The Double Standard About Bias in Journalism

One of my favourite TV correspondents is John Stossel. I find his reporting is consistently forthright, provocative, challenging to axiomatic ideas and both well presented and well researched. In short, what good journalism ought to be.

Stossel has recently changed networks, switching from the politically accepted ABC to the unfashionable (read right of center) Fox. Here is his take on the situation. (Also see here).

Interesting. A journalist is upfront and candid about his politics and is vilified (of course, his are the wrong politics). On the contrary, an explicit declaration of ideology removes bias and clearly identifies the author's advocacy of that ideological perspective: bias is the manipulation of data or facts to align with an ideological perspective that remains implicit and surreptitious.

Keep these constructs in mind, especially when reading blogs and especially in the mainstream media's reporting of environmental issues. Ask yourself:

• what is explicitly ideological and therefore advocacy?
• and what is assumptive in its perspective, implicit in its tacit acceptance of axiomatic ideas and biased in its presentation of politically correct dogma?

Now, no ideology is immune to corruption or abuse. But Stossel is right when he says that only one perspective is labeled as biased and objectionable. Just ask the guys over at Superfreakonomics.

Besides, the UK is only one step away from making environmentalism the official state religion and everywhere else, it is the de facto alternative to the evils of capitalism: things like freedom, prosperity, wealth, a free press....thank goodness for George Orwell. Without him, we'd have to conjure up a new term for doublespeak (spin?) to assist people in differentiating advocacy from bias. Of course, Penn and Teller have a more succinct phrase.

Climatism

 

Terrance Corcoran has another excellent article today discussing the emergence of "climatism" and the imposition of a stasist green state.  He notes that:

• Formal state corporatism is unmarketable as a political model, but green industrial statism looks like a winner.

The hype leading up to the Copenhagen debacle is beginning to ramp up.  The trouble for warmists is that not only have they lost the general public's attention, they now have lost most politician's.  Climatism signals the end of AGW as a real concern: it has done its job and fixed climate into the political lexicon as a dominant motive for government intervention, regulation and sibsidy.  The Copenhagen conference will say very little new nor incisive about actual climate mitigation or adaptation.  Rather, it will lay the justification for social engineering in economic policy, energy and resource management, all on the axiomatic imperative of a change in climate that is neither unprecedented nor alarming. 

 

AGW is best thought of as a great global swindle based on inconvienient truths wherein real climate data have failed their climate audit.  This leads to climate resistance by climate realists, who demand debate about junk science that is not evil, just wrong and fails to address the question, watts up with that?

 

green power is not sustainable

One of the basic requirements of sustainability is that economics be integrated with environmental and social concerns.  Ignoring basic economics of reality in the name of those concerns, both perceived and real, is not sustainable.

 

But in socialist imposition of government policy, all governing rules of common sense are ignored:

 

• Under the new Ontario electric power and green energy plans, personally directed by the minister, everybody is protected and subsidized except consumers.
• Billed as a North American first, the new Ontario green energy plan involves imposing hidden taxes on electricity consumers to fund an industrial strategy based on government directives, subsidies and trade protectionism — all for the benefit of a select collection of rent-seeking corporate interests. Today's the first day those corporate interests and local community activists can apply to the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) for new "Feed-in Tariffs" on new wind, solar, biomass and other renewable generating facilities.
• While the going price of electricity at the wholesale level in Ontario is currently around 4 or 5 cents a kilowatt hour, the OPA is offering feed-in tariff contracts at between 45 and 80 cents to companies building new solar power generating facilities, 13.5 cents on land-based wind farms, 19 cents on off-shore wind farms, and between 10.4 and 19.5 cents on biogas projects.

As Corcoran points out, feed-in tariffs have not worked in Europe, nor is demand for electricity in the province of Ontario robust in the present climate: both economic and real.

 

But economic reality and social equity never prevent green environmentalist dogma from being embraced politically when it is deemed expedient by inept and morally bankrupt regimes.

 

 

no longer just broken, the hockey stick is finally dead

I ended my last post by saying that data do not change your perspective, your perspective changes your data: a by-line for this blog. Some see the wisdom of this contention, others query it, or just think it odd, disagree and reject it.

The latest support for the insight of the contention is provided by the ongoing sadness of the hockey stick fraud that was further evidenced with the revelations of this week. They are outlined by Anthony here, with many accompanying links and enough comments and explanations that those with and without any background can fully appreciate the import of the latest audit findings. (Direct links to Steve's work are here and here).

In short, not only was the infamous hockey stick for global warming produced with faulty methods and suspect data, it is now clear that the data utilized then and subsequently were selectively employed to bias (falsify?) the results. This was done by a small coterie of experts consistent with the prevailing ideology and justification that AGW had to be sold as the public policy crisis of the present era.

These revelations follow hard on the embarrassing admission that data critical to the AGW myth are just not being withheld from scrutiny, they are in fact simply missing: maybe the dog ate them?

Will anyone from the scientific climate community actually step up and sanction the climate alarmists who sought to distort and deceive? It is not the character of academics to do their laundry in public but one has to hope that some strong repercussions at least in the court of public opinion are finally forthcoming to the "Team" for their shameless self-promotion at the expense of scientific integrity.

Follow up:

here is an excellent summation of the whole mess by Ross McKitrick, which concludes

• The IPCC review process, of which I was a member last time, is nothing at all like what the public has been told: Conflicts of interest are endemic, critical evidence is systematically ignored and there are no effective checks and balances against bias or distortion.

• I get exasperated with fellow academics, and others who ought to know better, who pile on to the supposed global warming consensus without bothering to investigate any of the glaring scientific discrepancies and procedural flaws.

And here is another good summation from Jennifer's blog.

latest climate data

Many people want to disregard the politics surrounding climate change and AGW. Despite comments about ideology and politicization of science, there are those who still want the whole mess to be just reduced to the facts: what do the data indicate?

Here is a site that presents the data, in historical context, in as neutral, objective a fashion as I have seen.

A recent example is this pdf which contains graphs of temperature, temperature change and CO2 from each of the four sources of temperature data, such as this one:

The author offers these comments:

• Most climate models assume the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide CO2 to influence significantly upon global temperature. Thus, it is relevant to compare the different global temperature records with measurements of atmospheric CO2, as shown in the diagrams above. Any comparison, however, should not be made on a monthly or annual basis, but for a longer time period, as other effects (oceanographic, clouds, etc.) may well override the potential influence of CO2 on short time scales such as just a few years.
• It is of cause equally inappropriate to present new meteorological record values, whether daily, monthly or annual, as support for the hypothesis ascribing high importance of atmospheric CO2 for global temperatures. Any such short-period meteorological record value may well be the result of other phenomena than atmospheric CO2.
• What exactly defines the critical length of a relevant time period to consider for evaluating the alleged high importance of CO2 remains elusive, and is still a topic for debate. The critical period length must, however, be inversely proportional to the importance of CO2 on the global temperature, including feedback effects, such as assumed by most climate models.
• After about 10 years of global temperature increase following global cooling 1940-1978, IPCC was established in 1988. Presumably, several scientists interested in climate then felt intuitively that their empirical and theoretical understanding of climate dynamics was sufficient to conclude about the importance of CO2 for global temperature. However, for obtaining public and political support for the CO2-hypothesis the 10 year warming period leading up to 1988 in all likelihood was important. Had the global temperature instead been decreasing, public support for the hypothesis would have been difficult to obtain. Adopting this approach as to critical time length, the varying relation (positive or negative) between global temperature and atmospheric CO2 has been indicated in the lower panels of the three diagrams above.

So the data show 40 years of cooling, followed by a 20 year period of temperature increase, followed by the present period of another 10 years of cooling.

In the midst of the warming phase the dogma for AGW was established and has been developed as the central platform for ideological environmentalism since then.

Science gives us measurement. Meaning is provided by us.

And what meaning is applied to those measurements varies with ideology, politics, values and agendas of those framing the public policy issues that arise from the meaning they apply to those data. The data may be neutral: the meaning they are given is never neutral nor free of ideology.

Data do not change your perspective. Your perspective changes your data.

Growth first, climate later

So the major topic of the day is Obama's speech to the UN on climate (well, other than the dust storm that shut down Sydney -- no fear, someone somewhere will manage to link the two, causally: meanwhile see this).

Here is a particularly pithy but accurate take on events:

• U.S. President Barack Obama more or less shuffled climate control policy off into the great dreamscape of unattainable plans and long range objectives.
• Like equality for all and peace in our time, the world will have to wait for sweeping and binding climate policy.
• On the urgency of climate policy, Mr. Obama used language with enough drag coefficient to stop an ocean liner, even one with the momentum and power of climate change.

Other comments of interest include this and this.

So how soon before the careerist advocates of ecomyths abandon the AGW meme and re-surface with another vehicle for their dogma, abandoning climate science to the scientific obscurity it had prior to its Warhol moment of fame?

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Tomorrow marks first showing at my local Fine Arts cinema of the re-release of the classic Monty Python film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.   Python humour is deeply ingrained within the cohort that grew up watching all of the original episodes on English TV and re-enacting them all the following morning.  To this day, members of that generation can recall with great accuracy their favourite skits: the cheese shop, the dead parrot, the upper-class twit race, the Bishop and nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!  We may falter at Shakespeare, our Latin and Greek is passed recall, but Python sketches, we have them!

 

What prompted this reminiscence, was the exchange over at the Roger Pielke Jr. site concerning the pathologies in climate science, the subsequent illustration of tribalism in climate politics and the continued confirmation that nobody expects the Spanish inquisition when they posit reasonable propositions only to be scorned.

 

Sadly, as Climate Audit continues to document, all climate science is not equal, nor do people practice what they preach.

 

Over at Climate Resistance, they discuss the status of climate porn and make this observation:

 

• ....climate change isn't something difficult for governments to cope with. It is actually convenient.
• The political establishment's absorption of environmentalism allows it to substantially lower the standard by which it is measured, and gives authoritarianism a legitimising basis.
• The looming, inevitable environmental crisis instructs the public to lower their expectations accordingly. It means that rather than finding a way through problems such as energy supply, water and travel infrastructure, and of course, raising expectations, politicians can turn the normal business of politics around, and redefine the problem as one of individual morality.
• The statement that the public must use less electricity, must travel less, and must consume fewer resources is a statement that the public must expect less of politicians and politics, and behave themselves.
• The failure of the establishment's collective imagination is what drives 'climate change ethics'.
• The search for international agreements and legal frameworks to 'combat climate change' is a way of externalising what cannot legitimately be done domestically. Once in place, politicians can reasonably argue that punitive climate laws are a matter of international obligation; we are all bound by them, and cannot do anything about them. It defers politics and political accountibility to the strange, undemocratic, inaccessible space that exists between states.

It was Harold Wilson's England that gave rise to Monty Python's particular brand of satire.  Hopefully the current state of political ineptness will serve as similar fodder for new comedy.  Until then, there is this and, of course, the renewed quest for the Holy Grail.

Comment Sense

Two excellent comments today from the National Post.  Lots of journalism is for effect, much of it sensationalist.  Much comment is political opinion and as laden with as much rhetoric as the best spin.  But some, some, offers comment that reflects regular common sense: what I shall call comment sense. 

 

The first is from Lawrence Solomon, continuing his series on "green" energy alternatives, a topic he has followed for longer than the topic has existed.  His latest words of comment sense concern the future prospects of coal in a "de-carbonized" society:

 

• We can be confident that coal use will keep on growing for decades to come, in line with official projections that show worldwide demand soon doubling —without coal for electricity production, most jurisdictions will be unable to keep the lights on.
• We can also be confident that communities will successfully fend off many if not most of the carbon storage schemes that threaten them and their environments.
• Finally, we can be confident that governments, after spending tens of billions on carbon storage schemes of dubious benefit, will conclude that the safest place to store today's relatively high levels of carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, where it now resides.

The second snippet of comment sense is courtesy of Peter Foster, who discusses the ramifications of disputing the politically correct consensus on global warming: which in certain social circles is a dubious, if not heinous, sin:

• We rely on authority for the vast majority of what we believe, but global warming theory does not rank as knowledge of the same order as whether Iceland exists or the moon is made of green cheese. My reason for believing in the existence of Iceland is that a conspiracy to conjure it out of geographical thin air is passing unlikely. But anthropogenic global warming is different. Far from being an established fact, it is a hypothesis whose allegedly disastrous consequences will occur sometime in the relatively distant future. It also comes attached to considerable psychic satisfactions and political advantages for its promoters.
• It conforms to a broad view — long and fondly promoted by fans of Big Government — that capitalism is essentially short-sighted and greed-driven (just look at the subprime crisis!). This stance is not merely appealing to activist politicians and bureaucrats, it is pure gold for the vast and growing army of radical NGO environmental lobby groups, whose raison d'être — and fundraising — are closely related to the degree to which nature is seen to be "endangered." It is also appealing to rent seeking businessmen who see the profit potential in the vast array of controls and subsidies.
• However, once you get people believing in "authority," then you're pretty much home and dry. Authority relieves us of the anxiety of uncertainty and the pain of thought. If the issue can also be portrayed as "moral" (millions of poor people dying from biblical droughts and floods!) then to question it is not merely cause for rejection but censure. Skeptics must be either crackpots or in the pay of Big Oil or Big Coal.

Comment sense reminds us that, despite the dogma peddled in the name of environmentalism, skepticism is scientific and consensus is political. 

 

Pockets of sanity getting more prevalent

One advantage of taking a hiatus from daily scrutiny of world events, environmental ideology and policy implementation, is that one realizes the virtue of patience.  Eventually this too shall pass.  The world may be largely an insane entity with only pockets of sanity, but eventually those pockets of sanity are revealed both to those who seek them, and by the excesses of those who prosper from the perpetuation of global insanity: common sense is humanity's saving grace in its quest for sustainability. 

 

Some recent examples of emerging sanity:

• What America has today is government by lawyers, ideologues, social engineers and rent seekers. Congress has nary a real engineer, and precious few members with any business background or ability to figure out basic cradle-to-grave energy, resource, economic and pollution equations. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks natural gas is an "alternative to fossil fuels.
• The sad truth is that global warming scare was nothing less than a hoax. Much like the "ice age" scares of the 70's, it was a ginned up "crisis" that socialists in the environmental movement used in an effort to destroy capitalism. Fortunately, the world is watching their theories fall apart due to the current cooling trend.
• Three cheers for Jairam Ramesh! India at last has an environment minister who is willing and able to denounce the hypocrisy and immorality of the West in twisting the arms of India and China to curb their carbon emissions. He is right to make it clear that India has no intention of signing the new 'climate change' treaty in Copenhagen in December, which would put curbs on the carbon emissions of the Third World.
• Those development economists and sundry celebrities, who on the one hand, want to see the end of world poverty and on the other, to curb Third World carbon emissions, should be ashamed of themselves for advocating the latter path which will make the former goal impossible to achieve.

In the coming months we are set to be inundated with a full-court press of hype ahead of the next climate conference in Copenhagen.  One fact remains indisputable, what the developed economies of the world do or don't do no longer determines the fate of the world by themselves:

•  ...each year the increase in Chinese CO2 emissions alone is greater than those produced by the entire British economy. On the fashionable assumption that climate change is entirely driven by CO2 emissions, the effect on global temperatures of Britain closing every fossil fuel power station would be much smaller than the statistical margin of error: in effect, zero.

So when you are exhorted to panic and run around like a chicken with its head cut off because the end of the world is nigh, as doubtless the rhetoric of the coming months will imply, resist the urge, reflect quietly and serenely on your world this past year or so and commit to doing your part to being a little happier, a little more tolerant and a little more involved: be empowered, be engaged but don't be dictated by dogma into irrelevance, poverty and serfdom. 

 

Remember, "the greatest story teller ever" spun fairy tales from Denmark.  Good place for a climate conference.

 

When the student is ready: the teacher will appear

I have recently begun reading again. I underwent back surgery in January, and, during my recuperation, I found I had neither the physical capability nor the mental desire to read. Subsequently, the dearth of postings on the blog for the last couple of months.

This was the longest period of my life since I learnt to read without reading. Normally, I am a voracious reader, with two or three books on my active list, another couple lined up and daily consumption of websites, news and sports. It was odd but strangely enlightening to be not reading anything substantive. I thought, I reflected but did not feel any compulsion to read. Moreover, aside from sports, I found that most of what was on the web was a repeat of previous crises, events and history: that which we do not learn from, we are condemned to repeat.

This past week, I started to read Len Deighton's examination of the Second World War, Blood, Tears and Folly, and Paul Theroux's Fresh-Air Fiend, a collection of his travel writings.

Travel writing is a new genre for me. Usually I travel and make up my own mind about places but as I am teaching a course on Tourism next academic year, I was intrigued to read Theroux.

Strange how these things work. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. The book you are reading, is the book you need to read now in your life.

Theroux writes in his introduction that he finds the information age

...misleading, creating the illusion of knowledge, which is in fact the most profound ignorance.

Connection has made people arrogant, impatient, hasty, and presumptuous...in many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there is too much) with ideas (of which there are too few).

We are awash with information, most of it a cacophony of white noise, which people struggle to tune and filter into something relevant to their own daily lives and well-being.

What we lack are ideas.

Particularly ideas that benefit people's daily lives and positively affect their well-being. That is:

• ideas that have information that substantiates them, rather than invalidating them
  
• ideas that empower the individual, rather than making them subservient to authoritative dictate, and
  
• ideas that sustain life and prosperity, rather than impoverishing and constraining choice in the realisation of socially engineered dogma.