Some signs of sensible thinking at the BBC

Maybe the BBC have decided that they need to be seen to be publishing views that are at odds with their fundamental beliefs re Man Made Climate Change. I suppose they think we should be thankful for the odd article on their web site that gently puts a climate change sceptic point of view. I am sure these articles will be used by "John Reith" on the Biased-BBC comments sections to show how unbiased the BBC really is; maybe that is another reason for their existence.

here is one such article that asks "Has climate change become a stark catastrophist vision of global doom? Here, a social anthropologist argues that it is something to be managed, not scared of" and here is an article that reports that "Apocalyptic visions of climate change used by newspapers, environmental groups and the UK government amount to "climate porn", a think-tank says. The report from the Labour-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) says over-use of alarming images is a "counsel of despair". It says they make people feel helpless and says the use of cataclysmic imagery is partly commercially motivated....The IPPR report also criticises the reporting of individual climate-friendly acts as "mundane, domestic and uncompelling".

There is also this article that says that "Climate change is a reality, and science confirms that human activities are heavily implicated in this change. But over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country - the phenomenon of "catastrophic" climate change. It seems that mere "climate change" was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be "catastrophic" to be worthy of attention.
The increasing use of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers "chaotic", "irreversible", "rapid" - has altered the public discourse around climate change. This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as "climate change is worse than we thought", that we are approaching "irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate", and that we are "at the point of no return". I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric. It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns." Please do read the whole of this article, By Mike Hulme
Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research makes some interesting points. He explains that even though he is a believer in the fact of climate change he does not agree with the use of the "exaggerated rhetoric" used by many climate change campaigners, including The Independent newspaper. Phrases that he uses as examples of this are "catastrophic", "chaotic", "irreversible", "rapid", "climate change is worse than we thought", "irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate" and "at the point of no return".

However it is this extract that I think will chime with many "the discourse of catastrophe allows some space for the retrenchment of science budgets. It is a short step from claiming these catastrophic risks have physical reality, saliency and are imminent, to implying that one more "big push" of funding will allow science to quantify them objectively."

As Deep Throat said to Bob Woodward, "Follow the money", it's a good rule for investigative journalists - it's just a shame that investigative journalists will not investigate the Man Made Climate Change industry.