At The BBC, Not Even Religious Programmes Are Sacred
Not one, but two sections of the July 5 edition of “Sunday: Religious News“on BBC Radio4 have been dedicated to climate change/global warming.
The total duration of “Sunday” was 44m 04s. Of those, 06m 20s were spent on a “Church’s campaign to combat climate change” (children dressed as animals in a Noah’s Ark, converting to renewable energies, etc etc). And 05m 27s on a baffling “interview with the UN Assistant Secretary General on how faith groups can fight climate change” (baffling as parts of the interview had absolutely nothing to do with Faith, rather perhaps with faith in AGW).
That means 11m 47s for climate-change-related stuff, 27% of the whole programme.
Truly AGW is the new religion at the BBC.
Categories: AGW, Climate Change, Omniclimate
BBC, BBC Warming bias, Culture, Politics, Radio4, Sunday: Religious News
The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE 
Note the unintentional typo: Godd Morning Sunday!
Dennis
😎
but your letter is a tad too long I think…I doubt they are going to read it. Do you mind if I take a look at it and perhaps post it as a “guest blog” in a slightly different form?
I only just came back and apologise for not responding to your request. Use any of it you wish if it is not out of context now.
I did have a very friendly e-mail conversation with editor Hilary Robinson, who was surprised that there could possibly be criticism of global warming. I sent her a copy of my paper, Social Construction of a quasi-reality, just re-printed at SPPI, Global Warming: The Social Construction of A Quasi-Reality?
(Energy & Environment, Volume 18, Number 6, pp. 805-813, November 2007)
She replied and said her husband agreed with everything I said!
This is an e-mail I sent to Godd Morning Sunday, hosted by the likeable Aled Jones. He was discussing with a guest how children were frightened about Climate Change and we had to “address Climate Change for our children’s future”.
Dear Aled,
I have to say how disappointed I am to hear you once again pushing global warming on GMS. It is often said that it is the new religion, you are confirming that it is.
Don’t you think it is dreadful that children are being told lies at school and are then losing sleep because they are told the world is coming to an end?
The main theme of global warming is that our current climate is hotter than it has ever been in a thousand years. Anyone having a look at the history of climate over the last thousand years knows it isn’t true. Over the last 150 years, a miniscule amount of time in the whole scheme of things, we have been recovering from the Little Ice Age:
Brian Fagan,
Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations (Basic Books, 1999). Link for the full chapter here: http://williamcalvin.com/readings/Fagan%201999%20chapter%20on%20LIA.htm
“By 1500 European summers were about seven degrees Celsius cooler than they had been during the Medieval Warm Period.
Some of the greatest suffering came in the shadow of the Alps. In June 1644, a procession of three hundred people led by the bishop of Geneva, Charles de Sales, made its way high in the Alps to “the place called Les Bois above the village where hangs, threatening it with total ruin, a great and terrible glacier come down from the top of the mountain.” The villagers had good reason to worry, for the Les Bois glacier was advancing “by over a musket shot [120 meters] every day, even in the month of August.” The bishop duly blessed the glacier and repeated his invocations at a whole ring of ice sheets, which hemmed in seven small villages. It was as well that his blessings worked and the glaciers retreated, for the Les Bois glacier had blocked the valley of Chamonix itself and threatened to transform it into a lake. A quarter-century later, the ice sheets had retreated, but “the land they occupied [was] so barren and burned that neither grass nor anything else has grown there.”
Still, the worthy bishop’s efforts had little immediate effect. Between 1640 and 1650, a decade with cool and extremely wet summers, glaciers throughout the European Alps advanced farther than at any time since the Ice Age. In desperation, the people again prayed for mercy. By September 1653, the Aletsch glacier threatened so much farmland that the local people asked the Jesuits for assistance. Fathers Charpentier and Thomas preached reassurance to the community’ for a week. Then a solemn procession walked for four hours, bareheaded in the rain, to the “snake-shaped” glacier. The supplicants heard mass and a short sermon, before the priests sprinkled the front of the glacier with holy water in the name of Saint Ignatius and recited “the most important exorcisms.” “On that very spot just in front of the glacier, they set up a column bearing his effigy: it looked like an image of Jupiter, ordering an armistice not just to his routed troops, but to the hungry glacier itself.”
We are told that Saint Ignatius stopped the glacier in its tracks, but rapidly advancing Alpine ice sheets continued to threaten farming communities in the foothills. In the eastern Alps the expanding Vernagt glacier repeatedly dammed river valleys and formed lakes behind rubble barriers that broke repeatedly,flooding everything downstream. At Christmas 1677, one village burned a vagrant suspected of practicing magic to block the valley. Hundreds of people died in unexpected, catastrophic floods. Farming populations fell sharply as people fled the encroaching ice. The hovering glaciers in the Chamonix area brought bone-chilling cold, perennial frosts, and “such strong winds that they sometimes carry away part of the hay and grass after it has been cut.”
The French historian Le Roy Ladurie has likened the fluctuations of Alpine glaciers to the endless cycles of ocean tides. After centuries of “low water” during the Middle Ages, the ice sheets were high in the mountains. Then, around A.D. 1300, the tide began to rise and the glaciers spread downslope. A glacial “high tide” brought the ice deep into foothill valleys between 1590 and 1850. The greatest thrusts occurred in the seventeenth century and again in 1818–1820 and 1850–1855, scarring villages and decimating Alpine pastures. By 1860 the tide had turned and a great retreat began. By 1900 many glaciers had receded more than two kilometers deeper into the mountains in just forty years.”
So what part of climate history do you consider normal and what point do you want to take us back to?
The ice caps are not melting. The Antarctic has just had the lowest summer melt on record and overall the ice has been increasing over the last 50 years, in spite of some melting on the Antarctic peninsula, which has happened before thousands of years ago.
Arctic ice extent has been recovering from its 2007 low but there has only been satellite monitoring since 1979, a flea bite in time. The Met Office have recently decided that the Arctic is not going to melt anytime soon and have now said 2060-2080. Of course they have no way of knowing because these are simply computer projections, which have no basis in fact.
This is an interesting history of the Greenland climate from the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was originally at this link. It has now been removed, presumably the Danes don’t want anyone to know the truth about Greenland Climate history before the Copenhagen Conference.
http://www.um.dk/Publikationer/UM/English/Denmark/kap7/7-1-19.asp#7-1-19
“Until around 4500 BC, the remains of the mighty ice cap which had been left over from the last ice age covered parts of Arctic Canada and blocked the way to Greenland. The first people arrived in the northernmost part of Greenland in around 2500 BC, and in the course of a few hundred years the ice-free part of the island became home to an Arctic tribe of hunters known as the palaeo-Eskimos. The warmer climate which appeared once the ice had gone allowed the population to increase rapidly.
Towards the end of the 10th century the climate became warmer, and the change affected all those living in the northern hemisphere. Much of the ice in the seas around the Canadian archipelago disappeared, and baleen whales moved into the area to search for food. Eskimo whalers from northern Alaska sailed east in their large, skin-covered boats and reached Greenland in the 12th century.
To see the massive significance, check out this map of the Arctic: http://www.athropolis.com/map2.htm
These “large skin covered boats” were not ice-breakers, but they came from Northern Alaska to Greenland, a feat that would seem impossible today.
During the Viking Age, people from Northern Europe began to move west in the North Atlantic, and in 985 the Icelander Erik the Red began to colonise Greenland. The Norse community was based on agriculture and sealing and was economically dependent on contact with Europe. The society was organised as a free state controlled by the big farmers. There are signs of formal trade with the Eskimo population, and it is known that the ivory from walrus and narwhal tusks was highly valued, particularly when paying tithes to the church. The Catholic church appointed the first bishop of Greenland in 1124. In 1261, the Norse community became part of the kingdom of Norway.
During the following centuries, conditions gradually deteriorated for the population of Greenland because of the island’s limited economic importance for Norway, the over-exploitation of the limited resources and the notable change in climate.”
The phrase climate change is deliberately used to muddy the water because global warming predictions have not come true, (this scare has been ongoing since the mid 80’s). Climate has always changed, it will always change. It is not happening because of our use of fossil fuels.
Any melting of Arctic ice would not raise sea level because it displaces its own weight of water, as Archimedes discovered in his bath. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt it would take thousands of years, as indeed did the massive ice sheets which once covered the British Isles.
The whole thing is political and Western governments actually want to prevent poorer nations from developing. They want to keep them dependent on western aid so we continue to control their lives. Major global financiers are pushing for carbon trading because there is big money in it. Lord Stern, one of the promoters of carbon trading is actually working for a company selling carbon trading advice to global companies. I am not maligning him, simply stating a fact. Many of our Climate Change Committee have vested interest in the carbon taxes they are proposing.
I do not think such an obviously political issue, subject to such widespread scientific dissent, should be promoted as fact on GMS.
Can I suggest you check out Dr Roy Spencer’s site. He is responsible for one of the satellite data sets used by scientists around the world and you really should do some personal research rather than listen to the pronouncements of Ed Miliband, or dismiss my comments as the ramblings of a grumpy old man.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite.
“I contend that the belief in human-caused global warming as a dangerous event, either now or in the future, has most of the characteristics of an urban legend. Like other urban legends, it is based upon an element of truth. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere is increasing, and since greenhouse gases warm the lower atmosphere, more CO2 can be expected, at least theoretically, to result in some level of warming.
But skillful storytelling has elevated the danger from a theoretical one to one of near-certainty. The actual scientific basis for the plausible hypothesis that humans could be responsible for most recent warming is contained in the cautious scientific language of many scientific papers. Unfortunately, most of the uncertainties and caveats are then minimized with artfully designed prose contained in the Summary for Policymakers (SP) portion of the report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This Summary was clearly meant to instill maximum alarm from a minimum amount of direct evidence.
Next, politicians seized upon the SP, further simplifying and extrapolating its claims to the level of a “climate crisis”. Other politicians embellished the tale even more by claiming they “saw” global warming in Greenland as if it was a sighting of Sasquatch, or that they felt it when they fly in airplanes.”
I enjoy the programme but I really will have to change my listening habits if this evangelising continues.
But who would care?
Regards
Dennis Ambler
Erasmussimo, if you believe that global warming is a threat, you have been deceived. Read Genesis 8:22.
Sean, the larger question concerns the long-term effects of climate change. You can be certain that when climate changes starts to bite, it will be poor people who suffer the most. So, which poor people do you care about more: today’s poor people or tomorrow’s poor people?
Do you mean real poor people versus speculative poor people? The former.
I’ve been through this with my own church when someone proposed that Climate Change become a cause we work on. I’ve found that the people who are active in a church genuinely care about people as their primary focus and the environmental concerns are subordinate. Because of this, and the fact that most climate change “action” has a severe impact on the household economics of the poor, they are swayed by rational arguments and the deliterious impact on the most vulnerable. In other words, people with strong religious convitions that genuinely care about people, are quite open minded when it comes to climate change and will listen to arguments that focus on the impact of climate mitigation “solutions” on real people.