I am not a climate change denier

The Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband has acknowledged that there is "further to go" to persuade people in both the UK and around the world that global warming is man-made.

Interviewed by Today presenter on Humphreys on the opening day of the United Nations' climate change conference on Copenhagen, Mr Miliband said that those who denied the existence of a connection between human activity and global warming were "profoundly irresponsible".

And he said that the Copenhagen conference would be seen as successful if it led to "a deal consistent with science" which saw global emissions peaking in 2020.

Also - read this article on ScientificAmerican.com

Channels Four and Five

I must have made a subconscious connection last week when I saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth film on Channel Four. I made that entry about incandescent bulbs. Although I was glad they showed it I wish Channel Four would be true to their climate change denying past - remember The Great Global Warming Swindle which Channel Four commissioned, transmitted, released on DVD and stood by when Ofcom found it to have misled the public? I made a rather excellent (in my opinion!) blog post here where I also mentioned bulbs(?!)
Anyway - I used to watch Channel Four a lot ten years ago and Channel Five never - the situation today has almost entirely changed with me watching Five a bit and Four rarely (I did rant on about it after Christmas).
Now then, we do a lot of work for Five and their engineering department are a really nice bunch of guys. I was in their main transmission suite last Wednesday and was surprised to see that although promos, stings, ads and other interstitials come off server main programme segments still come off tape. I did my heart good to see a stack of DVW-500s!

RIP incandescent bulbs

Being a global warming denier is currently a bit fashionable. It's all tied up with people thinking they have a better handle on the subject than professionals who know several orders of magnitude more about it than they do. Just because a Channel Four documentary digs up some renegade (failed!) researcher who has a theory it doesn't mean there is any truth in it. George W. Bush depends on this kind of double-think when he says 'science is divided'- well, it is divided if you think the opinion of a tiny minority (in the pay of the petro-chemical industry) holds weight against 99% of climatologists. The fact that the vast majority of scientists have come to the conclusion that man-made CO2 is responsible is not proof, anyone that suggests that is wrong. But it does imply a very high-probability that it is the cause. To not accept that high-probability is to pick your science like a sweet in a sweet-shop to suit your own taste.
To a degree I blame Kuhn, or rather the poor half-baked understanding lots of folks have of the nature of scientific revolutions. They have the notion that scientific advances always come from mavericks who tirelessly labour outside the mainstream. People like to think that they too 'just might have something there' and produce something valuable even though they have no scientific training - well it isn't true - it never happens!
Anyhow, the Aussies have done it, and now Europe is going to use legislation to phase out incandescent bulbs - good stuff.
Interesting take on the programme here and Marcus Brigstock had a brilliant rant (2.9 megabyte MP3, 7 minutes) on The Now Show where producer Martin Durkin gets some of the heat he deserves.

In the end you have to remember that all programmes on Channel Four (in common with all commercial television) are the loss-leaders for the commercials. The channel wants you to watch the ad breaks and so will make programmes that play fast and easy with the truth so long as it gets people watching them. The BBC is the only place you find accurate science programmes.