Bishop Hill Preparing the ground
Mar 22, 2011 BBC Climate: other Thanks to readers who have been pointing to Bob Watson's interview on the Today programme this morning, in which he spoke about the difficulty of convincing a sceptical public of the horrors of climate change in the wake of Climategate.
Audio here, starting at 51:20.
This was a boilerplate interview, reiterating a series of standard AGW talking points. To me, what was interesting about was not the content but the timing - there was no obvious newsworthiness, with Climategate having slipped off the news schedules now.
I think the reason for Watson being given airtime now is that at some point in the near future we are going to get the BBC's review of science coverage published. For some time now the BBC has been sending out signals that the report will recommend hobbling anyone who might criticise the increasingly thin case for CAGW - what Brian Cox called the "Orwellian" solution. This is quite an important departure, and it is therefore likely that Watson's appearance is the first step in a softening-up exercise.
Expect more of the same.
Reader Comments (75)
Stuck-record and others.
My understanding is that "Wind Farm Wars", scheduled for BBC 2 at 7pm on March 24, has been postponed until after the local elections.
I pointed this out in a comment a while ago - even the Saturday morning travel thing - crossing continents ? - had on it some muppets who drove around the Atlantic investigating how communities were responding to rising sea levels. You know, the levels that aren't actually rising - but that wasn't questioned.
I sense giving Johnny Ball an outing was Andrew Neil arguing with his BBC employers.
A commenter here last year (who?) made the interesting comparison beween CAGW and Britain’s nuclear deterrent. It cost billions, it’s usefulness was moot, but once in place, it proved impossible to dislodge. And the Guardian fought as hard as any to keep it, against the wishes of its own readers, and at the price of splitting the Labour Party.
So with windmills. They’ve altered the language to keep the ideology on course, so that warming became change, “scepticism” became “denial”, and faffing in the wind became mitigation. As investment in sensible infrastructure is sacrificed to “renewables”, the effects of natural disasters will get worse, enabling them to blame CAGW, whether temperatures rise or not. Stringer and Lawson may still be allowed on TV as quaint eccentrics, just as the odd Marxist used to be given a minute or two.
I’d like to think Alex Cull is right, and that indifference will turn into resentment and disobedience. But that requires organisation, and we’re all libertarians here - right? - too individualist to organise a soirée in a winebar, let alone the more traditional festivities. Cheers.
As Justice4Rinka points out, it is not possible to vote for a climate sceptic government.
70% of voters may be opposed to the EU or the Iraq war, but less than one percent will vote for a party which represents their “off-consensus” beliefs.
Modern democracies are effectively controlled by the educated middle class who run the media, private or public. This is a new phenomenon, difficult to analyse in classic left-right terms, which is why its critics (Delingpole, the Marxists at SpikedOnline) tend to situate themselves at the extremes.
This class is in the process of forging its creed. It combines Mr Gradgrind’s philistine respect for “facts” with Mrs Jellaby’s pity for the ignorant savages of the third world. Cold winters will have no more effect on their beliefs than the non-arrival of the Second Coming had on the Early Church.
@ Justice4Rinka, logically, you would be entirely correct - they have it all sewn up, so why would they care? But I think the general indifference to CAGW is a concern for policymakers, as they seem to keep worrying at this "public engagement" thing, like a dog with a bone, unable to let it go. This book extract on one of Defra's webpages is an example of what I'm on about:
http://sd.defra.gov.uk/2010/12/engaging-the-public-with-climate-change/
The style is somewhat turgid, but you can get the general drift. Here are some excerpts:
"In recent years, there has been growing international acceptance that climate change poses a serious threat to human well-being and ecological stability... Responses to climate change have profound implications for individual choices and behaviour, as well as for the social contexts and governance structures within which these take place... From the perspective of policy, effective and democratic climate change governance involves societal engagement. Public support for, and enactment of, climate change policy is a key concern of political organizations and world leaders... "
However:
"Despite the clear implications of climate change mitigation and adaptation for individual values, choices and behaviours, public engagement with climate change is currently limited. On the mitigation side, energy demand for both domestic uses and transport is rising in most developed countries. Although a large majority of the public now recognizes terms such as ‘climate change’, understanding and emotional buy-in are far lower. Pro-environmental behavioural responses to climate change are even more limited; few people are prepared to take actions beyond recycling or domestic energy conservation. At the same time, few are taking actions to adapt to climate change; indeed, awareness of the need for adaptation is very low. Even flood victims rarely associate flooding with climate change, and are no more concerned about or likely to take action to tackle climate change than other people. In respect of both mitigation and adaptation, then, there is a lack of meaningful engagement with the issue of climate change.... there are clearly broader structural constraints and disincentives to adopting a low-carbon lifestyle, which reduces individuals’ motivation and ability to change their behaviour... These barriers to public engagement with climate change are addressed only very partially through current climate and energy policies."
From reading a number of similar articles, my impression is that public buy-in is important to them. I think that what they're trying to avoid (months or years down the road) is the sort of thing we saw with the fuel duty protests of 2000 but on a larger scale.
@ Geoff - maybe this is where the disobedience would start, with existing organisations (e.g. hauliers) hit particularly hard by green measures and forming a kernel of resistance. We're not seeing it right now, of course, but then, who would have guessed a few months ago that Tunisia, Egypt and Libya would be swept by revolutions? To most of us, it all seemed to come out of nowhere...
I'm not sure that the cAGW consensus is broken. Look at this comment in the DT, on the blog page yesterday, now on the front page of the DT online edition:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jeremywarner/100009856/a-global-energy-war-looms/
It is disquieting, to say the least, to see that business/economy journalists now sing from the same songsheet as the cAGW religionists in regard to energy use.
Oh - and he advocates 'energy rationing' as well - not because of AGW, to be sure, but because 'The World' will be needing more, according to a projection by a leading international bank ...
Hey Alex, don’t forget Yemen and the Saudi invasion of Bahrain.
It makes you wonder if there wasn’t some co-ordinated Western infiltration just to help guide these demonstrators into a democratic society. I’m with you I have no idea why tiny Tunisia suddenly erupted and similar disorder spread so quickly far and wide. Of course it’s nothing to do with safeguarding oil supplies throughout the Middle East. What conspiracy?
Alex,
You may be right, but on the other hand, all the guff and talking may simply follow through inertia from the economic interests of the incumbent climate quangocracy.
The BBC isn't going to stop running environment scare stories any time soon, because it's got Roger Harrabin. That's all he's there to do.
Climate psyence departments aren't about to disprove the CO2 hypothesis. What on earth would they then do if they succeeded?
Local government bureaucracies' alternative to whining loudly about polar bears is to sack themselves. They wouldn't like that. And neither would their "CEOs", whose handsome packages are rationalised partly off the number of heads they supervise.
In other words, it is (IMHO) not an important political concern to get the message out because the parties have tacitly agreed amongst themselves not to campaign on this issue. It matters not a whit whether 10 million voters are unpersuaded of climate change or not. If they're not, is there any party they can vote for that shares their beliefs? Exactly. No votes are at stake.
So I don't think the chatter is driven by government concerns at all. It's simply the shrill, default setting of all the prosperous quangoes who've arisen since the end of the Cold War. They're quangoes, and that's all they do.
Alex Cull
You may well be right that resistance will start with those like hauliers who are hit by green measures. Hauliers and other powerful special interest groups will be bought off, just like print workers in the “bad old days” of trade union power. I’m not sure I want to be part of a revolution led by Jeremy Clarkson though, however much I like his articles.
The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions were predictable, however incompetent our media may be at interpreting the world. Revolutions happen when 90% of young men can read and write. It happened in Germany in the 16th, in England in the 17th, in France in the 18th and Russia and Iran in the 20th centuries. Literacy is a great force for equality.
What we’re seeing in the West is the formation of a new autonomous social class based on education. When the university-educated élite were a tiny minority of the population, they were forced to bow to the wishes of the majority. Now they form 20-30% of the population, big enough to form a culturally self-sufficient group.
Though ideologically left-leaning, their numerical importance allows them to live isolated from the masses in a way which would have been impossible for a 19th century aristocrat. CAGW is a kind of cultural mass hysteria of the kind found in any isolated societies, like cargo cults on Pacific islands, or satanic possession in girls’ boarding schools. The DEFRA document you quote is terrifying in its Orwellian apparent normality. This stuff requires exorcism, not rational argument.
The level of criticism now aimed at CAGW has resulted in the climate science community lowering their eyes and muttering as one, "It's not fair."
The carefully constructed CAGW narrative has been shattered by Climategate and by the dumb errors in IPCC reports.
You know, if the CAGW crowd want to start reshaping language, we could match them.
I'd see their "climate denier" and raise them "climate liar". Alinsky rules are a-political.
What I see is that pretty well all facets of the establishment are fully supportive of CAGW, and they have good reasons for being so, regardless of the facts.
The EU, the three major parties (so no democratic safety valve), large sections of the civil service, local government, QUANGOs, NGOs, the academic and educational establishments, various well-heeled interests hoping to make profits from it.. CAGW is so good for all these sections that they are not going to let go without a struggle.
Speaking to people, I get the impression that they don't really believe CAGW is happening. Mention the huge costs and get a shrug of the shoulders. There's not much anger, yet, at the phenomenal waste, and even if there was, there's no easy way to express it in such way as to do anything about it.
There may well be a concensus. It may well take some time to collapse. But when the concensus does collapse, the fallout will surely resemble the Dreyfus affair in its impact, and wide scope.
DDB
I think 'climate liar' is a good tag for out-and-out alarmists.
Geoff
"Revolutions happen when 90% of young men can read and write."
Won't happen here, then!
:-(
cosmic -
Exactly.
Bob Watson has made a career out of this, having formerly worked for Al Gore,
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/DR.+ROBERT+WATSON,+EXECUTIVE+OFFICE+OF+THE+PRESIDENT%3B+EILEEN...-a015614578
He was the IPCC Chairman in 1997 at the Kyoto conference and it was reported that when asked about “the growing number of climate scientists who challenged the conclusions of the UN that man-induced global warming was real and promised cataclysmic consequences, he responded by denigrating all dissenting scientists as pawns of the fossil fuel industry. "The science is settled", he said, and "we're not going to reopen it here."
This was his cv at the World Bank:
"Dr. Robert T. Watson is the Chief Scientist and Director for Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development (ESSD) at the World Bank.
Prior to joining the World Bank, Dr. Watson was Associate Director for Environment in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President in the White House. Prior to joining the Clinton White House, Dr. Watson was Director of the Science Division and Chief Scientist for the Office of Mission to Planet Earth at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)." (I think the title says it all...)
He is one of Al Gore's favourite scientists, (after Hansen of course). He was appointed to his current job after the sudden announcement that founding Tyndall Director, Mike Hulme, was leaving for " a year's sabbatical". Co-incidentally Al Gore had been in the UK not long before Watson's appointment, after Gordon Brown appointed Gore as an Advisor on climate change.
Straight from the Goracle: http://blog.algore.com/2007/03/
"I had some really interesting and productive meetings in London this week -- discussing the climate crisis with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who is widely expected to be the next Prime Minister when Tony Blair retires.
Chancellor Brown has introduced a package of binding CO2 reductions in the United Kingdom that represent real leadership. The same day I met with the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, and 80 of his fellow Tory Members of Parliament.
They were unanimous in their determination to propose meaningful solutions to the climate crisis. There has been a revolution in British politics, with the two largest parties now wholeheartedly committed to CO2 reductions and international leadership to solve the climate crisis."
Gore/Watson Mutual Admiration Society
“We need an advocate such as Al Gore to help present the work of scientists across the world,” said Bob Watson, former chairman of the IPCC and a top federal climate science adviser to the Clinton-Gore Administration.
Watson’s World Bank leaving party:
http://info.worldbank.org/etools/BSPAN/PresentationView.asp?PID=2129&EID=963
"Jack Gibbons, Watson’s former boss at the White House, read aloud a letter written to Watson by Al Gore. In this letter, Gore calls Watson his “hero of the planet,” commends him on his incredible career and contributions, and congratulates him on his new jobs. (at Tyndall and Defra). Gibbons also spoke about the challenges facing scientists whose scientific evidence is often viewed not as strict science but as efforts to steer policy."
Here's where Bob Watson is speaking today:
http://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2011/research/climate-change-message/
"Researchers seek clearer focus for climate change message".
"The workshop offers 100 PhD students and researchers the chance to benefit from the experiences of the UK’s top science communicators, including representatives from the British Council, Science Media Centre and the Public Interest Research Centre. Alexandra Bell, PhD student in Biology, said: “We decided to organise the event because public trust in climate change science is at a 10 year low, despite the evidence base never being stronger. The day will allow our audience of early-career researchers to share lessons and tips on how best to get their research out there and really engage the public.” The day will finish with a debate chaired by Steve Connor of the Independent, with questions from the audience answered by a panel of speakers."
"Dr Calvin Dytham, of the Department of Biology at York, said: “The workshop is important and very timely as the effective communication of scientific results through the media to the public is particularly important with climate change. The University of York is particularly well placed to host this event as world-leading research on the impacts of climate change is carried out here. Inviting representatives from politics, NGOs, academia and the media to speak is an excellent way to stimulate discussion and debate.” "
Some all-too familiar names there...
@Mac
"DDB
I think 'climate liar' is a good tag for out-and-out alarmists."
It should be the first response of anyone on being called a denier, unless they accept the name. Prima facie, the alarmist has misrepresented the sceptic. That should be an easy argument to win.
In the unlikely event of my being called a denier on air, I think my response would be to enquire what it was I was supposed to be denying. Any of the likely replies should then be easy enough to deal with, and might make the speaker a bit more careful next time.
J4R
"is there any party they can vote for that shares their beliefs?"
UKIP? Not mainstream, I grant you, but you never know. It could be their USP...
So the BBC might be going to deny us sceptics a voice in the future, might they?
Does that mean then, that in the future we should be referred to as "Deny-ees" rather than "Deny-ers"?
Having said that, to be quite brutal, who gives a toss what the BBC thinks or does when it comes to CAGW? It's quite apparent the public at large doesn't. We've had years of unrelenting BBC propaganda, and what effect has it had? Ever falling belief and interest in CAGW, that's what.
The inescapable reality is the good ship "CAGW" is going down, and there's nothing the BBC can do about it. If they choose to go down with it, then so be it - more fool them.
Propaganda works by creating a backdrop of the assumption of the truth of an idea such that dissent becomes perverse, dissonant.
I'd say the BBC does it very effectively, not particularly in programmes dealing explicitly with CAGW, but in the way the underlying assumption is slipped in in all sorts of other programmes along the way; programmes dealing with gardening, nature, finance, what have you.
So, I'd say we are at the point where a significant minority are openly sceptical and a majority are getting bored and starting to realise the costs, but we are not quite at the stage where they don't want to hear any more of that crap and get cross, so it hits viewing figures and produces tons of complaints and most importantly, mass demands for an end to the telly tax.
Meanwhile, the BBC will continue. Belief in CAGW has permeated the organisation and influenced their pension investments and it isn't as if they are out of step with the government, which is also fully signed up to CAGW. If they started softening the message, they would be accused of undermining the government and the telly tax would start to be reviewed.
So, as the CAGW nonsense has come about gradually by establishment consensus, I suspect it will be accepted that it's in conflict with reality, gradually, and I'd expect it to be re-purposed, maybe to energy security, maybe to coping with the effects of climate change, and the BBC to be part of a co-ordinated retrenchment.
What I don't expect is a bald admission that it's rubbish and that they've been fools and taken their audience for fools and that they're now dropping it.
More evidence of where BBC science coverage may be going in this interview with Brian Cox:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/mar/24/brian-cox-wonders-of-the-universe
“I'm fighting for reason ... We live in a culture where people can say 'I don't like nuclear power' or 'I don't think wind farms are pretty', whereas PhD scientists are valuable precisely because they instinctively strip away emotional responses and say, 'Here's the evidence. Here are reasons.' I want Britain to be more reason-based."
More reason, less complaining from the ignorant masses. I think we get the message.
So where's the evidence for (C)AGW, Dr Cox? Motes and beams, and all that...