According to the headlines last week, the sun is not to blame for recent global warming: mankind and fossil fuels are. So Al Gore is correct when he said, “the scientific data is in. There is no more debate.”
Of that the evangelical BBC had no doubt. There was an air of triumphalism in its coverage of the report by the Royal Society.
It was perhaps a reaction to the BBC Trust’s recent criticism of the Corporation’s bias when reporting climate change: but sadly, it only proved the point made by the Trust.
The BBC was enthusiastically one-sided, sloppy and confused on its website, using concepts such as the sun’s power, output and magnetic field incorrectly and interchangeably, as well as not including any criticism of the research.
But there is a deeper and more worrying issue. Last week’s research is a simple piece of science and fundamentally flawed. Nobody looked beyond the hype; if they had, they would have reached a different conclusion.
The report argues that while the sun had a significant effect on climate during most of the 20th century, its influence is currently dwarfed by human effects. It says that all known solar influences since about 1990 are downward and because global temperature has increased since then, the sun is not responsible.
No. The research could prove the contrary. Using the global temperature data endorsed by the Inter-national Panel on Climate Change, one can reach a completely different conclusion.
That’s David Whitehouse from the Telegraph.
Any article that starts out with that, has got something going for it to begin with. But of course, it gets better.
It is undisputed that the sun of the later part of the 20th century was behaving differently from that of the beginning. Its sunspot cycle is stronger and shorter and, technically speaking, its magnetic field leakage is weaker and its cosmic ray shielding effect stronger.
So we see that when the sun’s activity was rising, the world warmed. When it peaked in activity in the late 1980s, within a few years global warming stalled. A coincid-ence, certainly: a connection, possibly.
What this very good article does not mention however is the idea that the rest of the solar system was reporting similar increases and temperature. None of those planets involved the burning of fossil fuel, the SUV, or indeed, mankind at all.
Update:(Bit)
Protien Wisdom [1]passes on a link to an article by Ex BBC’er Anthony Jay, and here’s just a taste:
We belonged instead to a dispersed “metropolitan-media-arts-graduate” tribe. We met over coffee, lunch, drinks and dinner to reinforce our views on the evils of apartheid, nuclear deterrence, capital punishment, the British Empire, big business, advertising, public relations, the Royal Family, the defence budget… it’s a wonder we ever got home. We so rarely encountered any coherent opposing arguments that we took our group-think as the views of all right-thinking people.
It sounds, for all the world, like your average collection of leftists. And so it is. Four, these are mainstream media “news” people .
This ignorance of the realities of government and management enabled us to occupy the moral high ground. We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world. We were not Marxists but accepted a lot of Marxist social analysis. Some people called us arrogant; looking back, I am afraid I cannot dispute the epithet.
We also had an almost complete ignorance of market economics. That ignorance is still there. Say “Tesco” to a media liberal and the patellar reflex says, “Exploiting African farmers and driving out small shopkeepers”. The achievement of providing the range of goods, the competitive prices, the food quality, the speed of service and the ease of parking that attract millions of shoppers every day does not show up on the media liberal radar.
The third factor arises from the nature of mass media. The Tonight programme had a nightly audience of about eight million. It was much easier to keep their attention by telling them they were being deceived or exploited by big institutions than by saying what a good job the government and the banks and the oil companies were doing.
…
For my money, here’s the clincher:
For a time it puzzled me that after 50 years of tumultuous change the media liberal attitudes could remain almost identical to those I shared in the 1950s. Then it gradually dawned on me: my BBC media liberalism was not a political philosophy, even less a political programme. It was an ideology based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine. We were rather weak on facts and figures, on causes and consequences, and shied away from arguments about practicalities. If defeated on one point we just retreated to another; we did not change our beliefs. We were, of course, believers in democracy. The trouble was that our understanding of it was structurally simplistic and politically naïve. It did not go much further than one-adult-one-vote.
We ignored the whole truth, namely that modern Western civilisation stands on four pillars, and elected governments is only one of them. Equally important is the rule of law. The other two are economic: the right to own private property and the right to buy and sell your property, goods, services and labour. (Freedom of speech, worship, and association derive from them; with an elected government and the rule of law a nation can choose how much it wants of each). We never got this far with our analysis. The two economic freedoms led straight to the heresy of free enterprise capitalism – and yet without them any meaningful freedom is impossible.
But analysis was irrelevant to us. Ultimately, it was not a question of whether a policy worked but whether it was right or wrong when judged by our media liberal moral standards. There was no argument about whether, say, capital punishment worked. If retentionists came up with statistics showing that abolition increased the number of murders we simply rejected them.
Of course, this commentary by Mr. Jay goes far deeper than a simple discussion about the mainstream media , in this case including the BBC, prostituting themselves over “global warming”. But I think this series of quotes goes a long way toward explaining the lack of mentality that goes into the nonsense we’ve been seeing over “global warming” of late.
Mr. Jay, apparently feels he and his fellow BBC types were useful idiots to borrow Mona’s phrase. but I find it difficult in the extreme to believe that they’re all that way. They can’t all be that stupid.