Altfish wrote:Alan H wrote:There are quite a few and there's even one run by Jeremy Corbyn's brother Piers. However, his page in
Wikipedia says he doesn't believe climate change is predominately man made...
He's nothing but a charlatan,
Although I disagree with Piers Corbyn on climate change and on earthquake prediction, I'm not convinced that WeatherAction is entirely without merit and that its successes are necessarily either "Texas Sharpshooter" or "Scattergun" events. A decade or so ago, I made comparisons of MetOffice and WeatherAction forecasts, and the MetOffice was not wreathed in glory! My big problem with WeatherAction is that its methods are not published and are therefore not open to scrutiny. Corbyn says this is because WeatherAction is a commercial proposition and these are commercial secrets but, if there is scientific merit to them (they are based on study of the Sun), then they could possibly be improved, for the benefit of all, by being made available to other scientists.
Also, in a similar way that it was the life insurance companies that responded to the statistical smoking-cancer link long before the scientific link was made, when bookies refused to take bets from WeatherAction (asserted by Corbyn, neither refuted nor denied by William Hill), I suggest something may merit more than dismissal.
Altfish wrote:
Also when does difficult questioning become haranguing? I would say that in too many cases politicians are let off easily.
I agree. I have long held the view that, if any politician does not give a direct answer, s/he should be given one further chance and if s/he still declines, then his/her microphone is switched off and the interview is terminated. They'd soon learn.
Dave B wrote:The standard of "everyday" journalism has diminished over the past 20 years (since the Internet basically). The BBC usually made an attempt to be accurate, honest, objective and balanced - but it is getting worse,
I hesitate to mention this here, given the subject's connection with the GWPF, but David Whitehouse tells marvellous stories of his time as a BBC science correspondent. On one occasion, he was being sent out to investigate the effects of electromagnetic smog (...I think, but it may have been geopathic stress - the memory is not what it was...) and told the producer that it was a waste of time because it had been thoroughly debunked. The producer's response was along the lines of, "Yes, that's what science says, but I want you to get to the truth."
As far as the BBC in general goes, I was listening to old Infinite Monkey Cage podcasts on my drive back from the IoW yesterday; we reflected on how this was such a good use of license fee, compared to Brian Cox's "Wonders of..." stuff where you get a few minutes of him gazing wistfully from some exotic location at enormous expense or something we heard trailled last week, where "slebs" are being sent, again at enormous expense, to report on aspects of "foreign lands" that interest them.