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Voyage Of The Damned Fools

The BBC reports today that a US ice-breaker, the Polar Star, has now been called in to rescue not only the trapped Akademik Shokalskiy, but also the Chinese rescue ship, the  Xue Long, which transferred those passengers from one to the other, and is now itself trapped. In other words, the ship which rescued the passengers from the trapped ship by flying them in a helicopter to another ship, which nearly got trapped, is trapped. There’s a Monty Python sketch in there somewhere.

The reality is that two ships, along with their crew (22 on the Russian ship, and 111 on the Chinese vessel), have gotten trapped in the ice due – allegedly – to the negligence of Prof. Chris Turney, who was out there to prove that the ice was, er, melting. I say “allegedly” because it’s pretty obvious that there will be legal repercussions from all this, and I’ll let all our lurking lawyers and journalists and non-lurking journalists go threaten Anthony Watts and others for prejudicing court proceedings instead of wasting our time. This post is about the BBC’s coverage (and cover-up in process) of the whole fiasco.

Yes, I know the ice melting was only one part of the official research reasons for the trip, which included studies of various wildlife and marine habitats. But the focus was on how Climate Change – which they all believe is caused by human activity – is affecting those things, just like the supposedly melting ice. Curiously, as some here have noticed, that purpose came and went throughout the BBC’s coverage of the story.

The Aurora Australis has finally been told it can head home with its new passengers, and will eventually be allowed to go back and finish what it was supposed to be doing: resupplying Australia’s research base, Casey Station. Hopefully nobody else in the area will need rescuing by an icebreaker, because the Xue Long won’t be able to help. The US Coast Guard icebreaker is similarly abandoning its own proper mission, as even the BBC reports, to resupply the US research station on Ross Island. 133 people are stuck, and who knows how many more actual scientists and their research have been severely inconvenienced by this tourist trip. Or was it a research trip? We’ll see.

The BBC is currently describing the Akademik Shokalskiy as a “Russian research vessel”. If and when it gets freed eventually (there’s still the possibility that the ice will crush the hull), its next scheduled task is to take a group of tourists around the Antarctic Peninsula. See, it originally was an actual research vessel, so the BBC is being “accurate” as usual. Only it’s retired from that and has been refitted as a tourist ship. The Expeditions Online website lists it as an “Expedition Ship”, and the amenities look appealing.

The Akademik Shokalskiy is a fully ice-strengthened expedition vessel built in 1984 for polar and oceanographic research. This class of vessel is world renowned for polar exploration, because of its strength, maneuverability and small passenger numbers. The Shokalskiy provides comfortable accommodation in double and twin cabins with private facilities. All cabins have outside windows and ample storage space. On board there is a combined bar/library lounge area and a dedicated lecture room, where the science team and expedition staff will present a programme of talks.

Check out the website and you’ll see its “NOTICE TO REPORTERS” that they’re not the operators of the ship and are merely a booking agent. They know there will be legal ramifications and want to make sure nobody includes them as a defendant in any lawsuit.

Before we get to the inevitable legal repercussions, let’s examine just how cavalier with the truth the BBC has been during this whole saga. Aside from who is at fault here, there’s the question of the overall purpose of this little adventure. The official reason we’ve been fed by the BBC is that it was to retrace the footsteps of Douglas Mawson’s original tremendous scientific expedition to the region. We’re meant to ignore Turney’s own “Science Case” for the trip is all about the melting ice, and how Climate Change (and we all know there’s only one kind and one cause for these people) affects the wildlife and ocean habitats. All the other stuff is a sideshow, an aegis under which to do this.

Turney has written a book about Mawson (a free signed copy goes to anyone who sends him $400. A measly $200 will only get you the t-shirt. Hopefully all “expedition members” who paid $8000 minimum will at least get one of those for their trouble.). Mawson, of course, deserves all the respect in the world for his achievements. His truly scientific exploration essentially opened the world’s mind up to Antarctica. There’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting to retrace his steps and sort of duplicate his tests in celebration of the 100th anniversary of his pretty amazing expedition. When one considers that he barely survived the ordeal but through his own strength and initiative lived to tell about it, and compares his experience to the whining from certain members of today’s expedition, there’s much to discuss about what’s become of us as a species.

Unfortunately, Turney, who has done some proper science and is an experienced expedition leader, he set off expecting to find less ice. In addition to the terrific and often amusing coverage from Anthony Watts, Paul Homewood has been following this silly saga, and he too notices some BBC dishonesty. In this case, he’s calling out both Turney and the BBC:

BBC In Warmist Fantasyland

There have been various attempts to blame the debacle on global warming, but this one really is nonsensical.

According to the expedition report, filed by the Guardian:

“Direct access from the sea has been impossible for the past four years, however, ever since a 75-mile-long iceberg called B09B grounded itself in the entrance to Commonwealth Bay. A thick band of sea ice has since built up around the iceberg, sticking fast to the land and blocking ships from getting to Boat Harbour, where Mawson moored the Aurora in January 1912.”

And Chris Turney, leader of the expedition states that:

“The thick chaotic surface we see around the Shokalskiy is consistent with the idea that this ice is several years old and is considerably more difficult to break through by icebreaker than single year ice.”

NSIDC are quite clear just what sea ice is:

Sea ice is frozen seawater that floats on the ocean surface. Blanketing millions of square kilometers, sea ice forms and melts with the polar seasons, affecting both human activity and biological habitat. In the Arctic, some sea ice persists year after year, whereas almost all Southern Ocean or Antarctic sea ice is “seasonal ice,” meaning it melts away and reforms annually.

A scientist ignored other scientists, because of his own religious beliefs. And the BBC is enabling him to cover it up.

On Dec. 26, BBC journalist Andrew (Bad) Luck-Baker reported on how the science was continuing while they were stuck in the ice. In a moment of honesty, he admitted the Warmist intent of the expedition:

The goal of the modern day Australasian Antarctic Expedition is to repeat many of the original measurements and studies, to see how facets of the environment have changed over the past century. This passage of time coincides with warming and climate change in Antarctica.

Then we get to another level of spin. There’s also the question about who are all those other passengers who were not crew or scientists or PhD students or Guardinistas or Beeboids (or Google marketing mavens or Turney’s own family). Further down there’s this:

In addition to the Russian crew of 22, the expedition team consists of 18 professional scientists from Australia and New Zealand, and 22 volunteer science assistants. They are members of the public, ranging in age from their 20s to their 70s. They paid to join the scientific adventure.

So not eco-tourists, but “volunteer science assistants”.

A report on Jan. 2 stated that one of the goals of the expedition was “to track how quickly the Antarctic’s sea ice was disappearing”. So let’s not have any more denial that this wasn’t a Warmist expedition with a goal of “proving” their theory, rather than a simple historical retracing of Mawson’s journey.

On Dec. 28, it was a “scientific mission ship”. No mention of tourists, although they quoted one of them as a “science volunteer”. Actually, it was the same guy and the same quote (Bad) Luck-Baker included in the previous report. Didn’t he have time to speak to anyone else? Or were they all too busy with the yoga and knot-tying and songwriting?

Two days later, either he or the other BBC contributor (pulling double duty for the Guardian as well, naturally), Alok Jha, filmed “Expedition Member” Terry Gostlow telling the folks back home that they it was all “good fun” and they were hoping to get back home soon. Gostlow is not listed as either a Science Leader or a PhD student on the Spirit of Mawson website, so one assumes he’s another one of those paying volunteers.

On the same day, either (Bad) Luck-Baker, Jha, or a desk-bound editor filed a report when they learned that the Xue Long was on its way with the helicopter.

The Russian-flagged research vessel Akademik Shokalskiy has been stuck in ice for nearly a week. It is carrying 74 scientists, tourists and crew.

Oops. On the same page, there’s an inset extra commentary from (Bad) Luck-Baker, where he refers to “research volunteers”. A different BBC report from the same day also refers to tourists.

On rescue day Jan. 2, though, the BBC reported that “the scientists and tourists were now all aboard the ship Aurora Australis.”

Oops again. So we’ve gone from “science volunteers” to “expedition member” to “research volunteers” to “tourists”, all in the space of a week.

I’m sounding sarcastic about this because the BBC’s inconsistency is rather telling. If they were true paying field assistants, actually involved somehow in helping the scientific work, nobody would dream of calling them tourists. I’m saying the BBC seems uninterested in letting you know much these paying customers were contributing in between attending lectures and praying to Gaia, not because there’s no such thing as science volunteers, paying or otherwise. In fact, I’m well aware that this is a very common thing in a number of scientific disciplines. Many archaeology and palaeontology projects simply wouldn’t be possible without lots of people paying their own way to help sort artifacts, spend hours in the heat painstakingly brushing away dirt, and even make the tea. These things are advertised regularly things in science and history magazines.

The fact that the BBC – an organization known to have the promotion of Warmism as a directive from the top – sometimes refers to the paying customers as tourists tells us that it’s not quite the same thing as people paying their way to help excavate some dinosaur bones or catalog a mind-numbing amount of 5000 year-old ostracons.

The reason I’m looking at these paying passengers is because this appears to be the deciding factor in what happened. Now that people are becoming aware that hell and lots of money will be paid, and the lawyers are sharpening their pencils, blame is being placed on Turney not only for an apparent lack of preparation (it seems that he didn’t make sure they had adequate weather reports), but for indulging his paying eco-tourist customers instead of heeding the ship captain’s warnings and getting out of harm’s way while there was still time, the BBC has rushed in to help with his defense.

Meanwhile Prof Chris Turney, co-leader of the AAE 2013, has defended the scientific value of the expedition and rejected claims it was a “tourist trip” hampered by poor preparation.

Writing in the UK’s Observer newspaper, he said the trip had been struck by bad luck as opposed to human error. He said it was an important scientific expedition and its success would ultimately be measured by peer-reviewed studies.

I’m sure Turney is very eager to reject those claims. Whatever he publishes from this expedition will only be reviewed by peers who already agree with his conclusions, but that’s neither here nor there. The problem for him is that it’s not just people the BBC will claim have a vested interest in damaging the reputation of Warmists saying it was due to human error: one of his own passengers has said it. The Australian Green politician, Janet Rice, said this on her own blog (h/t WUWT):

The third drama of the day is the one which is still unfolding. Because of the Argo mishap we got off late, and had one less vehicle to ferry people to and fro. I’m told the Captain was becoming rather definite late in the afternoon that we needed to get everyone back on board ASAP because of the coming weather and the ice closing in. As I write we are continuing to make extremely slow progress through what looks like a winter alpine snow field – it’s yet another surreal part of this journey that we are in a ship trying to barge our way through here! I’m sure the Captain would have been much happier if we had got away a few hours earlier.

In other words, Turney ignored the advice of his captain – someone who is an experienced  professional and knows the area and its conditions very, very well – in favor of indulging his science volunteers/research volunteers/expedition members/tourists. Read the whole blog and you’ll see that, while at least one actual scientist was taking seal tissue samples, the paying customers were there to commune with the penguins and have nice day out. Turney also wrote at a few days before this that he was surprised to see some ice move in so quickly. A pretty cavalier approach from start to finish is in evidence in other blog posts collected by one of Watt’s readers here.

The Argo to which she refers is one of three amphibious all-terrain research vehicles, which they damaged by towing it back in haste. Who’s going to pay for that? And who do you think paid the way for a Green politician? She sure wasn’t there to help constituents. She’s a Warmist and was there to support the cause.

There were others there not for science but to support the cause. Google did one of their Google Doodle competitions, and awarded two free trips to teachers whose students sent in the winning entries. They were there to do lesson plans and video chats to promote Warmism to children. No lesson plans have been published yet. Google also sent along their Australia/New Zealand branding and marketing manager (listed as part of the Science Team!). For Warmism.

To sum up, we have evidence that the expedition leader had a pre-conceived notion to expect less ice, wasn’t completely prepared for everything, and had a lot of tourists on board to complicate matters and placed an apparently undue burden on the expedition itself. Allegedly, of course. Notice, though, that the BBC has reported precisely none of this. They have, however, reported Turney’s surprise and excuses for the ice trapping them.

The BBC has been misleading about the reasons for the trip, the nature of many of the passengers, and the underlying as well as overt cause of their predicament. All in the name of supporting their Warmist agenda. They assigned two journalists, including World Service senior science editor (Bad) Luck-Baker, to follow the scientists around to tell you how the wildlife and environment was responding to climate change. Period. They say so  right here.

Alok Jha and Andrew Luck-Baker continue to follow the scientists on the ongoing Australasian Antarctic Expedition 2013. They go out on fieldwork trips with the researchers studying how the wildlife that lives in this inhospitable environment is responding to climate change.

All the history stuff and retracing of Mawson’s footstep was window dressing for the Warmist agenda. In case there are any lingering doubts, the top listing on the Supporters page of the expedition website is Turney’s own Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales. I imagine not a few Australian citizens are going to question their government’s handing out taxpayer money for this as well.

You know what the BBC isn’t reporting? That the ice is, in fact, not melting the way they claim, and Global Warming isn’t ruining it. It turns out that the models predicting the horror show were not based on proper data, and so overestimated everything. You know that iceberg that Turney blames for trapping them? The one which AGW was supposedly causing to calve? In reality, actual scientists have discovered that it’s been ground away on an underwater ridge. Even what he blames for what he wrongly blames is wrong. BBC Science editor Jonathan Amos wrote about that underwater ridge once, but I think he got away with it. I can’t even find it now.

More recently, just as the whole expedition coverage was kicking off, Amos managed to report that satellite data showed ice loss in West Antarctica, nowhere near Mawson’s Hut, in order to reinforce the dogma that we were all going to be doomed by rising sea levels. He wisely refrained from openly blaming AGW there. He’s done more reports on the new satellite data showing a microscopic rise in sea levels due to a little melting Antarctic ice, but doesn’t remind everyone that it’s not due to AGW, which he ought to be doing at every opportunity so that people don’t get the wrong idea. Of course, that wrong idea is the correct one the BBC wants their audience to have.

The entire thing was expected to give a boost to the whole Warmist agenda, so the BBC eagerly assigned two people to go along, and spent who knows how much of your license fee to do it. Once the whole thing went wrong and everyone started to find out it was half science, half eco-tourism, all with a dedicated agenda, they played around with the truth in order to keep the image of historical reenactment going. I fear that information will not be available via FOI requests, because journalism. In any case, it’s your license fee hard at work.

I suspect Prof. Turney might get thrown under the bus by people who see this foolish voyage as damaging to the cause. Let’s see how the BBC covers it.

 

 

Holier Than Thou

The BBC, together with the Telegraph entrapped MP Patrick Mercer, and managed to get him to sign up to what he thought was an agreement with some lobbyists…he would get some money for asking some questions for them in Parliament.

A lot of effort obviously went into the scheme and they got the result they wanted….an MP apparently willing to compromise his position for money.

The BBC didn’t seem so keen to investigate Tim Yeo even when Guido had done all the foot work making allegations of a conflict of interest between Yeo’s position as Chair of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Select Committee and his business interests in ‘green’ industry…Guido claiming:

A serious contender for villain of the year has to be Tim Yeo. The conflicted chairman of the Energy and Climate Change select committee has time and time again flown the green flag this year, insisting that it is mere coincidence he makes over £100,000-a-year from his own renewable energy investments. Just because a conflict of interest is declared, it is still a conflict of interest…

Yeo was forced to distance himself from some businesses and to declare the rest. 

But that is a side issue really…one of the biggest conflicts of interest is in fact that of the BBC itself and its coverage, well, promotion, of man made climate change.

The BBC’s coverage and active persuasion has led to enormous changes in the way people see green issues and has helped persuade politicians to adopt a radical green vision for Britain…one that the Sunday Times today (paywalled) says will make Britain’s energy the most expensive in the world….with all that entails…the fuel poverty, deaths from cold weather as people switch off their heating, and the hugely detrimental effect of the massive cost to business and homes.

Ironically perhaps, Tim Yeo is still at the heart of the problems as on Tuesday he will press for even more rigorous pollution reduction targets…ie CO2 reduction…..ensuring it is ‘green’ energy that has to be utilised to meet those targets. 

The BBC knows this…but again makes no comment about his business interests….or indeed of the BBC’s pension interests in green businesses.

 

The full glorious story of the BBC’s own involvement in ‘secret lobbying’ on behalf of the climate change movement is laid out by James Delingpole in the Telegraph…linking to Bishop Hill and Tony Newbery.

This is Bishop Hill’s submission to the equally compromised BBC Trust review of the BBC’s science coverage carried out by Prof. Steven Jones….a man who is an ardent supporter of the AGW theory and someone who owes his career to the BBC….no conflict of interest there.

 

This is Delingpole’s article in the Telegraph:

Why the BBC cannot be trusted on ‘Climate Change’: the full story

Thanks to the combined efforts of the great Bishop Hill and the similarly wondrous Tony Newbery at the Harmless Sky blog, we now have the most comprehensive and thoroughly damning account yet of how the BBC became such an important part of a sinister political campaign to promote climate change alarmism. I recommend reading their report in full at either of their sites linked above. But here below are some of the highlights.

It is to Professor Jones (Steve) that Newbery and the Bishop have addressed their submission.

They conclude:

‘It would appear that, through the activities of CMEP [Cambridge Media and Environment Programme – the Harrabin outfit which deserves a blog of its own…] BBC Newsgathering has got very much too close to government, environmental activism, and the climate research community for its reputation for impartiality and accuracy to be preserved with regard to the science of climate change.’

 

 

Perhaps it is time someone investigated the BBC’s involvement and conflicts of interest with the green lobby.

THE REAL BBC SCANDAL…

Excellent piece by Melanie Phillips well worth a read if you have not already seen it….

“The BBC has expended considerable effort, not to mention a very large amount of licence fee-payers’ money, upon suppressing evidence of its biased reporting.

In 2004, prompted by persistent concerns about anti-Israel bias, a report was written by broadcasting executive Malcolm Balen on the BBC’s Middle East coverage. The BBC has spent more than a third of a million pounds resisting legal efforts to force it to publish this report, which remains secret to this day.

In a report published in 2007, the BBC claimed that the previous year it had held a ‘high level seminar’ on climate change attended by ‘some of the best scientific experts’. As a result, said this report, the BBC had

‘come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change]’.

A member of the public, Tony Newbery, mounted a five year attempt under Freedom of Information law to force the BBC to divulge the names of the ‘scientific experts’ who had persuaded it into this astounding abandonment of objectivity in reporting on the issue of climate change.

The BBC spent thousands of pounds blocking Mr Newbery’s action, which finally failed last Friday, implacably refusing to make those names publicly available. Now we know why.

For an enterprising blogger, Maurizio Morabito, has uncovered the list of these 28 names through searching an internet cache on the website of the International Broadcasting Trust, which helped set up the seminar with the BBC.  This list shows that in fact only a tiny number of these secret participants were actually current scientists – and most or all of those were climate change alarmists, including the director of the Tyndall Centre which was at the eye of the infamous ‘Climategate’ email storm. The rest of them were activists or journalists.

So the BBC censored its journalism on climate change on the basis of a seminar of climate change partisans, zealots and assorted distinctly unauthoritative others, whom it wholly misleadingly described as some of the ‘best scientific experts’.  It then spent thousands of pounds of public money trying to conceal this fact on the spurious grounds — as with the Balen report – that journalistic processes had to remain private…”

The BBC Is Indispensable…If Only I Knew What For

Let’s strip the BBC of its automatic right to the license fee and its status as ‘State Public Broadcaster’…let’s put that out to tender…’privatise’ the BBC….if it won’t change let’s change it!

 

The BBC is no longer the upright pillar of the community that it is supposed to be, and indeed still thinks it is.

It is rotten and corrupt to the core…and that rottenness starts at the very top.

Ironically  the BBC is in a similar position to Jimmy Savile, once highly regarded, respected and celebrated for good works but now brought low by the unexpected and swift unearthing of their misdemeanours which have finally caught up with them both.

The BBC is though, fighting a bitter rearguard action still trying to keep under wraps its dirty little secrets but at least for now the magic has gone and the veil lifted from the Public’s eyes and they can see ‘Auntie’ is perhaps not the lovable old girl she pretends to be.

As she hands out sweets to the kids she is throwing stones at their cat and kicking the dog….only now she has been caught doing it.  Whether that translates into demands for more openness, transparency and accountability and those demands result in concrete action by the BBC is the question.

The Mail reports that trust in the BBC has fallen below 50%…from a BBC report…

‘Public trust in BBC falls below 50% after Savile
Almost half of licence fee payers no longer trust the BBC in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, according to a poll for one of its own networks.
A survey commissioned by Radio Five Live revealed the public’s faith in the broadcaster has plunged, with 47 per cent admitting they did not believe it was ‘trustworthy’.
Just 45 per cent said they felt it was trustworthy, while the remaining eight per cent did not give an opinion.’

 

Even those across the Pond have noticed and are questioning the truth of claims of ignorance made by Mark Thompson:

‘Soon after his death, a BBC current affairs program called “Newsnight” began an investigation into Savile’s sexual proclivities. Yet despite getting at least one woman on tape who said she had been molested by Savile, the piece was killed. Then, earlier this month, a BBC competitor, ITV, ran a devastating exposé of Savile. The ITV investigation raised subsequent questions about whether the BBC had covered up Savile’s wrongdoing.
Plainly, the answer is yes. What is far less certain is how high the cover-up went.’

It certainly does look like an attempt at a cover up was put into operation….when that failed it seemed as if the top management then passed the buck….because the ‘buck’ always flows downhill…and those below, such as Peter Rippon, were set up to take the blame.

The thing is that cover ups seem to be what the BBC does…far from being open and transparent and accountable it does everything it can to prevent its inner workings and thoughts being revealed.

We probably all know that they have spent a great deal of time and £300,000 preventing the Balen Report being made available to the Public.  Why?  It can only be to ‘protect’ the reputation of the BBC…or rather the reputations, jobs, careers and pensions of journalists and management involved in reporting from the Middle East…reporting which is relentlessly anti-Israeli and thereby creating the legitimacy for terrorism and attempts to de-legitimise Israel as a nation state.

Just how much damage would such revelations do to the BBC’s image and its ability to report world wide?  Its journalists would always be regarded as no longer impartial or neutral and their ability to report would be severely limited.

So the BBC attempted to cover up Savile‘s behaviour, they have covered up anti-Israeli reports that lead to increased violence against Jews, and now they carry on in that vein by hiding the identity of people who influenced the BBC’s decision to accept man made global warming as the  ‘settled science’  and consequently to silence the sceptical critics of that theory.

It must surely be of critical importance  to know the identity of those people….who were they, where did they work and what was their interest in the subject…and what did they have to gain by having global warming presented as man made?  The pro-AGW advocates scored a huge victory in their propaganda drive in capturing the BBC whose authority, credibility and the power to influence and change people’s perceptions and actions regarding climate change is immense….that is why it is important to know who benefits , who persuaded the BBC to change its policy and what they broadcast.

All those questions go to the very heart of the matter…. the BBC cannot be allowed to make ‘game-changing’ decisions about what information they broadcast to the world without revealing exactly why they did that…it is not good enough to say that they listened to ‘expert scientists’…….that ‘advice’ should be there for everyone to see and judge as to its veracity and credibility.

We know that in fact many of those present were not scientists but from business, NGOs and environmental pressure groups……all with vested interests in getting the BBC to accept their version of ‘Truth’….Just how many sceptics were there, how many putting an alternative view?

The BBC are right now engaged in a legal battle to keep those identities hidden:

The BBC’s Helen Boaden was on the witness stand today as Tony Newbery makes a last-ditch attempt to force the BBC to disclose who attended its mysterious seminar on climate change in 2006 (background here). If the Information Tribunal throws his case out, it’s probably the end of the line.

A squad of Beeb legal staff,  including two barristers, crammed into a small court room to support the £354,000-a-year news chief against her opponent, a North Wales pensioner who was accompanied only by his wife. The case is a six-year freedom of information battle in which the BBC is refusing to disclose who attended a seminar it held in 2006.
This seminar is historically significant. The BBC’s global reputation for news reporting stems from its unshakable impartiality; even in wartime its commitment to maintaining evenhandedness has occasionally enraged British politicians (and sometimes servicemen). Following that 2006 seminar, however, the corporation made a decision to abandon impartiality when covering climate change – and that’s according to the BBC Trust. This was an unprecedented decision for the BBC in peacetime.
On what basis was this made? In June 2007, the Trust, which governs the gigantic publicly-funded broadcaster, published a report with the gnomic title From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel [PDF]. That document gives us this clue:
The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].
Blogger Tony Newbery was curious as to the identity of these “scientific experts”, and filed a Freedom of Information Act request, as he outlines here in an introduction to the saga.

A decision as momentous as this must surely be accounted for and cannot be made  behind closed doors.

To do so and then to keep those doors closed, not only with this but with Balen and initially with Savile,  illustrates how far the BBC has descended into the world of deceit and politics. It is rotten to the core and that rottenness starts at the very top, with the BBC Trust who we can see to be not just a toothless tiger but a tiger which has no interest in performing its natural function……the ranks of management, from Mark Thompson down are no less wanting and are all too ready to hide significant wrongdoing at the BBC in order to protect the BBC’s reputation and of course their own skins.

Unless there is complete openness at the BBC its proclaimed values of impartiality, accountability and transparency are worthless.  If the BBC cannot be trusted, and it is patently obvious that it cannot be, then what is the point of it?

It has shown itself to be politically corrupt, working hand in hand with Labour, it has allowed its senior journalists to champion causes that promote a left wing agenda such as Occupy and the climate change lobby, it has worked to marginalize Right Wing commentators and politicians and policies by labelling them racist or just plain ‘nasty’, it has worked to censure and demonise those who argue against mass immigration, it has sought to silence anyone who has anything critical to say about Islam, it even now defends the European Union and quietly supports those who agitate for Britain to join.

The BBC is corrupt and rotten to the core.  It may produce some great programmes about animals or art but that doesn’t by any measure mean it should be allowed to pervert the democratic process by attempting to ‘manufacture’ the  Public’s social, cultural and political  perceptions, views and responses.

The BBC needs new rules on disclosure and it needs a completely separate body that looks to regulate and control it….the BBC Trust is a body that does not engender the slightest confidence in its ability or desire to hold the BBC to account.

 

Or strip it of its license fee and put that out to tender.

Let’s see if there is a real alternative to the left wing propaganda that passes for news and current affairs on the State Broadcaster and its complacent and arrogant presenters and journalists.

An Expert Is Someone Who Knows More And More About Less And Less.

‘The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: ‘l don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.”Don’t you think God knows the facts?’  Bethe asked.   ’Yes,’ said Szilard. ‘He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.

 

The BBC continues its cover up of wrong doing and the obscuring of the evidence trail when asked to be fully transparent and accountable for its actions.

We have had the Balen Report and its evidence of anti-Israeli reporting kept under lock and key, now the BBC has decided that the ‘expert’ people who influenced one of the most important strategic changes in its stance towards reporting climate change should be kept anonymous….as related by Bishop Hill.

‘My long struggle to find out who attended the BBC’s seminar on climate change has come to an end (if you are not familiar with the story, see here). Readers here will recall that the seminar appears to have been attended by a bunch of NGO people, who decided that there was a consensus on climate change that meant that sceptics could be sidelined in the corporation’s output. The BBC Trust then falsely reported that the decision had been made by leading scientists.

My FOI request, dating back several years, has been repeatedly turned down and the appeal has gone all the way to the Information Tribunal, a rather more formal process than the Information Commission, being overseen by a judge.’

 

Bishop Hill also releases his submission to the Leveson inquiry which includes a section on Roger Harrabin’s CMEP which he ran in conjunction with climate change activists and was partly funded by the University of East Anglia…of CRU Climategate fame..

Here is some of that submission:

On 6th January 2010, and in the wake of the Climategate scandal that had engulfed the University if East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Professor Richard Tait, chairman of the BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee (ESC) announced that the BBC would conduct a review of impartiality and accuracy of their coverage of science.

It seemed to us that if such an exercise was to be useful, then input from the BBC’s critics would be essential, therefore we wrote a very constructive joint letter to Professor Tait asking if we could make a submission to the inquiry.

In spite of an extensive correspondence with the BBC Trust over a period of four months, we were unable to obtain confirmation that the letter had been delivered to Professor Tait.

The view that we formed was that the last thing the BBC Trust wanted for their review of the impartiality and accuracy of its science coverage was any input from critics.

We ask that the Inquiry should look at the submission that we then sent to Professor Jones too.

In summary, it identifies a rather shadowy organisation called the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme, set up and co-directed by the BBC’s Environment Analyst, Roger Harrabin, and Dr Joe Smith, a lecturer and environmental activist from the Open University.

We provided evidence that CMEP had been financed by a leading climate research institute, a major environmental NGO and a government department among others.

The purpose of CMEP was to organise seminars at which senior BBC staff would be joined by specialists in particular fields relating to environmental matters. CMEP’s partners in these ventures were the BBC itself and an environmental lobby origination called the International Broadcasting Trust.

We provided evidence that these events had a real impact on programming.

We also drew the BBC’s attention to a statement in John Bricut’s seminal report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel: Safeguarding impartiality in the 21st Century, adopted and published by the BBC Trust in 2007 and signed off by Professor Tait.

This notes the care that the BBC takes to preserve impartiality in reporting controversial subjects such as climate change by saying:

‘The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus.’

This event took place in January 2006 and was organised by CMEP…meantime, an eyewitness account of the seminar posted at Harmless Sky indicates that the experts advising the BBC at this seminar were in fact climate change activists.

Between the time when Professor Jones was appointed by the BBC and the publication of his report, he had things to say about climate sceptics in an article for the Daily Telegraph headline “Gods, floods – and Global Warming’:

’Global warming is a myth.

‘Type that into a search engine and you get thousands of hits – but global warming is not a product of the human imagination; or no more so than any other scientific claims for – like them – it depends on its data, the accuracy of which has been affirmed by the inquiry into the leaked East Anglia documents. The subject has, alas, become the home of boring rants by obsessives.’

This hardly suggests that the professor would be likely give anyone who might question the current dogma on climate change, or the way in which it is reported by the BBC, a fair hearing…BBC news gathering and editorial staff had got far too close to environmental activism for impartiality to be preserved.

Over five years after we started to try and discover who the “best scientific experts” that the BBC relied on when it first decide to limit coverage of climate scepticism in its output, we still do not have an answer.’

FOLLOW THE MONEY…

As Durban fizzles out – much to Richard Black’s chagrin– and the wheels spectacularly fall off the renewables frenzy, Christopher Booker has summed up brilliantly the saga of how the corporation has abandoned its impartiality. There’s no hiding place from his searchlight; what has happened has been a deliberate, sustained climate alarmist campaign sanctioned from the highest levels and pursued with a vigour that would have impressed even Goebbels and Speer. The stench is now firmly at the door of the trustees, those “independent” citizens who are supposed to be the watchdogs of the BBC’s £3.5bn budget and its journalistic integrity.

This morning, to me, Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky – whose impressive work Christopher Booker’s paper is based upon – has posed the most interesting question about their behaviour in this massive breach of the Royal Charter. For years the trustees claimed they had commissioned the Jones report into their science coverage only because it was part of a regular cycle of such reviews – it was not linked at all to mounting evidence of bias in their output and deliberate sidelining of sceptics. But Mr Newbery has spotted that Roger Harrabin, in his defence of his seedy links with the UEA Tyndall Centre, has let the cat out of the bag and given lie to their posturing. He said in a recent interview:

Climate sceptics seeking more space on the BBC helped provoke the Trust’s investigation into science impartiality but the Trust said we were already giving them too much space – not too little.

This means that without a shadow of a doubt, the trustees have known all along that they are engaged in a window dressing exercise and cynically commissioned the Jones nonsense both to cover their backs and to ram home even further that they did not give a stuff about sceptic opinion.

Could that be because at least three of them – Lord Patten, Diana Coyle and Anthony Fry – have direct pecuniary interests in the climate change scam? And I note that the latest trustee appointment (on December 1), Lord Williams of Baglan (who worked for the BBC World Service and then became a UN envoy) is also a climate change fanatic. The fact that he worked for the UN is enough to damn him, but he also lists among his financial interests membership of the international advisory board of CITPAX, a body that claims it supports peace, but in reality is engaged in climate change propaganda at the core of his activities.

To me, the BBC trustees are nothing more than a cosy club of climate change activists. Richard Black and his chums are scurrying around doing their bidding.

BOOKER PAPER

Christopher Booker has written a preview of his Global Warming Policy Foundation paper for the Daily Mail. I can’t see anything spectacularly new in it, however…all he outlines (and more) has been chronicled on this site and by others such as Bishop Hill and Tony Newbery at Harmless Sky.

Meanwhile, Richard Black has been forced to file this morning the last resort of a reporter with nothing to report…he says the Durban talks are “lacking urgency”. Well blow me down. Could that be because the bottom has fallen out of the market?

LAMB TO THE SLAUGHTER?


This man, Robert Lamb, appears to be at the heart of the BBC’s environmental programmes scandal. Surprise, surprise, he was trained as a BBC producer in the 1980s and has since become a one man blizzard of greenie programming. Two of the companies he has has set up and run have been named by the BBC trustees as “causing concern” because they accepted funding from external sources in alleged breach of current affairs programme guidelines and were made in such a way that there could have been conflicts of interest. In other words, the production standards and financing stank to high heaven.

So who is Robert Lamb? A partial profile is here. As you see, he ticks almost every greenie activist box – the BBC, the UN, and various right-on pressure groups. His own, self-righteous assessment of his eco-fascist agenda is here. Basically, he set up the Television Trust for the Environment in the 1980s and ran it until around 2005. Over the past few years, he formed and now runs his own outfit called One Planet Pictures. He also helped establish, and is now an executive producer of, Dev TV.

TVE, as I reported yesterday, has mysteriously vanished from the web (on October 24, a B-BBC reader found) and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Under the template created by Mr Lamb, it currently (according to its latest charity commission return – h/t Tony Newbery, Harmless Sky) generates more than £1.4m a year of support from sources that include various greenie tranzis and government departments that have an EU-driven climate change agenda. From the beginning, again under Mr Lamb’s nakedly aggressive political agenda and template, its goal was to disseminate unbridled greenie alarmist propaganda in accordance with the UN agenda. The only surprise really is that it has taken this long for this to be seen as a conflict of interest.

Dev TV and One Planet Pictures – set up, I surmise, on the basis of my own inside information, after Mr Lamb fell out with the TVE trustees – appear to be run on exactly the same lines. I urge you to have a quick look at what they say and how they are structured. Their output is hardcore, unqualified propaganda. And Dev TV’s co-production guidelines here appear to be a recipe for exactly the conflict of interest and undue outside interest that the BBC trustees have now – so belatedly – fingered.

I do hope this signals the end of Mr Lamb’s eco-fascist career. But the BBC both spawned him and has kept him in business for almost 30 years – I suspect that like the hydra, he will keep on going.

BLATANT DISHONESTY…

Tony Newbery, of Harmless Sky, who is quietly doing brilliant work about BBC bias, tipped me off last night about an item on Today’s business news yesterday morning. It is a gem. First, the Guardian had already led on the story (one BBC box firmly ticked!); second, it involved a dodgy capitalist (who as a bonus was daring to exploit fossil fuel); and third it allowed the use of an “expert” who actually is a militant greenie anti-capitalist.

The story was that Tony Hayward, former chief executive of BP, has formed a company called Valleras and has secured £1.3bn of backing from a range of sources including the Rothschilds. It has very enterprisingly launched a reverse take-over of a Turkish company called Genel which has the rights to extract oil in Kurdistan, estimated to be the world’s sixth largest (and hitherto unexploited) oil field.

My instinct is to say…fantastic! Thank goodness someone in Britain has not thrown in the towel under the deluge of EU regulation and is showing a flash of the spirit that built an empire. But not, of course, the BBC. You could hear the disdain in presenter Adam Shaw’s voice that the new company might soon join the FTSE 100, especially as it was run by an executive who – as was rammed home with relish – had been associated with the gulf oil spill.

But the most questionable part of the whole exercise was that the woman chosen by the programme to react to the news – and introduced on air as only a “San Francisco based oil industry analyst” was Antonia Juhasz, who in fact is a hellcat hell-bent on destroying the oil industry. That’s not difficult to prove, because Exhibit A is her book called The Tyranny of Oil: the World’s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must Do To Stop It. With such neutral credentials, Mr Shaw asked the said Ms Juhasz several times what she thought of Mr Hayward’s return to frontline oil exploration. It doesn’t take much imgination to work out what was expected of her, and she duly delivered; essentially it boiled down to that Mr Hayward was a nasty, vicious crook who should not be allowed near an oil well and must be held to account for the “catastrophe” and “disaster” of the gulf oil spill. Mr Shaw uttered not one peep of disagreement.

Of course, the BBC and Mr Shaw got exactly what they wanted. But a very serious point of journalistic conduct is raised here, in that without a shadow of a doubt, the deliberate omission of Ms Juhasz’s highly partisan standpoint was blatantly dishonest, even by the BBC’s gutter standards.

UNTRUSTWORTHY

I’m head down at the moment helping to write a long paper on BBC bias that I hope will appear in print in due course. I missed – Autonomous Mind and Harmless Sky didn’t – that the BBC trustees had issued a grovelling retraction about the Steve Jones paper that is being used by the corporation to support its climate change activism. In a nutshell the public school hating Professor Jones – in a key section where he argues vehemently for the suppression of all dissent – fingered Lord Lawson and Lord Christopher Monckton for making crassly erroneous statements on specific BBC programmes. He simply did not check his facts. What he said was wrong and now the Trust has begrudgingly owned up, although – par for the course – they haven’t the grace to call it an apology or properly acknowledge their mistake. The retraction has instead been quietly attached to the latest version of the report.

It beggars belief that £140,000 of our cash was spent by the so-called regulatory body of a £3.5bn organisation on this report and that it saw the light of day with such crass errors. It confirms the vindictiveness and hate against “deniers” at the top levels of the corporation and the obscene rush to suppress them.

Part of my current research covers the operations of the BBC Trust. I will make my revelations soon. But what has happened here fits perfectly with what I have uncovered so far…the “trust” is anything but trustworthy on this and other editorial issues.