BBC Staff to be giving less air time to fringe science such as climate change deniers

I think the BBC has for once done the right thing here. I don't think we should give any air time to something which is 98% certain. The BBC would never air a story on a 2% chance it was true, so why should climate change be any different. It is simply spreading disinformation; I agree the BBC must be impartial but this cannot come at the expense of scientific fact so this is definitely a good outcome.


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It is not certain at all. Ice levels are at their highest for years.

Doesn't mean much. Global warming is global, small scale weather patterns can be very different and often get colder not warmer. Also, IIRC, there was a recent article explaining why we have more ice than before.

It does mean something, because all the scientific models predicted sea ice would decrease. Explaining the past is easy, predicting the future is where a theory is tested.

Now, I do believe the world is getting warmer and there is a lot of evidence to back that up. But I think one of the major problem with the debate is that climate scientists think they have any sort of licence to talk about what should or should not be done in response to climate change, which is an economic, not a scientific, issue. Scientists are wheeled out all the time to support some windfarm somewhere or criticise fracking as if their climate expertise gives them a corresponding economic and industry expertise, which it does not. Here is where I believe their shrill voices are often far more questionable.

Environmentalists are deliberately trying to conflate these two issues – the reality of global warming and the question of what should be done about it – to give the impression that their prescriptions are just as scientific and well-evidenced as climate change itself. People who are not convinced that extortionately expensive wind farms are the best way to deal with our energy problems are treated as climate-change deniers. The price they pay for this merger is that when the public see the obvious problems in their logic they don't differentiate and assume the same problems exist in the climate-science.

What I want to know is whether this ban on climate-change sceptics is restricted to the scientific debate, or whether people who – quite sensibly in my view – hold economic beliefs such as that wind farms are a ridiculous way to deal with the problem (such as Nigel Lawson) et cetera will now also be proscribed.

Criticizing the methods for dealing with climate change is fine, but so long as that criticism is not based on a denial of man made climate change.

Unless someone has a better idea than building loads of renewable energy generators, you shouldn't really attack the current methods. Something has to be done, and whatever is done loads of people will disagree with it. It's a lose-lose situation.

I think this is a case where often the treatment is worse than the illness. The doomsday scenarios you might have heard are very much the outliers in terms of scientific predictions. Rising temperatures would definitely cause some bad things, such as rising sea levels which could threaten extremely low-lying land such as in Bangladesh, but the world has seen warmer temperatures even in the recent past and it's hardly as if it's something human adaptability could not handle.

On the converse the prescriptions include raising the price of fossil fuels which, amongst other things, is hamstringing economic growth in the developing world where deaths from poverty, famine and preventable diseases are still distressingly common. Tell me that is worth it. When it is far from clear that such policies are likely to have any effect on reducing climate change, or whether it would even be possible to reverse it, it seems a bit like a cruel joke.

But unless we do something, CO2 levels will keep rising until they are eventually so high that environmental disasters are inevitable. This may be in 50 years, it may be in 500 years. But it will happen.

The reason we won't use fossil fuels indefinitely is because we expect future technologies to be more efficient. Currently, however, renewable energy is not even comparable, with the exception of nuclear power which people dislike for other reasons.

So really, we only need fossil fuels to tide us over until fusion overtakes everything in a few decades. Arguably the economic hit the world takes from anti-carbon measures means fewer resources to fund this sort of research.

It is impossible to predict what technology we will have in a few decades. Whatever we guess will amost certainly be completely wrong.