MediaWatch: Jo Nova, McLean, Newscorp fools! Govt committees are always right.

Ponder the irony — MediaWatch is meant to be a media auditor, but it starts from the assumption that every government run collective is 100% accurate (at least on climate change). And unaudited UN committees are infallible too. Indeed newspapers have a duty to repeat what these committees say without questioning them. Host Paul Barry actually uses the word duty.

Once upon a time, the duty of investigative reporters was to to investigate, now their job is to be glorified marketing hacks advertising the latest government scheme to change the weather. What could possibly go wrong?

How about if governments set up all their institutes to find problems with CO2 and asked none of them to audit the others? What if whole government departments were tasked to slay the carbon dragon, and while exactly no groups anywhere were funded to find out if the sun controlled the climate instead? Using the MediaWatch Wand of Truth, only government scientists can criticize government scientists (and only then for five minutes until their uni trawls through their emails and sacks them). Thus and verily IPCC scientists should be obeyed.

MediaWatch marvels that the Australian Newscorp media can’t be bothered repeating the […]

Even believer media are bored of climate change — TV coverage down

It’s panic stations over at Believer Central. They are losing their grip on the media. And 2015 was a bumper year for Climate Scares – the hottest ever year, the giant Paris Junket, The El Nino, The Pope! (The Pope?) Despite all that, the media spent less time on the climate. It doesn’t get any better than 2015 for the Global Worriers — there is no higher level of panic. But the free propaganda machine is slowing…

Lookout, climate denial is on the rise (don’t ask about the error bars):

 

Dana Nuccitelli, The Guardian

During the most important year for climate news, TV coverage fell

A report by Media Matters for America reveals that the media are failing to inform the American public on the most important issue of our time.

Media Matters for America has published a report detailing US broadcast news coverage of climate change in 2015, and their findings are stunning.

Stunning eh? Or not.

Dana might be knocked over, but I see ABC down 20, Fox up 20, and some “other stuff”. It’s not really much of a trend. The thing that really bugs Dana seems to […]

How many things can Lord Deben get wrong?

I did a spot on the ABC Drum today. Very odd to do it from a studio where I could not see any of the panel at all, and didn’t know the etiquette of how these things work. (I know a lot more now). But I’m glad to have a chance to speak, even if it was short.

So just in case there is anyone out there thinking that Lord Deben had some good points, here’ s what I was thinking as he spoke without pausing to breathe, and here’s my reply (it would have been nice to say it on air):

Firstly, all of this presupposes that there is a reason to reduce CO2. Thousands of scientists and millions of measurements suggest not.

That aside, saying Australia is “not a special case” is to deny geography and demographics.

The UK might have the fastest growth rate in the EU but Australia’s population growth rate is two-to-three times faster than the UK. Do those people count? Not in climate change maths. Australia’s population has grown by 38% since 1990. It’s massive and it matters.

Adding more wind power won’t help solve the […]

Miranda Devine: Perth electrical engineer’s discovery will change climate change debate

Good news, a spot of media coverage.

Perth Edition, The Sunday Times

Miranda Devine: Perth electrical engineer’s discovery will change climate change debate

Photo: AustralianClimateMadness

A MATHEMATICAL discovery by Perth-based electrical engineer Dr David Evans may change everything about the climate debate, on the eve of the UN climate change conference in Paris next month.

A former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science.

He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly.

He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.

It turns out the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has over-estimated future global warming by as much as 10 times, he says…

The series of posts flows under the tag: “Climate Research 2015″

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This is what we need more of: Scientists calling out newspaper hype

Professor Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts Research, Met Office Hadley Centre, responded to an alarmist news story in the Independent, both with a comment at the article, and in a tweet (or two). If more scientists spoke out publicly, reporting would get better.

Prof Richard Betts commenting at the Independent (my bold):

Official prophecy of doom: Global warming will cause widespread conflict, displace millions of people and devastate the global economy

Leaked draft report from UN panel seen by The Independent is most comprehensive investigation into impact of climate change ever undertaken – and it’s not good news

Climate change will displace hundreds of millions of people by the end of this century, increasing the risk of violent conflict and wiping trillions of dollars off the global economy, a forthcoming UN report will warn.

Based on thousands of peer-reviewed studies and put together by hundreds of respected scientists, the [IPCC] report predicts that climate change will reduce median crop yields by 2 per cent per decade …

And so on– it is pretty much all there: war, starvation, floods, seas rising, and death. Richard Betts comments (my bolding):

“I’m one of the authors of the IPCC WG2 report, and […]

Media bias — ABC, CBS exclude skeptical scientists for 1300 days

The bias is obvious in what they don’t say. Reporters are supposed to seek out and promote the most rational, well argued positions they can find. Instead they elevate themselves to defacto “science judges” and decide which scientists deserve to be heard. It could be called arrogance, or it could be called “lying by omission”.

COLD SHOULDER: ABC, CBS Exclude Scientists Critical of Global Warming for More Than 1,300 Days | NewsBusters

Like a simple parlor trick, the networks are able to make skeptical scientists vanish, at least from the eyes of their viewers.

In some cases, the broadcast networks have failed to include such scientists for years, while including alarmist scientists within the past six months. ABC, CBS and NBC’s lengthy omission of scientists critical of global warming alarmism propped up the myth of a scientific consensus, despite the fact that many scientists and thousands of peer-reviewed studies disagree.

Neither CBS nor ABC have included a skeptical scientist in their news shows within the past 1,300 days, but both networks included alarmists within the past 160 days — CBS as recently as 22 days ago. When the networks did include other viewpoints, the experts were dismissed as “out […]

Newman says The Party is Over for the IPCC

Another sign the debate is shifting, and probably in an irreversible way. Like a ratchet, the truth is slowly advancing, but once revealed, there is no going back.

The debate is gaining nuance: instead of scientists and deniers, there the public starts to see the argument is about shades of grey. The real debate has never been about whether greenhouse gases were real, instead it’s about how much global warming will happen. The cheating tactic of pretending the conflict was about something that nearly everyone agrees upon is like a ticking bomb for alarmists. The fuse has been lit. They will pay for their deception eventually.

Maurice Newman, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, is following up on his extraordinary front page article in The Australian. He is influential and was Chairman of the ABC, and of the board of the Australian Stock Exchange, and was Chancellor of Macquarie University until 2008.

Maurice Newman in The Australian today:

GIVEN the low-grade attacks on me following my piece “Crowds go cold on climate cost” (The Australian, Dec 31) readers of Fairfax publications and The Guardian may be shocked to hear I believe in climate change. I also accept carbon […]

Sydney Morning Herald allows a skeptic to say the games up for climate hysteria

Reader Cookster expressed amazement asked if the tide was turning and linked to Tom Switzers piece in the SMH today “Game Finally Up for Carboncrats”. It’s a no-holds barred description of the current state of the climate scare. I’m not a regular reader of the SMH (the left leaning major daily in Sydney), so I might be wrong, but I’m tempted to agree with Cookster. What I can’t tell from the other side of the country is whether this was put out in print in the main Op-Ed section (please let me know).

Switzer is well respected in Australian newsprint (he’s the editor of The Spectator Australia) which no doubt made it hard for the SMH to say no. But look how confident, and well informed he is. The bland truth is that Kyoto is over, and as Tom says:

“Prospects for a replacement are virtually zero. Rich nations are rejecting climate compensation for the developing world. Europe is in a coal frenzy. Germany, a former green trend-setter, is slashing unaffordable subsidies to the renewables industry. The European Parliament is losing confidence in the EU emissions trading scheme. No Asian nation has an emission trading scheme in operation. China’s and […]

NY Times climate news shrinks 30% — another signpost in the decline of The Great Global Warming Scam

It’s not just the money that is leaving the room as reality bites, the chattering classes are not chattering about it so much either. The New York Times closed their Green Blog earlier this year, which covered energy and environment. Seven reporters and two editors were moved into different roles. Did that matter? Seems so.

Think Progress tells the sad story:

The decision was met with disbelief and consternation by many, although readers were promised that The Times’s environmental coverage would be as aggressive as ever, and that the decision was purely structural.

It’s always about “seeming” and not about doing isn’t it?

So much for “structural”, now there are 30% less stories:

Maxwell T. Boykoff, who tracks media coverage of the environment at the University of Colorado, reported to Sullivan that The Times published just 247 print articles that prominently featured climate change between April and September of last year, In 2012, there were 362 such articles during the same time period – that’s a decline of about one third.

Furthermore, in that six-month period since the environment desk closed, there were only three front-page stories in which climate change was the main focus, compared with nine the year […]

Six questions the media should be asking the IPCC – by Bob Tisdale

It’s clear science journalists need some help. The IPCC are saying “The ocean ate my global warming” and most environment reporters just cut-n-paste this excuse — they fall for the breathtaking joules-to-the-22nd-figures — not realizing they convert to a mere 0.07C over nearly 50 years (as if we could measure the average temperature of the global oceans to a hundredth of a degree!). Worse, the warming we do find is so small, it supports the skeptical calculations, not the IPCC’s ones. I ran a tutorial for journalists at the end of the post, and asked Bob Tisdale (author of Climate Models Fail ) if he had some other questions. He did, oh boy, and here they are. Thanks to Bob. – Jo

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Questions the Media Should Be Asking the IPCC – The Hiatus in Warming Posted on October 3, 2013 by Bob Tisdale

Joanne Nova asked me to suggest questions the media should be asking the IPCC about their 5th Assessment Report (AR5). I’ve provided a few examples along with background information.

This post will discuss the slowdown in global warming since 1998 (or the halt since 2001) known as the hiatus. While the hiatus in warming […]

More media pressure finally forcing the IPCC to cut the spin

The race in the media continues: The UK Daily Mail (again), The Spectator, The UK Express. The headlines the IPCC must hate just keep coming, now in major newspapers and magazines. Finally, maybe, some of the media is starting to get it. At last also the IPCC is feeling the pressure to explain the halting of global warming and the poor performance of its climate models.

This is all well and good, but before we celebrate, ponder that if science journalists had been doing their job 10 years ago, the IPCC would have been put on the spot before before the wild evangelistic doom-fest of 2007 where national GDP points were roasted with every chapter. Billions could have been saved.

As I keep saying: The media is the problem. With good journalists, and real reporters, everything else gets better. Shine the light…

The UK Daily Mail Tamara Cohen

World’s top climate scientists told to ‘cover up’ the fact that the Earth’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years

But leaked documents seen by the Associated Press, yesterday revealed deep concerns among politicians about a lack of global warming over the past few years.

Germany called for the references […]

A tipping point: Skepticism goes mainstream…

Worldwide momentum is shifting. With David Rose’s article in the Daily Mail, Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal (“We got it wrong on warming“), and the excellent article by Ross McKitrick in the Financial Post the skeptical message is going mainstream.

The war is by no means over, but the race in media coverage has stepped up a notch. Now, for the first time there is an element of competition, serious newspapers don’t want to be left behind. Editors have realized the skeptics have a case.

In Australia the grand failure of the carbon tax in the recent election is still ripping through the news, the institutions, and the mood. It was a categorical defeat. From comments and emails I know this event was watched around the world.

Roy Spencer, veteran with two decades of experience wonders if this is a turning point too:

“…recent events are quite exceptional.”

” We are now at the point in the age of global warming hysteria where the IPCC global warming theory has crashed into the hard reality of observations.”

Ross McKitrick, Canada:

“To those of us who have been following the climate debate for decades, the next few years will […]

The day the Global Warming death spiral began

Let the historic dissection begin. Man-made global warming is a dying market and a zombie science.

The Carbon Capture Report, based in Illinois, tallies up the media stories from the English speaking media on “climate change” daily. Thanks to the tip from Peter Lang, we can see the terminal trend below. The big peak in late 2009 was the double-whammy of Climategate and Copenhagen (aka Hopenhagen). It’s all been downhill since then.

Mentions of “climate change” in news, blogs and tweets dropped suddenly from July 29, 2011

Source: Carbon Capture Report

But something that caught my eye was the drop in mid 2011 (or precisely — July 29, 2011) when media stories fell by half, a step-change fall from which they never recovered.

Media Matters, and Joe Romm make much of of the fact that after Paul Ingrassia (a skeptic) was appointed as Reuters deputy-editor-in-chief news coverage of climate change fell by half.

Media Matters found a 48% decline in climate-change coverage over a six-month period, after Ingrassia joined the agency in 2011.

But Ingrassia started in April 2011 not July. Media Matters compares 6 months before the global fall Oct 2010 – April 2011 — to […]

Jo Nova talks on 2GB about carbon credits and the forced market that is called “free”

Michael McLaren, 2GB

Thanks to Joe V in comments for finding the links to my interview on the “Carbon Free Market”

Michael McLaren speaks with Joanne Nova, author of The Skeptic’s Handbook, who speaks about the stupidity of aligning ourselves with Europe’s ETS.

Listen http://www.2gb.com/article/ets-more-black-market-green-economy# or Download

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Is the media waking up? Global warming: time to rein back on doom and gloom?

Tic, tic, tic. The sleeping MSM is stirring. Headlines no one could imagine seeing a few years ago are popping up on a regular basis. The backdown is beginning.

For those who have not gone-over-the-falls and chained their reputation to a big-Green-rock, there is time to backtrack. This is a good moment to start mentioning that “things have changed.” It’s five years too late, but that’s better than being ten-years-too-late, and it still has a tiny bit of kudos for being ahead of stampede that is coming.

The term du jour is “new evidence”. It’s the ticket back to reality, even though strong evidence has been there for a decade, and the lack of warming is just one more clue that the models are wrong.

As far as I can tell, Geoffrey Lean is one of the commentators who’s been very much on the side of the global warming drive, but not a zealot. He allowed the odd caveat, he spoke of skeptics, but not of deniers. When the ClimateGate II emails were released, mostly he wrote about how they didn’t matter, were misrepresented, and the science was settled. Even then, there was a small caveat that “disturbing questions” remain, […]

Getup-poplexy! scared of monckton, mannkal, bolt and jonova: fox australia would be a hit

Thank you GetUp! Australians are finally talking about how they can get more media competition and how we can lift media standards. Read on to see Moncktons reply, and the call for interest Spot those afraid of free speech.

Gina Rinehart merely buys 13% of Fairfax, and the GetUp-union-funded-Labor-green fan club rush to start raising funds ($37,000 already), not to compete in the free market for shares, but to run the scariest adverts they can, to whip up fear and interfere with normal corporate board room activity. It’s just the way they do things. What are they so afraid of? They’re afraid the public might hear the other side of news. When you run a propaganda campaign, the worst thing that can happen is a crack in the armour — That people like Monckton, Bolt, Nova, or the libertarian economists at Mannkal might get a chance to be heard. Once the truth gets out it can’t be put back in the bag. It spreads.

Wait for it. This is the dark conspiratorial “secret” aim of free market thinkers that they uncovered. Remember some poor hapless soul had to view hours of free market discussion to find this:

“And […]

ClimateGate II: Handy Guide to spot whitewash journalism – The top 10 excuses for scientists behaving badly

Sorting real journalists from sock puppets is not too tricky: real investigators tell you what the story is about; PR writers tell you what to think.

Do they “discuss” ClimateGate emails … without quoting the emails?

Who digs for details, and who hides the evidence?

The PR writers for Big-Government were quick to come up with excuses for ClimateGate II. Which is all very well, but it’s blindingly obvious where their own personal prejudices lie if they won’t print the emails that they are supposedly discussing. It’s not so much cherry-picking, but cherry-denial. “Don’t mention the radioactive cherries, but lets discuss how cherry farmers have been victimized, talk about the history of cherry tree farming, and hear their excuses and assertions that the cherries are an essential part of our diets. Don’t mention the Geiger counter. OK?”

The top 10 excuses for PR writers who pose as “journalists” to ignore ClimateGate emails

This is standard issue damage control for ClimateGate — protect the cheats and liars, attack the whistleblower, and use excuses and padding-fillers to cover a story without actually giving the public any information on the […]

The Watts Up Tour in WA

Narrogin Observer Climate Skeptics Headline (Click to read it)

UPDATE: See Quadrant for Anthony’s thoughts on this news story.

For those who are wondering, The WA leg of the Watts Up tour was thoroughly enjoyed by many. People drove up from as far as Albany to watch us in Narrogin – three hours each way on a dark foggy night.

9.4 out of 10 based on 17 ratings […]

The great collapse of the global warming myth

Photo adapted from Ron Neibrugge’s beautifully crisp original at Wild Nature Images

This is it: The dam wall is breached.

There are defining moments in any era, and we are right now in the midst of the Great Collapse.

Jan 30, 2010: the hottest hoax

Open Magazine's "Hottest Hoax in the World" Cover Issue

The weekend before last, a magazine cover called it Fraud. This could have been New Scientist, Scientific American, Discover, or any of the other popular science magazines, but it wasn’t. They were all scooped by an Indian publication, Open Magazine, that had only been running for a year.

The climate change fraud that is now unraveling is unprecedented in its deceit, unmatched in scope—and for the liberal elite, akin to 9 on the Richter scale. Never have so few fooled so many for so long, ever.

The entire world was being asked to change the way it lives on the basis of pure hyperbole. Propriety, probity and transparency were routinely sacrificed.

Feb 2, 2010: the Australian abandons the IPCC and the ETS 7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings […]