RIP David Bellamy

[IanDG]

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/dec/11/tv-naturalist-david-bellamy-dies-aged-86?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1576091180

[hellymedic]

RIP David.

[fuaran]

He was an inspiring ecologist. Then he became a climate change denier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eOFYAg_DPw

[Hot Flatus]

Jeez I thought he'd karked it years ago

[Wowbagger]

A vewitable wiot of wavenous weptiles

[Steph]

I met him once, on a train from London. He was getting quite vocal about the ecological damage done by air travel.

I didn't mention I was returning from a Uni interview for an aero-engineering degree...

[Wowbagger]

What was he saying, given that he was a denier?

[SteveC]

Saw him live twice. Once when I was at school and he came to our British Association of Young Scientists group. Very inspirational, made me consider his course at Durham (although in the end I didn't do biology and wouldn't have got in there anyway) and once, many years later when he was getting political. Much of what he said was good sense, but I did disagree with some of his solutions.

But the world will be a duller place without him.

[Steph]

What was he saying, given that he was a denier?

This was 77 or 78, and he was actually talking about CO2 output as being harmful, rather loudly.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Did he actually deny climate change was happening? I thought he agreed it was but doubted it would play out in the way people were saying at the time, whatever that was.

A vewitable wiot of wavenous weptiles

[Wowbagger]

Apparently he changed his mind - twice!

In his foreword to the 1989 book The Greenhouse Effect,[22] Bellamy wrote:

The profligate demands of humankind are causing far reaching changes to the atmosphere of planet Earth, of this there is no doubt. Earth's temperature is showing an upward swing, the so-called greenhouse effect, now a subject of international concern. The greenhouse effect may melt the glaciers and ice caps of the world causing the sea to rise and flood many of our great cities and much of our best farmland.

Bellamy's later statements on global warming indicate that he subsequently changed his views completely. A letter he published on 16 April 2005 in New Scientist asserted that a large proportion (555 of 625) of the glaciers being observed by the World Glacier Monitoring Service were advancing, not retreating.[23] George Monbiot of The Guardian tracked down Bellamy's original source for this information and found that it was from discredited data originally published by Fred Singer, who claimed to have obtained these figures from a 1989 article in the journal Science: however, Monbiot proved that this article had never existed.[24] Bellamy subsequently accepted that his figures on glaciers were wrong, and announced in a letter to The Sunday Times in 2005 that he had "decided to draw back from the debate on global warming",[25] although Bellamy jointly authored a paper with Jack Barrett in the refereed Civil Engineering journal of the Institution of Civil Engineers, entitled "Climate stability: an inconvenient proof" in May 2007.[26]

His opinions changed the way some organisations viewed Bellamy. The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts stated in 2005 "We are not happy with his line on climate change",[27] and Bellamy, who had been president of The Wildlife Trusts since 1995,[9] was succeeded by Aubrey Manning in November 2005.[28] Bellamy complained that his views on global warming resulted in the rejection of programme ideas by the BBC.[29]

[Cudzoziemiec]

But that was 2005. We've achieved so much since then. About half a degree.

[Wowbagger]

How active has he been since then? He was 86. That means he was 72 when he decided to "draw back from the debate".

[mattc]

He was an inspiring ecologist. Then he became a climate change denier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eOFYAg_DPw

I think you can be both.

(it sounds to me like he just interpreted the facts/figures differently - most of us would say "wrongly"! - but he clearly cared about the planet. He wasn't a selfish Clarkson-type. IMO )

[Wowbagger]

From memory, he was very useful to the climate-change-denying tabloids for quite some time.