MORE HOT AIR

MORE HOT AIR

Via Bishop Hill "Remember Paul Hudson, the rogue weather man at the BBC who doesn't do 'consensus' and who upset the 'gang' when he noted that there had been no warming since 1998... from hacked CRU email: 'Michael Mann wrote in answer: "extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its particularly odd, since climate is usually Richard Black's beat at BBC (and he does a great job). from What I can tell, this guy was formerly a weather person at the Met Office. We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might be appropriate for the Met Office to have a say about this, I might ask Richard Black what's up here?" ' He's been at it again and thrown some cold water over the overheating believers (and I note from a BBC news report this morning that with sea levels inexoriably rising due to AGW our sea shore is eroding terribly fast)..... http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2011/10/met-office-finally-wakes-up-to.shtml 'For as long as I have been a meteorologist, the mere suggestion that solar activity could influence climate patterns has been greeted with near derision. Perhaps the art of weather forecasting has become so dominated by supercomputers, and climate research so dominated by the impact of man on global climate, that thoughts of how natural processes, such as solar variation, could influence our climate have been largely overlooked, until very recently. This is an exciting time for solar physics, and its role in climate. As one leading climate scientist told me last month, it's a subject that is now no longer taboo. And about time, too.'

CAPTURED?

Biased BBC reader Clifford provides his first contribution...

"The news reports on Radio 4 (the only BBC source I've used about this) since yesterday (11 October 2011) evening have carried the story of the deal to release Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. All the reports I have heard have used the word 'captured' to describe how Shalit came to be held in Gaza by a Palestinian militant group, which is possibly not entirely under the control of Hamas, though for years Hamas has made no real effort to control it.

To 'capture' means to seize someone who is meant to be in legal custody in the national territory concerned. The normal word for taking someone, including a soldier, against his will across an internationally recognised border, as the border prevailing between Israel and Gaza is, when he was on his own side of that border, as Shalit was at the time (2006), is 'kidnapping'. However, that distinction is either too complicated and subtle for BBC journalists or, in view of the BBC's record in such matters, the failure to observe that distinction is a calculated attempt to present the kidnapping of Shalit by a paramilitary Palestinian group as legitimate. This was either linguistic incompetence or (as I suspect) biased reporting -- the BBC is capable of using the word 'kidnapped' when it wants, as in its reporting on Afghanistan."