In several posts at Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre reviews a “remarkable decision” by Ofcom, the U.K. television regulator.
After Channel 4 showed “The Great Global Warming Swindle,” a film skeptical of the “standard model” on global warming, complaints were filed by dozens of academics and ordinary citizens against Channel 4 for showing the film and against the filmmakers for not fairly presenting the individual views of some experts interviewed.
From McIntyre’s detailed posts it appears that almost all of hundreds of allegations of wrongdoing were rejected, but a small number were upheld. For example,
Ofcom found that [Professor] Wunsch had not been adequately warned under Practice 7.3 of the aggressive polemical turn that the production itself would take and for which there was little hint in his correspondence and actual interview. Ofcom:
it found no indication that Professor Wunsch had been informed of the polemical line that the programme would take, for example that the programme would state that the public was “being told lies” and the “scientific evidence does not support the notion that climate is driven by carbon dioxide, man-made or otherwise”. In the circumstances, the Committee considered that Professor Wunsch was not provided with adequate information to enable him to give informed consent for his participation.
While Wunsch may well have been naive, the obligation to comply with Practice 7.3 rested with the producers regardless of potential naivete on Wunsch’s part.
Wow! In the UK, you can be found guilty of some sort of TV or filmmaking misconduct for not adequately disclosing your angle on the story to the person you are interviewing. I wonder how this rule would be applied if it were imported into the US.
I sometimes ask reporters who call me what their angle on the story is. Some are fully honest, some are not. During the Arming America dispute, a reporter for a major British newspaper responded to my question that he was trying to find any errors in my long list of problems with Michael Bellesiles’s book so that he could write in defense of the book. I just laughed at the reporter's candor. It never occurred to me that there might have been a different journalistic standard in the UK.
But I see problems because the focus of the program may change as it develops materials. Would it have to go back and get new consent? If so, what would be the standard? Seems like you could cure this with a simple fraud rule -- liability for affirmatively misleading the interviewee, otherwise it's interviewee beware.
interview an obviously unknowing subject and make them seem like a buffoon? Wouldn't he have had to reveal the deception or face sanctions?
My message: Don't be like sheep: observe, "investigate", learn, see the conspiracy...
"Informed consent" sounds like a pipe dream.
How could you ever investigate wrongdoing if you had to get informed consent from those you were investigating?
I don't know whether this UK case was based on getting permission to use someone's likeness on the air.
It's odd nonetheless.
I don't know the current status of the rule but I believe the AHA got the government to clarify the intent.
Yes, the AHA did a good job there. Now I think the main problem is with university administrators. They will come up with a "human subjects" policy that the biologists, psychologists, etc. have written and impose it university-wide. Then the folklorists, sociologists, etc. find that it keeps them from doing their fieldwork.
Further bad news for the AGW True Believers: members of the UN/IPCC are now publicly disputing the IPCC's conclusions. And Dr. Roy Spencer's testimony to Congress last week drives another big nail into the dying AGW/planetary catastrophe hypothesis. So who are you gonna believe? Al Gore? Or your lying eyes?
Must suck to be Al Gore. The climate is contradicting his predictions.
It's quite good.
You sure about that?
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: Artic Report Card 2007
NASA: Artic Sea Ice Continues to Decline
IIRC, the north pole has been ice free in the not so distant past.
Going back a bit further, we see atmosphereic CO2 levels many times current levels without the temperature effects predicted by AGW folk "if we don't do something to reduce CO2".
On a planet 4 billion years old, anything less than 100 million years is not so distant. Any incident for which there is any human record is just yesterday, any indication recent enough to leave clues in the ice cores is like last week in geological terms.
We do know (or have a good idea) that just 14 million years ago there were open plains in Antarctica and summer temperatures were at least 10C higher than they are now. We also know that the sea level was about 6m higher as recently as 180,000 years ago. Those seem like pretty good indications of an ice free Arctic.
I didn't realize there were any libertarians this naive as to the likely consequences of having governments license media outlets. How refreshing!
But "can" does not = "is". Even Antarctica is experiencing net ice loss, a loss that is accelerating, poses risk or rapid sea level rises and is very worrying, not only to scientists but to insurers like Lloyd's:
Marlo Lewis/CEI laughs at the ice sheets and Gore; Lloyd's and other insurers do not. Hmmm.
A couple links from the main page your links come from:
Ocean
North Pole Temperatures at depth returning to 1990s values
Land
Increase in permafrost temperatures is slowing down
Despite the hysterical warnings that 2008 would be the "Year the Artic Icecap Melted!", it appears to have more ice than last year:
Arctic sea ice extent on July 16 stood at 8.91 million square kilometers (3.44 square miles). While extent was below the 1979 to 2000 average of 9.91 square kilometers (3.83 million square miles), it was 1.05 million square kilometers (0.41 million square miles) above the value for July 16, 2007
As my pothead roommate used to say, "paranoia will destroy ya." Although this time around, it may be literal.
Is that your spontaneously occurring opinion? Or do you have, like, actual science to back you up?
For those interested in facts, here's the record of global sea ice going back to 1979: click. You'll note that for three years, global sea ice declined. Natural cycle. Lately it has been rising fast because the planet is cooling. Currently, global sea ice coverage is 1.05 million square kilometers higher than it was in July of 2007.
Going back twenty years, you can see that sea ice coverage is higher today [images take ~10 sec. to load].
And Tokyo Tom should be very wary of NASA's figures -- which are *ahem* "adjusted" without explanation. And the "adjustments" always show more warming. Always, without exception. What are the odds, eh?
NASA's James Hansen, who does the adjustments [and who was Al Gore's advisor for An Inconvenient Truth], refuses to disclose the methods he uses to "adjust" his final temperature graphs: click
Those who understand the nature of bureaucracies and empire-building know what the temptation of the $5 billion per year [and rising] that is shoveled into "global warming" can do to corrupt the science. This massive overweighting of funding in AGW starves many more deserving areas of science of adequate funding.
For those who don't believe that government bureaucrats deliberately use propaganda to get more global warming funding, take a look at the proposed draft, vs the final product of the weather map issued for public use: click
It's obvious why Hansen fudges the numbers. After all, it's not like he's hiding nuclear secrets. This is the climate we're talking about. And the taxpayer-funded methodology NASA uses is being kept secret because Hansen is fudging the data.
The reason why is obvious: taxpayer money -- and plenty of it, which would be jeopardized if it was generally realized that the climate always naturally changes, and that the current climate is well within normal historical parameters. In other words, the AGW/planetary catastrophe hypothesis is bunkum.
Of course not, most if not all of those pushing the hype really believe it. Very few on either side of the debate are scientists, but quite a few of the most vocal alarmists are environmentalists and bureaucrats (i.e. IPCC), that do have agenda's of their own. Of course many on the skeptics side have their own agenda's too.
That is why it is so important that the science rule the debate, we depend on actual measurements not models and organizations like the IPCC kept out of it.
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