Brian
Micklethwait (London) Science & Technology
Saturday October 10, 2009
BBC Climate
correspondent Paul Hudson asks What happened to global warming?:
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that
fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in
1998.
No surprise to me
about those dates. But yes indeed, big surprise that a BBC person is saying
this.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any
increase in global temperatures.
No matter how
hard we tried.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made
carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has
continued to rise.
So what on Earth
is going on?
What indeed? This
is not the usual BBC line, is it? Whatever your opinion of A(nthropogenic)
G(lobal) W(arming) - mine has for quite a while been that it is wall-to-wall
made-up nonsense - I think you will agree that this is quite a moment, as is
further illuminated by the fact that Instapundit has just linked to the above
piece. Which is how I just heard about it.
I wonder if the
BBC feels inclined to switch to being AGW-skeptic in order to try to make
difficulties for David Cameron - stirring up his own party's AGW skeptics
against him etc. David Cameron has swallowed the AGW argument whole, or at
least pretended to. With that man, you never really know what he really
believes. Apart from believing in David Cameron, David Cameron probably doesn't
know himself what he really believes, and probably never will.
But I digress.
Mainly I just have a question. Is it right that this marks a big shift for the
BBC, or have I not been paying attention properly? This is entirely possible. I
don't follow this debate religiously, and certainly do not know the names of
all the key players on this topic in the mainstream media. Maybe Hudson has
been a known unreliable for some time. But whatever the truth of that, I will
certainly keep my eyes and ears open for what others, especially people like Bishop Hill, make of this, in the days and weeks
ahead.
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2009/10/the_bbc_wonders.html