Wednesday, July 23, 2008

More on the OFCOM swindle

On having a closer look, things look pretty fishy to me. The Rado et al complaint refers repeatedly to Section 5.7 of the code which says:
5.7 Views and facts must not be misrepresented. Views must also be presented with due weight over appropriate timeframes.
Now I'd say it is basically indisputable that Durkin's Swindle fails repeatedly on that score. There is plenty of documentation here.

But OFCOM basically decided that Section 5.7 did not apply, and instead treated the complaint as if it was made under Section 2.2, where in order for a breach to have occurred, the programme would have to actually directly cause harm! Why did they do this?

OFCOM'S bizarre claim is that climate science is not covered by the rubric: major matters relating to current public policy. Tell that to the G8 ministers...even if the fact of anthropogenic climate change is considered indisputable, the magnitude and speed of future changes is a major issue that has a big impact on rational policy decisions (with substantial uncertainty even within the mainstream scientific consensus).

In order to justify their judgement, OFCOM even present an open invitation to HIV denialists, effectively stating that they would be allowed to broadcast their theories outside the scope of the Broadcasting Code. No doubt some IDiots will also have pricked up their ears at this news. What a great day for British Broadcasting!

I hope that Rado et al appeal successfully against this cowardly evasion.

(I'm off on holiday for a few days, so any silly flames and trolling will stay up for a little while. But they will be deleted on my return.)

4 comments:

Tilo Reber said...

Okay, so I went to the site, went to the index, clicked on one sample, and this is it.


2.2

Palaeoclimatic Temperature Reconstructions of the Past

[Narrator]


We are told that the earth’s climate is changing. But the earth’s climate is always changing. In earth’s long history there have been countless periods when it was much warmer and much cooler than it is today: when much of the world was covered by tropical forests, or else vast ice sheets. The climate has always changed; and changed without any help from us humans.

[Comment 35: The narrator is trying to make the public believe that previous warming and cooling periods have been overlooked by climatologists; and they are therefore mistaken in their theory of greenhouse warming. Yet the entire field of palaeoclimatology is a study of historical climates. The documentary makers actually make reference to these historical climate studies in discussing ice-core data, so they must be aware that climatologists are aware that the climate is always changing. For the narrator to try to mislead viewers in this way is a clear breach of the Broadcasting Code.]

So now the sheer idiocy of the complaint becomes immediately apparent. The narrator makes four statements of fact.
A. The earth's climate is always changing.

B. It has been much hotter than today.

C. It has been much cooler than today.

D. It achieved these changes without any help from mankind.

The commentor is then not able to contradict anything that the narrator has said, but the commentor can read the narrators mind and finds that the error is in the commentor's evil intention. The commentor concludes that the narrator is trying to tell the public that climate scientists don't know that it has been hotter and colder in the past. Now this is clearly the most idiotic mind reading trick on the part of the commentor that I have ever seen. You really have to ask yourself, why would a commentor invent such a perverted, conspiritorial and idiotic motivation for the narrator?

The reason that the narrator gives us this information should be clear to any 5 year old. Part of the effort to sell AGW has been to point out again and again how unusual 20th Century climate is. Warmers act like most of the planet has been at a comfortable room temperature, with no variation, for most of the history of mankind. Of course they know the real historical record. But they never expose this information to the public when they are making their case for AGW. The people who are really trying to mislead us, then, are the alarmists. The fact that the commentor so strongly objects to four simple, undisputed statements of fact shows that he doesn't want the public to be exposed to anything but the selected, guided, and agenda driven information that the alarmists are selling the public. I'm surprised that Annan isn't ashamed to associate himself with such a clear case of suppression of free speech and such moronic objections to simple statements of fact. The assertion by these people that they are not against free speech is a bald faced lie.

Peter Houlihan said...

Has your response or anybody else's to Schwartz's heat capacity paper been accepted or published?

James Annan said...

Pete,

Our comment is accepted and should be officially published in a week or two. I think there are 2 others with the same status.

Peter Houlihan said...

Thanks, I found all comments on Schwartz on the "In Press" section of the Jour. Geophys. Research.

Schwartz was willing to do a reanalysis, but was not willing to abandon his one dimensional model.

I enjoy reading your blog.