Can we trust the climate scientists? Certainly not with decisions

The BBC is more unbearable than usual, propagandising about climate change. When did the media stop trying to report the news and begin telling people what to think and how to behave? Was there a time when they just reported things?

A BBC insider said that the BBC internal briefing to editors on covering climate change was reminiscent of ‘a campaigning organisation'.

I am sceptical about climate change and shocked that the views of sceptics are deliberately suppressed by the BBC. It is the same with Covid and lots of other subjects. You can list them, gentle reader.

An article at the weekend quotes an anonymous BBC employee saying 

'There's a climate of fear around stories about race and transgender'

This balanced article in the estimable Unherd headlined

Can we trust the climate scientists?

about Steven Koonin's book is very much worth reading. 

No, we can't trust experts to see the big picture, obviously. Covid and the euro and YK2 and a thousand other things taught us that.

"Koonin came to public attention a few years ago, after he wrote a controversial opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal headlined “Climate science is not settled”. It was a response to what he considered the widely held opinion among policymakers and the wider public that, in fact, climate science is settled. His particular concern was that we can’t yet accurately predict what the future climate shifts will be. The book itself is best thought of as the extended version of that op-ed, with added graphs.

"We can break down his thesis into, roughly, three areas. One, is that despite “the mainstream narrative among the media and policymakers”, it is hard to be sure that the climate has changed in meaningful ways due to human influence. In particular, floods, rainfall, droughts, storms, and record high temperatures have not become more common, and although the climate is unambiguously warming and sea levels have gone up, it’s hard to confidently separate human influence from natural variability."

I am by no means sure climate is unambiguously warming, though. Do you know, gentle reader?

Sea levels were 20 feet higher 120,000 years ago. As for climate models, we know 14 day weather forecasts are not much use and the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's web page tells us:

"However, a 10-day—or longer—forecast is only right about half the time. Meteorologists use computer programs called weather models to make forecasts. Since we can’t collect data from the future, models have to use estimates and assumptions to predict future weather. The atmosphere is changing all the time, so those estimates are less reliable the further you get into the future."

Time to trot out the mediaeval warm period and saffron grown in Saffron Walden...