Thursday, July 17, 2014
BBC rejects false equivalency
I was about to give up on any hope that false equivalency in the media would be combated and rejected by "responsible" media. It turns out that the BBC has kindled some hope in me, as explained in this excellent WAPO article by Katrina vanden Heuvel. I love the John Oliver solution of staging an actual climate change debate with 3 deniers vs. 97 reputable scientists armed with proof. At some point the deniers would be viewed as Humphry Bogart was giving his paranoid rant while rolling the steel balls around in his hand in "The Caine Mutiny."
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Katrina is always good for spewing nonsense. In this piece, she does not disappoint. Her attempted funny on the deniers versus the 97, refers to a false claim that 97% of scientists agreed that man caused global warming was correct science. The real percent is 0.3%! The thought that consensus is science is absurd on its face. Did Copernicus, Gallileo (sp) and Einstein have a consensus with their theories? Of course not.
"But Cook’s 97 percent consensus claim was rebutted in subsequent analyses of his study. A paper by five leading climatologists published in the journal Science and Education last year found that Cook’s study misrepresented the views of most consensus scientists.
The definition Cook used to get his consensus was weak, the climatologists said. Only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate studies examined by Cook explicitly stated that mankind caused most of the warming since 1950 — meaning the actual consensus is 0.3 percent.
“It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%,” said Dr. David Legates, a geology professor at the University of Delaware and the study’s lead author."
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/05/16/where-did-97-percent-global-warming-consensus-figure-come-from/#ixzz37kpM4LVl
No global warming has occurred for 17 years 10 months.
http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/07/03/global-temperature-standstill-lengthens-no-global-warming-for-17-years-10-months-since-sept-1996-214-months/
Willy, this has been an ongoing problem as we know and the reality is that even at the start of her article she doesn't cite the reality that this is a fairly new practice, which has only happened in our lifetimes. When we were kids there certainly was a lot of news that was suppressed or considered too private or irrelevant to cover (sex scandals etc.) but stories relying on scientific evidence did not include coverage of non or unscientific arguments. There were plenty of people in the USA whn we were boys who believed the arty was flat or when we were young men that the moon landing was fake etc. but journalists and news outlets did not give any credence to those people and their theories, they weren't even usually mentioned. But the rightwing propaganda masters and machines realized the Nazis "big lie" theory would work for them, and no matter how much scientifically unsound their propaganda might be they would repeat it endlessly in the media outlets they gained more and more control over (giving for instance Rush Limbaugh free air time etc. and buying up small rural radio stations to control content etc.) and then send representatives, including elected Republican federal politicians, to repeat the lies on "mainstream" media and act insulted if questioned or confronted with factual scientific proof refuting those lies and the tactic worked etc. (Oillie North's pretend outrage in his old service uniform was not questioned while the proof of his lies and law breaking was being shredded while he pretended umbrage and became a rightwing hero etc.
"earth" not "arty"—another peculiar spelling correction from the automatons
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