Controlling the Message

Here is a bit from an excellent post by Nigel Calder that explains how the global warming crowd isn't involved in science, it is doing propaganda. (You have to scan past the initial bit about his father and WWII.)

Hushing up unfavourable news was routine in the Second World War. In November 1941 the British battleship Barham was torpedoed in the Mediterranean. She blew up with loss of more than 800 men. But the Germans didn’t know that, so the news was censored. When the next of kin were eventually told some weeks later, they were ordered to keep it secret. But a medium, Helen Duncan, claimed to have heard the news from a dead sailor. She became the last person in England to be imprisoned for witchcraft. I’m not kidding.

For a modern parallel, take the news about the polar sea ice. Last year [2007] you were told – shock, horror! — that Arctic sea ice was at its lowest extent since satellite measurements began. How that news was trumpeted on television and radio and in all the newspapers! What went completely unreported was that simultaneously, at the other end of the world, Antarctic sea ice was at a record high. Although the big freeze in Antarctica was again plainly announced in a press release from the US weather bureau, NOAA, not a single newspaper in North America or Europe carried this news unfavourable to the global warming brigade.

The collusion of my fellow journalists in this protracted deception is disturbing but not surprising, I’m afraid. Unfortunately only 1% of the huge number of articles on global warming in the posh London newspapers deviate from the official line of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s not my reckoning. It comes from environmental researchers, at Oxford University if you please, who complain about the more balanced reporting in the not-so-posh papers, with a deviancy rate of 23%. They say it has “skewed public understanding of human contributions to climate change”. In other words, kindly abandon the journalistic principle that different points of views should be heard on controversial matters, or else a lot of dreadful people out there (you or me) may not truly believe that climate change is their fault.

Some American journalists boast openly about their bias. Ross Gelbspan, former editor of The Boston Globe, said “Not only do journalists not have a responsibility to report what skeptical scientists have to say about global warming, they have a responsibility not to report what these scientists say.” Charles Alexander, science editor of Time magazine said, “I would freely admit that we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy.”

Everything Nigel Calder writes is interesting. I've been reading him for thirty years. I keep his book "Magic Universe" on my bedstand to delve into again and again reading about bits of science. His blog is a delight.