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The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change

#31

Post by simiones »

silverpepsi wrote: post #20
simiones wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Integrity in news reporting has nothing to do with presenting every possible view as legitimate. A news report about the Earth that invites both physicists and flat earth loonies is not in any way better than one that doesn't even mention the flat Earth "theory". You are actively misleading the public when inviting climate change deniers to a discussion about climate change.

Here's a challenge I bet your little principle can't sustain: find a major long standing theory in human history that turned out to be wrong. Then apply your idea . The desired outcome for a rational principle would be that the truth and reality bubbles efficiently to the surface instead of gets burried and is taboo and something people are ostracized for promoting. I have yet to hear a principle that can deliver thi…

For pure scientific debates, I'm all for inviting any scientist with some amount of credentials to the table.

But for public policy debates, I think the track record is exactly the opposite: for every major public policy issue that required scientific knowledge, inviting the reactionary types dug out by the sleazy PR industry has done a dis-service to the public. We've seen this with tabacco, with led, and with global warming in just the last century.

Re: The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change

#32

Post by Angostura »

flooow wrote: post #5

> "My role was to identify the voices that were not in the mainstream and to give those voices a stage," Rheem says. [...] > He says the media was hungry for these perspectives. > "Journalists were actually actively looking for the contrarians. It was really feeding an appetite that was already there." A rare example of the BBC breaking the media omertà on itself here. You thought journalism was supposed to help you…

I was a journalist. The intent here, is reasonable. Whenever you wrote an article with person A claiming a thing, the editor would ask you to 'stand it up'. That involved checking the claim's validity by finding supportive and contrary sources and talking to them. The intent was to then produce a balanced, authorative synthesis.

Unfortunately, with things like climate change, the result tends to be 'false balance'. The BBC recognised this several years ago - but too late.

Re: The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change

#33

Post by Comevius »

celdon25 wrote: post #28
Comevius wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crimes against humanity, it's what it is. Sabotaging the human race for personal gain is the ultimate crime, it makes Hitler look like a saint. Any sentient species in the Universe wishing to prevail must, absolutely must be able to effectively discourage such behavior.

> it makes Hitler look like a saint. You clearly don't understand what you are talking about, based on this.

I clearly do. Hitler killed millions of people, not unlike the Black Death or Genghis Khan, but what can you do, life goes on. Climate change is different. Life will absolutely not go on if we don't start handling it. It's an extinction event, and that's not a hyperbole, we are actually in the middle of the Holocene extinction event, also called the sixth mass extinction.

Re: The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change

#34

Post by jamessb »

Barrin92 wrote: post #11
headsoup wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you at least appreciate the irony of the BBC here saying we shouldn't give contrary opinions a stage as a way of ensuring integrity?

The BBC as a public broadcaster isn't in the business of hosting contrarians for profit but to broadcast factful news, so.. not really. The opinion of scientists qualified to speak on the question of CC matters, letting literal oil lobbyists speak is like asking the fox if we should keep the door to the henhouse open.

> The BBC as a public broadcaster isn't in the business of hosting contrarians

In the past, the BBC certainly has been in the business of "hosting contrarians", though perhaps with the misguided intention of providing balance rather than attracting viewers.

For example, OFCOM found them to have broken broadcasting standards by allowing Lord Lawson (a well-known climate change denialist) to make false statements on the Today Program [1, 2] without being challenged or corrected. This happened despite a complaint being upheld about a previous appearance of the same guest on the same program [3].

[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-43699607

[2]: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/112701/...

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140901181614/https://www.bbc.c...

Re: The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change

#35

Post by superchroma »

silverpepsi wrote: post #19
Comevius wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crimes against humanity, it's what it is. Sabotaging the human race for personal gain is the ultimate crime, it makes Hitler look like a saint. Any sentient species in the Universe wishing to prevail must, absolutely must be able to effectively discourage such behavior.

...Sentence two, and y'all folks keep wondering who is fueling the lack of trust & emergence of conspiracy theories. When you're fueling the emotional aspect with your words that unabashedly, you are making people who are on the fence or unsure certain something is really wrong with the mainstream claims. I can tell you this just from the reaction you gave me in the pit of my stomach.

No, it's an emergency. We've screwed the planet, big time. When they're cutting open whales to reveal heaps of plastic, find it on Everest's peak and also in our meat at the supermarket, and when 3M is still, to this very day, trying to weasel out of being forbidden from making PFAS (a pointless, stupid chemical group that we basically didn't need as a race), we can't afford to sit idly by and entertain the feelings of people who never really had an interest in anything outside of their yard.

Re: The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change

#36

Post by manuelabeledo »

> He maintains that climate science was too uncertain in the 1990s to warrant "drastic actions", and that developing countries - particularly China and Russia - have ultimately been responsible for the decades of climate inaction, rather than American industry.

This is such a classic at this point. "Look, even if we are partly responsible, and way ahead in per capita terms, look at how others are doing overall".

I feel that this kind of hypocrisy has permeated down from geopolitical excuses, to the common people, who are now blamed, very publicly so, when it comes to essentially any kind of pollution, from air travel to plastic use.

Re: The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change

#37

Post by celdon25 »

Comevius wrote: post #33
celdon25 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it makes Hitler look like a saint. You clearly don't understand what you are talking about, based on this.

I clearly do. Hitler killed millions of people, not unlike the Black Death or Genghis Khan, but what can you do, life goes on. Climate change is different. Life will absolutely not go on if we don't start handling it. It's an extinction event, and that's not a hyperbole, we are actually in the middle of the Holocene extinction event, also called the sixth mass extinction.

If it weren't for Hitler, World War II might have been over climate policy instead, and there might be no nukes. You gloss over Nth-order effects and cite a single statistic to compare relative damage done to humanity (spoiler alert: what you actually tried to do here is not possible to scientifically do at all - you are pro-science, right?). This tells me that you haven't done any real research on the topic, but are obtusely confident about it, on HN of all places. Who were your most influential authors on existential risks? Have you contributed to the literature at all?

Re: The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change

#38

Post by Comevius »

flooow wrote: post #27
Comevius wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because a perspective is different it doesn't mean that it's the truth, or should be treated equally importantly for the sake of some kind of balance. Climate change denial is a good example, because it's not the truth, and it's not important. It doesn't have it's own scientific literature, nobody ever tries to prove it, it's contrarianism at best, propaganda at worst. And yet the media tends to give it an equal…

Thank you for semi-articulately saying my argument back to me.

No offense, but in my experience semi-articulate wins the day. I bet you a beer nobody knows what "media omertà" means. Even Google can't define it, but it references a book called A Climate Vocabulary of the Future that defines it as the media silence on climate change.

Re: The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change

#39

Post by Angostura »

hunglee2 wrote: post #9
headsoup wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you at least appreciate the irony of the BBC here saying we shouldn't give contrary opinions a stage as a way of ensuring integrity?

yes indeed I do, BBC itself started for PR purposes, I believe BBC Worldwide retains it as its core purpose

The BBC was started with the core mission to 'Inform, educate, entertain.'

The BBC World Service - funded by the Foreign Office, rather than from the core BBC license fee funding, did indeed have soft-power as part of its remit.

Re: The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change

#40

Post by manuelabeledo »

celdon25 wrote: post #28
Comevius wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crimes against humanity, it's what it is. Sabotaging the human race for personal gain is the ultimate crime, it makes Hitler look like a saint. Any sentient species in the Universe wishing to prevail must, absolutely must be able to effectively discourage such behavior.

> it makes Hitler look like a saint. You clearly don't understand what you are talking about, based on this.

It seems that there are only two differences between Hitler and climate change deniers. First, Hitler had actual executive powers to implement the measures suggested by his own slander campaign. Second, unlike Hitler, we still refuse to acknowledge that climate change deniers do have a direct responsibility over the various disasters and subsequent deaths caused by climate change.
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