Articles Tagged "BBC"

I have just been listening to Uncertain Climate, the first in BBC “Environment Analyst” Roger Harrabin’s two-part Radio 4 investigation into the politics of climate change. The announcer introduced it as a programme “on an unusual aspect of global warming that you won’t have heard in the news headlines”. This was touching, but would only have been accurate had it added the phrase “if your only source for those news headlines is the BBC website”.

Anyhoo, I listened to it so that you don’t have to. The programme was rather what you would have expected the BBC and Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin to make on global warming – which is to say apparent sweet reasonableness and noble questing-for-truth disguising a deal of disingenuousness, special pleading, (presumably) unconscious bias, and economy with the actualité. (Hat tip: Nick Mabbs)

Its slipperiest trick, to my mind, was giving so much space – almost unchallenged but for some (heavily edited) interpolations from an underrepresented Nigel Lawson – to former UN ambassador Sir Crispin Tickell.

When the final lofty analysis of the CAGW scare gets to be written up by Sir Christopher Booker’s or Lord Delingpole’s grandson in about 2050 (by which time it will have become superabundantly clear, as polar bears maraud outside the freezing walls of Carlisle, and Mount Kilimanjaro becomes the favoured skiing destination of Boris Johnson’s descendants, that global cooling is and always was the far greater threat), at least one chapter will be dedicated to the deleterious influence of this pompous, insufferable mandarin in skewing the climate debate with his hysterically overblown claims of the eco disasters awaiting us. (In the 1970s he wrote a book worrying we were all going to be done for by Global Cooling. But Sir Crispin doesn’t much talk about this any more.)

Bob Ward forced to concede on doubts over climate outcomes during interview - best bit !

Thatcher quoted as starting the climate movement in UK (but failed to mention that she changed her mind later)

'Oil funds skeptics' line still played up. What about the trillions going to the warmers Harrabin ?

Only skeptic was Lord Lawson.

Heartland Institute gets a say in next weeks episode. NM.

CLICK to listen to BBC broadcast Uncertain Climate: Episode 1 by Roger Harribin (29 min)

For more, see article from James Delingpole above

Tonight at 8pm I’m going to be on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions. I welcome all the support you can give me but don’t get your hopes up: I can pretty much guarantee I’m going to be rubbish – as I have been on the four or five previous occasions I’ve submitted to this ordeal.

Why am I so rubbish on Any Questions? Well one reason, obviously, is that I’m not a sufficiently experienced or quick-witted broadcaster. I’m not as silvery and slippery and avuncular a politician as my fellow panelist Tony Benn, nor yet as loveable a wag as my second fellow panelist John Sergeant, nor yet as straight-down-the-line bright, informed and likeable as my third fellow panelist Ruth Lea.

So, yes, I’m rubbish – I fully acknowledge that. But I don’t think my rubbishness is the only – or indeed the main reason why I always seem to come across so badly on Any Questions. If it were, then I would also be rubbish when I do US talk radio or shows like Glen Beck and Fox & Friends and, without wishing to blow my own trumpet, I’m not. On US shows I come across as likeable, self-deprecating, witty, informed, honest, funny. I can even come across that way on British TV productions, such as the oft-repeated Channel 4 documentary When Boris Met Dave.

What is it, then about Any Questions that brings out the worst in me?

Well, in three letters: BBC.

Driving back from our annual two-week red-kite shooting holiday in deepest Wales with our friends the Monbiots (George, Mildred, and their delightful daughters Anthropogenina and Arrheniusa) this weekend, I tuned into BBC Radio 4’s Any Answers. (This is the show where ordinary members of the public phone in to give their views on matters arising from Any Questions – which I’m on this Friday, of which more anon.)

One of the questions had been about climate change and three callers were offered the chance to air their views. The first believed Man Made CO2 was definitely going to drive global temperatures up by between 4 degrees and 6 degrees C by the end of the century, that it was going to be catastrophic, but there was nothing we can do. The second and third disagreed violently: not with with the assumption of Man-Made Eco Disaster – they took that part as a given – but with the outrageous suggestion that something couldn’t be done to avert climate change. Of course it could: these people were angry and they wanted urgent action by yesterday at the very latest.

Where does the BBC find these people and are they representative of the country as a whole? Well we know the answer to the second part is “No.” Contra BBC Radio 4’s Any Answers, 100 per cent of British people do not believe in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). An IPSOS Mori poll in February found that 31 per cent of those surveyed believed the “Climate Change” problem had been exaggerated, while six per cent said it wasn’t happening at all.

Global climate change talks have moved backwards since last year, say negotiators from both rich and poor nations at discussions in Germany.

The US envoy said some countries had "walked away" from commitments made at Copenhagen last year to contain greenhouse gas emissions. But the top UN climate official, Christiana Figueres, said progress had been made towards an eventual deal.

Negotiators are working towards the next climate summit in November. There is one last preparatory meeting, in Tianjin, China, in October, to draft a negotiating text before the summit in Cancun, Mexico.

"At this point, I am very concerned," said chief US negotiator Jonathan Pershing at the conclusion of a week of talks in Bonn.

"Unfortunately, what we have seen over and over this week is that some countries are walking back from progress made in Copenhagen, and what was agreed there." Mr Pershing said some of the major developing countries were backing away from commitments to slow the growth of their greenhouse gas emissions, saying such controls should only apply to industrialised countries.

He warned that record global temperatures, devastating floods in Pakistan and forest fires in Russia were "consistent with the kind of changes we could expect from climate change, and they will get worse if we don't act quickly".

Click source to read more!!

On 17th November 2009, over a thousand emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) were published on the internet triggering the scandal that has now become known as Climategate.

Between 8th and 18 of December, hopes of a globally binding agreement on carbon emissions reduction died at the Copenhagen Summit. On 3rd December, the UEA appointed Sir Muir Russell to conduct an ‘independent’ review of the activities at the CRU.

And on 6th January 2010, Professor Richard Tait, a BBC trustee and chairman of their flagship Editorial Standards Committee (ESC) announced a review of the accuracy and impartiality of science coverage, with particular attention to climate change, and a report was scheduled for Spring 2011. For climate sceptics this was a timely and welcome development. Over the last few years, bloggers have been reporting on an apparent synergy that exists between the BBC and the environmental movement which has led to blatant distortion in reporting climate change.

During the following few weeks, an extremely rushed inquiry into Climategate by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee took place and, while giving evidence to the Committee, the Vice Chancellor of the university, Professor Edward Acton, announced yet another review, specifically concerned with the scientific research undertaken by the CRU. This was to be chaired by Lord Oxburgh.

The UK government is to stop funding the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), its independent environmental watchdog and advisory body.

Set up by the Labour government in 2000, the SDC is among a number of green bodies to be abolished.

The news comes on the day the SDC, with a budget of £3m, published a report saying Whitehall had saved £60-70m as a result of introducing green measures.

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman announced the details in a statement.

"This government is committed to being the greenest government ever, and the Structural Reform Plan published last week sets out how Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) will play its part in achieving this," she said.

Click source to read FULL report

......I have, though, uncovered many inconsistencies - the sort of inconsistencies that look like informality to the science authorities, and conspiracy to climate sceptics.

I conclude that although many scientists say their work has benefited from the public debate generated by Climategate, the scientific establishment has not fully adjusted to the inevitability of scrutiny from the blogosphere and its demands for increased "democratisation" of science.

I have found inconsistencies in two main areas.

First is the remit for the Oxburgh panel itself, which was set up by the UEA in conjunction with the Royal Society and christened the Science Assessment Panel.

The Commons science committee said the panel led by Lord Oxburgh would examine the validity of the climate science at UEA.

The MPs drew this conclusion from evidence they took in committee. This stirred excitement among climate sceptics.

The scientist behind the controversial 'hockey stick' graph has said it was 'somewhat misplaced' to make his work an 'icon of the climate change debate'.

Professor Michael Mann plotted a graph in the late 1990s that showed global temperatures for the last 1,000 years. It showed a sharp rise in temperature over the last 100 years as man made carbon emissions also increased, creating the shape of a hockey stick.

The graph was used by Al Gore in his film 'An Inconvenient Truth' and was cited by the United Nations body the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as evidence of the link between fossil fuel use and global warming.

But the graph was questioned by sceptics who pointed out that is it impossible to know for certain the global temperature going back beyond modern times because there were no accurate readings.

The issue became a central argument in the climate change debate and was dragged into the 'climategate' scandal, as the sceptics accused Prof Mann and his supporters of exaggerating the extent of global warming.

Let’s just remind ourselves, shall we, why the BBC is constitutionally incapable of reporting on global warming in a fair, balanced or indeed honest way. On 26 January 2006, the BBC’s not-notably-sceptical Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin organised a conference at BBC TV Centre called Climate Change – The Challenge To Broadcasting. (Hat tip: Nick Mabbs)

Perhaps it should really have been called The Challenge To Impartiality. It was co-hosted by the director of television Jana Bennett, the director of news Helen Boaden and held under the auspices of the BBC and two environmental lobby groups – The International Broadcasting Trust and the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme. The keynote speaker was the fanatically warmist ex-Royal Society President, Robert May, who proceded to assure the audience of around 30 key BBC staff and 30 invited guests, most of them environmental activists, that – as Bob Carter puts it in his superb Climate: The Counter Consensus – “the science supporting global warming was so certain that it was the BBC’s public duty to cease providing airtime to alternative viewpoints.” The BBC has been hideously biased in its coverage of AGW ever since.

Tonight’s Panorama is a case in point. Here is a blog by the programme’s producer Mike Rudin describing the piece of glib Warmist propaganda he is foisting on the licence-fee paying public this evening.

See if you can spot the weaselry in this summing-up paragraph:

There is genuine uncertainty and disagreement about the exact scale and speed of human-induced global warming and crucially what we should do about it. But I was surprised to find how much agreement there is on the fundamental science.