Where it’s not due

Guest post by Tobias Ziegler
Cross posted at Not A Hedgehog

Here is an interesting case study in how Bolt uses selective reporting and distorted interpretation to weave a new pseudo-fact into his narrative.

It starts with this BBC News story on Bangladesh:

New research shows Bangladesh may not be as vulnerable to rising sea levels caused by climate change as previously feared, scientists in Dhaka say.

They say satellite images show the country’s landmass is actually growing because of sediment dumped by rivers.

Now, note that this story does not actually relate to research evidence for or against global warming. Instead, the research suggests instead that any loss of land mass due to rising sea levels will be offset to some extent by “new land” being created as sediment gathers in the delta regions where rivers flow into the Bay of Bengal.

But to what extent will it offset a rise in sea levels? The researcher says:

Mr Sarkar said that in the next 50 years this could add up to the country gaining 1,000 square kilometres.

That would be a gain in landmass of well under 1%. On the other hand, the IPCC projections for the impact of rising sea levels look like this:

A report by UN scientists has projected that rising sea levels will inundate 17% of Bangladesh by 2050, making about 30 million people homeless.

Which leads Dr Atiq Rahman to this conclusion:

“The rate at which sediment is deposited and new land is created is much slower than the rate at which climate change and sea level rises are taking place,” he said.

All of these details are reported in the BBC’s story. What does Bolt choose to tell his readers?

Bangladesh growing, warming hype receding
Al Gore wept for the people of Bangladesh, millions of whom would be made homeless – he claimed – as global warming caused rising seas that would drown their low-lying country.

Small problem. Bangladesh is not sinking, but growing:

New research shows Bangladesh may not be as vulnerable to rising sea levels caused by climate change as previously feared, scientists in Dhaka say.

They say satellite images show the country’s landmass is actually growing because of sediment dumped by rivers.

A report by UN scientists has projected that rising sea levels will inundate 17% of Bangladesh by 2050, making about 30 million people homeless.

Satellite images of Bangladesh over the past 32 years show that the country is growing annually by about 20 square kilometres (12.5 square miles), said Maminul Haque Sarker of the Dhaka-based Centre for Environment and Geographic Information Services.

So, he manages to fold Al Gore into the story, which begins to tie it to the broader “don’t believe the hype” narrative Bolt has constructed. Now, how does he handle the response by the IPCC scientist?

Naturally, confronted by the real-world data, one of the IPCC scientists responsible for the scare puts his faith instead in the theory:

Dr Atiq Rahman, a lead author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, told the BBC that there was little in the new research to make him think that their projection needed revising.

Work in the buzzwords – remind readers that it’s a “scare”, and denigrate a scientist as relying on “faith”. Suggest that “real-world data” should trump “theory”, when in fact they are not contradictory – the research data being reported addresses historical change, whereas the theoretical projections (derived from empirical evidence) address the future effects of an entirely different factor. Finish dismissing the expert with this:

And why not. Believer Rahman has a far more reliable way of measuring sea level rises and land growth than mere satellites:

He said that many people living along the coast had observed that sea levels where higher now than in their grandparents’ day.

Include the non-quotation in the report of Dr Rahman’s comment (along with another implication of zealotry – “Believer”) that mentioned some anecdotal reports, while leaving out the next sentence (which I have provided earlier), which would have quoted Rahman noting that the land gains from sediment will not offset the sea level rise. Make him sound as illogical as possible.

Then, finish it off by bringing it back to Gore again:

Is he joking? I think we can safely add this to the long list of Al Gore whoppers. His Nobel Prize should really have been for literature.

So, there is Bolt’s detailed reporting of the new Bangladesh research. A finding that shows a small landmass growth unrelated to climate change gets turned into a rebuttal of the notion that rising sea levels could be a problem for a low-lying country. From this point, it can become another one of the “facts” that Bolt can state in any of his attack pieces on global warming, shopping bags, activist judges, or anything else where teh Left is a target. Leftists think we should respect human rights? These are the same Gore-worshipping bozos who said Bangladesh would sink into the sea.

It starts here, in a self-congratulatory post on how well he understands the role of blogs and how he is reshaping the world:

Take this week alone. If Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery has said global warming will leave Perth parched, I can run a graph showing its dams haven’t been so full in years.

If Al Gore says Bangladesh will drown under rising seas, I can show that satellite measurements prove the country is growing, not shrinking.

If the UN’s climate scientists warn of doom, I can link to a new peer-reviewed study showing none of their predictions seem to be coming true.

If some other alarmist says the North Pole is almost gone, I can run satellite pictures from Wednesday showing much more ice there now than at this time last year.

And thus the patchwork narrative is woven. We will see where the rising lands of Bangladesh pop up next.

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Tags: Climate change