Yet another excuse for The Pause

10 February, 2014 by

Age-old excuses

Age-old excuses

UPDATE: One of the other ABC reports (and there are plenty) leaves no room for any doubt:

Stronger than normal trade winds in the central Pacific are the main cause of a 13-year halt in global surface temperatures increases, an Australian study reveals.

Note: “are” the main cause. Not might be, or perhaps, but “are.” And if that weren’t enough, we have a D-word alert:

The authors reject the study gives impetus to climate change deniers and instead suggest that when the winds ease, global warming will accelerate rapidly.

The ABC really is a piece of shite.

The ABC breathlessly reports that a well-known warmist has worked out yet another reason for The Pause, and another factor that the climate models apparently didn’t know about.

Matthew England of the University of New South Wales (see here and here, for example of his impartiality on the matter) proposes a variation on the ‘Dog Ate my Warming’ excuse, accepted uncritically as usual by the ABC:

Scientists have come up with an explanation for the pause in global warming, which has long been a point of contention raised by climate change sceptics.

Over the past 15 years the rate of global warming has slowed – and more recently almost stalled.

Sceptics say the slowdown suggests warming is not as bad as first thought, while most climate scientists say it is just a natural climate variability.

Now an Australian-led team of researchers has found strong winds in the Pacific Ocean are most likely to be behind the hiatus.

The University of New South Wales (UNSW) researcher Matthew England said oceans were much more dominant in terms of their heat uptake.

“Obviously we have implications of that such as sea level rise,” Professor England said.

Professor England led a team of researchers from around the world that has come up with an explanation for why the oceans soak up the heat.

Their research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, has found the answer lies in stronger than usual trade winds whipping across the Pacific Ocean.

It was found the winds were churning the Pacific like a washing machine, bringing the deeper colder water to the surface and pushing the warmer water below.

“The phase we’re in of accelerated trade winds particularly lasts a couple of decades,” Professor England said.

“We’re about 12 to 13 years in to the most accelerated part of the wind field.

“It’s important to point out there’s a cycle we expect to reverse and when they do reverse back to their normal levels we’d expect global warming to kick in and start to rise.” (source)

Note how the day of reckoning, when warming is set to resume, has been pushed out to some unspecified point in the future. Personally, I think it’s the Flying Spaghetti Monster that’s tinkering with the climate, reaching out with his noodly appendage to fool the warmists… no more ridiculous than the above, I would say.

Add it to the list.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Abbott knifes the ABC – labels it ‘unpatriotic’

29 January, 2014 by

So far left it's coming back the other way…

So far left it’s coming back the other way…

Tony Abbott finally makes noises against the ABC’s incessant bias. From global warming to asylum seekers, from Julian Assange to Edward Snowden, from Obama-worship to apologists for Islamist atrocities, from smearing our Navy to damaging the relations with our international neighbours, the ABC is always of the hard left. It even criticises Labor and the Greens from the left! I repeat my post from September 2013:

Reform of the ABC long overdue

This blog has frequently exposed the barely-concealed left-wing bias of our publicly funded broadcaster, the ABC. As Gerard Henderson points out regularly on his must-read Media Watch Dog, there isn’t a single conservative presenter or editor on any mainstream current affairs programme, earning the corporation’s acronym the alternative interpretation of “Anything but Conservatives”.

In their stead we have had to suffer “Red” Kerry O’Brien (whose “old leather bag” visage will be gracing the ABC’s election coverage tomorrow, naturally), Tony Jones (adding another lefty voice to the already skewed Q&A panel every week), Fran Kelly (activist presenter of Radio National’s Breakfast show), News Radio’s political editor and resident Lefty, Marius Benson, Jonathan Green (editor of the Drum, which is banged repeatedly for Labor/Green causes) and Mark Scott himself – wilfully blind to the “groupthink” that is endemic in his organisation – to name but a few.

Then we have all the climate change alarmists, like Dr Karl, Robyn Williams, Adam Spencer, Bernie Hobbs, Tony Jones again, all the Catalyst team etc., 95% of the contributors on the online site, extremists like Clive Hamilton, Stephan Lewandowsky etc, and the list goes on.

It is galling that taxes paid by all Australians go towards funding that Lefty/Green echo-chamber, which caters for a small urban elite, staffed with inner-city Ultimo types who couldn’t run a chook raffle. Privately owned media organisations stand or fall on their output, witness the enduring success of News Corp, and the rapid decline of Fairfax, as it too panders to the latte-sipping, sandal-wearing intelligentsia, and in the process ignores the vast majority of Australians. The Age astonishingly endorses Labor for the election tomorrow – as one commentator pointed out, after asylum disasters, NBN, massive debt, waste, dysfunctional leadership, knifings, in-fighting, Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper, what would it take for them not to endorse Labor?

But the ABC is paid for by all of us, and it should be representative of the views of all Australians, not just a mouthpiece for the Left. It is probable that a Coalition government will be elected tomorrow, sweeping away six years of Labor incompetence. Yet you wouldn’t believe it listening to the ABC this morning, with the majority of stories either puff pieces for Rudd and Labor, or criticism of the Coalition and Abbott. Maybe they realise that the clock is ticking, time is running out, so they have to make the most of it, like the last gasp of the Roman Empire.

It’s time for the ABC to be subjected to significant reform. Balance must be restored in current affairs broadcasting, and the ABC must fully reflect the diversity of Australian opinion. Whether this is by some form of privatisation or otherwise, the population have switched off in droves, with Sky taking over as the de facto national broadcaster.

When the ABC isn’t trusted to run the election debates, something is seriously wrong. Let’s hope Tony Abbott and the Coalition will start to fix it.

It looks like they might. The ABC itself reports (ouch, that must hurt…):

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has stepped up his criticism of the ABC, accusing the national broadcaster of being unpatriotic in its coverage of the Edward Snowden leaks and asylum seeker abuse claims.

Mr Abbott also questioned the ABC’s newly established Fact Check unit, saying he wanted the corporation to focus on straight news gathering and reporting.

“A lot of people feel at the moment that the ABC instinctively takes everyone’s side but Australia’s,” he said in an interview with Ray Hadley on Sydney radio station 2GB.

“I think it dismays Australians when the national broadcaster appears to take everyone’s side but its own and I think it is a problem.”

Asked if he shared those sentiments, Mr Abbott said he was “worried and concerned” by the ABC taking a lead in reporting leaks from Snowden, a former US National Security Agency contractor.

The NSA leaks revealed Australia’s spy agencies tapped the phones of Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudohoyono and his wife in 2009.

The revelations caused a rift in the Australia-Indonesia relationship early in Mr Abbott’s prime ministership.

“The ABC seemed to delight in broadcasting allegations by a traitor,” Mr Abbott said.

“The ABC didn’t just report what he said, they took the lead in advertising what he said, and that was a deep concern.”

Mr Abbott’s attention was also drawn to a Facebook post published by an ABC researcher seeking off-the-record discussions with Navy personnel.

In the post, the researcher said her “boss” doubted asylum seekers’ claims they were mistreated during a boat turn-back operation.

The asylum seekers say they suffered burns when Navy personnel forced them to hold onto hot pipes coming out of the boat’s engine.

The Navy has denied the allegations and the Government has strongly defended the military, without confirming or denying the operation took place.

“You can’t leap to be critical of your own country and you certainly ought to be prepared to give the Australian Navy and its hard-working personnel the benefit of the doubt,” Mr Abbott said.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said the ABC should apologise for casting doubt on the reputation of Royal Australian Navy sailors if the organisation felt it was wrong.

“If the ABC now finds that these allegations were utterly unsubstantiated then it should come out and say so,” Ms Bishop told reporters in Brisbane.

The first step on a long road, Tony. Don’t waver. You can listen to the interview here.

Filed Under: ABC Bias, Aussie Politics Tagged With: , ,

You’d think we’d never had a heatwave before…

16 January, 2014 by

Safe CO2 heatwave…

Safe CO2 heatwave… (source)

The ABC is acting as the taxpayer-funded PR agent for the privately-funded Climate Council, which itself is behaving as if it had never seen a heatwave before:

Heatwaves in Australia are becoming more frequent, hotter and are lasting longer because of climate change, a report released today by the Climate Council says.

The interim findings of the report, titled Australian Heatwaves: Hotter, Longer, Earlier and More Often, come as southern Australia swelters through a heatwave, with the temperature in Adelaide today forecast to hit 46 degrees Celsius.

The report says heat records are now happening three times more often than cold records, and that the number of hot days across Australia has “more than doubled”.

It says the duration and frequency of heatwaves increased between 1971 and 2008, and the hottest days have become hotter.

And it predicts that future heatwaves will last up to three days longer on average, they will happen more often, and the highest temperatures will rise further.

“It is clear that climate change is making heatwaves more frequent and severe,” report co-author Professor Will Steffen said in a statement.

“Heatwaves have become hotter and longer and they are starting earlier in the season.”

After notching up two consecutive days over 40C, Melbourne is on track to record its second-longest heatwave since records began in the 1830s.

Second-longest?

The longest heatwave in Melbourne was in 1908, when there were five consecutive days over 40C.

When CO2 was under 300ppm, well below the ‘safe’ 350ppm. Shurely shome mishtake?

Despite the IPCC and many other climate scientists refusing to link ‘extreme weather’ to climate change, the Climate Council and the ABC are quite happy to do so as part of a co-ordinated scare campaign:

Professor Steffen says the extreme weather patterns can be attributed to climate change, with the continued burning of fossil fuels trapping more heat in the lower atmosphere.

Professor Steffen says large population centres of south-east Australia stand out as being “at increased risk from many extreme weather events, including heatwaves”.

“The current heatwave follows on from a year of extreme heat, the hottest summer on record and the hottest year on record,” he said. (source)

But where’s the warming, Willy? Global temperatures have barely risen for over a decade. Whilst Australia is experiencing a heatwave, the US is freezing. Oh wait, that’s climate change too. Everything’s climate change.

All of the above is ably abetted, naturally, by the Bureau of Meteorology, which suddenly finds it an appropriate time to announce that it has introduced a definition of “heatwave”. Which begs the question, in a country which has been ravaged by heat waves since the dawn of time, why has it taken until now to define what one actually is? I’m surprised that the Bureau stopped at ‘severe’ in their heatwave categories, and didn’t jump the shark with ‘catastrophic’ (like the bush fires), or even ‘calamitous’, ‘apocalyptic’ or ‘cataclysmic’! My own suggestion would be ‘OMG we’re all gonna fry’…

Once again, the ABC dutifully does the Bureau’s PR work here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , , , ,

BBC’s shameful climate propaganda seminar exposed

13 January, 2014 by

Activists, all of them...

Activists, all of them…

I wonder how much of the same goes on at our own publicly funded broadcaster? Probably all of it.

Whenever there is a climate change story to be covered, the ABC will rush to its favourites: David Karoly (alarmist), Matthew England (alarmist), Clive Hamilton (Green, activist), Stephan Lewandowsky (“scepics are conspiracy theorist fruit cakes”), Will Steffen (alarmist), Tim Flannery (alarmist), and the list goes on.

After lawyering up and spending thousands of licence fee payer’s cash on opposing Freedom of Information requests, the story is finally out, as the Daily Mail reports:

The BBC has spent tens of thousands of pounds over six years trying to keep secret an extraordinary ‘eco’ conference which has shaped its coverage of global warming, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

The controversial seminar was run by a body set up by the BBC’s own environment analyst Roger Harrabin and funded via a £67,000 grant from the then Labour government, which hoped to see its ‘line’ on climate change and other Third World issues promoted in BBC reporting.

At the event, in 2006, green activists and scientists – one of whom believes climate change is a bigger danger than global nuclear war – lectured 28 of the Corporation’s most senior executives.

Then director of television Jana Bennett opened the seminar by telling the executives to ask themselves: ‘How do you plan and run a city that is going to be submerged?’ And she asked them to consider if climate change laboratories might offer material for a thriller.

A lobby group with close links to green campaigners, the International Broadcasting Trust (IBT), helped to arrange government funding for both the climate seminar and other BBC seminars run by Mr Harrabin – one of which was attended by then Labour Cabinet Minister Hilary Benn.

Applying for money from Mr Benn’s Department for International Development (DFID), the IBT promised Ministers the seminars would influence programme content for years to come.

The BBC began its long legal battle to keep details of the conference secret after an amateur climate blogger spotted a passing reference to it in an official report.

Tony Newbery, 69, from North Wales, asked for further disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. The BBC’s resistance to revealing anything about its funding and the names of those present led to a protracted struggle in the Information Tribunal. The BBC has admitted it has spent more than £20,000 on barristers’ fees. However, the full cost of their legal battle is understood to be much higher.

Read it all, then go and visit Tony’s blog: Harmless Sky

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

‘Mediacracy’ creates consensus

30 December, 2013 by

"Stop telling me what to think!"

“Stop telling me what to think!”

People don’t have to think for themselves any more, because the media does it for them.

The ABC, like the BBC in the UK and the majority of mainstream media outlets in the US, parrots the same liberal-left slant on every story, including the absolute belief in the alarmist position on climate change. Daniel Greenfield writes:

A nation where governments are elected by the people is most vulnerable at the interface between the politicians and the people. The interface is where the people learn what the politicians stand for and where the politicians learn what the people want. The bigger a country gets, the harder it is to pick up on that consensus by stopping by a coffee shop or an auto repair store. That’s where the Mediacracy steps in to control the consensus.

The media is no longer informative, it is conformative. It is not interested in broadcasting events unless it can also script them. It does not want to know what you think, it wants to tell you what to think. The consensus is the voice of the people and the Mediacrats are cutting its throat, dumping its body in a back alley and turning democracy into their own puppet show.

Media bias was over decades ago. The media isn’t biased anymore, it’s a player, its goal is turn its Fourth Estate into a fourth branch of government, the one that squats below the three branches and blocks their access to the people and blocks the people’s access to them. Under the Mediacracy there will still be elections, they will even be mostly free, they just won’t matter so long as its upper ranks determine the dialogue on both sides of the media wall.

The Mediacracy isn’t playing for peanuts anymore. It’s not out to skew a few stories, it’s out to take control of the country. In military empires, the military can act as a Praetorian Guard. In political empires, it’s the people who control the political conversation who also control the succession.

The remainder of the article looks at the US angle, but from an Aussie perspective, so much of this is applicable.

We have the ABC, a conservative-free zone, which never, EVER, reports any story about climate change which challenges the accepted consensus, and which demonises and ridicules those who do, supported by liberal-left academics who claim that any media outlet which does, or which criticises their politically correct opinions, is part of an evil “hate media” which should be muzzled by legislation.

For those of the population which rely on the ABC for their news, there is no doubt about climate change, just as Tony Abbott is as wicked as John Howard, and that Julia Gillard had nothing to do with a union slush fund which was allegedly defrauded by her ex-boyfriend.

Fortunately, however, the media cannot control the direct effects of their agenda on the population, such as losing one’s job or house because the economy has slumped, or losing one’s property rights because of crazy planning laws resulting from climate change alarmism, and people wake up to realise they have been duped.

We can see this happening in Australia, as more and more people are discovering just how much of a lefty echo-chamber the ABC has become. Despite all attempts by the ABC to derail Abbott and the Coalition at the election in September, the people weren’t fooled, and for that we should be grateful.

Filed Under: ABC Bias, Climate Tagged With: , ,

The ABC’s Charter

24 December, 2013 by

Leans to the Left

Leans to the Left

Pinched from Biased-BBC and tweaked remarkably little:

  1. The BBC ABC is an institution that must always be part of the public sector & funded by the licence fee taxpayer,
  2. Any criticism of the BBC ABC is simply the result of politicians attempting improper influence,
  3. High public expenditure is good: the public sector is preferable to the private sector, which by seeking the profit motive, is inherently evil,
  4. Margaret Thatcher John Howard was an evil woman man whose policies ruined Britain Australia [and Tony Abbott is likewise an evil man whose policies will ruin Australia]: BBC ABC spokesmen should, wherever possible, use the word “Thatcherite Howard Era” disparagingly and contemptuously,
  5. The Murdoch empire is inherently evil and must be shown to be such at every opportunity, The Guardian, Observer and Independent The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald are fine newspapers, whereas the others are beyond the pale.
  6. Left wing comedians such as Jeremy Marieke Hardy, Mark Steele, David Mitchell and Jo Brand Catherine Deveny, the Chaser Boys and the team from The Hamster Decides are to be hired as much as possible by the BBC ABC: the more obscene and offensive their output, the better the BBC ABC likes it,
  7. Christians who openly wear a cross are suspect (Israelis are similarly suspect) whereas Muslims must always be granted craven levels of deference,
  8. High levels of immigration are good, and anyone seeking to limit uncontrolled mass immigration is racist,
  9. The EU UN is ” A GOOD THING” and people opposing it should have their views ridiculed and disparaged,
  10. Global warming due to man’s activities is a fact: it cannot be disputed,
  11. Public and Grammar Private schools are inherently bad whereas comprehensive public schools are inherently good. Failing comprehensive public schools do so because of lack of funding, political interference or being located in areas of deprivation: however their failings can never be blamed on the teaching profession,
  12. The state must always protect all people from any harm or misfortune irrespective of cost to the taxpayer, or their behaviour.

One more added in the comments:

  • No government was in power between 2007 and 2013. All the bad things happening to Britain Australia are entirely attributable to the Tory-led coalition after 2010 Abbott government since September 2013 or to Thatcher Howard (see 4 above).

And one of my own:

  • A highly doubtful story about a conservative politician allegedly punching a wall in the 1970s (but which nobody actually saw) will be afforded widespread and continual coverage, whereas a well documented alleged fraud of union funds in which a bunch of Labor goons appear to have been in it up to their necks, and which is currently before the courts, will be suppressed as not being newsworthy.

Please feel free to add to the list in the comments!

Filed Under: ABC Bias, Aussie Politics Tagged With: , , ,

Group-think described

22 December, 2013 by

Group-think rules…

Group-think rules…

Christopher Booker, writing in the UK Telegraph, points to a fascinating extract from a book entitled “The Blunders of our Governments” by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. The extract in question refers to the work of an American psychology professor in the 1960s, Irving J. Janis, who studied the cultural phenomenon of group-think.

When reading the following paragraphs, keep in the forefront of your mind the following:

  • the ABC (and its ideological twin the BBC);
  • John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli of Skeptical Science;
  • Stephan Lewandowsky and his psychology mates, and
  • the majority of the ‘consensus’ community in climate science

and see how much of it can be applied to them.

Janis became intrigued by a sequence of unfortunate episodes in modern American history that seemed to him to display a number of common characteristics: the Roosevelt administration’s faiure in 1941 to prepare for a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; the Truman administration’s rash decision in late 1950 to invade North Korea; the launching of President John F. Kennedy’s clownish Bay of Pigs expedition in 1961; and Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War during the mid-1960s. To that original list, he later added President Richard M. Nixon’s attempt to cover up his own and his henchmen’s complicity in the notorious Watergate break-in of 1972.

According to Janis, whose views are now almost universally accepted, group-think is liable to occur when the members of any face-to-face group feel under pressure to maintain the group’s cohesion or are anyway inclined to want to do that. It is also liable to occur when the group in question feels threatened by an outside group or comes, for whatever reason, to regard one or more outside individuals or groups as alien or hostile. Group-think need not always, but often does, manifest itself in pathological ways. A majority of the group’s members may become intolerant of dissenting voices within the group and find way, subtle or overt, of silencing them. Individual group members may begin to engage in self-censorship, suppressing any doubts they harbour about courses of action that the group seems intent on adopting. Latent disagreements may thus fail to surface, one result being that the members of the group come to believe they are unanimous when in reality they may not be. Meanwhile, the group is likely to become increasingly reluctant to engage with outsiders and to seek out information that might run counter to any emerging consensus. If unwelcome information does happen to come the group’s way, it is likely to be discounted or disregarded. Warning signs are ignored. The group at the same time fails to engage in rigorous reality-testing, with possible alternative courses of action not being realistically appraised.

And the following paragraph could have been written for our friend Professor Lewandowsky:

Group-think is also, in Janis’s view, liable to create “an illusion of invulnerability, shared by most or all the members, which creates excessive optimism and encourages taking extreme risks”. Not least, those indulging in group-think are liable to persuade themselves that the majority of their opponents and critics are, if not actually wicked, then at least stupid, misguided and probably self-interested.

Denial, conspiracy ideation, extreme free-market adherents – add those to the list and we’re done! It continues:

Irving Janis’s own conception of group-think is tightly bounded. It refers only to situations in which members of a face-to-face group feel, consciously or subconsciously, a need to maintain the internal cohesion of the group. It is, in that sense, a purely psychological concept. But of course the notion of group-think can be extended and used more widely to refer to a variety of situations in which there exists such widespread agreement among the members of a group about the desirability of a given course of action that no threats to the group’s internal cohesion ever arise. Because there really are no dissenters in the group, no one in the group ever expresses dissent. There are no nay-sayers. Everyone is agreed. But such situations can be just as dangerous as the ones Janis describes. The decision-making processes associated with unforced agreement may be just as defective as the ones associated with suppressed dissent.

As Booker concludes:

[Janis’s] account of “the illusion of unanimity”, and how group-thinkers regard anyone daring to question their belief-system as an “enemy” to be discredited, superbly characterises the mentality of that small group of “climate scientists” at the heart of driving the warming scare. This was never more clearly brought home than by those Climategate emails, showing how they were ready to fiddle their data to promote what they themselves called “the cause”, and to suppress the views of any scientists they saw as a threat to their illusory “consensus”. We all casually use the term “group-think”, but I had not known how comprehensively Janis explains so much that is puzzling about this world we live in.

Perhaps Cook, Lew, Nuccitelli and the rest of the “consensus” crew should take a good, long, hard look in the mirror now and again, instead of applying pseudo-psychology to their critics.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , , , , , ,

ABC’s Catalyst forgets about “consensus”

11 December, 2013 by

Consensus when it suits

Consensus when it suits

Consensus is optional, where the ABC is concerned. Naturally, with climate change, consensus is paramount, and anyone daring to question it is a denier in the pay of Big Oil.

But when it comes to cholesterol-reducing medications (statins), Catalyst appears happy to take the word of a few “outliers”, as the following transcript demonstrates:

NARRATION
For the last four decades, dietary fat and cholesterol have been the villains in heart disease.

Dr Michael Eades
You very seldom see the words ‘saturated fat’ in the public press when they’re not associated with artery clogging. So it’s like it’s all one term – ‘artery clogging saturated fats’.

NARRATION
But now some medical experts are coming forward to challenge this medical paradigm.

Dr Jonny Bowden
I think it’s a huge misconception that saturated fat and cholesterol are the demons in the diet, and it is 100% wrong.

Dr Stephen Sinatra
Saturated fat has been vilified for years because of the cholesterol theory.

NARRATION
A multibillion dollar food industry has fuelled our phobia of fat and cholesterol and dramatically influenced our diet.

Dr Michael Eades
That’s not science. That’s marketing.

Dr Jonny Bowden
It’s lived past its expiration date, and it’s one of these hypotheses that just won’t die.

NARRATION
Have we all been conned?

Dr Maryanne Demasi
In this episode, I’ll follow the road which led us to believe that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, and reveal why it’s being touted as the biggest myth in medical history.

But the story has had such an effect on viewers that many are ceasing medication entirely, without any supervision from GPs or specialists, with potentially tragic consequences:

AN ABC report about cholesterol medication could cause as many as 3000 heart attacks in the next five years and cost the health system between $12 and $33 million.
The Heart Foundation has made the estimate after a survey it conducted found a third of those taking cholesterol lowering statin medications stopped them or reduced them in the wake of the Catalyst program on ABC.

When extrapolated to the entire population of 2.1 million Australians who take statins the survey found 55,000 people completely stopped taking their pills after the program.

A further 130,000 changed their medication by stopping it then restarting it or they reduced how much they took.

And 120,000 people saw their GP about their medication as a result of the Catalystepisodes.

One in four of those who altered their medication had previously had a heart attack, the research found.

The program has been heavily criticised by health experts who claim it was biased and the ABC is investigating 80 official complaints.

The ABC’s own health expert Dr Norman Swan has warned “people will die” because of the program.

Heart Foundation cardiovascular health director Dr Rob Grenfell says it is “alarming the survey found one in three people were worried or confused about their medication after the program.

“What Catalyst has done is create great confusion in the general public, unfortunately people have ceased their medication and that will cause harm,” he told News Corp Australia.

So who are Bowden, Sinatra and Eades? Media Watch reports:

Well, Dr Jonny Bowden and Dr Stephen Sinatra are co-authors of this popular American potboiler.

The Great Cholesterol Myth—why lowering your cholesterol won’t prevent heart disease and the statin-free plan that will

— The Great Cholesterol Myth, Jonny Bowden and Stephen Sinatra

The foreword to this book was written by the other “expert” we saw in the opening clip, Dr Michael Eades.

Three men with one mind, presented as three independent points of view.

There’s much more at the link.

Whereas Catalyst (and the ABC in general) is reluctant ever to investigate opposing views in the climate debate, based on a belief that climate change may cause problems for mankind in centuries or millennia, it appears all too eager to give air time to issues that may cause suffering and even death right here and now.

Filed Under: Climate, General Science Tagged With: , ,

ABC bias apes BBC

5 December, 2013 by

Leans to the Left

Always leans to the Left

The ABC is the taxpayer-funded, hermetically-sealed bubble of poisonous green/left ideology masquerading as an impartial media outlet, following closely in the footsteps of the UK’s BBC.

Just as Maurice Newman, former chairman of the ABC has railed against the corporation’s “groupthink“, former BBC news head, Roger Mosey, uses remarkably similar language in describing his own organisation:

“The BBC Trust speaks the language of diversity but in its edicts it promotes conformity, whether its about an agreed approach to the science of climate change, ‘correct’ terminology in the Middle East or the way a documentary about benefits [welfare] should be constructed,” he said.

He added: “On the BBC’s own admission, in recent years it did not, with the virtue of hindsight, give enough space to anti-immigration views or EU-withdrawalists; and, though, he may have exaggerated, the former director general Mark Thompson spoke of a ‘massive bias to the left’ in the BBC he joined more than 30 years ago.

“I share Mark’s view that there was more internal political diversity in recent times, but that isn’t enough unless it’s evident in a wider range of editorial views on air.” (source – h/t Bishop Hill)

We all know “ABC” is short for “anything but conservatives”, a motto which is adhered to strictly, without a single conservative presenter or editor of a mainstream current affairs show, and a string of lefties to present shows like Media Watch. Not only that, but other areas, like science, are stuffed with green/left activists, think Robyn Williams, Bernie Hobbs, “Doctor” Karl to name but three…

Defund Restructure the ABC now.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: , ,

Typhoon Haiyan: ABC’s hysteria vs realists’ calm

14 November, 2013 by

Yeb Sano: feeling a bit peckish by now, I imagine…

Yeb Sano: feeling a bit peckish by now, I imagine…

On the one hand, we have their ABC, breathlessly parroting the mindless hysteria of the UN in its hermetically sealed über-Gruppendenken bubble, like this:

The United Nations meteorological agency has found the effects of climate change are making the impact of severe storms like Typhoon Haiyan worse.

The World Meteorological Organisation’s Michel Jarraud says Australia’s record-breaking summer helped push average global temperatures higher this year, and rising sea levels worsened the situation in the Philippines.

“The impact of this cyclone was definitely significantly more than what it would have been 100 years ago because of the simple mechanical fact that the sea level is higher,” Mr Jarraud said.

“Storm surges have a much more devastating effect than they would have had decades ago.” (source)

and slathering the opinion pages with weepy articles like this:

Sano announced that he will be taking part in a solidarity hunger strike for those “who are now struggling for food back home”, and will continue to fast until the international gathering shows “real ambition on climate action”. The Assembly — with high-level political representations from around the world — met Sano’s speech with a standing ovation.

Abbott’s speech took place in Canberra just 36 hours later. On Wednesday morning our new Prime Minister stood before the freshly sworn-in Parliament and tabled a set of bills designed to repeal the carbon price and — perhaps even more significantly — remove Australia’s limit on carbon pollution.

And the best bit:

Tony Abbott’s voice was steady with resolve; Sano’s voice, on the other hand, shook with the raw emotion of a man witnessing the terrible price climate change is exacting on his country. (source)

Geez, pass the sick bag.

On the other hand, however, we have rational thought, careful analysis and calm reflection from Benny Peiser:

Climate activists claim that tropical cyclone activity, including the frequency and intensity of typhoons, has increased as the global temperature has gone up. Yet empirical observations published in scientific journals show that despite the moderate warming during the 20th century, the number of tropical cyclones making landfall in the Philippines did not increase and has remained unchanged for more than 100 years.

Hours before the typhoon hit the Philippines, authorities moved nearly 1 million people to evacuation centres. Many of these structures collapsed when the tropical storm hit coastal towns and villages, killing thousands. Much of the initial destruction that killed so many was caused by winds blowing at 235 kilometres per hour — and occasionally at speeds of up to 275 kph/h. But it didn’t have to be that way.

A superstorm of similar magnitude, Cyclone Yasi, hit Queensland, Australia, in February 2011. The cyclone hit Queensland with an eye of 100 km in diameter and wind speeds of up to 285 km/h. Yet local disaster management committees had initiated their plans long in advance. Evacuation, including of hospitals, was completed more than four hours before the cyclone struck. Because Australia is an advanced nation that can afford to implement highly effective disaster warning systems, not a single person died as a direct result of this destructive cyclone.

…

As a result of economic development and technological advancement, the world is getting increasingly better at coping with and adapting to the effects of extreme weather events. As Goklany concludes: ‘Currently many advocate spending trillions of dollars to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gases, in part to forestall hypothetical future increases in mortality from global warming induced increases in extreme weather events.  Spending even a fraction of such sums on the numerous higher priority health and safety problems plaguing humanity would provide greater returns for human well-being.’ (source)

Which demonstrates even more clearly that wasting those trillions of dollars on pointless GHG reductions will simply make developing countries poorer and less able to adapt. Climate Madness, once again.

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