The other night on UK television’s Channel 4 Richard Lindzen presented a programme called The Great Climate Change Swindle. [See Martin Moore]
Lindzen dissents vocally from the scientific consensus, in arguing that climate change is not man made.
But Lindzen goes beyond just dissent in his views on policy. Here’s part of liberal academic blogger Jim Casey‘s account of one of his talks from 2006:
Richard was invited to my campus (Washington and Lee University) last week to give a public talk about “Global Climate Change.” His talk was titled Climate Alarmism and Scientific Illiteracy … [He] started with the theme of scientific illiteracy and how this enables the media to exploit the public and create what he calls climate alarmism. In the end he concluded by saying the only way to restrict CO2 emissions was to restrict wealth creation – which is NOT correct – and he finished with an unequivocal conclusion – nothing should be done to reduce CO2 emissions and any policy with this objective is too costly because there are no benefits to doing so.
Presumably Lindzen is the global warm-up man for Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, which C4 bought in February for airing in 2008. Yup, that’s what we in journalism call “balance.”
One response to “"Balancing" climate change”
Tell the people what they want to here
Martin Durkin has agian succeeded in producing a one-sided documentary, using discredited and industry funded “scientists”. I’m sure that the ITC will make channel 4 appologies for deliberate distorting of facts and opinions as it has done with previous Durkin documentaries, but sadly the damage is already done. Tackling climate change would require lifestyle changes from all of us, muddying the water on an area where internationally science has reached consensus will do untold damage to our ability to do this. Sadly most viewers won’t google the names of the documentary maker or the “experts” who participated, many won’t even have bothered to watch the show, but will be talking about it in pub having seen the trailers. This is the problem with the concept of journalistic balance: people are far more receptive to what they want to hear than what they don’t.
So I’ll be flying off to barcelona for the weekend to do some shopping and maybe I will go for that black 4×4. If millions die as a result of our inaction on climate change what responsibility will “media balance” have in this…