Friday, 15 May 2009
The Hadow-BBC Mission
A hilariously over-excited report on the BBC news last night about the triumphant(?) conclusion of Pen Hadow's mission (and mission's the word, rather than expedition - a warmist mission, of course) to the Arctic. The story that was actually being told by the pictures and most of the words was completely at variance with the intended message. We saw and heard about the team suffering such extreme cold that their high-tech instruments wouldn't work and frostbite struck in temperatures of minus 30 - inside the tents. We saw Hadow manfully drilling into the ice with a brace and bit - and of course we saw plenty of images of melting ice (this is, after all, the time of year when the Arctic ice does melt around the edges - and the time of year when it's usually perilous to lift anyone off the ice - this year it seemed to be strangely firm). The 'message', in the end, was suspiciously vague and hurried - the ice cap was 'thinner than expected'. Well, we'll see... For a decidedly non-BBC perspective on these matters, see here.
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I read a good article in some american journal the other day about mankind's in-built instinct to love apocalypse scenarios.
ReplyDeleteand AAGill, that once rather good critic had some fun (and true) stuff to say about Moonbat this weekend:
"The real killer thing is the schadenfreude: the naked, transparent, hand-rubbing glee with which they pass on every shame, sadness and terror. No disaster is too appalling or imminent that the green movement can’t caper and keen with a messianic glee. Take George Monbiot, the Malvolio of the green movement, who, as I’ve pointed out before, would be a geography teacher if it weren’t for the amazing good fortune of imminent apocalypse. Every week, he sifts the minute details of demise, like a jolly self-congratulatory Scrooge. Most of us would rather drown with the polar bears and Bangladesh than get in a lifeboat steered by Monbiot. This is a real problem. Or, rather, it’s a serious blockage on the road to solving the real problem. Eco-advocates are viscerally unconscionable people. The enormous, vicarious pleasure they get from frightening folk makes them repellent, and they get all hurt when we don’t thank them for it. Nobody wants to trust a future to a bunch of malcontents who plainly have so much of their self-worth and cachet invested in it all going to hell in a recycled handcart. This isn’t merely a question of presentation, or marketing, or tone, or spin, this is serious cultural blindness and childish arrogance."
Oh yes that's good stuff - Gill - who'd have thought it?
ReplyDeleteMeantime our pension schemes are in trouble because, amongst other things, we are all living too long.
ReplyDeleteThe reporter on the story, David Shukman (the BBC's Environment Correspondent), seems to spend most of his life in a helicopter or plane.
ReplyDeleteIt's not the implicit hypocrisy that bothers me, it's the expense. ITN and C4 don't seem to spend nearly as much on this sort of palaver, but then they don't get free money.
Absolutely - and they don't keep sending an expensive dummy like Huw Edwards to countries where they've already got perfectly good reporters.
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