BBC’s Baghdad Al Stitches Propaganda Against Sceptics – Opposite Picture Of German FOCUS Piece

The photo montage could have been better, I know – but you get the idea.

Funny how Britain’s propaganda unit of the green movement – the BBC – somehow concocted such a picture of the sceptics. Germany’s FOCUS magazine, a proponent of the AGW theory, sees the sceptics in a completely different way – read below.

Obviously, things have gotten awfully bad for the green movement, and especially the BBC, who now finds itself resorting to the dirtiest of tactics – once used exclusively by totalitarian regimes.

Once a premier news organisation, the BBC has reduced itself to being a pathetic caricature of journalism.

Without a doubt the BBC, a public network, has departed from its obligation of fairness and balance, and has assigned itself with the higher mission of “rescuing the planet” and has given itself a role in setting public policy. That is not its duty under its current charter.

It has assigned itself a new job: to isolate the targets and to get the masses to despise them – all on behalf of a virulent green movement. Not unlike Goebbels. When one looks at how the BBC stitched together its recent documentary on climate sceptics, even Goebbels would blush. While Goebbels propaganda was mean and mean, BBC’s is mean and desperate.

The Rupert Murray stitchwork is in the same league as the 1010 clip. Make no mistake, it too will backfire. It will only serve to entertain the greenshirts, and appall the rest.

It is a particularly desperate piece of propaganda, one that I’d classify it as something you’d see from Baghdad Al, Saddam’s Information Minister during the Iraq war, who everyday insisted everything was peachy as Baghdad burned behind him. It should tell you something about how these guys communicate.

Can we trust the news they tells us? Can we trust the science that’s put forward?

Alternative view of sceptics: German FOCUS magazine

I wish to remind people that there is an alternative view of climate sceptics one that recently appeared in the warmist German news magazine FOCUS. I advise people to read and compare it to the BBC documentary. It’s a completely different picture.

Here it is again (originally posted on January 11, 2011):

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FOCUS Story On Germany’s Hostile Environment For Skeptic Scientists

What’s going on at FOCUS magazine in Germany? Has it become “fair and balanced”?

An online FOCUS story here about the 3rd International Climate (Skeptic) Conference, which took place in Berlin early last month, got past my radar. Even though it is 3 weeks old, it is still worth writing about. The FOCUS story is dubbed: “Among Doubters”.

Hat-tip: Ike

The story looks in-depth at the climate conference and the overall atmosphere for skeptics in Germany, but does it fairly, something we are not at all accustomed to from the rest of the hostile media here in the Vaterland.

For example not so long ago Die Zeit had a notorious drive-by shooting piece that put the cross-hairs on Fred Singer called “The Merchants of Doubt”, read here.

The FOCUS piece starts out by describing the overall “poisonous” atmosphere that pervaded before the start of the conference. Some German Parliamentarians started their own McCarthy-style inquisition on the sceptic movement in an attempt to intimidate and marginalise it. The inquisition was laced with the term “denier” and had all the usual Big-Oil and Tobacco accusations, read here.

FOCUS quotes EIKE-spokesman Holger Thuss, and comments:

‘Oil money? That would be nice!’, defends Holger Thuss of the European Institute for Climate and Energy(EIKE), with a tone of sarcasm. The think-tank founded in 2007 is headquartered in Jena and is supported only by small donations from private persons and membership fees. After the conference, the institute was penniless.

Being a bit familiar with this institute, I can tell you that it operates on a shoestring and does not have an office, as members appear to work from their homes. Hardly oil-funded. The press has always used this point to ridicule EIKE as post office box operation.

Yet the press, politicians and activists fear the organisation, and are working hard to marginalize it. But so far they’ve succeeded in doing just the opposite.

For most of the media, the 3rd Conference in Berlin was allegedly a gathering of wacked-out conspiracy theorists. But FOCUS found that this was hardly the case:

The approximately 120 who gathered in Berlin were supposedly “climate deniers“, yet hardly gave a conspirator impression. They were predominantly men, mainly of retirement age, with thinned hair and gray scholarly beards.”

As someone in attendance, I was an exception to that – in both respects. And what about all the accusations that we are just a haggle of deniers and flat-earthers? FOCUS quotes Bob Carter:

‘Whoever labels us as climate deniers is not making any scientific arguments, rather political ones’, says Australian geologist Bob Carter in response to such characterisations. When someone calls him a skeptic, then, as a scientist, he is ‘proud of it’.”

FOCUS then reports that almost all the attendees believe in climate change, and the dispute is about the extent of man’s influence, and here writes more about Bob Carter:

The paleontologist examined climate change and changes in sea level over the last 65 million years in numerous field studies – and has detected far greater variations than those of our recent history. The assertion that man is heating the world’s climate with CO2 emissions is fundamentally refuted he claims.

FOCUS also wrote about what happens when scientists do not march in lockstep with the so-called “mainstream” scientists, citing Jan Veizer’s and Nir Shaviv’s breakthrough paper on the impacts of cosmic rays on climate:

‘Practically overnight no one wanted to be seen with me’, bitterly recalls the emeritus Leibniz-Prize winner, who also taught in Germany and in Canada.

FOCUS adds:

Whoever challenges the notion of man-made climate change gets mercilessly punished by the Establishment. So it is no surprise that one hardly finds any young researchers who take a critical and skeptical view, and that mainly retired professors dominated the conference.

Also 38-year old academic high-flyer Nir Shaviv advises his own students on the threat of sanctions and reminds them to be very careful in challenging official climate dogma: ‘Whoever starts questioning is taking the risk of shooting himself in the knee.'”

What a way to conduct science. FOCUS then writes about how some politicians have been at the receiving end of hellfire and brimstone for expressing openeness to non-mainstream views, for example conservative CDU politician Marie-Luise Dött, read here and Free Democrat Paul Friedhoff.

But all the greenshirt intimidation tactics have in the end backfired for the most part. The debate is not ending, as Al Gore demanded in an authoritarian style back in 2006. Science does not stop just because a politician like Gore, who has got a stake in it all, demands it so.

FOCUS ends its piece with the subheading:

No end in sight for this debate”

We have indeed come a long way since the days of “The science is settled”, haven’t we? FOCUS then quotes Bob Carter, who demands a change in political course, and that we ought to get away from the belief that we can restrict temperature increase to 2°C. Carter pleads that governments use taxpayer more wisely.

Why not start in the third world and help the people there get clean water and better sanitation facilities. That would be a good start.“

Kudos to FOCUS. If they keep this up I’ll soon find myself adding widget for subscriptions to FOCUS magazine – and I’m now even considering a subscription to its news magazine.