There’s an interesting post from Ben today about my post on Saturday outlining BBC environment correspondent Richard Black’s response to Climategate. Ben says:
The “climate scientists” implicated in Climategate clearly think of Black as one of their own. When the fair article “Whatever Happened to Global Warming” (written by Paul Hudson, weatherman with a First in Geophysics and Planetary Physics) appeared on the BBC website, the Team were not amused. Here’s Michael Mann in one of the emails:
“extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its particularly odd, since climate is usually Richard Black’s beat at BBC (and he does a great job). from what I can tell, this guy was formerly a weather person at the Met Office.
We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might be appropriate for the Met Office to have a say about this, I might ask Richard Black what’s up here?
And in another post, Will S suggests that a FoI request is put in to the BBC to see what email exchanges there have been between Black, Harrabin et al and the CRU unit. An intersting idea. The Mann email clearly suggests much closer links than is normal between journalists and their sources – (to me) it sounds as though he knows Black will do his bidding. Is this the smoking gun showing that the BBC is in bed with the whole climate change scam?
FOI Act is available against the bBC “in respect of information held for purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature.” That is their get-out clause.
I noticed in this BBC article:
“One senior climate scientist told me that the chair would have to be a person accepted by both mainstream climate scientists and sceptics as a highly respected figure without strong connections to either group.”
Shouldn’t that be “mainstream climate scientists and alarmists“?
Al Gore getting busted…
‘Some say the moon landings were filmed on a backlot…’
That was his first response by way of addressing a serious set of (possibly inconvenient) questions.
Editing can create a lot one way of the other, and this piece has a fair bit. But those sections seem to be very significant even without full context.
The BBC’s reluctant acknowledgment of this scandal is increasingly pathetic. The last thing they posed on the website about it was Friday. Naturally it was from their leading Warmist prosletyzer, Roger Harriban. He is unquestionably biased on this issue, yet the BBC News Online editors have no problem letting him be the organizations final word on the matter:
Inquiry into stolen e-mails
Harriban pretends at first to be objective about this, Oh wait, no he doesn’t. He begins immediately in attack position, making every effort to downplay the damage and undermine the credibility of any potential inquiry.
Of course there is no mention of the Warmist scientists’ attempts to delete e-mails in a blatant attempt to break FOI laws. No mention of the increasingly likely idea that the e-mails were not stolen, as Harriban labels them, but were in fact leaked by a whistleblower, and had already been collected in response to FOI requests.
Instead, to support the Warmist cause, the BBC News online editors allow Harriban to quote in his defense one Sir David King, “former government chief scientist”.
how did the leakage occur – was there any payment in the process?
he alleged behaviour of the scientists indicated by the e-mailsdoes this
have any impact on the scientific conclusion?
That’s what King told Harriban, one can be sure. Notice that the first point is not only about how the e-mails were leaked but assumes and openly suggests illegal payments, further undermining the credibility of the source. Of course, this is irrelevant to the reality of the contents, but they want to distract from that as much as possible.
Then King states the obvious, to show how very serious he is about finding out “the truth”.
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But, how reliable is King as an opinion on this? The fact that he’s the former government chief scientist would normally make one be inclined to trust him. however, here’s what Harriban and the BBC don’t want you to know about Sir Daivd King:
As an invited speaker to an international seminar invited by the Russian Academy of Sciences to discuss the scientific basis of the Kyoto Protocol it was perplexing that the event did not commence on schedule. The delay was particularly odd, as it appeared that the listed speakers were assembled. The program did commence after nearly two hours wait and the reason for the delay became apparent. Sir David King, chief scientific adviser to the United Kingdom government, had been lobbying vigorously to have a number of the listed international speakers omitted from the program. He even submitted his own program of speakers! Having failed in his objective, King absented himself from the proceedings for the remainder of the day…
The pre-seminar lobbying by Sir David King further underscored the politicisation of the climate change issue. It became apparent that the objective of the UK delegation was to defend the findings of the IPCC and convince the members of the Russian Academy of Sciences that the science of climate change is settled… The input of independent scientists (at the meeting), who could demonstrate shortcomings in the IPCC findings, clearly would hamper the UK delegation in meeting its objectives and were to be silenced.