MELTING ICE - AGAIN...
>> MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2011
Since the IPCC admitted last year telling huge porkies about the dangers from Himalayan glaciers, dozens of greenies have clearly been sent there to prove that they were right after all. Last month, for example, Richard Black faithfully reported, on a sample size of 10 out of 54,000 glaciers, that 'ice loss was accelerating', underlining the need for massive new taxes at the Durban climate talks. It was rubbish, of course. Now Mr Black's colleague-in-arms, Jonathan Amos, has filed a Boxing Day tale of woe as part of the IPCC's continuing campaign. His worry is that near the Cho Oyo peak, a new 'enormous' meltwater lake called Spillway (who called it that, I wonder?) could - because of undoubted warming - bring menace:
The concern is that this great mass of water could eventually breach the debris dam and hurtle down the valley, sweeping away the Sherpa villages in its path. The threat is not immediate, but it's a situation that needs monitoring, say scientists.
As usual, despite the uncertainty that he clearly acknowledges, it's a onesided rant about impending peril. The source of it appears to be mainly Ulyana Horodyskyj, from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado in Boulder, US. And her qualifications? She's reading for her doctorate in gelogical sciences. Well golly gosh, our future is in safe hands.
The rest of the piece is larded with claims such as that that the region is like Swiss cheese and that this is an 'exponential (meltwater) growth area'.
Put alarmist greenies guzzling on fat research grants into an area, and they will find a problem. And the BBC will be faithfully there to report it.
Myth-Spinning From Detroit
There's yet another BBC North America correspondent pushing an agenda these days. Ian Pannell has gone to Detroit to spin a tale of woe and misery, blaming all of it on the current economic situation. He even clearly articulates the message one is meant to take away:
"The gap between the rich and poor in America is now bigger than it's been for 30 years."Pannell closes the piece with this line, followed by a statement that "what we've seen" all over the US is a similar problem. In case anyone didn't bother watching all the way through, the message is spelled out equally clearly in the blurb accompanying the video.
Now, before we get into the problems of Detroit, let me just say that I'm in no way denying that there's a severe economic problem in the US right now. I'm on record here many times complaining about exactly that. In fact, I believe we've been in a Depression for the last 18 months or so, and will continue to be unless there's a drastic change nationwide. So this post is not meant to challenge Pannell's last sentence. Instead, I mean to challenge the agenda being pushed and the myth being spun specifically from Detroit.
Detroit, of course, is definitely a problem city. Unemployment in the Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn region is the worst in the nation among what we call "greater metropolitan areas". As of May 2010, Detroit had about 90,000 (!) abandoned homes or residential lots, and the city has had to spend money demolishing them. If that seems like an awful lot of homes emptying over a relatively short period of time (we're meant to assume that this is all about the "downturn" since 2008), you'd be right to be suspicious. Yet Pannell wants you to believe that Detroit is just like the rest of the country, a victim of economic inequality thrust upon it by outside forces. Well-trained BBC audiences will already know the approved causes: greedy bankers and the evil rich appropriating more than their fare share of wealth.
Except it's simply not true. Detroit has been going down the tubes for years and years. Here's what Pannell and the BBC don't want you to know, because it detracts from their agenda:
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