV 🙂
The Media IS the Problem – Part I
When the Smith and Nasht came to our house (on behalf of the ABC) to take footage for the “I can change your mind” documentary, David and I asked fellow skeptic and camera-man Barry Corke if he could film them filming us, so we have our own copy of what happened. He agreed — it was obvious to all of us that we needed some insurance against biased edits. We all knew that petty chicanery was possible. James Delingpole had recently given the BBC three good hours of his time, only to find they trimmed all of his clever answers down, waited for him to have a hypoglycemic vague moment and then crowed about how the great James Delingpole was, can you believe, tongue tied (the failure!)
In the final version that went to air, not only did three of the four key sets of evidence that fuel our skepticism vanish, the editors split and diced sentences to make it appear that David said a sentence he never actually said. He doesn’t […]
Oh the irony. The BBC, supposedly the public owned broadcaster, had a meeting with 28 climate experts in Jan 2006 where it decided on its policies on climate coverage. It led to the extraordinary move of the BBC abandoning any semblance of impartiality (a principle that’s so important it’s written into its charter). In the meantime, the BBC did everything it could to hide those influential experts names. It’s been nearly seven years since the seminar, but now we know why their names were top secret. No one is even pretending this was about “the science”. The BBC has become a PR wing of Greenpeace.
In mid 2007 Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky started asking who was at the seminar, but the BBC wouldn’t give up the names. In fact the BBC thought the names were so significant that when Newbery sent them an FOI, they not only refused to hand over the list, but they used six lawyers against him (see The Secret 28 Who Made BBC ‘Green’ Will Not Be Named). The BBC, improbably, argued they weren’t “public” and even more improbably, they won the case. Who knew? The BBC could be considered a “private organisation”. Where are […]
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