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November 26, 2009

Climategate - your ABC at work

ABC radio host Jon Faine explains why he will not even discuss a story which has:
* caused an international controversy
* shocked world leaders in climate science
* triggered calls for an inquiry by a former British Chancellor of the Exchequer
* caused fellow Leftist and warmist crusader George Monbiot to call for the resignation of one of the warmist scientists, and complain that fellow Leftists who ignore it are in denial.

* helped to prompt a Liberal revolt against Malcolm Turnbull
* caused warmist crusader Tim Flannery to confess on ABC television for the first time that the world had indeed been cooling, and ”when the computer modelling and the real world data disagrees you have a problem” and “we have to understand why the cooling is occurring, because the current modelling doesn’t reflect it”.

* revealed that one of the co-authors of the IPCC report that Faine cites as gospel conceded ”we can’t account for the lack of warming, it’s a travesty that we can’t”.

So here’s Faine’s explanation for his censorship of what’s clearly a huge story with serious ramifications:

    We make decisions every day [based] on our own opinions about what we think are the main stories. And what we leave out is often as important as what we put in, and that was my judgement of this issue..

    That was my assessment of whether this was actually of any significance or not, and I decided that it wasn’t and we wouldn’t spend time on it. It suits the conspiracy theorists beautifully...
    It was a small, even a tiny fragment of a sidebar of a secondary issue to the edge of the periphery of something people were talking about other than the main game. That’s how I saw it.

It suits the “conspiracy theorists beautifully”. In other words, it suits the sceptics - and that must not be allowed to happen.

Unprofessional doesn’t quite cover it. Scandalous is much closer.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/climategate_how_faine_censored_the_sceptical_news/

 

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Filed under  //   ABC   Climategate   CRU   Jon Faine   media   media bias  

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October 2, 2009

International Free Press Day

Okay, like Maxwell Smart, I missed it "by that much," but well worth publicising and supporting anyway.

It is a cause for grave concern that some of the most serious threats to free speech, as Mark Steyn found out in Canada, come from within our own societies in the form of an intolerant and militant political correctness, increasingly given teeth in the form of human rights and equal opportunity commissions that can judge you on charges that they have brought against you and then punish you once they have found that their own accusations have been proved.
It’s four years (and a couple of days) since Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published several cartoons, leading to widespread Presbyterian unrest. Mark Steyn:
To mark the anniversary, the International Free Press Society, with which I am honored to be associated, has declared September 30th International Free Press Day. In the four years since their publication, I have learned at first hand how imperiled true freedom of the press is in a western world by now almost congenitally disposed to pre-emptive surrender. So I am happy to support International Free Press Day, and I hope it will become an annual event.

As Steyn wrote at the time: “The Danish cartoons story was a test, and the civilized world failed it.” The media especially. International Free Press Day is at least an attempt to learn from that test.

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Filed under  //   freedom of speech   International Free Press Day   Jyllands-Posten   Mark Steyn   media  

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September 18, 2009

Media Matters - revolutionary vs "bourgeois" truth

We must distinguish between “bourgeois truth,” which is concerned with sterile facts, and “revolutionary truth,” which is concerned with what will promote the revolution. Hot Air is a trafficker in mere bourgeois truth, while Media Matters understands the importance of revolutionary truth.

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Filed under  //   media   Media Matters   revolutionary vs bourgeois truth  

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June 30, 2009

The funnest new game in town

Madonna King is just the latest player of an increasingly popular new game: try to get a direct answer out of Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan.
 
Previous players, with equally entertaining results, include Emma Griffiths, Chris Uhlmann, Tony Jones (twice), and Kerry O’Brien.
 
 

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Filed under  //   Kevin Rudd   media   Wayne Swan  

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June 23, 2009

TV station falls for plane crash hoax

"A BOLIVIAN television news channel has been left red-faced after falling for a hoax that saw it claim pictures from the hit TV show Lost were actually the last moment of Air France flight AF447 before it plunged into the ocean on June 1."
 
 
I'd seen them and wondered myself about the time of day issue. I was pretty sure all the news reports had the Air France flight being during the night.
 
But also, the tail of the plane is visible in the first of the photos and it's not that of an Air France plane.
 
And as if the authorities, which would have possession of any recovered items, would have released them so soon.
 

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Filed under  //   Air France hoax   hoaxes   media  

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June 12, 2009

Guess who thinks Rudd's ocker-speak is normal?

Laurie Oakes.
 
Who does seem to feel that it is his job to make Rudd's excuses for him.
 
More here
 

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Filed under  //   Kevin Rudd   Laurie Oakes   media   media bias  

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June 12, 2009

Common Sense and The Perils of Predictions

PredictionsForDisaster

 
Forbes, “Absolute Return” column, April 21, 2008, page 246:
Here’s another name you should own, Freddie Mac ($29 per share)…Freddie is cheap at 1.1 times book [value].
Less than five months later, Freddie Mac’s stock was worth 25¢ per share, a loss of 99%.  It has since recovered to 70¢ per share, so the loss is “only” 97.6%.
 
A forecast of a stock of a single company five months into the future seems easy.  The company had government backing (federally sponsored corporation).  What could go wrong?
 
Yet, the forecast published by Forbes, short of an outright bankruptcy, could not have been more inaccurate.  It is worth examining how a situation that seemed rock solid (government-backed securities!) became catastrophic to see if there are any lessons that might apply to the atmospheric sciences.
 
The assumptions that Freddie Mac (and other financial stocks) were low risk was primarily a result of computer models.  As one expert stated (using pseudonym at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=1265 ),
 
The problem is inherently complex – imagine being asked to value a portfolio of 10,000 residential mortgages issued to a total of something like 17,652 individuals. Each mortgage balances some issue amount against some payment stream; each has had zero or more payments recorded against it, each has an initial interest rate; an interest computation method; zero or more early payment opportunities; some mention of late or missed payment penalties and conditions, and an expiry, renegotiation, or call date.
 
While I do not doubt that is “complex,” the level of complexity is miniscule when compared to the complexity of the earth-atmosphere-ocean system and their interactions.
 
Full post at Watts Up With That?
 
Plus, the next installment of Tim Flannery Prediction Watch!
 
See how this prediction, made just last year, is going:
 
The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009.
 
But I think you can guess
 
Which only goes to make this comment by Flummery, just a few weeks ago, not just strange, but really, quite disturbing. This man is clearly not telling the truth.
 
Australian scientist and campaigner Tim Flannery, one of the conference organisers, said climate change was harming his home country. “Water resources have dried out to the point where they’re now affecting the future of some of our cities.”
 
And while Flummery is a scientist, his field is palaeontology and his particular area of expertise the evolution of kangaroos.
 
But his real talent is obviously in marketing.
 
Andrew Bolt checks out a prediction made by the CSIRO:
 
Remember the CSIRO’s claim that global warming would kill the Australian ski season?  Six years on, the snow is actually even better:
VICTORIA’S snow resorts are enjoying the best ski and snowboarding conditions for a decade.
At the same link there's something wonderous and unexpected to behold - an ABC journalist covering both sides of the argument! What is the world coming too?
 
"One ABC program, however, is now trying to cover the other side of the argument. Brave journalist, that."
 
And who said Queensland was backward?
 

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Filed under  //   climate change   climate models   complexity   computer models   CSIRO   Freddie Mac   media   predictions   stock market   Tim Flannery  

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June 7, 2009

Sniff the Zeitgeist

The wind has shifted.
 
George Negus' pathetically soft interview about climate change with Lord Nicholas Stern on SBS has produced an interesting reaction even from SBS's own viewers.
 
Most are outraged about Negus' fawning over Stern and his inability to ask a single hard question.
 
He finishes the interview with this typically trite and shallow observation: Why do I get the idea that Lord Stern just might have been trying to tell us to grow up - politically, that is.
 
Here's a question that Negus could have asked, if he had been arsed enough to do some research:
 
Why did Stern use a social discount rate of only around 2% in finding that the costs of doing nothing now would be greater than acting now, when he knows full well that the accepted figure should have been around 4%?
 
Why, despite devoting not a few words in his review to the importance of the social discount rate, did he not mention in the review the rate he used? (People had to badger Her Majesty's Treasury to get the figure - so much for a supposedly "independent" review!)
 
What is is about climate change boosters and hiding stuff? Whether it's Stern or the Hockey Stick's Michael Mann, is the reason they act like they have something to hide the fact that they do have something to hide?
 
(Well, in the case of Michael Mann it turned out he did definitely have something hide.)
 
Now, Back to Senator Steve Fielding.
 
He's recently returned from a conference of sceptics in Washington and he's got some questions for Senator Penny Wong.
 
He hasn't made up his mind yet, but at least, unlike George Negus, he does appear to have an open mind.
 

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Filed under  //   climate change   Dateline   George Negus   media   media bias   Michael Mann   Nicholas Stern   Penny Wong   SBS   Stern Review   Steve Fielding   the Hockey Stick  

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June 6, 2009

The island of Lohachara reappears!

It was always one of the lamest global warming/rising sea level scare stories ever, that is, the disappearance of the island of Lohachara in the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal.
 
Breathtaking in its studied refusal to look at the already long available evidence that the islands in this group come and go and move all the time in response to tidal flows and other factors.
 
It also confirmed the fact that Geoffrey Lean is possibly the most incompetent environment writer for any newspaper in the world, though his Amazon rain forest doomed by drought story, which actually got the results of a study completely arse about also stands out amongst his ignorant scaremongering!
 
 

Tim Blair

Sunday, June 07, 2009 at 12:22am
 

 
Recall the tragic island of Lohachara, eaten by global warming some years ago:
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.
 
The story, by the Independent on Sunday‘s environment editor Geoffrey Lean, was a complete crock, omitting even a vague date of the island’s removal. And now, as Achintyarup Ray reports, Lohachara is back:
The island is there in front of one’s eyes. Says boatman Mukunda Mondal (41), “Yes, the island is emerging. I have noticed it for the past one year. It’s clearly visible in winter.”
 
Judhisthir Bhuian, now a resident of Jibantala colony on the Sagar island, had his home on the Lohachara . He still goes back to the place where their house once stood. ”A huge landmass is coming up, covering Lohachara and Bedford,” he says.
 
Geoffrey Lean – a tilter by nature as well as by name – has been wanting for inspiration of late. Perhaps he could examine Lohachara’s revival, which marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists didn’t come true.
 
UPDATE. For no apparent reason, the Independent only a few hours ago republished Lean’s absurd 2006 piece.
 
UPDATE II. From the Times of India piece referenced by Ray:
2007. Kodak Theatre, Hollywood. The list of Oscar presenters includes Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lopez.
 
Instead of the usual million-dollar goodies, each of them receive a small glass model called the Lohachara sculpture after an island which “in December, 2006, became the first inhabited island to be lost to rising sea levels caused by global warming”.
 
A little more than two years later, Lohachara island is emerging again.
 
And the website for the holy Lohachara sculpture has vanished.
 

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Filed under  //   climate change   environmentalism   Geoffrey Lean   Lohachara island   media   sea level   the Independent   the Sundarbans  

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May 30, 2009

Is Laurie Oakes spinning for K R Puff'n'Fluff?

Rudd and Wayne Swan played into Turnbull’s hands when they botched the post-Budget sales pitch through an apparent reluctance to use the figures - a deficit of $57.6 billion and debt peaking at more than $300 billion.
“Apparent” reluctance? Judge how merely “apparent” it was in this interview and this. Yet Oakes insists:
But those pundits who put this down to misguided “spin” are off the mark. It is the result of old-fashioned, unadulterated incompetence.
 
The advice of the spin-doctors - accepted by the Prime Minister and the Treasurer - was that the Government should embrace the numbers, not run away from them.
 
Swan did not leave the deficit figure out of his Budget speech deliberately. It was supposed to be there. Stuff-up, not spin, was the explanation.
Really? Then how odd it was that this “stuff up’’ was repeated in Swan’s Budget speech to the National Press Club, where once again the only figure he failed to give was for the deficit. And that in later interviews he baulked again and again at giving the figure. Can Oakes seriously claim this was not spin, but a mere oversight?
 
Apparently yes:
And when Rudd kept saying that the debt would peak at “around 300” - without using the words “dollar” or “billion” - it was not a cunning ploy to avoid giving the Liberals a line they could use in their election commercials.
 
The PM is simply a sucker for jargon. Saying “300” instead of “300 billion dollars” is Treasury-speak. Having sat around with Treasury boffins for weeks preparing the Budget, Rudd started talking like them.
And if you believe that, Oakes has another line to sell you - that the Opposition is bungling by linking the wild spending of Rudd to that of Gough Whitlam:
Whitlam, Labor’s 92-year-old folk hero is such a loveable, great-grandfatherly figure these days, and his period in office was so long ago, that using him to frighten the horses just doesn’t work.
What on earth has got into Oakes?
 
 
This is something I've noticed about Oakes for some time, not that he's alone in this, that is, this tendency to make Labor's excuses for it.
 
Everything becomes okay about Joel Fitzgibbon's relationship with a Chinese woman with connections to the Chinese regime and military, who made gifts to him and paid for several trips to China, and the Opposition rank hypocrits, because a single photo of her with John Howard is dredged up from years gone by.
 
But how many trips did she pay for for Howard? Any gifts given? Was it any different to the thousands of people who have their one-off photos taken with the prime minister at hundreds of functions in a year?
 
The photo was meaningless in relation to questions of Fitzgibbon's actions or judgement and the Opposition's questioning of them, but you wouldn't have thought so watching our journalistic elite at work
 

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Filed under  //   Kevin Rudd   Laurie Oakes   media   spin  

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