The BBC isn't 'balanced' in its reporting of climate change: but the facts aren't 'balanced' either

Telegraph ^ | November 14th, 2012 | Tom Chivers

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

A new scandal is enveloping the BBC. It has been revealed that they have taken an editorial decision not to give equal air time to two sides of a debate.

Some scientists believe that the dodo is extinct, and their views are valuable. But should we not teach the controversy? What about the counter-argument: that dodos are not extinct, but in fact left Mauritius on a spaceship in 1685 and built the Martian canals? The BBC is peddling the "dodo extinct" theory, but it should be made clear that it is only one theory. We should teach the controversy. Of course, the archaeologists, zoologists and historians who claim that they are dead have their opinion. But the opinion of Mad Clive, the guy who shouts at the pigeons on Buckingham Palace Road, is just as valid. Surely our media, our national broadcaster no less, should be balanced in its reporting? The BBC might also want to reconsider its leadenly one-sided coverage of the "do leprechauns exist?" argument.

"Balance" in reporting is, at best, a useful thing to aim for, and at worst an actively harmful fiction. It's a fig-leaf of objectivity: it is true that person A made comment X, and person B made comment Y. That can be useful, occasionally, where there is a genuine divide in opinion between well-informed groups. A Government minister and his shadow might reasonably disagree on state provision of a service, or on a moral point about crime or punishment. But in the climate debate, as portrayed in the media, there is no such divide. It's not quite Mad Clive versus the archaeologists, but it's not so far off.

Yesterday, Guido Fawkes, the entertainingly scurrilous Tory gossip blog, published a piece [edit:

[Objective Scrutator]

The Telegraph is about as conservative as that Commie pig Al Gore, so it always angers me that they are often described as such. There is no controversy about global warming, true: any right thinker can see that at the atomic level, the environment is far too resilient for mankind to permanently alter it. The study of this nonexistent phenomenon is highly beneficial to National Science Foundation crackpots (who can make a ton of money off of peddling this nonsense) and the liberal agenda; that is the only reason it is even discussed.

At least England has the Daily Mail. I’m starting to wonder if America has any reliable news source.

[Happy Rain]

A quantum wave function is a virtual reality waiting for an observer to collapse it into a physical reality. According to Schrodinger, if such a wave function were a cat in a gas chamber with the odds of it's suffocation being exactly 50-50, the expectations of the observer who opens the door to the chamber, collapsing the function, either kills or saves the cat.

In the subatomic world, prejudices from observers can create reality albeit too small and insignificant to really matter except on the freak occasions where observers’ expectations gave us such animals as fission and coherent light...

...try as they might,benighted Leftist academia cannot collapse the continually occurring wave functions of climate change into something man is causing—they either have serious doubts about their own ideological indoctrinations or someone else with some sense is collapsing them first.

[Dr. Sivana]

What about the counter-argument: that dodos are not extinct, but in fact left Mauritius on a spaceship in 1685 and built the Martian canals?

And if the University of Anglia had purposely hidden a 300 year-old document maintaining just that, I would certainly give it a fair hearing upon discovery, and demand that they cough up everything they've got.

[Tublecane]

Global temperatures not rising since 97 in an era of rapidly expanding carbon emissions is much more solid evidence than the possibility that aliens whisked Dodos away. You’d think even they would be willing to admit that. Ah, but they changed it from global warming to “climate change,” and now no matter what happens it confirms their theory. Which is like proving the Dodo never went extinct by pointing to a Labrador retriever and saying that’s a Dodo right there.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

China is stamping out coal-fired electric plants like cookies. If that makes me want to believe that CO₂ is benign, so be it. But what’s certain is that the AGW crowd is far more interested in burdening American power generation than it ever has or ever will be in controlling CO₂ generated anywhere outside of America (and possibly Europe and Australia).

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

China is stamping out coal-fired electric plants like cookies. If that makes me want to believe that CO₂ is benign, so be it. But what’s certain is that the AGW crowd is far more interested in burdening American power generation than it ever has or ever will be in controlling CO₂ generated anywhere outside of America (and possibly Europe and Australia).