BBC

Hard Talk on the wrong track

by Bryan Walker July 27, 2011

I wondered what Stephen Sackur might want to put to Rajendra Pachauri when he interviewed the IPCC chair on BBC’s Hardtalk this week. His agenda turned out to be depressingly predictable for the most part. The opening was not encouraging. Sackur referred to other options than a global climate deal in view of the stalled [...]

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BBC about to bite bullet on climate BS

by Bryan Walker July 22, 2011

“I recommend that the BBC takes a less rigid view of ‘due impartiality’ as it applies to science (in practice and not just in its guidelines) and takes into account the non‐contentious nature of some material and the need to avoid giving undue attention to marginal opinion.” This is one of the recommendations of a [...]

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Adapting to climate change in Vietnam and the Philippines

by Bryan Walker April 27, 2011

I stumbled across a documentary programme on BBC World during the weekend, Nature Inc. It visited two Asian regions where the impacts of climate change are being experienced and described the active local measures under way to cope with them. It’s the sort of programme we ought to be seeing a great deal more of [...]

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Earle: everything in the oceans at risk

by Bryan Walker March 19, 2011

“We are committed to developing deepwater energy supplies offshore.” Those blunt words from the US Administration were put to oceanographer Sylvia Earle by Stephen Sackur late in a captivating BBC Hardtalk interview I watched a few days ago. What chance, he asked, did her message about the plight of the oceans stand in the face [...]

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Something for the weekend: poles, podcasts and Chomsky

by Gareth February 12, 2011

Something for everyone this weekend: a few podcasts to grab, ice news from both ends of the planet, interesting reading, and a great interview with Noam Chomsky. Audio first: Radio NZ National’s Bryan Crump interviewed Prof Jean Palutikof, Director of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility at Griffith University in Queensland at the beginning [...]

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Paul Nurse: science under attack

by Bryan Walker January 29, 2011

Paul Nurse is the new President of the Royal Society. His predecessor Martin Rees was firm in his insistence on the seriousness of climate science and climate change, and Nurse is equally so. In a striking BBC Horizon documentary Science Under Attack he examines why public trust in scientific theory appears to have diminished, especially [...]

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Rees: scientists are citizens too

by Bryan Walker September 25, 2010

The BBC’s HARDtalk interviewer Stephen Sackur engaged this week with the eminently reasonable Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society. The interview covered a range of topics, and climate change was among them.  It could hardly not be, given the seriousness with which Rees regards it.  Sackur chose to introduce the subject by suggesting that [...]

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IPCC report: done well, could do better

by Gareth August 31, 2010

The InterAcademy Council report on the IPCC — Climate Change Assessments: Review of the Processes and Procedures of the IPCC — released yesterday, calls for “fundamental reforms” to the IPCC’s management structure and review processes. Climate Central provides a useful summary of the key findings: The IPCC should create an Executive Committee to run the [...]

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When the rain comes…

by Gareth June 22, 2010

The extreme weather flavour of the moment is without doubt heavy rain and flooding. As I write, severe flooding has caused 132 deaths in southern China and 19 in Burma. The Var region in southern France is recovering from spectacular flash flooding that killed 25 people (watch the BBC video), Tennessee’s recovering from a 1000 [...]

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Ghost riders in the shed

by Gareth June 4, 2010

I was flicking through the channels on the Sky box last night — the 10-30pm news was too depressing to endure — and I stumbled on this amazing programme on the Living Channel. Originally broadcast by the BBC last December, it’s a special edition of science show Bang Goes The Theory, called The Human Power [...]

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