The BBC has abandoned plans for Planet Relief, a ‘telethon’ to raise awareness about climate change, which was being touted as a cross between Comic Relief (an annual BBC cringe-fest in which people give money to various good causes because comedians tell them to) and Al Gore’s mega-flop Live Earth. The report says:

“The decision comes after executives said it was not the BBC’s job to lead opinion on climate change.”

Which is exactly what they’ve been doing for the past several years – so what’s changed? The report admits that:

“…against the backdrop of intense internal debates about impartiality, senior news editors expressed misgivings that Planet Relief was too “campaigning” in nature and would have left the Corporation open to the charge of bias.”

There has indeed been intense internal debate, with various senior BBC figures criticising the corporation for ‘editorialising’ …

Tanveer Ahmed, a psychiatric registrar and a graduate of the University of Sydney, said it was now clear that British universities had inadvertently lent support to the growth of home-grown radicalism by giving in to this kind of campus pressure.

“(These groups) are very assertive, very quick to cry racism, they’ve taken advantage of the impression among some academics that they’re a marginalised, victimised minority,’’ Dr Ahmed said.
“University is often the beginning of their path to greater religiosity and at times radicalism too,’’ he said. Politicised Muslim groups might seek to build their profile by pressuring a university to allow a certain speaker on campus, for example.

Dr Ahmed said another pattern was for these Mulsim groups and leftists to ally themselves.

“I remember going to a protest (in Sydney during the recent Hezbollah-Israel conflict in Lebanon) and seeing environmental groups …

It’s a good thing Leonardo DiCaprio made so much money from “Titanic” a decade ago.

His environmental documentary, “The 11th Hour,” has been a total bust at the box office. After 18 days in release, the film has grossed only $417,913 from ticket sales. The 90-minute snore-fest is playing on 111 screens this week, but that number is likely to be reduced this Friday. The film will be sent to DVD heaven after that.

By comparison, Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim’s similar but far more engaging “An Inconvenient Truth” had already made $3.5 million by its 18th day of release.

I hesitated to say before “11th Hour” actually opened how mind-numbingly dull it was for fear that I would ruin it for those interested in the subject of global warming. But at Cannes, when the film by Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen was …

Just days after we posted urging the BBC to stand up to its climate change critics and go ahead with plans for a series of programmes on global warming it emerges that the corporation has lost its nerve and canned the idea.

According to reports on the BBC website it has scrapped plans for a TV special on climate change, provisionally titled Planet relief and scheduled for early next year, after senior executives and climate change sceptics expressed concerns that it would breach impartiality rules.

The BBC is yet to comment on the reports, but it is hard to interpret the decision as anything but a major climbdown.

To suggest this has anything to do with impartiality is a smokescreen.

If the BBC really thinks all campaigns must be entirely impartial and must not take political or campaigning positions then I for …

Suppose a group of scientists introduced a new cancer drug that they claimed could save many lives. There were side effects, of course, but they claimed that the benefit far out weighed these risks. The government than asked these scientist to form an assessment Committee to evaluate this claim. Colleagues of the group of scientists who introduced the drug are then asked to serve on this Committee, along with the developers.

If this occurred, of course, there would be an uproar of protest! This is a clear conflict of interest.

Yet this is what has happened with the IPCC process! The same individuals who are doing primary research in the role of humans on the climate system are then permitted to lead the assessment! There should be an outcry on this obvious conflict of interest, but to date either few recognize this conflict, or see that …

The BBC has scrapped plans for Planet Relief, a TV special on climate change, the BBC News website has learned.

The decision comes after some senior executives expressed concern that the programme concept might breach impartiality guidelines.

Celebrities such as Ricky Gervais were said to be interested in presenting the show, which would have involved viewers in a mass “switch-off” to save energy.

Environmental campaigners slammed the decision as “cowardice”.

“This decision shows a real poverty of understanding among senior BBC executives about the gravity of the situation we face,” said activist and writer Mark Lynas.

“The only reason why this became an issue is that there is a small but vociferous group of climate ‘sceptics’ lobbying against taking action, so the BBC is behaving like a coward and refusing to take a more consistent stance.”

There has …

By Denis MacShane

Hatred of Jews has reached new heights in Europe and many points south and east of the old continent. Last year I chaired a blue-ribbon committee of British parliamentarians, including former ministers and a party leader, that examined the problem of anti-Semitism in Britain. None of us are Jewish or active in the unending debates on the Israeli-Palestinian question.

Our report showed a pattern of fear among a small number of British citizens—there are around 300,000 Jews in Britain, of whom about a third are observant—that is not acceptable in a modern democracy. Synagogues attacked. Jewish schoolboys jostled on public transportation. Rabbis punched and knifed. British Jews feeling compelled to raise millions to provide private security for their weddings and community events. On campuses, militant anti-Jewish students fueled by Islamist or far-left hate seeking to prevent Jewish students from expressing their opinions.

IBM Corp. has demonstrated how to perform certain computer functions on single atoms and molecules, a discovery that could someday lead to processors the size of a speck of dust, the company said Thursday.

Researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California developed a technique for measuring magnetic anisotropy, a property of the magnetic field that gives it the ability to maintain a particular direction. Being able to measure magnetic anisotropy at the atomic level is a crucial step toward the magnet representing the ones or the zeroes used to store data in binary computer language.

In a second report, researchers at IBM’s lab in Zurich, Switzerland, said they had used an individual molecule as an electric switch that could potentially replace the transistors used in modern chips. The company published both research reports in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The new technologies …