(Article by Marc Morano republished from ClimateDepot.com)
The National Climate Team’s parameters remain under wraps, but random details trickle out. For example, the Team includes weather specialist Tyne Logan. On ABCTV’s 7pm flagship news of August 31 she did a piece about Sydney University medicos broiling volunteers in a heat chamber, cheered on by climate scientists, to estimate what level of global warming would kill them. “It’s been set to 54 degrees Celsius, with 26 per cent humidity — a combination believed to be lethal after six hours,” Ms Logan remarks in the script, which mercifully omits the broadcast’s spooky music. Baking those poor test participants reminded me of the roast chook gondola at Woollies in Moonee Ponds. Owing to pesky ethics guidance, the boffins bring their humans out before rather than after they’re killed. I’ll elaborate on Ms Logan’s account later.
The ABC’s one-eyed climate coverage has prompted controversies and inquiries dating back 15 years. The real excitements were from 2004-17, involving Prime Minister Howard’s pick of stockbroker Maurice Newman to chair the ABC from 2007-12. Newman’s successor was ex-judge Jim Spigelman (2012-17), who also took some interest in the charter’s impartiality requirement. Current chair Kim Williams has also addressed the matter of bias but has yet to show any hint he is prepared to do something about it. Here’s a timeline of the ABC’s green-eyed misreporting and its refusal to change its ways.
2007: The ABC’s top science staffer, Robyn Williams, suggests we are in for a 100-metre sea level rise this century.[1] Insights like this have earned him seven universities’ honorary doctorates and an Australian Academy of Science fellowship.
March 10, 2010: Chair Maurice Newman fronts staffers in a Sydney briefing and blasts their climate “group think” and “collective censorious approach”. They suppress contrary views and abuse the sceptic community as “deniers”, he says, in j’accuse mode. The 250 staffers “rise to their feet to express shock and anger,” according to Renfrey Clarke at the “Green Left” blog. The green lefties call on “journalists and the public to be rid of him”.
December 2012: Newman, speaking as an ex-chair, pesters ABC Complaints over the Science Show’s Robyn Williams likening sceptics to pedophiles and crack smokers. The Complaints people re-assure him the ABC per se does not equate sceptics to child molesters. The spokesperson says: “Unlike the BBC, the ABC acknowledges there are climate scientists who question the core thinking about climate science. The ABC gives them and their views air time.” Lordy! The addled ABC attacks Britain’s even more addled Beeb.
Mid-2013: Chair Jim Spigelman, an ex-NSW Chief Justice, arranges an “ABC science reference panel” to investigate how well the ABC is covering climate and medical science. He remarks, in advance of any findings being released that the ABC’s science crew are “head, shoulders, thorax and abdomen”[2] above commercial rivals. He’s not a climate sceptic, he adds, but ABC journalists in line with the impartiality charter should “ hold scientists and technologists to account for their claims and conduct”. “Balance” apparently involves following the weight of evidence:
We must go beyond PR handouts, or what has been called ‘churnalism’ … What I believe needs most work is to develop our capacity to appropriately challenge scientists, not least those whose work is distributed by press release from organizations with a vested interest in favourable publicity. That includes, these days, universities
2013-14: Quadrant Online gets the scoop that the science panel leader is ABC director and bumbling climate warrior Professor Fiona Stanley AC (so much for independent investigation) along with Media Watch’s former sultan of smug Jonathan Holmes and others. Professor Stanley is lead signatory on a greenies’ “Monster Climate Petition” which begins,
“My great great grandchildren ask me in dreams, what did you do while the planet was plundered? What did you do when the earth was unravelling?”
Read more at: ClimateDepot.com
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