I remember David Bellamy as an iconic figure of natural history tv; up to his thighs in bogs, he’d expound on plantlife in the big booming voice beloved of mimics – who also took to his immense beard. He even lectured at my first univ, tho I never saw him around there (I wasn’t in botany dept).
Later, when he came to Hong Kong, Bellamy pronounced that China could use 100 cities like Hong Kong, which to me seemed odd, as would hold over 600 million people, and Hong Kong is no model of sustainability. Wondered: has the chap been given too many meals by folk connected to big business.
Recently, come across Bellamy pronouncing on global warming as being “poppycock”. Turns out this was two years ago, in Britain’s Daily Mail, in an article that included:
Instead, they have an unshakeable in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement. Humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide – the principal so-called greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up.
They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock.
you can read the full text of the article on the site called (I’m not making this up) junk science:
Global Warming? What a load of poppycock!
– and maybe note that Junk Science has a major aim of debunking environmental science, and is linked to Exxon funding: googlefight
I tried googling for refutations of Bellamy’s baloney; at first unsuccessul, but today come across guff from UK journalist George Monbiot; entertaining, including an exchange of letters, and Bellamy’s points re warming – even his ill-founded and since retracted idea that glaciers are on the whole advancing – indeed refuted.
Monbiot had a go at Bellamy in Goodbye, Kind World:
this prompted letter from Bellamy, and letter from Monbiot, then letter from Bellamy, another from Monbiot; Bellamy for some reason mainly covering pros and cons of wind power and not much re global warming:
Correspondence with David Bellamy
Monbiot followed up with another article:
Junk Science
Climate change denial, as David Bellamy’s claims show, is based on pure hocus pocus
this begins:
For the past three weeks, a set of figures has been working a hole in my mind. On April 16th, New Scientist published a letter from the famous botanist David Bellamy. Many of the world’s glaciers, he claimed, “are not shrinking but in fact are growing. … 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.”(1) His letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers. And it began to worry me. What if Bellamy was right?
He is a scientist, formerly a senior lecturer at the University of Durham. He knows, in other words, that you cannot credibly cite data unless it is well-sourced. Could it be that one of the main lines of evidence of the impacts of global warming – the retreat of the world’s glaciers – was wrong?
includes:
“Despite his scientific reputation, he makes all the mistakes that are possible”. He had cited data which was simply false, failed to provide references, completely misunderstood the scientific context and neglected current scientific literature.(4) The latest studies show unequivocally that most of the world’s glaciers are retreating.(5)
Post edited by: martin, at: 2006/07/24 10:41