The BBC report on a paper published in the current issue of Nature that poses a bit of a moral conundrum for environmentalists: A new model of the Earth's climate suggests that human-made carbon dioxide emissions may prevent the onset of the next ice age. Based on...
“Welcome to the 21st Century”
A couple of our recent posts have looked unfavourably at the BBC’s coverage of the climate debate, in particular the three part series, Earth: the Climate Wars. But it’s not all bad at the Beeb, and it’s not fair to characterise their output as entirely biased in...
Oiling the Wheel of Despair at the Edge of Scare City
The future is bleak. That seems to be the message that everybody wheeled into the public spotlight is keen to tell us. Indeed, if you can't say that the future is bleak, you have no business being on the news. Other than the current comparisons to today's economic...
Only Happy When It Rains
Bizarrely, this week's episode of Laurence Llewelyn Bowen's BBC Radio 4 series Laurence Llewelyn Bowen's History of Home, in which celebrity interior designer and big, flouncy ponce Laurence Llewelyn Bowen explores the history of our homes from the 1920s to the...
More Climate Wars
Ben has an article on Spiked-Online today, about the BBC's recent 'Climate Wars'. Iain Stewart, professor of geosciences communication at Plymouth University, introduced last week’s instalment with the words: ‘Global warming - the defining challenge of the...
Biased Broadcasting Climate
Dr. Iain Stewart's new BBC2 series Earth: The Climate Wars promised to be a 'definitive guide' to the climate debate. Instead, this week's episode 'Fightback', which focused on the sceptics was as shallow and as hollow as any old commentary. The film's blurb on BBC...
BBC On Bad Acid Trip
The merest sniff of an environmental problem can go straight to the heads of the soberest of science reporters and leave them mumbling jibberish about the imminent end of the world as we know it. Take last Thursday's edition of BBC Radio 4's normally excellent...
Huffing and Puffin' On the Isle of Maybe
Rich wonders: "Nature as harmonious and peaceful? Have these people watched Springwatch?" Good point. They had live footage of swallows eating their own chicks the other day. Springwatch somehow manages to marry the genres of science documentary, freakshow and...
Environ Mental Ism
We've mentioned before how those of an Environmentalist bent are liable to blame the perceived failings of anybody who disagrees with them on some sort of mental illness. There's Andreas Ernst, for example, the scientist who says that the psychology of sceptics is...
When a Butterfly Flaps Its Wings, Environmentalists Just Flap
We're glad to see that the BBC has removed the error we flagged up on Thursday. Where it said The scientists predicted such species would struggle to cope with the 5.4C rise in tropical temperatures expected by 2100. it now reads The scientists predicted such species...