Wednesday 29 February 2012

The BBC manufactures news

Here is the BBC Radio 4's "The World This Weekend" from last Sunday.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01cj83k/The_World_This_Weekend_26_02_2012/

For those who don't know, it's BBC Radio's flagship current affairs programme, broadcast on Sunday lunchtime. It consists of a five minute news bulletin, followed by 25 minutes of discussion, interviews and analysis.

The second item on the news was that an ex-head of the National Health Service (appointed by the previous government), Nigel Crisp, "has told this programme" that the government's NHS reforms are a mess that will set the service back (etc, etc). And, sure enough, he said those things (amidst quite a lot that was considerably more emollient) in a segment after the news. His ex-boss, Labour's John Hutton, was also a part of the discussion and the tenor of his remarks was actually quite supportive of the coalition government's stance. I'd regard that as slightly more newsworthy: ex-Labour minister agrees with the Tories. Which seems to suggest that the BBC is more interested in highlighting anti-government views than pro-government views.

But that is incidental to my main point: short of John Humphrys running amok with a pump-action shotgun, what happens inside a BBC studio is not the news. On any proposition, it must be trivially easy to get somebody who used to be important to vent on the radio, for or against. There is an ex-senior civil servant who disagrees with a government policy. Big deal. If doctors plan to strike because of the reforms, that is news. If some clause of the government's bill gets voted down in parliament, that is news. Something has happened in the outside world, and it affects the public at large.

Of course, none of this would bother me if I weren't forced to pay for the BBC's inflated sense of importance and its tendentious news presentation.

Wednesday 8 February 2012

From the sublime to the ridiculous

Great science story in the Telegraph today: a 'new' oldest group of organisms on earth has been found: they're somewhere between 12,000 and 200,000 years old (most likely around 100,000 years). Each spans 10 miles and weigh more than 6,000 tons! They're sea grasses in the Mediterranean, as here:

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Great work by Professor Carlos Duarte of the University of Western Australia. Then he goes and spoils it all by claiming "If climate change continues, the outlook for this species is very bad". What? At 200,000 years, the things have lived through the better part of two full-blown ice ages! If they're over about 130,000 years old, they lived through the last interglacial, which was nearly 3ºC or about 5ºF warmer than today. See this temperature reconstruction from the Vostok (Antarctica) ice core:

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Even at 12,000 years old, they'd have seen some of the last full-blown ice age. And they'd have lived through the Holocene climate optimum (around 8,000 and 7,000 years before the present) and the Minoan, Roman and Medieval warm periods: all warmer than at present, as shown by this Greenland ice core:

 

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You don't get beyond your 12,000th (or 100,000th or 200,000th) birthday without being just a little bit adaptable [rolls eyes heavenwards].