Barry Hearn letter to ABC's "4 Corners"
ABC Four Corners Program
It is with immense concern that EVAG notes the advocacy displayed by "4 Corners" in the final program for 1999. By what right do you transmit such a blatantly biased program on publicly funded television?
Why was it not explained to viewers that PEW is a multi-million dollar advocacy organisation dedicated to the suppression of the human race? Why was it not mentioned that PEW subscribes to the misanthropist view (first enunciated by Ehrlich) that providing affordable energy to humanity is 'like giving an idiot child a machine gun'? Why was it not mentioned that subscribers to the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis freely admit that the Kyoto Protocol will make absolutely no difference to global climate? It is not just Prof Pat Michaels who has calculated that complete implementation of the Kyoto Protocol will _at most_ result in a total 'saving' of -0.07 degrees C saving over 50 years - Tom Wigley (senior scientist NCAR) derives a figure of -0.05C while the IPCC's own scientists suggest -0.06C! All say that this will have absolutely no effect on global climate! So why push the Kyoto Protocol?
Where is the public benefit in this advocacy?
Have you considered the human and environmental cost of misdirecting the vast societal effort and funds to irrelevant attempts to prevent inevitable change as opposed utilising that effort and funding to adapt to such changes as _may_ occur? Have you even noticed that the enhanced greenhouse hypothesis remains exactly that - an hypothesis? Have you even noted that the greater the scientific investment in this hypothesis the less likely it is to advance to advance to a theory since empirical measure tends only to _disprove_ it? Have you noticed that there are three methods of deriving global mean temperature and that only the most limited and least accurate supports the hypothesis of warming over the last 50 years while both the more general and least subject to error indicate a global cooling. over the same period?
Why did you state, as though it were fact, that weather extremes had increased when empirical evidence is clear that both frequency and severity of weather events have decreased over the past century?
The dearth of fact in your broadcast is utterly appalling!
This is the kind of thing that we expect from loopy advocacy but certainly not from investigative journalism - last we heard that was supposed to be objective!
Please be advised that this query - and your eagerly awaited response - will be published on the alternative green website.
Completely astonished,
Barry Hearn
EVAG Coordinator
16A Maryborough Tce
Scarborough QLD 4020
Phone 07 3880 3131
Fax 07 3880 3101
E-mail coordinator@altgreen.com.au
"4 Corners" response to ABC
Mr Barry Hearn
EVAG CoordinatorDear Mr Hearn,
Thank you for your email commenting on Monday nights program on climate change. The team at Four Corners, who produced "Emission Impossible", believe that it adequately reflected the well-researched views of mainstream science on climate change. It also gave time to those who do not hold the same views.
Janine Cohen
Producer
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