Time for a heated debate?

I've put it off for as long as I can, but I can't hold back any longer. As you might expect, it's the sainted Moonbat who's triggered the urge:

So here we go again. For the second time, Channel 4 has been fiercely criticised by the broadcasting regulator for a programme attacking environmental science. For the second time, the director was Martin Durkin.

He then goes on:

Ofcom has ruled that the programme he made last year — The Great Global Warming Swindle — treated two scientists and an organisation (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) unfairly.

But while the new ruling exposes some of the channel's practices, it also exposes the limitations of the regulator. The programme was peppered with distortions and misleading claims. But despite being presented with a vast dossier of evidence by climate scientists, Ofcom decided that it could not rule on the matter of accuracy. While news programmes are expected to be accurate, other factual programmes are not, and Ofcom "only regulates misleading material where that material is likely to cause harm or offence."

It decided that The Great Global Warming Swindle had not caused actual harm to members of the public: merely misleading them does not count. In fact, it is precisely because "the discussion about the causes of global warming was to a very great extent settled by the date of broadcast", meaning that climate change was no longer a matter of political controversy, that a programme claiming it is all a pack of lies could slip past the partiality rules. The greater a programme's defiance of scientific fact, the less likely Ofcom is to rule against it. This paradoxical judgment allows Channel 4 to keep getting away with it.

The irony of this man's hypocrisy is beyond staggering. Every charge he lays at the feet of this program can be laid at the feet of the global warming True Believers. But, of course, George is away with the fairies again. Here is a more impartial reading of the Ofcom ruling.

None of the complaints alleging lack of due impartiality in the science portion (sections 1-4) was upheld. Not one. The only bone thrown to the complainants was a finding that there had not been due impartiality in the portion talking about Africa - an issue that Bob Ward and the Myles Allen 37 didn’t even mention.

Ofcom’s reasoning here had a fine touch of irony, which will appeal to connoisseurs of irony, as I hope most CA readers are.

In order for section 5 due impartiality requirements to come into play, the issue had to be one “of political or industrial controversy”. The Code explains that these are “political or industrial issues on which politicians, industry and/or the media are in debate.”

But if the science was “settled”, as the complainants elsewhere argued, then the matter necessarily ceased to be one of “political or industrial controversy”, leaving section 5 inapplicable. As confirmation, Channel 4 introduced statements from the Stern Commission and the former Environment Minister that the science was “settled” and thus the science matters discussed in sections 1-4 were no longer matters of “political or industrial controversy.”

Rather a bold gambit and one that left the Complainants on the horns of a dilemma. In order to sustain their section 5 complaint, they would have had to reverse the position argued elsewhere in the complaint and argue that the science was not “settled”, hardly something that they wanted to do and a position that they did not adopt.

In their decision, Ofcom noted the views of the Stern Commission and the former Environment Minister that the science was no longer a matter of “political or industrial controversy” and threw out the section 5 complaints in relation to the science sections. Didn’t I tell you that the irony would appeal to CA readers?

The only bone that Ofcom threw the program complainants was a mercy bone in relation to the Africa segment, which was hardly a matter of big controversy, having attracted no ire from Bob Ward and the 37 professors. Ofcom concluded that the Africa segment did involve a matter of policy and that the GGWS producers had an obligation to have been more impartial on this topic.

The usual horse-shit about "the science is settled" is trotted out again by Moonbat, just to make the useless cunt feel a bit more certain of his case. The science is not settled, and it's not settled about any fucking scientific endeavour. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is unravelling, and I'm pretty sure he was a bit more rigorous and generally smarter than Moonbat. No science is ever settled. Anything can be disproven if some uncomfortable fact comes to light. Real scientists accept this.

Yet for some reason, every pro-MMGW fuckwit insists that the science is settled. When you raise the concerns about even simple, hard science being subject to refutation, they then say: "It's so important, it doesn't matter if we're right."

I'm sorry?

Anyway, let me lay out my reasoning for not giving a shit about all this eco-wibble:

1. I haven't seen any compelling evidence that global warming is happening at all. There is a preponderance of land-based temperature measuring stations that are in heat islands, making land-based measurements suspect. Some of it is made up. Satellite measurements all show no indication of global warming. There are currently nine authorities currently involved in providing a dataset of monthly global temperature anomalies. Eight of them say there is no evidence of global warming. The only satellite temperature monitoring organisation who claims that their satellites do show global warming is NASA's GISS, home of True Believer James Hansen.

2. I have never seen any compelling proof of the argument that man-made CO2 emissions are causing global warming. Whenever I ask a proponent for this proof, they a) wave their hands around; b) point me at "peer-reviewed science, like the IPCC"; c) talk about computer models.

a) isn't compelling;
b) the IPCC does not instigate any science, it selectively endorses reports that support its politically-defined agenda;
c) computer models are useless in complex environments and there is evidence that they are tweaked to get rid of results that don't fit the objective.

Data is selected around time frames that fit the hypothesis, the hypothesis is not amended to fit the data. The Medieval Warm Period is ignored. Many studies start in 1850, coincidentally when the northern hemisphere was coming out of a little ice age (LIA). The IPCC describes the LIA as a period of "modest cooling", when the Thames froze every year and New Yorkers could walk across a frozen harbour from Manhattan to Staten Island. The reverse of this "modest cooling" would, however, somehow become apocalyptic for us now.

Furthermore, Australian scientist David Evans, who worked for the Australian government developing their models for carbon emission tracking and who was an IPCC reviewer, has pointed out that if CO2 was causing global warming, there would be a significant build-up of heat at about 10km above sea level. This has not been found, so CO2 in general is not causing global warming, so man-made emissions can also not be a factor. Some Kiwi wingnut thinks it's a load of crap, as well.

3. I'm not convinced that the Kyoto Protocol will achieve anything except increase government interference in everyone's lives. If fully implemented, the Kyoto Protocol would exchange vast sums of money for maybe a 30-year window before whatever was going to happen, would happen anyway. But the other thing that Kyoto would do would be to transfer money from first world economies to third world economies to compensate them for the horrors that MMGW would inflict upon them. A much easier way of doing this would be to remove trade barriers. But then I guess governments wouldn't be able to get their sticky fingers into the pie, would they?

4. If this was a real problem, people would be crapping all over China in a big way: Britain's annual CO2 emissions are about one-tenth of China's. Russia, Japan and India all way more than us. But China and India would actually be winners under Kyoto, because they are not Annex I coutries -- they would get our money!

How the fuck does that work, then?

5. True Believers claim that global warming will only bring negatives: more hurricanes, more tornadoes, more droughts, more floods, more malaria, more starvation, etc., etc. One small example: it's claimed that the projected increased rainfall would only occur as floods, the IPCC did not project that any of the increased rainfall would bring benefits. However, analysis of history and pre-history seems to indicate that warmer periods are actually times of plenty on earth: more vegetation, more variety, and general good times.

6. I have not seen any compelling proof that trying to limit carbon emissions is the correct way to attack the problem. I'm not alone, environmentalist Bjorn Lomberg disagrees with me in every way, but this: he says that we shouldn't be trying to curb carbon emissions, we should be trying to prepare the world for the consequences. He thinks this is a much more effective way of working around it. Cheaper, too.

Needless to say, he was duly excommunicated from the Church of the True Belief for his heresy.

7. Most "greens" actually seem to be watermelons: green out the outside, red on the inside. Every green agenda brings with it the dead, heavy, controlling hand of the state. Individuals are not capable of doing the right thing, and global warming seems to be a great excuse for the state to fuck us around more. No signs that they're actually achieving anything "green", but plenty of recycling sorting, reduce services, extra taxes ... the list goes on.

I'm sure some True Believer will be here soon enough to tell me I'm wrong, but unless you being something new to the table (like concrete proof, that isn't just the opinion of some fuckbubble True Believer) I'm afraid I'm going to have to call you a cunt and tell you to fuck off.