blogging it real

There is no pool so shallow that a thousand bloggers won’t drown in it. Take the latest claims from the former broadcaster David Bellamy. You may remember that Bellamy came famously unstuck three years ago when he stated that 555 of the 625 glaciers being observed by the World Glacier Monitoring Service were growing. Now he has made an even stranger allegation.

In early November the Express ran an interview with Bellamy under the headline “BBC shunned me for denying climate change.” “The sad fact is,” he explained, “that since I said I didn’t believe human beings caused global warming I’ve not been allowed to make a TV programme.” He had been brave enough to state that global warming was “poppycock”, and that caused the end of his career. “Back then, at the BBC you had to toe the line and I wasn’t doing that.”

This article received more hits than almost anything else the Express has published, so ten days ago the paper interviewed Mr Bellamy again. He took the opportunity to explain just how far the conspiracy had spread. “Have you noticed there is a wind turbine on Teletubbies? That’s subliminal advertising, isn’t it?”

There is just one problem with this story: it is bollocks from start to finish. Bellamy last presented a programme on the BBC in 1994. The first time he publicly challenged the theory of manmade climate change was ten years later, in 2004, when he claimed in the Daily Mail that it was “poppycock”. Until at least the year 2000 he supported the theory.

In 1992, for example, he signed an open letter, published in the Guardian, urging George Bush Sr “to fight global warming … We are convinced that the continued emission of carbon dioxide at current rates could result in dramatic and devastating climate change in all regions of the world.”(8) In 1996 he signed a letter to the Times arguing that “Continued increases in the global emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels are likely to lead to climate change at a rate greater than the Earth has experienced at any time during the last 10,000 years.”(9) In the same year he called for the replacement of fossil fuels with wind power(10). In 2000 he announced that he was supporting a plan to sue climate change “criminals”: governments and industries which blocked attempts to stop global warming(11). But Bellamy’s new claims about the end of his career have been repeated as gospel in several newspapers (12,13) and all over the web(14).

But what Monbiot and the mainstream media fails to grasp is that attacking the founders of nzclimatescience by using facts, figures and scientific evidence doesn't change a thing.

As sure as Israel will be slaughtering Palestinians tomorrow, our men at nzclimatescience will be getting media coverage tomorrow.

I mean, anyone could find examples of Bellamy's hypocrisy...just check out his wikipedia page:

In 1997 he stood unsuccessfully against the incumbent Prime Minister John Major for the Referendum Party. Bellamy credits this campaign with the decline in his career as a popular celebrity and television personality, stating in 2002:

"In some ways it was probably the most stupid thing I ever did because I'm sure that if I have been banned from television, that's why. I used to be on Blue Peter and all those things, regularly, and it all, pffffft, stopped."

He is Britain's most prominent campaigner against the construction of wind farms in undeveloped areas. This is despite appearing very enthusiastic about wind power in the educational video Power from the Wind produced by Britain's Central Electricity Generating Board.

Labels: global warming, nzclimatescience, poppycock, tellytubbies