An Aunt With an Attitude: Britain's Bernie Goldberg exposes bias at the BBC.

Those of us who pay the British Broadcast Corp.'s annual $220 license fee but grit our teeth every time we watch one of its news programs have floundered for some time in search of a term to describe what ails the corporation. Mr. Aitken, a 25-year veteran reporter now retired, has put his finger on it: institutionalized leftism.

The phrase is a play on one — "institutional racism" — currently in vogue among the professionally aggrieved. It's frequently lobbed when the forces of multicultural goodness can't point to specific proof of racism in an organization but just know deep down that something is amiss.

Mr. Aitken told London's Daily Telegraph (and subsequently confirmed in a telephone conversation) that Britain's taxpayer-funded behemoth, arguably the most powerful media brand in the world, sports a worldview remarkably at odds with a good percentage of the population to whom it purportedly answers.

The BBC's world is one in which America is always wrong, George W. Bush is a knuckle-dragging simpleton, people of faith are frightening ignoramuses, and capitalism is a rot on the fabric of social justice. Through this prism, the United Nations is the world's supreme moral authority, multiculturalism is always a force for good, war is never warranted, and U.S. Republicans sprinkle Third World children over their Cheerios for breakfast.

Global warming may or may not be happening. Global warming due to greenhouse gases may or may not be happening. But the argument is far from settled. Many Freepers, like myself, remember the predictions of disaster by fraudulent panic-mongers like Paul Ehrlich who in 1969 predicted worldwide mass catastrophe and starvation in his huge bestselling book, which I've read, "The Population Bomb" .

His predictions all came acropper, but his failures were ignored by the international leftist community who supported him. This same leftist community is also squarely behind all the predictions of disaster due to global warming made by current panic-mongers. So in light of all the past failed predictions of disaster by anti-capitalist lefties, don't you think a little skepticism is in order?

"Global warming may or may not be happening. Global warming due to greenhouse gases may or may not be happening. But the argument is far from settled."

Amen to that. You're preaching to the choir here. I agree with you 100% about global warming, and I can assure you that you'll you'll not find a single post on FR where I have said anything to the contrary. My post #21 was a purely hypothetical (I thought the "if" would have been a giveaway there) response to NZerFromHK's comment about British stubborness on the issue of Global Warming. I was merely illustrating that FReepers can be just as stubborn and reactionary in their response as any Brit. Bang on queue, NZerFromHK blithely assumed that as a Brit I accepted GW as a fact. (At least I think that was the assertion he was referring to. It might have been that I'm a budding Neo-Mosleyite, or a closet socialist. Wrong on all counts either way.)

http://www.cei.org/gencon/019,04553.cfm

"...

First, global temperature is a contrived concept. There is no magical point in the Earth’s atmosphere to place a thermometer and take the planet’s temperature. Moreover, if you live in a polar or tropical region (or almost anywhere for that matter), a GMT of 62 degrees F is patently meaningless—what matters is what’s going on outside where you are.

Our GMT is based on surface records. But if you look at a map of weather stations around the globe, you’ll readily see the built-in bias of temperature readings from surface-based weather stations.

The overwhelming majority of surface-based weather stations are land-based — relatively few temperature readings come from ocean-based facilities, resulting in a major upward bias in available temperature data since about 75 percent of the Earth’s surface is water.

An additional bias arises from the fact that there is more land mass and, therefore, more surface temperature stations in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere.

There’s an even further bias introduced by the tendency of land-based weather stations to be located in more heavily populated areas, which are subject to the urban heat island effect. Relatively speaking, not many temperature readings come from the wilds of northern and central Asia or eastern Africa, for example.

There are alternatives to the JunkScience.com-calculated GMT—none, however, are available in real-time.

The National Climactic Data Center collects temperature data from about 3,000 surface-based weather stations. But researchers often try to statistically adjust these data to account for the urban heat island effect, which produces results that are more statistical mysteries than true averages of global surface temperature readings.

Other researchers calculate GMTs from data collected by satellites and weather balloons. These data measure atmospheric temperatures from all around the Earth and don’t suffer from the same biases as the surface temperature data. It’s important to note that without the upward bias inherent to the surface temperature data, the satellite/balloon temperature measurements show no significant increase since data collection began 30 years ago.

Global warming alarmism is largely based on the notion that global temperatures have increased since the 19th century industrial revolution due to manmade emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide. The infamous hockey stick graph tries to dramatize the alleged increase in temperature by going back 1,000 years.

But the pre-20th century GMTs in the hockey stick graph for the most part don’t come from thermometer readings. Instead they are guesstimates of GMTS based on geographically and temporally scattered data scavenged from tree rings, ice cores and other dubious proxies for thermometers.

Whether calculated in real-time or two months after-the-fact, surface-based calculations of GMT are inherently and impossibly biased. In this light, the hockey stick’s GMTs over the last 1,000 years are near worthless—yet it is this very data that are being used to drive global warming hysteria.

..."

Look, I agree with you. I've been arguing this corner for years. What riled me about your post is that I come to FR because there is simply no equivalent UK forum, and I've got to know some great, like-minded people here. But tonight I logged in, saw I had a new message from a name I didn't recognise, and in all innocence I clicked on it. Straight off it was brainwashed stubborn greenfreak socialist Poms on the verge of becoming Nazis. The same old tired old lines (apart from the "Poms" bit of course) trotted out ad nauseum by a small but persistent and vociferous number of posters here on FR. Did you reply to me simply to insult and patronise me? If so, knock yourself out, I'll just file you under "Frenchmen and Other Anglophobes" and leave it at that. But I'd prefer it if we could be civil. Just don't try and convert me to Crowded House.

I want to be civil as well, but objectivity must rule over first. The fact is you are not as conservative as most of us here - it is given that scepticism to the validity of global warming is not welcome even among conservatives in Britain. It is also given that in modern Britain the twin religion of environmentalism and transnationalism reign supreme. You can't dispute that this is accepted in Middle Britain. And you can't dispute reading today's Daily Telegraph is like reading the Times in 1954, and reading the Times today is like reading copies of Daily Mirror in 1962. Your country isn't even as conservative as it used to be - something that will make Margaret Thatcher feel alien in her homeland.

Pointing out the bad in Britain does not mean Pom-bashing. I will leave that to Aussies to do so. (wink)

FYI: At 8%, the UK has the lowest domestic recycling rates in Europe. It is also, incidentally, drastically lower than the USA (33%) and Australia (20%), while New Zealand, as you may well know, was the world's first country to pursue a Zero-Waste Policy. Now that's not a boast, far from it, it's shameful, but I'd be interested to know how you square that up with this "given" idea of environmentalism as some sort of supreme religion in Middle Britain. I can and will dispute you on this one because you are quite spectacularly wide of the mark. The UK may well talk the talk, but in practice, we trail woefully behind most of the rest of the developed world.

Apathy is the British disease. Not Socialism, not anti-Semitism nor anti-Americanism, not Transnationalism, not Environmentalism, not Multi-Culturalism, not Secularism, but sheer bloody apathy.

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