ABC: institutionalised bias

26 November, 2012 by

Faine and Williams

Two stories, taken together, demonstrate beyond any shadow of doubt, that the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) is a mouthpiece for Labor, the Left in general and the Green agenda. OK, you’re saying, tell me something I didn’t know. Yes, yes, true, but these two examples perfectly encapsulate the blatant and institutionalised bias of the ABC ,which flies in the face of its legal obligations as an impartial public broadcaster, but somehow it escapes any sanction for doing so.

Story Number 1 – Julia Gillard and the Australian Workers Union

Overseas readers will have to bear with me for a little while. This story concerns our (sub-) Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, in the days when she was a lefty lawyer in a lefty law firm in Melbourne in the 1990s. She helped to establish an incorporated association through the bank accounts of which a union official, who was also her boyfriend at the time, siphoned hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own personal benefit. Gillard managed to have two journalists who dared raise this issue sacked – Glenn Milne of The Australian and Michael Smith, a radio presenter who now blogs at Michael Smith News (and, I must add, is on a personal crusade to get to the very bottom of this shady period in Gillard’s past – add a bookmark).

There are plenty of questions for Gillard to answer, but at the moment, she’s using the stonewalling technique, alternating with the amnesia defence. The Opposition here is pushing Gillard hard for answers, as the issue goes to the heart of her credibility and integrity – and suitability for the high office of Prime Minister.

The ABC refused to even mention this story until this week, despite it having been rumbling on for several months. Emails of complaint were met with brick walls and a bizarre inability to accept that the story even existed! I personally thought journalists were supposed to ask tricky questions, but in the case of the ABC I assume that they should ask such questions only when it’s not something bad for Labor.

On Thursday of this week, Jon Faine, presenter on Melbourne’s Morning show, did his very best to defend Gillard and Labor against these charges. As the ABC blog notes:

Mornings host Jon Faine has had it with a long-running media campaign casting aspersions about Julia Gillard and her alleged role in establishing a union slush fund. He lays into the journalists who continue to push the story, and raises doubts about whether information from former unionist Ralph Blewitt is likely to produce any evidence.

Jon “has had it” – in other words, he cannot abide the fact that his beloved PM may have some awkward questions to answer, and instead pretends that there’s nothing to see and the main witness has no credibility. You have to listen to it to get the full picture. Following this tirade, Michael Smith contacted the show and asked for a right of reply. He got it the next day. Once again, you have to listen to it to fully appreciate the the contempt in Faine’s voice – he was formerly a lawyer at the same firm – no conflict of interest there, clearly – and thinks he knows something about the law.

So here we have an ABC presenter, paid by the public broadcaster, out of taxpayer funds, who has no interest in impartial reporting but simply defending Gillard and Labor. Faine is just beyond belief. The whole thing is breathtaking.

Story Number 2 – Robyn Williams links climate sceptics to paedophiles and crack dealers

Robyn Williams is the presenter of the Science Show on ABC Radio National and has a long list of form of defaming and smearing sceptics (see here). Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology professor from the University of Western Australia, has similar form for smearing sceptics, most recently equating them with fruitcakes who believe the moon landings were faked. He also works closely with John Cook of Un-Skeptical Pseudo-Science so it’s hardly news that he and Williams are best mates.

“What if I told you that paedophilia is good for children, or that asbestos is an excellent inhalant for those with asthma, or that smoking crack is a normal part, and healthy one, of teenage life, and to be encouraged? You’d rightly find it outrageous. But there have been similar statements coming out of inexpert mouths, again and again in recent times distorting the science.

…

[Quoting The Economist magazine on the US election] It was a telling moment of denial. Much like the comforting myth that there is no such thing as climate change, or if there is, humans are not involved. Ensconced in a parallel world of conservative news sources and conservative arguments, all manner of comforting alternative visions of reality surfaced during the 2012 election. Many […] involved having to think about unwelcome things, often basic science or economics.”

Lewandowsky is then wheeled in:

“I discovered that those people [sceptics] were not sceptical at all. They were rejecting the science, not on the basis of evidence but some other factor. We basically found that the driving motivating factor behind the rejection of climate science was people’s ideology or personal worldview.

[…]

Specifically what we find it that people who are endorsing an extreme view of market fundamentalism are likely to reject climate science.”

I can’t bear to transcribe any more. It’s too painful. You can listen here (if you dare). This, of course, is the moon landing denier paper, rearing its ugly head again for the sympathetic Williams, who will accept it all as evidence of the fact that sceptics are bonkers – and of similar standing to crack dealers and paedophiles.

Once again, it is the same crude characterisation of sceptics as anti-science deniers that we have heard countless times by Williams and Lewandowsky.

All at the taxpayers expense.

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ABC's twaddle on Tuvalu

18 September, 2012 by

Silliest van on earth

The ABC, keen as always to prop up The Cause, hijacks the visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to the island of Tuvalu to bang on about climate change:

Once the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are carried from their aircraft on multi-coloured throne chairs in Tuvalu, the view will be of climate change.

The tiny Pacific nation, final stop on their tour, is at the forefront of small island countries already feeling the effects of rising sea levels.

Prince William and his wife will not have a chance to talk to non-government organisations in Tuvalu working on keeping back the sea.

Bet they’re gutted.

But Maina Talia, secretary of the Tuvalu Climate Action network, says the effects of climate change will be obvious as they tour on Tuesday.

“I’m not really sure of like what is the arrangement between the government of Tuvalu and the royal couple,” Maina Talia told Radio Australia’s Pacific Beat.

“But I must say that on their arrival, they must see how vulnerable we are to climate change.

“Even they can see the impact on gardens, on our food security and even we have lost a lot of traditional root crops due to the long drought that we faced last year and the beginning of this year. (source)

Hang on, it was sea level rises a minute a go – make your mind up…

Anyway, there you have it. Unfortunately, sea level rises at Tuvalu are virtually nil, and any that do exist are probably more to do with subsidence of a coral atoll than rising sea levels caused by dangerous AGW:

Sea levels at Tuvalu

And if that wasn’t enough, the ABC reported back in 2010 that the islands were actually growing.

More twaddle from the ABC…

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BHP Billiton dumps Olympic Dam, cites carbon and mining taxes

24 August, 2012 by

Australia not worthy of investment

Leigh Sales spectacularly failed to conceal her contempt for Tony Abbott on 7.30 yesterday, in equal measure shrill and patronising, and showing little if any respect for her guest – typical ABC in other words, where a non-Labor politician is concerned.

Accusing Abbott of being “loose with the truth” in linking BHP’s decision to abandon the Olympic Dam project, she refused to accept that the carbon tax and the mining tax could possibly have anything to do with it, because BHP boss Marius Kloppers had avoided mentioning them explicitly in the statement earlier in the day.

But as soon as he’s out of the country, guess what?

BHP Billiton head Marius Kloppers has told European investors that Australia’s carbon and mining taxes have helped to render the nation’s coal industry unworthy of further investment at this time.

Despite reassuring Australians that the taxes were not to blame for BHP’s mothballing of the $US30 billion Olympic Dam expansion, Mr Kloppers referred to both when telling British media that new investments in Australia’s coal sector would not be profitable. (source)

But isn’t that exactly what the carbon tax is supposed to do? Shut down our economy so that we create fewer emissions? It’s certainly working.

I assume we’ll be getting an apology from Leigh sometime soon, right?

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ABC Environment on Muller and crumbling scepticism

17 August, 2012 by

Sara Phillips

This article, by ABC’s environment editor, Sara Phillips (pictured), encapsulates all that is wrong with the national broadcaster’s treatment of the climate debate. Written, as always, from a position of belief, and institutionally critical of any dissent, Phillips attempts to show that scepticism is crumbling in the face of ever-mounting evidence to the contrary:

American physicist Richard Muller is one climate sceptic who has recently changed his mind after reviewing the evidence.

Muller crunched a bunch of numbers to do with global temperatures and announced in the New York Times that he is a “converted sceptic”. It was this opinion piece in arguably the world’s most influential paper that set tongues wagging about climate change all over again.

Muller had previously been claimed by those unconvinced by the science as one of their own, because he questioned the validity of Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ graph, used by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth.

Muller was never a sceptic, and there are plenty of rusted on believers who have problems with both Mann’s hockey stick and AIT, which is nothing more than a propaganda film. Muller’s subsequent evidence-free claim of attribution to human causes has led to widespread ridicule from within the warmist community.

She then attempts to frame Bjorn Lomborg as a convert from scepticism, using some highly selective quotes from past newspaper interviews:

Bjorn Lomborg is another high-profile climate sceptic who changed his mind after reviewing the evidence. He now believes climate change is real, but that it won’t be the calamity predicted by some.

However, Lomborg directly addressed his alleged switch in a Guardian article cited indirectly:

He reiterates that he has never denied anthropogenic global warming, and insists that he long ago accepted the cost of damage would be between 2% and 3% of world wealth by the end of this century. This estimate is the same, he says, as that quoted by Lord Stern, whose report for the British government argued that the world should spend 1-2% of gross domestic product on tackling climate change to avoid future damage. (source)

He has never doubted the role of CO2, but has rightly questioned the cost-benefit analysis of the proposed solutions. Phillips then describes Alan Jones as “frothing” to David Karoly. Whether you agree with Jones or not, Phillips would never describe a consensus climate scientist as “frothing”, a highly inappropriate term to use. But it just helps to paint the picture of “deniers” as being deluded and crazy.

Of course there is a spectrum of views on climate – as she points out – which range from outright disbelief that temperatures are rising at all to acceptance of a measurable human signal in the global temperature record. However, she portrays this range of views in a very simplistic manner in an attempt to ridicule those who dare question the consensus.

Her conclusion appears to be that scepticism is on the wane and that “denial” is harder to sustain. But her view, distorted as it is by the prism of belief in AGW, fails to appreciate that the majority of sceptics accept the role of CO2 and that there is a human contribution to warming.

However, the reality is that there are problems with the surface temperature record, and there are problems with feedbacks in climate models, and there are serious questions to be answered regarding the proposed mitigation policies in response. Nothing in Muller’s alleged conversion changes any of those issues.

More importantly, she completely ignores the fact that, due in part to an endless barrage of scare stories which have failed to eventuate, scepticism of the alarmist claims of The Cause™ has increased substantially over the past decade, to the point where a significant proportion of the public are now highly suspicious of the pronouncements of climate scientists and government advisers such as Tim Flannery.

Unfortunately, the article is just the latest in a very long line of examples of ABC’s climate groupthink, where the utterances of climate scientists are beyond reproach and questioning of the consensus is frowned upon. That is not how science works: the motto, which the ABC, our taxpayer-funded and supposedly impartial national broadcaster, would do well to remember, is “question everything”.

Read it here.

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Tweet of the Day: ABC's Dr Karl 'loves the carbon tax'

9 July, 2012 by

“Dr Karl” is a regular fixture of the ABC’s pop science output (see here), and therefore, almost inevitably, like all his colleagues at Auntie, a climate alarmist.

In response to a tweet about the carbon tax yesterday, Dr Karl replied:

Apart from not addressing the question, Dr Karl actually loves the carbon tax! What a surprise from an ABC science journo! A pointless political gesture which will damage our prosperity at a time when the global economy is spiralling into GFC Mark II – and Dr Karl “loves” it.

Obviously, he fails to spare a thought for the millions of ordinary Australians whose finances will be stretched even closer to breaking point by a policy which serves no purpose apart from keeping Gillard in power by appeasing the Greens.

I replied, naturally, enquiring what effect the carbon tax would have on the climate. I have yet to receive a reply. Quelle surprise…

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Arctic warm periods 'inexplicable' by greenhouse gases alone

22 June, 2012 by

Drilling on Lake Unpronounceable

Quick, throw another heretic on the fire. The ABC momentarily abandons its trademark groupthink on climate to report on a paper which shows warm periods in the Arctic over the past 2.8 million years, and which cannot be explained by greenhouse warming alone.

Funny, because usually they can’t explain things but for greenhouse gases…

The Arctic went through ice-free periods of extreme warmth over the past 2.8 million years, based on a new analysis of deep sediment in Russia.

The team led by Martin Melles of the University of Cologne, Germany, drilled into an iced-over lake formed by a meteorite impact on the Chukchi Peninsula in Siberia for the longest sediment core ever collected in the terrestrial Arctic.

Since the meteorite struck an area of Lake El’gygytgyn that was not eroded by glaciers, the sediment record reaches back nearly 30 times further in time than ice cores from Greenland that cover the past 110,000 years.

The sediment reveals periods of extreme warmth that show the polar regions are much more vulnerable to change than previously thought, and are difficult to explain by greenhouse gases alone, according to the study in the journal Science.

Scientists have long known that the Arctic went through climate cycles, but the latest research shows some of these warm phases were “exceptional”, with temperatures 4°C to 5°C warmer and 30 centimetres wetter than during normal interglacials, the study’s authors write. (source)

More evidence of natural climate change perhaps? You can be sure this paper won’t make it into IPCC AR5…

Paper is here.

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Greenhouse gases 'largely to blame' for ocean warming

12 June, 2012 by

Alarmist Broadcasting Corporation

Instead of reporting the problems with its last alarmist story, namely the fact that bloggers have once again found holes in a supposedly “peer-reviewed” paper propping up the consensus, the ABC just moves on and runs another:

A new US-led study, featuring research by Tasmanian scientists, has concluded that warming ocean temperatures over the past 50 years are largely a man-made phenomenon.

Researchers from America, India, Japan and Australia say the study is the most comprehensive look at how the oceans have warmed.

The study, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, examined a dozen different models used to project climate change, and compared them with observations of ocean warming over the past 50 years.

It found natural variations accounted for about 10 per cent of rising temperatures, but man-made greenhouse gases were the major cause. (source)

Authors supporting “the Cause” include Aussie John Church and Ben Santer. Need I say more?

Judith Curry gets technical about it here, and ocean temperature records in general were pretty rough before the ARGO era, but concludes that the latest paper will no doubt win out in AR5. Why? Because it’s the “right answer”, according to the consensus. Politics and activism win out over impartial science every time.

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ABC finally corrects 2011 ANU death threat story

5 June, 2012 by

FOI request

UPDATE: Marc has written to the ABC requesting they amend the sloppy and partisan wording of this update. We’ll see how far he gets…

Thanks to Marc Hendrickx for this update, which now appears on the original 4 June 2011 story. It still however refers to “climate sceptics” as if the only reason they were forced to issue the correction was because of evil deniers, rather than the fact that the story was incorrect:

UPDATE (June 4 2012):  Following  the release  of specific emails under Freedom of Information request, climate change sceptics have claimed that the released emails contradict suggestions that any death threats were received, but a spokesperson for the ANU says the university is standing by its claims that death threats were received. Questions have also been raised about whether one of the released emails did, in fact, constitute a threat to use a gun, with a person involved in the kangaroo culling program claiming the comments were made by him, and were in no way intended as a threat. The specific emails released under FOI were found by the Privacy Commissioner to contain abuse, but not overt threats.

Note the ANU still claims “death threats” were received – I’m still waiting for the ANU to provide them.

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Media's double standards on threats

2 June, 2012 by

Chris Merritt writes about the threats endured by those on the other side of the climate debate and politics in general, which, naturally, are rarely reported or mentioned by our PC media, whose self-appointed job is to defend the climate consensus:

At the moment, climate change is one of the “hot button” issues that brings out the crazies. But it’s not just climate change.

Melbourne columnist Andrew Bolt has also had threats of physical violence for criticising Islamism and Anita Heiss’s book Am I Black Enough for You?.

He has even been threatened for opposing a national day of mourning for the Black Saturday bushfires.

Bolt puts it down to the morally superior manner of those who play a leading role in setting the tone of public policy debate.

The most startling incident occurred a decade ago when an activist organisation published his home address on its website “along with an exhortation to burn the house down”.

Two weeks ago a filmmaker, whom he named, used Twitter to urge his followers: “Let’s assassinate Andrew Bolt.” It was later removed.

A Greens candidate at the last federal election used Twitter to publish this: “Andrew Bolt is a vile c … of a man. I openly condone hunting him down and beating him to within an inch of his life.” (source)

But hey, Bolt’s fair game right? In the politically correct, groupthink world of ABC and Fairfax, Bolt is the very embodiment of the antichrist. What’s wrong with saying he should be done in?

Comments from the consensus side about their desired treatment of sceptics is of course all waved through without protests, such as these examples:

And conservative journalists are subjected to much the same abuse and threats as the climate scientists for daring to question shoddy and politicised science, or for having the temerity to question why we should be spending billions on a carbon tax which will do nothing for the climate, but we rarely hear anything about that.

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Media Watch's Holmes on The Drum

31 May, 2012 by

Jonathan Holmes

Jonathan Holmes, presenter of Media Watch, writes a lengthy defence of his team’s reporting of the ANU death threats story on ABC’s The Drum. You can read it here.

The only point I am going to comment on is detail is the following claim:

In any case – and this is a factor which The Australian keeps dodging around, although it is crucial – the 11 emails were in fact irrelevant to the ANU scientists being moved to more secure offices, because that had happened 16 months earlier, in February 2010.

The Canberra Times’s Rosslyn Beeby no doubt knew this, but did not make it clear in her report. The ABC and the AAP don’t seem to have taken it aboard, and certainly didn’t report it back in June 2011. Simon Turnill didn’t understand it when he put in his FOI request.

Well actually, it’s nothing to do with understanding – Beeby didn’t make it clear, as Holmes states, if indeed she did “no doubt” know it. In any event, my FOI request was based on the ABC’s reporting of this event, which says:

Several of Australia’s top climate change scientists at the Australian National University have been subjected to a campaign of death threats, forcing the university to tighten security.

Several of the scientists in Canberra have been moved to a more secure location after receiving the threats over their research.

Vice-chancellor Professor Ian Young says the scientists have received large numbers of emails, including death threats and abusive phone calls, threatening to attack the academics in the street if they continue their research.

He says it has been happening for the past six months and the situation has worsened significantly in recent weeks.

I cannot see any way of construing the above to mean anything other than the following: death threats have been received at ANU in the last six months and we’ve moved staff as a result.

Holmes then quotes a number of emails, none of which contain “death threats”, but simply confirm the unfortunate truth that scientists (along with many others public figures) receive abusive emails from a tiny minority of disturbed individuals. This fact should not have been used as a way to tar all critics of the climate consensus as being a bunch of dangerously unhinged lunatics who would resort to sending death threats to climate scientists because they disagree with what they are saying (the inference – intended or unintended – from the Canberra Times and ABC reporting).

Holmes ends thus:

Who you believe on this matter – The Australian, or Media Watch – should have nothing at all to do with whether or not you accept what the vast majority of qualified scientists are telling us about climate change. 

Science by consensus again. And still the ANU haven’t produced evidence of any death threats to any staff at any time. They are welcome to do so whenever they like and then we’d all be happy to see an end to this farce.

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