The BBC and its reluctance address climate change

I wanted to send the following to the BBC and to their Science editor David Shukman specifically. But that isn't possible and what I wrote is too long to go in their complaints form. I've been in this place with the BBC before - they write something which may shape the minds of millions but to respond to it and question it, well, you have to have a blog to do it! And then they'll probably never ever see it anyway. However, it makes me feel better so here's what I would have sent to David.Shukman@bbc.co.uk (you know, I just might try that ...):

Dear Mr Shukman,

Having just watched your video item ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24905945 ) titled “Why was Typhoon Haiyan so fierce?” I’m left little the wiser. In the studio you used a very fancy “virtual reality” simulation explaining how a typhoon forms, but this was basic meteorology and failed to answer to “why was it so fierce?” The closest you managed was “higher temperatures mean more energy” although you gave no explanation as to whether these ocean temperatures were higher than usual and if so, why this might be. Surely this might have helped answer your own question.

You then added “It’s the result of weather at its most extreme.” Yet in the item you also had Julian Heming from the Met Office saying that it might one of the strongest typhoons to ever make landfall. This point seemed uncertain and I’ve read on other news sites that it “might be” or “it was” - I suppose we will have to wait for confirmation. Clearly though, it’s entirely possible that its landfall strength was unprecedented.

So, was Typhoon Haiyan the result of weather at its most extreme”? Was Hurricane Sandy “weather at its most extreme”? Were the fires experienced in Texas in 2011 “the most extreme”? Then, the Texas forest services stated ( http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/09/06/312811/hell-and-high-water-fires-extreme-conditions/ ) “This is unprecedented fire behavior. No one on the face of this Earth has ever fought fires in these extreme conditions.”. Tom Boggus, director of the Texas Forest Service added:  ”It’s historic. We’ve never seen fire seasons like this. We’ve never seen drought like this.”

Is it possible though that these are not “the most extreme”? Is it possible that our climate is warming, and given that “higher temperatures mean more energy” (as you explained) then these events could be replaced by new “extremes”. Typhoon Haiyan may indeed be the “most extreme” weather - for now.

Later, almost at the end of the 2 1/2 minute item trying to answer your title question we have a video extract of an impassioned plea from Nadarev Sano of the Philippines at the UN Warsaw climate talks. You said “It was an emotional moment”, so acknowledging in passing what he and his country have suffered and why his speech brought tears to many at the conference and why he has said he will fast for the duration unless something is done to address climate change by Cop19.

However, with hardly a pause for breath, you add the same predictable, tired and distracting statement that we hear again and again - “… the fact is though that no single weather event can ever be blamed on climate change.” This empty phrase is still likely to make the average potentially concerned person slump back complacently into their armchair. If no single weather event can be attributed to climate change, then logically, none can. If no weather even can be attributed to climate change then what on earth are 95+% of climate scientists so worried about, why does the UK express a wish to meet “our climate targets” and what is the purpose of Cop19?

Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has written: The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be….

The air is on average warmer and moister than it was prior to about 1970 and in turn has likely led to a 5–10 % effect on precipitation and storms that is greatly amplified in extremes. The warm moist air is readily advected onto land and caught up in weather systems as part of the hydrological cycle, where it contributes to more intense precipitation events that are widely observed to be occurring.”

To be fair, you added “But scientists do say warmer oceans could make the most vicious storms more likely.” So in the last seconds we finally grasp the science - warmer oceans may make typhoons stronger. So then, it seems that the one big question to answer is: “Are the oceans warming and if so, why?” 

Given that you are the BBC’s Science Editor I expect it’s a question you would be keen to answer. I look forward to your news item giving the answer.

Joy

After that previous post, something to celebrate today is that it was one year ago today that I left Brighton to move to Essex to live with Chris. Despite such a whirlwind romance my gut feeling (and his too if I may be so bold to speak on his behalf) is that we are both really happy together and that the decision was absolutely the right one. I miss my friends in Brighton but can pop back as and when as it's only a few hours away but sadly that's not possible with the choir and I've still not found another that I feel "fits" as the Rainbow Chorus did. I'm still looking though.

Things are (much!) quieter, the pub is closer, the night is blacker, the stars are brighter, the feel is calmer, the buses are fewer, natural beauty is much closer and life is very different.

I'm looking forward to the unfolding years of my new life with my wonderful, loving and provocative man. Yey!

Some things seem to never change

There was an interview on the BBC web site today with Tom Hooper who has just directed a new film of Les Miserables and I got to this part and thought "Oh no. We are over a decade into the 21st Century and this is still seen as shocking / remarkable territory:

A lot of people have said they cried watching that scene.

We could it put on the poster: "You will cry ugly tears".
I've seen it fell really tough people. There's an executive at Universal, and he's an ex-marine, and he was weeping when he saw the film. I love that it has that effect.

Was that your goal?Yeah, that was the intention. Make grown men cry.

Here's to the day that such sentiments would sound as absurd as "Yeah, that was the intention. Make grown women cry." It can't come too soon ...


And some men who couldn't possible be marines (ex or otherwise):

And I think it's safe to say that at this stage of the game, as a species we've inflicted enough pain, destruction and death on ourselves, other species and our home planet that any emotionally aware human would weep.

Uganda's proposed Anti-Human Rights Bill

An unspeakably vile piece of legislation proposed in 2009 is now back on the table again for President Museveni to pass .. or not.

This was originally put together back in 2009 and makes horrific reading - to see what's entailed if it passes into law just download this short 4 page PDF written by Uganda's Civil Society Coalition on Human Rights and Constitutional Law.

If you think it's as barbaric as I do, then please sign All Out's petition to be part of something that will hopefully stop this hideous bill again.

'Modern' life

I read "Sons and Lovers" by D H Lawrence at school as a teenager and loved it. It seemed profound and beautifully written even though, given the nature of its themes rather outside the realm of my experience, I didn't understand some of its deeper currents.

Recently I decided to take "Lady Chatterly's Lover" down off my bookshelf and read it for the first time. It's not much of a secret that Lawrence was not overly keen on the increasing mechanisation of society but I found a segment that I read today that, though written in 1928, seemed prescient for our way of life today, so here it is:

Forty years had made a difference in the neighbourhood. The iron and coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of material disintegration!

What will become of miners, and oil and gas workers when we can no longer burn fossil fuels because the idiocy of us destroying our own liveable environment for comfort will be seen for what it is? They will be no more necessary to life for most of us than a farrier would be today. Our fossil fuel burning extravaganza is so woven into our lives that it seems impossible that it will not always be there, but it must have seemed too that horses would always fill our streets, that most people would work on the land and that blacksmiths would have plenty of work to do, yet they have been cast aside by the reshaping power of black gold. But its time too is passing and I believe that the wheel will turn again to activities more human-scale and what seemed history may well become our future.

'Normal' postings may be resumed soon. Or not.

Got any unattractive natural resources?

This is just great and from the same people that brought you the crazed weather woman video.

I love the sultry voice and the general weirdness of the whole thing

You're never too old

I saw this image at the weekend thanks to the Guardian's Eyewitness app for Apple's iOS and I loved it and the story so I had to pop it up here:

Former farmer Liu Xianping, 72, has become an internet sensation after modelling his granddaughter's teenage fashion designs for her online boutique Yuekou. What began as a joke went viral after Lyu Ting posted the photographs online, and saw her sales increase fivefold. Comments have been very favourable about Mr Liu's slender pins.

How much????!!!!!!!

There has recently been a bit of a debate about the cost of tickets to see the Rolling Stones saying that the average cost of tickets is about £406.

Well, maybe but when I was curious enough to look online about two weeks ago(ish) this is what I found. To say my jaw hit the floor was an understatement.

After the hurricane

Two photographs I've seen online, the first from the 30th and the 2nd from today made me want to give them some captions:

"What happens when we keep burning our way through all that petrol"

Given the above, it seems appropriate to link to a rather amazing animated sequence about what's going up above New York.

I caught a headline from on the BBC that I couldn't stop thinking of when I then saw this image.

"East Coast residents were overjoyed to hear that the NYSE had re-opened!"

And then to wrap up, two entries from the Climate Progress blog:

The most recent one is a post about Governor Cuomo of New York City who would obviously disagree with the BBC reporter I heard yesterday say that "[Sandy] ... is a once in a generation storm". But then the BBC seem under the strictest orders never to mention Climate Change as even possibly playing a part in any extreme weather event that they report.

The other is the omission of the mention of Climate Change by the mainstream media when discussing Sandy's appearance, approach, arrival and aftermath. I particularly liked this tidbit from the USA - "During this July’s extreme heat wave, only 8.7 percent of television news coverage mentioned climate change; over the summer, television news outlets covered Paul Ryan’s P90-X workouts three times more than the record loss of Arctic sea ice;". I have to add that I've no idea who Paul Ryan is ...

How many guns do they need?

Mitt Rommney, current US presidential hopeful, said last night:

And our military — we’ve got to strengthen our military long- term. We don’t know what the world is going to throw at us down the road. We — we make decisions today in a military that — that will confront challenges we can’t imagine. 

In the 2000 debates there was no mention of terrorism, for instance. And a year later, 9/11 happened. So we have to make decisions based upon uncertainty. And that means a strong military.

It's sobering to be reminded of the USA's military expenditure in 2010:

And Iran isn't even listed! But then, you can never have too much stuff ...