BBC Confirms: Fake African Penguin Climate Claim ‘Was Misleading’

‘Climate Leader’ China Plans 200 New Airports

In this newsletter:

1) BBC Confirms: Fake African Penguin Climate Claim ‘Was Misleading’
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 15 December 2018
 
2) ‘Climate Leader’ China Plans 200 New Airports
Paul Matthews, Climate Scepticism, 12 December 2018

 
3) UN Climate Accord ‘Inadequate’ And Lacks Urgency, Alarmists Warn
The Guardian, 16 December 2018 
 
4) COP-Out: The Annual UN Climate Merry-Go-Round
Global Warming Policy Forum, 17 December 2018
 
5) China Was The Climate Champion Of Paris. Now It’s Doing A Complete U-Turn
Patricia Adams, Financial Post, 12 December 2018
 
6) China’s Great Leap Backward On Climate Change
The Global And Mail, 13 December 2018
 
7) Peter Ridd: Crying Wolf Over The Great Barrier Reef
GWPF Opinion, 12 December 2018

Full details:

1) BBC Confirms: Fake African Penguin Climate Claim Was Misleading
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 15 December 2018

‘BBC News agree that the introduction to the report was materially misleading’


https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2018/10/16/african-penguin-decline-bbc-fake-news/

You may recall the BBC’s news story a couple of months ago, claiming that African penguin populations were declining because of climate change. I covered the report here.

This was the exact wording used by the BBC presenter:

“The next report is about the African penguin population and how it’s rapidly declining. Conservationists are saying their habitat is being hit by rising tides caused by climate change.

And it’s interesting that since that report by the UN last week on climate change, so many different organisations have been coming forward to emphasise the importance it has on their work.”

The report from South Africa, which then followed, made no mention of climate change at all, but instead laid the blame fairly and squarely on overfishing.

Me being me of course, I promptly lodged a complaint with the BBC. Rather than just accepting they were wrong, the BBC Complaints Dept responded with this ridiculous letter:

“Thank you for getting back in touch with us and for your further feedback regarding the BBC News Channel programme ‘Outside Source’.

We have discussed your concerns with the programme team. There are a number of factors influencing the decline of these penguins but researchers are clear that climate change is one of them. Climate change has affected fish stocks, and increased severe weather incidences have depleted penguin chick numbers.

Please see the links below for further information on this:
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/featurednews/title_569138_en.html

http://country.southafrica.net/country/us/en/articles/entry/article-southafrica.net-boulders-beach-penguins

*(The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites).”

This is standard procedure at the BBC – send a reply that fails to answer the complaint, and hope that the complainer will get bored and give up.

But they ought to know me better by now!

You may have spotted that neither of the references provided dealt with the issue at hand, ie rising tides.

So I resubmitted the complaint to the BBC Executive Complaints Unit, who upheld my complaint, responding:

 
















Full post
 
2) ‘Climate Leader’ China Plans 200 New Airports
Paul Matthews, Climate Scepticism, 12 December 2018
 
China is planning to build over 200 new airports by the year 2035, almost doubling its current number.

 












Here in the UK we’ve been debating whether to build another runway at Heathrow for about 20 years.
 
But China is planning to build over 200 new airports by the year 2035, almost doubling its current number.
 
“The Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) published a development report on Monday that aims to add 216 new airports by 2035 and develop a number of regional transport hubs.
 
According to the CAAC, China had 234 civil airports as of October this year and is expected to have around 450 by 2035, China Daily reports.
 
Further, the demand for passenger transport in China will account for a quarter of the world’s total and exceed that of the US by 2035, making China the largest air passenger market in the world.”
 
According to this report, a new airport will open in Beijing next year that will be the largest in the world.
Previously, a figure of 136 new airports by 2025 had been quoted.
 
Note that the vague INDC submitted by China for the Paris Agreement included the action “To achieve the peaking of carbon dioxide emissions around 2030”.
 
How that is consistent with 200 new airports by 2035 isn’t clear.
 
Full post
 
3) UN Climate Accord ‘Inadequate’ And Lacks Urgency, Alarmists Warn
The Guardian, 16 December 2018 
Fiona Harvey
 
Agreement will fail to halt devastating rise in global temperature, say scientists


 
The world has been put on notice that its best efforts so far will fail to halt the devastation of climate change, as countries came to a partial agreement at UN talks that failed to match up to the challenges faced.
 
Leading figures in climate science and economics said much more must be done, and quickly, to stave off the prospect of dangerous levels of global warming. […]
 
The two-week-long UN talks in Poland ended with clarity over the “rulebook” that will govern how the Paris agreement of 2015 is put into action, but the crucial question of how to lift governments’ targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was left unanswered.
 
Full story
 
4) COP-Out: The Annual UN Climate Merry-Go-Round
Global Warming Policy Forum, 17 December 2018
 
Same COP procedure as every year
 
Each year since 1995, the nations of the world have gathered to try to reach a global agreement on carbon dioxide emissions. These ‘Conferences of the Parties’, or COPs as they are usually termed, involve all of the members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and take place towards the end of the year. Back in 2015, we at the Global Warming Policy Forum were much amused to observe that the headlines that emerged from the COPs each year had developed a certain similarity. We noted also that some people even reckoned that we were seeing less and less meaningful activity each year, and more and more liturgy and ritual.
 
This year saw the annual jamboree of the global climate establishment congregate at the twenty-fourth COP in Katowice. So, three years on, have we seen any new themes emerging, or has the liturgy had its familiar order: hype, hope and hysteria? Let’s take a look. . .
 
The COP Climate Carousel (pdf)


 
5) China Was The Climate Champion Of Paris. Now It’s Doing A Complete U-Turn
Patricia Adams, Financial Post, 12 December 2018
 
To meet its energy needs, China is aggressively pursuing every means at its disposal except green energy


 
In 2015, U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping were lauded as world saviours for endorsing the UN Paris agreement “to combat climate change and to accelerate and intensify the actions and investments needed for a sustainable low-carbon future.” As the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China’s leadership was especially valued, and lauded, even though the Paris agreement was non-binding and committed China to nothing.
 
Then Donald Trump was elected president of the United States and withdrew the U.S. from the Paris agreement. China and its Communist Party leader Xi were happily thrust into a leadership position.
 
It didn’t last long. As the nations of the world congregate in Katowice, Poland for the 24^th Conference of the Parties climate-change meeting (COP24), China is reeling from Trump’s trade sanctions. Xi is focused now on his need to maintain economic growth at home. And the U.S. and EU have largely abandoned a Green Climate Fund that would have redistributed US$100-billion a year from developed countries to developing countries. That was the lucre that made climate change interesting to China and other Third World countries. So China no longer has an economic incentive to participate in what it saw as the Paris climate-change charade.
 
Instead, China’s energy policy is focused on the Communist Party’s two primary domestic needs: securing the energy to fuel China’s economy and reducing the smog that undermines public confidence in the party. Failure to accomplish those two goals would represent an existential threat to the party’s control over China.
 
Over the past year, China’s demand for energy is up substantially, as high as 15 per cent in the case of natural gas. To meet its need for fuel, Chinese authorities are using their expansionist Belt and Road Initiative and other projects to secure imports from Myanmar and Turkmenistan via pipelines; from Siberia via the nearly completed Russian “Power of Siberia” project and a proposed “Power of Siberia 2” pipeline; and from the Middle East via pipelines through Gwadar, Pakistan to Kashgar, China.
 
Because that isn’t enough, China is securing LNG supplies from as far away as Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Qatar, the United States and Canada, as well as from Russia’s Yamal project along a Polar Silk Road.
 
And because even all that is still not enough, China is securing oil from Oman, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Angola, Iraq, UAE, Kuwait, Colombia, Kazakhstan, Congo, South Sudan, Brazil, Venezuela, and Canada.
In other words, to meet its energy needs, China is aggressively pursuing every means at its disposal except green energy. As for reducing smog, China has decided that clean-burning natural gas — not renewables — is the answer.
 
Full post
 
6) China’s Great Leap Backward On Climate Change
The Global And Mail, 13 December 2018
Gary Mason
 
It wasn’t long ago that China was being hailed as the world’s great hope for solving our climate crisis.
 
Unless the planet’s biggest polluter signed off on doing something about the environmental emergency that confronts us, it was thought, reducing carbon emissions to the levels required was seen as virtually impossible.
 
And there were promising signs the People’s Republic was finally ready to be that climate champion.
 
Seemingly overnight, the country became the leading market for renewables. Its massive solar farms alone were said to be transforming world energy. We cheered when China endorsed the United Nations Paris agreement to intensify efforts to combat rising greenhouse gases – even though its commitment was non-binding.
 
Alas, the praise seems to have been a tad premature. As it turns out, the country’s Communist leadership has slammed the brakes on its plans to fight climate change.
 
“I don’t think they ever intended to get their CO2 levels down,” Patricia Adams, executive director of Toronto-based Probe International, said in an interview. “I think it was all talk.”
 
The Global Warming Policy Foundation recently published a new report by Ms. Adams entitled The Road from Paris – China’s Climate U-turn. It’s grim reading for anyone who believed the Chinese wanted to be full participants in the war on pollution.
 
So what happened? Political realities got in the way, of course. The Politburo is focused on economic growth. Enhancing the standard of living is essential to keeping the country’s massive population happy. It’s a job that’s also become more complicated and challenging as a result of a brewing trade war with the United States. And so, without the time or patience to wait on green energy to fuel its progress, China has doubled-down on conventional sources, according to Ms. Adams.
 
Full post
 
7) Peter Ridd: Crying Wolf Over The Great Barrier Reef
Global Warming Policy Forum, 12 December 2018
 
The scare stories about the Great Barrier Reef started in the 1960’s when scientist first started work on the reef. They have been crying wolf ever since.

 















Scientists from James Cook University have just published a paper on the bleaching and death of corals on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and were surprised that the death rate was less than they expected because of the adaptability of corals to changing temperatures. It appears as though they exaggerated their original claims and are quietly backtracking. To misquote Oscar Wilde, to exaggerate once is a misfortune, to do it twice looks like carelessness, but to do it repeatedly looks like unforgivable systemic unreliability by some of our major science organisations.
 
It is a well-known phenomenon that corals can adapt very rapidly to high temperatures and that if you heat corals in one year, they tend to be less susceptible in future years to overheating. It is the reason why corals are one of the least likely species to be affected by climate change, irrespective of whether you believe the climate is changing by natural fluctuations or from human influence.
 
Corals have a unique way of dealing with changing temperature by changing the microscopic plants that live inside them. These microscopic plants called zooxanthellae give the coral energy from the sun by photosynthesis in exchange for a comfortable home inside the coral. But when the water gets hot, these little plants become effectively poisonous to the coral and the coral throws out the plants turning the coral white – it bleaches. But most of the time the coral will recover from the bleaching. And here’s their trick- they take in new zooxanthellae, that floats around in the water quite naturally, and can select different species of zooxanthellae to be better suited to hot weather. Most other organisms have to change their genetic makeup to deal with temperature changes, something that can take many generations. But corals can do it in a few weeks by just changing the plants that live inside them. They have learnt a thing or two in a couple of hundred million years of evolution.
 
The problem here is that the world has been completely mislead by scientists about the affect of bleaching and rarely mention the spectacular regrowth that occurs. For example, the 2016 bleaching event supposedly killed either 95%, 50% or 30% of the reef depending upon which headline and scientist you want to believe. But the scientists only looked at very shallow water coral – less than 2 meters below the surface which is only a small fraction of all the coral, but by far the most susceptible to getting hot in the tropical sun. A recent study found that the deep water coral (down to over 40 m) got far less bleaching as one would expect. I estimate that less than 8% of the GBR coral actually died. That might still sound like a lot, but considering that there was a 250% INCREASE in coral between 2011 and 2016 for the entire Southern Zone of the GBR, an 8% decrease is nothing to worry about. Coral recovers fast.
 
But this is just the tip of the exaggeration iceberg. Some very eminent scientists claim that bleaching never happened before the 1980’s and is entirely a man-made phenomenon. This was always a ridiculous proposition. A recent study of 400-year-old corals has found that bleaching has always occurred and is no more common now than in the past. Scientist have also claimed that there has been a 15% reduction in the growth rate of corals. However, some colleagues and I demonstrated that there were serious errors in their work and that if anything there has been a slight increase in coral growth rate over the last 100 years.
 
This is what one would expect in a gently warming climate. Corals grow up to twice as fast in the hotter water of Papua New Guinea and the northern GBR than in the southern GBR. I could go on with many more examples.
 
This unreliability of the science is now a widely accepted scandal in many other areas of study and now has a name. “The Replication Crisis”. When checks are made to replicate or confirm scientific results, it is regularly found that around half has flaws. This is an incredible and scandalous situation and it is not just me saying this – it is the editors of eminent journals and many science institutions.  A great deal of effort is now going into fixing this problem especially in the Biomedical Sciences where the problem was first recognised.
 
But not for GBR science. The science institutions deny there is a problem and fail to correct erroneous work. When Piers Larcombe and I wrote an article to a scientific journal suggesting we needed a little extra checking of GBR science, the response from many very eminent scientists was that there was no need.
 
Everything is fine. I am not sure if this is blind optimism or wilful negligence, but why would anybody object to a little more checking? It would only cost a few million dollars, just a tiny fraction of what the governments will be spending on the reef.
 
But the truth will out eventually. The scare stories about the GBR started in the 1960’s when scientist first started work on the reef. They have been crying wolf ever since. But the data keeps coming in and, yes, sometimes a great deal of coral dies in a spectacular manner with accompanying media fanfare. It is like a bushfire on land, it looks terrible at first, but it quietly and rapidly grows back ready for the scientists to peddle their story all over again.
 
Dr Ridd was, until fired this year, a physicist at the James Cook University Marine Geophysical Laboratory. 

The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.