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Graham P Davis · October 20th 08, 11:47 AM posted to uk.sci.weather

wrote:

On Oct 19, 10:49 am, Graham P Davis wrote:
wrote:
Anyhow my thread was about the BBC failing in their birch leaf
thrashing angst to report on any climate news that contradict the
doomsaying AGW bandwagon. This is no mistake, it is because the BBC
and I 'll through in UKMO here; are incresasingly being lead by
ideology.

They are being led by science, not ideology.

Now does anyone on this group have an explantion other than that; or
do you feel the BBC's coverge on climate is fair an impartial.?

I think the BBC's coverage is generally fair and impartial, sometimes I
wonder if it's not being too fair towards misguided minorities such as
during the MMR scare.

My main problem with the recent BBC2 "Climate War" series was that it
perpetuated the myth that during the seventies, after a period of slight
global cooling, scientists forecast a new ice age and then a decade
later, after the scorching seventies UK summers, forecast global warming.

--
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks., UK. E-mail: newsman not newsboy

Well Graham all I know is that during the seventies the Daily
Telegraph Sunday supplement ran a rather large feature on the coming
ice age, as did the tabloid Sunday Mirror (Pictorial in the
seventies). In fact the Pictorial devoted the front page and
subsequent pages to the headlines "New Ice Age on its way" or
something like that. So something was definitely catching the
imagination at that time. Of course as there was no internet then it
would have been even a lower profile story but it wasn't ;so something
was definitively afoot at the time. Didn't the ex editor of the New
Scientist Nigel Calder write a book called the Weather Machine (I
still have it)
which was a response to serious concern about the planet cooling and
possibly drifting towards much harsher times for agriculture?

I agree that there was a theory of a new ice age. What the programme failed
to show was that at the same time the global-warming theory was also in
existence and preceded the evidence of warming and the hot UK summers of 75
and 76.

There were a couple of ice-age panics in the media. One in the sixties was
triggered by the Met Office long-range-forecasting group and was based on
100-year cycles. What it was forecasting was another Little Ice Age for the
UK but the media blew it up out of all proportion - basically losing
the "little" - as usual. However, by the end of the sixties, a new study by
one of the group broke the analysis into seasons and this showed that the
winters had reached their minimum in the sixties and would get warmer for
the next fifty years. It also showed springs and autumns would get colder.

The other ice-age theory was, as far as I remember, connected with global
cooling due to pollution particles. No account had been taken of increasing
CO2 and the scientist(s?) responsible for the theory soon realised the CO2
effect would swamp any cooling caused by pollution.

--
Graham P Davis, Bracknell, Berks., UK. E-mail: newsman not newsboy