Shame on the CBC

Dr. Tim Ball & Tom Harris have written a four five part series published by Canada Free Press titled "CBC’s continuing denial of the climate science debate". Here's an excerpt:

Like the network itself, The Fifth Estate has violated its own mandate with ‘The Denial Machine’

The CBC television programme, “The Fifth Estate”, describes its raison d’ etre as follows:

“to challenge assumptions and question conventional wisdom, and most importantly to give voice to victims of injustice who deserve to be heard but have been silenced.”

But what if The Fifth Estate itself is the perpetrator of the injustice? What if it is their own network that has ignored and mistreated those who disagree with “conventional wisdom” on an issue of national importance? Will the programme then “challenge assumptions” on which fashionable views are based? Or will they simply parrot political correctness, carefully ignoring, or denigrating the opinions of those who spend their lives studying the field?

If the past year’s repeated broadcasts of The Denial Machine (aired for at least the 15th time on October 28th on CBC TV) is any indication, then the answer to these questions are obvious--when it comes to climate change, the Fifth Estate is not even remotely interested in questioning conventional wisdom or even following basic journalistic ethics. They are climate campaigners--state-funded propagandists, pure and simple. And, as is usually the case with partisan activists, the ends apparently justifies the means in their eyes, no matter how disreputable.

My (Tim Ball’s) own experience with Fifth Estate staff is a case in point.

Read more... link to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Update: be sure to check out the documents linked below...

To learn more about the lack of any known consensus in the scientific community about the causes of the past centuries modest warming and forecasts for the future, readers may read a paper prepared by the authors as well as the PowerPoint slides that accompanied the presentation of this paper.

Energy efficient windows

Sent to me by a friend:

Last year I replaced all the windows in my house with that expensive double-pane energy efficient kind, and today, I got a call from the contractor who installed them. He was complaining that the work had been completed a whole year ago and I still hadn't paid for them.

Hellloooo, just because I'm blonde doesn't mean that I am automatically stupid. So, I told him just what his fast talking sales guy had told ME last year, namely, that in ONE YEAR these windows would pay for themselves! Hellloooo? It's been a year! (I told him.)

There was only silence at the other end of the line, so I finally just hung up.... He never called back. Guess I won that stupid argument.

I bet he felt like an idiot.

Maybe she'd like to invest in some carbon credits?

Climate Skepticism in Europe

Climate skepticism has now gained a firm foothold in various European countries.

Hillary vows to conceive "son of Kyoto"

In Her latest policy pronouncement...

Democratic White House frontrunner Hillary Clinton on Monday pledged that as president she would negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol on climate change by 2010 – two years before Kyoto expires.

This announcement is guaranteed to make AlGore pee his pants with glee, as Hillary also promised to "set up a US-wide cap and trade system that would auction trading permits covering 100 per cent of America’s carbon output."

Oh well, they way she's been going lately, she'll probably announce that she's opposed this plan in a day or two.

Harris on the Coren show

Here's a video of NRSP Executive Director Tom Harris on the Michael Coren show on October 30, 2007 discussing climate change and the IPCC.

Christy's Nobel moment

Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a participant in the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John R. Christy comments on being a co-recipient (along with the Goracle) of this year's Nobel Peace Prize .

I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don't find the alarmist theory matching observations. (...)

It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system's behavior over the next five days.

Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, "Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with 'At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .'"

I haven't seen that type of climate humility lately. Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer.

Others of us scratch our heads and try to understand the real causes behind what we see. We discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we've seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America.

One of the challenges in studying global climate is keeping a global perspective, especially when much of the research focuses on data gathered from spots around the globe. Often observations from one region get more attention than equally valid data from another.

The recent CNN report "Planet in Peril," for instance, spent considerable time discussing shrinking Arctic sea ice cover. CNN did not note that winter sea ice around Antarctica last month set a record maximum (yes, maximum) for coverage since aerial measurements started.

More from the Wall Street Journal Online.

Update: Christy has refused his share of the Nobel Prize that he shares with AlGore.

Dion's dilemma

To tax or not to tax? The current leader of the Liberal Party says he would raise the GST at the same time he's allowing the Conservative government to cut the tax.

...between now and an election, Dion could draw considerable ridicule for criticizing the Tory government one day and then allowing it to pass key legislation the next in order to avoid an election.

The criticism of Citizen Dion isn't limited to those outside the Liberal Party.

One Liberal MP actually buried his head in his hands when told of his leader’s public musing.

Update: click here for an illustration of Citizen Dion's political future.

Newsbusters

The UN's 62nd anniversary

Do you trust the United Nations to keep you informed about important world issues like climate change?

Dr. Tom Coburn is a ranking member of the U.S. Senate's Federal Financial Management Subcommittee, part of the Committe on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He released this today on the 62nd anniversary of the UN:

The U.N. charter declares the purpose of the U.N. is to maintain peace and security, develop friendly relations based on respect for equal rights and self-determination, and encourage respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Unfortunately, 62 years later, the United Nations is incapable of living up to its charter.

For years, there have been attempts to reform the U.N., both from the Secretariat and from the U.N.’s donors. Unfortunately, all reform efforts have failed.

Dr. Coburn said, “The best way to honor the U.N. on its birthday is to help the organization cure its cancer of corruption, fraud, secrecy and impotence that is preventing the U.N. from achieving its mission.”

To that end, Dr. Coburn has unveiled a website, the United Nations Watch, cataloguing the growing list of scandals and released the following list of examples currently plaguing the U.N.:

A stinging indictment of the UN.

Stossel on AGW: Give me a break!

Man-made global warming? John Stossel says, "give me a break!"

GORELERO

"I took the initiative in creating the Internet" and other.. uh, untruths. GORELERO by Hugh Hewitt.

Global Warming effecting education system

Who'd a thunk? Global warming is now having an adverse effect on students' ability to learn.



h/t: the Grouchy Old Cripple