Things I don’t understand ||

 Following on from yesterday’s trash piece from Richard Black comes yet another tissue of misrepresentation. Here is my reply, kept safe because I know that the BBC doesn’t ever allow criticism of itself on its own website.

Once again another piece of Black Propaganda:

“Of all the accusations made by the vociferous community of climate sceptics, surely the most damaging is that science itself is biased against them.”

Really? Where did any of the skeptics claim that “the science” was biased against them?

Nowhere. You made up a straw man right from the start. They did not claim that “science” was biased against them, they claimed that some scientific journals refused publication and some funding agencies refused to find research for spurious reasons to prevent the questioning of key studies which are foundational to the IPCC’s output.

“Nature’s refusal to publish a re-analysis by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick of the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) “hockey stick” graph has been so well documented elsewhere, not least in hearings instigated by US congressmen, that there is really nothing new to say.”

That’s fascinating. Of course, you covered the congressional hearings and made clear mention of the report of a highly distinguished and independent statistician Edward Wegman, who found Steve McIntyre’s criticism of the Hockey Stick to be “valid and compelling” and the the conclusions of the study that the 1990s where the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millienium, cannot be sustained”?

No you didn’t.

What you did do was studiously ignore any findings which showed very clearly how false the Hockey Stick study really was and is. You did not write about the so-called “confirming studies” which were corrupted by use of the Hockey Stick as an proxy in itself and the Hockey Stick methodology which the NAS Panel specifically decried.

You even reported that the NAS Panel “backed the Hockey Stick” when in fact they demolished the methodology as flawed, recommended that bristlecone pine proxies should not be used as they are not temperature proxies and downgraded the Hockey Stick’s claims down to “plausible” which my dictionary defines as “Plausible … describe[s] that which has the appearance of truth but might be deceptive. The person or thing that is plausible strikes the superficial judgment favorably; it may or may not be true: a plausible argument (one that cannot be verified or believed in entirely).”

So it may be documented very well elsewhere, but not on the BBC, because the BBC is clearly not interested in science that disconfirms its prejudged views.

So once again, bias, censorship and straw man fallacies are the key ways that you continue to misrepresent scientific arguments that do not fit your pro-IPCC agenda. And it is an agenda, Richard. Please don’t confuse this continued bias with accurate journalism, because it ain’t.

More fun and games from the BBC as the IPCC report gets ever nearer.