Soon they'll throw you in jail for questioning it, like they do with the Holocaust. Won't that be progressive!
BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
41–50 of 119 posts
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#42I've always had mixed feelings regarding man-made climate change, seeing it as a marketed mainstream show. For me, this broad, somewhat blind, frightening threat is the ecological equivalent of the idea of terrorism. I can't help myself to think that there are a lot of other ecological issues, even more critical, and affecting our societies today. Water/soil pollution for instance does kill millions of people a year.…
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Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#43Hmm let's play "recognize the phenomenon":
1. An important truth will cause cataclysmic consequences because it's not recognized by the general populace.
2. The deeper aspects of this truth are in the possession of an elite.
3. Only the elite is qualified to speak about this truth.
4. The elite is self-selected and meets in regular councils that issue binding pronouncements.
5. The only solution is for the populace to recognize, regret and make amends for their past mistakes.
6. Doubters need to be silenced for the greater good.
Options: A) The scientific method B) Organized religion.
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#44Were every network to start doing what the BBC is, their unfounded opinions would cease to be heard, Bill Nye wouldn’t have to keep debating them, and maybe, just maybe, they’d all just go away. Not bloody likely. Now you've just put them in the same group as the other conspiracy theorists, and given them the additional (legitimate) ammo that "the establishment is censoring them". Confirmation bias is a hell of a dru…
Devil's advocate: When's the last time a fringe* conspiracy theorist's agenda has been able to effect legislature? EDIT: Added the word "fringe". As in, a conspiracy theory that doesn't get media coverage.
In fairness, and quite unfortunately, I don't think we can call climate change deniers a "fringe." A substantial proportion of the American public denies climate change in one way or another, be it denial of anthropogenic climate change, denial of climate change altogether, or dismissal of the significance of climate change. I don't have the latest figures in front of me, but in the not-too-distant past, deniers polled as a slim majority.
The tide seems to be turning, but until quite recently, it was an article of faith (literally, on occasion) among many conservatives that climate change was a liberal-media bogeyman. This was true even among the more respectable conservative publications and commentators, and not just the wackos.
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#45That sucks. If someone has an opinion, it should be free to be debated. The only way we can fight ignorance in science is with public debate. If someone wants to deny it, fine (otherwise it's not science) but put the hypothesis on the table and let people actually test it and debate it publicly. The proves only that the BBC has various political opinions and agendas and is not an unbiased source (as many people surel…
"it should be free to be debated." Right but it shouldn't be subsidized and given an artificial equal weight with a vast scientific consensus of experts. That's misleading which is the opposite of what journalists are supposed to do.
That's the problem with media like BBC - airing the view point becomes "subsidizing", and which opinion gets discussed and which is not becomes matter of centralized public policy instead of matter of private preference and market of ideas. Yes, this is the opposite of what journalists are supposed to do - instead of being free agents in the market of ideas, they become essentially a part of executive branch in enforcing public policy. Not a good development.
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have tested it and debated it publicly, and 97% of those professionally qualified to test it and debate it are of the same opinion.
That doesn't mean they're right or proposing different hypothesis' is suddenly forbidden. That's not science. Aristotelian physics was superseded by Newtonian Physics. That's science. I'm not suggesting that anyone will come up with a different conclusion but there's no excuse for this stupid dogma and religion getting in the way of rationality. Feynman is doing 500rpm in his grave...
It's not forbidden - it just won't be given equal airtime on BBC.
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#47Were every network to start doing what the BBC is, their unfounded opinions would cease to be heard, Bill Nye wouldn’t have to keep debating them, and maybe, just maybe, they’d all just go away. Not bloody likely. Now you've just put them in the same group as the other conspiracy theorists, and given them the additional (legitimate) ammo that "the establishment is censoring them". Confirmation bias is a hell of a dru…
For any given fringe view that the media properly marginalizes, some people will go on believing it. But that doesn't mean the number of believers (or undecided people) will stay the same. It's quite possible, and in my view probable, that reducing airtime from fringe views will substantially reduce the number of people who hold or lean towards those views.
Climate change scepticism is not a fringe view, but moderately widely held. It is hard to believe that those people will suddenly support environmentally literate policy. They will just switch to a different set of trite anecdotes to prove why nothing should change.
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#48That sucks. If someone has an opinion, it should be free to be debated. The only way we can fight ignorance in science is with public debate. If someone wants to deny it, fine (otherwise it's not science) but put the hypothesis on the table and let people actually test it and debate it publicly. The proves only that the BBC has various political opinions and agendas and is not an unbiased source (as many people surel…
Two things. First, if a vanishingly small number of people hold a particular opinion, reporting on that opinion in mainstream journalism distorts the perception of how marginal that view is. Standard journalistic practice is to get "both sides" of a story.
So, if there is a story on climate change, the standard practice would be to find someone to say "it's not a problem". The problem with that is the reader gets the impression that there is more disagreement in the scientific community than there actually is. This practice makes the article inaccurate. That's what they're trying to fix.
Second, the data shows that non-experts in a subject are not that rational about their views in the subject: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/upshot/when-beliefs-and-fa...
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#49Subtle: "climate deniers" instead of "climate change deniers".
I guess this dates me as an old guy, but it seems like there could be an interesting back story for the terminalology change from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change". Who was the group that first started advocating for this? When did it first appear in print in a scientific journal? When did it first appear in a newspaper or on a TV show? When did it first in a government or UN document? When did politicians start using it?
Re: BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have tested it and debated it publicly, and 97% of those professionally qualified to test it and debate it are of the same opinion.
That doesn't mean they're right or proposing different hypothesis' is suddenly forbidden. That's not science. Aristotelian physics was superseded by Newtonian Physics. That's science. I'm not suggesting that anyone will come up with a different conclusion but there's no excuse for this stupid dogma and religion getting in the way of rationality. Feynman is doing 500rpm in his grave...
The BBC reports on science. It does not do science. The BBC is not holding science back by making a policy to not give equal airtime to crackpots.