JoNova:
The best of BBC science reporting. Actress cum climate scientist, Emma Thompson, predicts that Arctic drilling will cause 4 degrees of global temperature rise by 2030, 15 years hence. The BBC reporter, Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis, trained with the best of BBC science and journalism, lets it pass.
Obviously, we’ve reached a tipping point — in journalistic standards. If a Nobel Prize winning physicist said that “warming may be natural”, BBC journalists are trained to point out he is not a climate scientist. But if an actress predicts Armageddon, the nation needs to know.
Perhaps Arctic drilling will unleash global magma?
165 years of global warming is about to hit escape velocityAt least one climate scientist is not going to let nonsense be broadcast without protest. Where are the others?
One of Britain’s top climate scientists has launched a blistering attack on actress Emma Thompson and the BBC, accusing them of ‘scaremongering’ over the speed of global warming – and risking a worsening of the refugee crisis. Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the Met Office and a professor at Exeter University, launched his attack on Twitter about an interview Ms Thompson gave to Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis last Wednesday. He followed it up with a longer critique – an extract of which this newspaper publishes today – on the website of HELIX, a prestigious EU-wide climate research programme which he also directs.
Lucky the UK still had a private press to clean up the mistakes of the publicly funded media.
