Not really an accurate title - The BBC didn't "fire" him, they just stopped making programs he suggested.
Regardless, I think he makes some pretty convincing arguments. It'd be nice if more people questioned what we're being told about man-made climate change etc.
Fox News host Brit Hume and a Washington Times editorial both cited a misleading statistic to suggest that global warming might have "stopped in 1998" because of a "negligible decrease in temperature" since that year. While 1998 was the hottest year on record, according to the Climatic Research Unit, an examination of temperature data since 1998 undermines the assertion that global warming "stopped" in that year. For example, neither mentioned the fact that five different years since 1998 (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005) have seen warmer temperatures than any year preceding 1998, according to Climatic Research Unit figures. Nor did they explain that 2005 was the second-warmest year on record, according to the Climatic Research Unit, and the hottest year on record when analysis of warming in the Arctic is taken into account, according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
A respected botanist failed to get funding for a show to attack global worming.
It was in 1996 that I criticised wind farms while appearing on Blue Peter and I also had an article published in which I described global warming as poppycock.
If you take someone who has a deep understanding of a related field like physics, or math, and they find a problem with a given model that's something to investegate. But, making a TV show attacking something he does not understand is not really something the BBC is going to support.
Sounds like he has a reasonable grasp of the issues to me. He knows all the facts that the "Man made global warming" camp hide and don't tell people - such that London used to be full of vineyards because it was so hot etc.
I think the problem is that man made global warming has become a very very convenient vehicle to get people to do things, and big business. It's become a religion - a movement on its own, regardless of the evidence one way or the other.
Do you honestly feel that someone saying "Global warming is part of a natural cycle and there’s nothing we can actually do to stop these cycles. " has a reasonable grasp of the issues. Humans could drop global temperatures by 2 degrees if we wanted to use a bunch a nukes. Granted it would be short term and the down sides are far more than the value but saying "we can't" is not the same as saying it's a horrible idea.
Over time people have constantly increased their control over the earth. Changing the weather is a large scale issue but so is building a dam. Like a dam the amount of energy you can control is significantly larger that that needed to build the control structure. And like a dam it's much simpler to channel the forces that are already at work than to start from scratch.
'Do you honestly feel that someone saying "Global warming is part of a natural cycle and there’s nothing we can actually do to stop these cycles. " has a reasonable grasp of the issues.'
Yes. I'm not going to start another argument here, because like religious arguments, no one ever wins. If you want to spend your time worrying that it's slightly hotter than it was a few years ago, but still freezing compared to a few years before that, go ahead. Ice caps melt all the time. New ones form. Guess which event the media report.
What makes religious arguments impossible to refute is the in ability to test life after death etc. However, building a device / system that control's the climate would tend to disprove that. I propose the urban heat island effect around New York, NY as one such device.
Edit: It's also more than just temperature: "Partly as a result of the urban heat island effect, monthly rainfall is about 28% greater between 20-40 miles downwind of cities, compared with upwind.[1] " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
PS: Unless your suggesting that at some point the sun will die as the natural cycle. But in terms of million year and less cycles humans can do a lot.
He didn't say no one can refute a religious belief, he said that no one ever wins religious arguments, which is pretty much on the mark. I have a suspicion that you won't leave this discussion with a changed opinion about global warming, and I doubt that anything anyone's going to say here will make you change your mind.
Personally, I agree with you that mankind could do something that would have a permanent effect on global temperature. I am simply of the opinion that there's nowhere near enough cogent evidence that this is what is happening. A paltry 150 years' worth of possibly inaccurate data, containing two decade-long periods of cooling? If you take away all the media hype and bias, there's not a lot there to convince me.
There are plenty of things that would change my stance on global worming. But, like most long studied subject's there is a lot of evidence to back up global worming. Everything from samples of arctic ice from thousands of years ago, to plant samples, weather models, and satellite data. But, the two basic factors that would change my mind are:
#1) A well defined mechanism that limits the impact green house gasses on temperature and weather.
#2) An accurate, global, and long term temperature measurement that strongly links global temperature to some other factor and shows little correlation with CO2. Which is more accurate than all the other data we have collected to this point.
I studied the physics behind global climate models and there are other factors that impact temperature, but most of them are short term factors and CO2 has a stable long term impact. At the basic level CO2 changes how much energy leaks to space though the atmospheric absorption gaps in EM spectrum. At temperature rise that changes some but 280 kelvin vs. 282 kelvin is minor etc.
Local areas can experience dramatic shifts in weather but as a global system energy in must equal energy out +/= extremely tiny fractions which are stored / released energy. etc.
PS: I am willing to change my stance with new information which is why this is not a religious stance. But, without such information there is little reason to change my stance.
Edit: The reason I called his statement as a religious argument is it equated the process where I gathered data to a religious viewpoint. However, if your staying that you feel global worming does not exist as a religious stance, I will stop talking, because there is little reason to present information to someone who does not care about it.
That is a local weather effect most likely caused by a shift in prevailing wind and ocean currents. Anyway, it says next to nothing about global temperatures.
Oddly enough several models demonstrate a possible cooling of northern Europe as a result of global worming. But, I think it's a stretch to suggest we can predict regional weather patterns with that level of accuracy over the long term.
PS: Magnitude of change is much harder to predict than direction of change and you need an accurate prediction of magnitude before you can understand the interactions of local weather patterns. Local weather is an extremely complex problem involving everything from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect, ocean currents, to the shape of the local, regional and global land masses etc.
Sorry, I've deleted my previous comment because I've just found out this thread has been 'deaded', so readers don't see it on HN front page. Apparently only people who have commented already can still see it.
The discussion was interesting thanks for your thoughts.
But I'm disgusted to take part in a forum where an editor can shut you up if you touch his religious beliefs. So much for hacker/scientist spirit. What a joke.
I can't find a statement in the article that he didn't get funding for a show to attack global warming.
The sad fact is that since I said I didn’t believe human beings caused global warming I’ve not been allowed to make a TV programme.
That sounds different to me. If he didn't get funding for a show because BBC thought the topic wasn't part of his core competences, that's just fair enough.
If he didn't get funding for a show unrelated to the topic of global warming because of his opinion, then it's a witch hunt.
He was not allowed to do programs about plants, which is area of his core competence. He was not proposing new program topics, they banned him from making ANY program.
Before they banned him, he presented around 400 TV programmes and published 35 books.
Now you understand what happened to Soviet dissidents.
Dissidents were not sent to prison camp after Stalin has died, unless they tried to organize a movement or something. There were actually very few political prisoners in the USSR in the 70s.
But those who thought differently and were not afraid of saying that in public were denied jobs and banned from publishing their views. And eventually forced out of the country.
It's worth pointing out that the Daily Express is a British tabloid with a not-exactly-stellar reputation for journalistic integrity. I'm sure there is some substance to the article, but I wouldn't be inclined to take it at face value.
Didn't you just made up the line "BBC fired respected scientist..."? I don't see that in the interview, and it doesn't look like he was ever an employee of the BBC (according to his wikipedia page).
Unfortunately, I don't think it's ever possible to completely segregate an argument from its proponent. It would be nice if the world were that objective, but it's not. Intelligent design is a similar issue in my mind.
It's worth knowing that David Bellamy claimed that he was no longer on television for other reasons (in 2002):
---
He tells me how he got talking to a man on a train some time before the 1997 election and told him he was torn between voting for Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour party and the Referendum party. The man told him he was an agent for the Referendum party, and soon after he got an invitation to lunch from Sir James Goldsmith, its founder. "It was the most fascinating lunch I've ever had. A bloody good lunch. I said: 'Why have you suddenly become a goody after being a baddy?' And he said: 'You go into a fish restaurant and the fish are full of poison, and that's why I'm dying of pancreatic cancer.' And I said, 'Well, I don't think you can prove that.' And he said, 'No, I can't prove it, but you say some bloody stupid things too.'"
It was then that Goldsmith asked him to stand against Major. "In some ways it was probably the most stupid thing I ever did because I'm sure that if I have been banned from television, that's why. I used to be on Blue Peter and all those things, regularly, and it all, pffffft, stopped."
Actually, he says, his TV career had stopped some time before that - he made his last BBC series eight years ago. Perhaps he is too scruffy for telly these days, I suggest. He gives me a look. "There are some bloody scruffy people on television these days. Very scruffy in what they think and the way they talk."
---
The article is interesting, but the headline here is terrible. He wasn't fired; he wasn't employed by the BBC. Instead, the BBC now won't make the documentaries that he suggests, which is an entirely different thing.
31 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 88.3 ms ] threadRegardless, I think he makes some pretty convincing arguments. It'd be nice if more people questioned what we're being told about man-made climate change etc.
He was a fixture on TV screen at one point -- then they stopped inviting him for the reasons he stated.
They fired him from being a regular contributor.
There is quite a difference though between actively firing someone, and just ignoring them.
No; there is a big difference between that and firing someone for their opinions.
should have been the title. Sorry, my fault.
Fox News host Brit Hume and a Washington Times editorial both cited a misleading statistic to suggest that global warming might have "stopped in 1998" because of a "negligible decrease in temperature" since that year. While 1998 was the hottest year on record, according to the Climatic Research Unit, an examination of temperature data since 1998 undermines the assertion that global warming "stopped" in that year. For example, neither mentioned the fact that five different years since 1998 (2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005) have seen warmer temperatures than any year preceding 1998, according to Climatic Research Unit figures. Nor did they explain that 2005 was the second-warmest year on record, according to the Climatic Research Unit, and the hottest year on record when analysis of warming in the Arctic is taken into account, according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
It was in 1996 that I criticised wind farms while appearing on Blue Peter and I also had an article published in which I described global warming as poppycock.
If you take someone who has a deep understanding of a related field like physics, or math, and they find a problem with a given model that's something to investegate. But, making a TV show attacking something he does not understand is not really something the BBC is going to support.
I think the problem is that man made global warming has become a very very convenient vehicle to get people to do things, and big business. It's become a religion - a movement on its own, regardless of the evidence one way or the other.
Over time people have constantly increased their control over the earth. Changing the weather is a large scale issue but so is building a dam. Like a dam the amount of energy you can control is significantly larger that that needed to build the control structure. And like a dam it's much simpler to channel the forces that are already at work than to start from scratch.
Yes. I'm not going to start another argument here, because like religious arguments, no one ever wins. If you want to spend your time worrying that it's slightly hotter than it was a few years ago, but still freezing compared to a few years before that, go ahead. Ice caps melt all the time. New ones form. Guess which event the media report.
What makes religious arguments impossible to refute is the in ability to test life after death etc. However, building a device / system that control's the climate would tend to disprove that. I propose the urban heat island effect around New York, NY as one such device.
Edit: It's also more than just temperature: "Partly as a result of the urban heat island effect, monthly rainfall is about 28% greater between 20-40 miles downwind of cities, compared with upwind.[1] " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
PS: Unless your suggesting that at some point the sun will die as the natural cycle. But in terms of million year and less cycles humans can do a lot.
Personally, I agree with you that mankind could do something that would have a permanent effect on global temperature. I am simply of the opinion that there's nowhere near enough cogent evidence that this is what is happening. A paltry 150 years' worth of possibly inaccurate data, containing two decade-long periods of cooling? If you take away all the media hype and bias, there's not a lot there to convince me.
#1) A well defined mechanism that limits the impact green house gasses on temperature and weather.
#2) An accurate, global, and long term temperature measurement that strongly links global temperature to some other factor and shows little correlation with CO2. Which is more accurate than all the other data we have collected to this point.
I studied the physics behind global climate models and there are other factors that impact temperature, but most of them are short term factors and CO2 has a stable long term impact. At the basic level CO2 changes how much energy leaks to space though the atmospheric absorption gaps in EM spectrum. At temperature rise that changes some but 280 kelvin vs. 282 kelvin is minor etc.
Local areas can experience dramatic shifts in weather but as a global system energy in must equal energy out +/= extremely tiny fractions which are stored / released energy. etc.
PS: I am willing to change my stance with new information which is why this is not a religious stance. But, without such information there is little reason to change my stance.
Edit: The reason I called his statement as a religious argument is it equated the process where I gathered data to a religious viewpoint. However, if your staying that you feel global worming does not exist as a religious stance, I will stop talking, because there is little reason to present information to someone who does not care about it.
Oddly enough several models demonstrate a possible cooling of northern Europe as a result of global worming. But, I think it's a stretch to suggest we can predict regional weather patterns with that level of accuracy over the long term.
PS: Magnitude of change is much harder to predict than direction of change and you need an accurate prediction of magnitude before you can understand the interactions of local weather patterns. Local weather is an extremely complex problem involving everything from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect, ocean currents, to the shape of the local, regional and global land masses etc.
The discussion was interesting thanks for your thoughts.
But I'm disgusted to take part in a forum where an editor can shut you up if you touch his religious beliefs. So much for hacker/scientist spirit. What a joke.
The sad fact is that since I said I didn’t believe human beings caused global warming I’ve not been allowed to make a TV programme.
That sounds different to me. If he didn't get funding for a show because BBC thought the topic wasn't part of his core competences, that's just fair enough.
If he didn't get funding for a show unrelated to the topic of global warming because of his opinion, then it's a witch hunt.
Before they banned him, he presented around 400 TV programmes and published 35 books.
Now you understand what happened to Soviet dissidents.
But those who thought differently and were not afraid of saying that in public were denied jobs and banned from publishing their views. And eventually forced out of the country.
Certainly he makes sensible points.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Express )
It's an interview. There is nothing added to its text by the tabloid apart from the introduction.
I cannot understand why you won't take an interview for a face value, unless you are after some sort of ad hominem effect on its contents.
should have been the title. Sorry, my fault.
--- He tells me how he got talking to a man on a train some time before the 1997 election and told him he was torn between voting for Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour party and the Referendum party. The man told him he was an agent for the Referendum party, and soon after he got an invitation to lunch from Sir James Goldsmith, its founder. "It was the most fascinating lunch I've ever had. A bloody good lunch. I said: 'Why have you suddenly become a goody after being a baddy?' And he said: 'You go into a fish restaurant and the fish are full of poison, and that's why I'm dying of pancreatic cancer.' And I said, 'Well, I don't think you can prove that.' And he said, 'No, I can't prove it, but you say some bloody stupid things too.'"
It was then that Goldsmith asked him to stand against Major. "In some ways it was probably the most stupid thing I ever did because I'm sure that if I have been banned from television, that's why. I used to be on Blue Peter and all those things, regularly, and it all, pffffft, stopped."
Actually, he says, his TV career had stopped some time before that - he made his last BBC series eight years ago. Perhaps he is too scruffy for telly these days, I suggest. He gives me a look. "There are some bloody scruffy people on television these days. Very scruffy in what they think and the way they talk." ---
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2002/sep/30/broadcasting.aca...
He tried to become Prime Minister of Britain running on an anti-Europe platform.
It should be noted that the majority in Britain is 'anti-Europe' so I don't think that's anything out of the ordinary.
should have been the title. Sorry, my fault.