Monthly Archives: March 2010

AN OBJECTIVE OBSERVER?

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Have you ever wondered why Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s environmental analyst, is such a fanatical warmist, to the extent that he faithfully reports every utterance of warmist zealots? Could part of the reason be financial? He is registered with this speaker agency and demands fees of between £5,000 and £10,000 to chair sessions at plush conferences on climate change themes. He modestly describes himself as follows:

Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s Environment Analyst, is one of the world’s leading journalists and broadcasters on the environment and energy, and a distinguished speaker, host and moderator. Roger Harrabin is a distinguished and influential figure in the British media who has won many awards for broadcasting on issues related to sustainable development.

Recent events that he has chaired include a conference organised by the Royal Society of Arts and the Soil Association on this theme:

The politics of food and farming are on the agenda as never before. Up to 30% of the average consumer’s carbon footprint can be put down to our current, intensive food and farming systems. The UK Government has signed up to a target to reduce our emissions by 80% by 2050 – but has so far resisted tackling the ‘elephant in the room’ of food and farming.

Also on the panel was (Lord) Peter Melchett, a former director of Greenpeace in the UK who once faced criminal charges for allegedly tearing up GM crops. Mr Harrabin has thus chaired a panel in which at least one participant may fairly be described as a greenie extremist and activist.

The pattern continues. Mr Harrabin has been a very busy boy on the conference circuit. He chaired this event in Prague (an EU climate change-fest); this one in February (the World Sustainability Conference); the annual conference of the Combined Heat and Power Association(another group trying to make as much cash as possible from global warming subsidies); a session in Milan at the Power-Gen Europe conference; this conference in London on Green Strategy; and finally, is due at this one, to be held held by the Economist in June.

Thus the BBC’s “environmental analyst” is making oodles of cash – tens of thousands of pounds – by using his privileged BBC position to persuade conference organisers to hire him. All of the events he chairs have a common thread in that they are greenies or warmists trying to foist their views on the rest of us or make as much money as they can out of the massive subsidies that the EU and our government spray about for anyone on the right bandwagon. Put another way, Mr Harrabin makes bucketloads of cash out of the alarmism he spreads and has a therefore a major vested interest in it. His actions stink.

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LAPDOG HARRABIN

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Roger Harrabin, like the lackey he is, faithfully reports the House of Commons whitewash about the University of East Anglia leaked emails. Not a whisper of a challenge or alternative view to that the committee involved has laughingly claimed that the science behind climate change is intact – even though it did not have the competence or remit to do so. One day, politicians will wake up with a revolution on their hands because they are so drastically out of touch with public opinion and are treating with malicious contempt their constituents. For genuine opinion about what people think of the House of Commons report, you have to look elsewhere, for example, the comments here. In the meantime, the BBC will be making no efforts to report the true picture on climate change, or anything else that’s outside their liberal-lefty worldview.

Update: for an excellent assessment of why Harrabin’s account is so dishonest and disingenuous see Frank Furedi here at Spiked.

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B-BBC DIGEST

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I wanted to update you on a very recent Biased BBC innovation, namely a Weekly Digest of the “Best of B-BBC” and this is being sent to 650 prominent MP’s and MEP’s. This is the result of the creativity and hard work of B-BBC contributor Graeme and we have already had some great feedback such as this…

Tory PPC for Lincoln Karl McCartney sent back:- “Thankyou for your email.  I’ve previously visited yoursite and indeed have the BBC’s telephone number on speed dial… I alsoattended a gathering hosted by the BBC Corporate Affairs section for PPCs andwas not reassured at all.

Others such as Nigel Farage have also responded favourable. We continue to get positive responses. The only Conservative MP’s who have asked NOT to receive the weekly digest are Alan Duncan, Simon Burns, and Michael Mates. What a shocker!
Bearing in mind the hundreds of prominent political eyes reading B-BBC, please do your best to ensure that comment here is civil at all times. We’re making an impact and we want to make sure everyone feels comfortable reading the blog. My sincere thanks to Graeme and I think this will help us further the mission to hold the BBC to account.

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TODAY EDITOR IS CLIMATE CHANGE ACTIVIST

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In Mongolia, it’s sadly been so cold this winter that a million animals have died, and many of the nomadic herders and farmers are said to be in desperate need of aid. The Today programme reported this story this morning, but guess what was missing from the equation? Any mention of that dreaded phrase “climate change”. This fits a pattern. Today reporters grind on about AGW every time there is a claim – however tenuous – that temperatures are getting hotter; but never when the reverse applies. Of course, one extremely bad winter does not prove cooling, but on Radio 4’s co-called flagship news programme, the topic is never discussed properly.

Could this be because Ceri Thomas, the editor of Today, is yet another BBC executive who is a climate change activist? Mr Thomas, it transpires, is on the board of a body called the Science Media Centre, another shadowy outfit that has been created, according to its own blurb, to act as:

first and foremost a press office for science when science hits the headlines. We provide journalists with what they need in the form and time-frame they need it when science is in the news – whether this be accurate information, a scientist to interview or a feature article.

An admirable objective, if – but only if – the Centre was properly neutral on matters of scientific controversy. But it it isn’t. It’s yet another collection of warming fanatics. It runs a number of briefings for journalists which show the reverse is true; everything they do on the climate front is geared towards the AGW perspective. So when Copenhagen was looming, who did the centre choose as its speaker to make sure journalists were properly in the picture? Why, none other than Vicky Pope, of the Met Office, who might be described as one of the UK’s warmists-in-chief. Others of these briefings follow exactly the same pattern and format, for example this one on so-called carbon sinks, which assumes as the start point that AGW is happening:

Efforts to control climate change require the stabilization of atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which in turn depends on the balance between our own emissions and natural carbon sinks. The Global Carbon Project has evaluated all the available evidence on carbon sinks and sources, the results of which have been published in Nature Geoscience. Two of the authors of the paper briefed journalists in their findings at the SMC.

I could go on, there’s tons more, but I have made the main point. Mr Thomas deems it acceptable that he is an active member of a body which is grafting away behind the scenes to prejudice the debate about climate science towards the warmist viewpoint.I know from other sources that he also responds to complaints about the programme’s climate change coverage by using sweeping warmist statements such as that there is a “great consensus” about climate change science, therefore there is only the need for him to afford “due impartiality” to sceptics – which means in practice that they rarely, if ever, appear on Today. And, in turn, that the programme is totally biased in its approach to the topic.

I submit that because of his activism, Mr Thomas is not fit to edit Today – or any other BBC programme. He should resign immediately.

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The Curious Incident of Joe Biden in the Daytime

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The tidal wave of disapproval over Israel’s recent misadventures has taken on a life of its own.

The Joe Biden incident was interpreted as an insult, both to him personally and to the whole United States. People have noticed that the language used by the Obama administration inflates the degree of offence taken, mimicking Arab-style rhetoric where pride and honour take precedence over common sense. The unfortunate timing of what was primarily a formality over an internal matter was blown up out of all proportion so it could be misrepresented as Israel’s deliberately planned symbol of defiance, and exploited to camouflage / justify Obama’s emerging strategy of siding with Israel’s enemies.

If the BBC was interested in reporting the full story they would have explained that Obama has reneged on previous agreements between Israel and the US over Jerusalem and ‘houses for Jews’ and is making new demands for concessions from Israel while letting the Palestinians off the hook altogether. He has not asked them for any concessions at all and it is feared that they are thinking up new preconditions for talks about talks while the going is good.

The BBC’S expansionist attitude to the concept of ‘illegally occupied territory’ means it now encompasses everything captured in Israel’s 1967 defensive war, and they’ve got their beady colonialist eye on Israel as a whole. All’s fair in love and war, and in the BBC’s eyes, in war, the winner loses all. (this concept is exclusive to Israel)

While the press made an almighty fuss about the height of the Turkish Ambassador’s seat, the BBC is less keen to trumpet the snubs that Obama dishes out so rudely to those he regards as unworthy, like our own dear leader, and of course Binyamin Netanyahu, who seems to have been left alone in the White House to mull over a list of new demands from Obama while he went off to dine with Michelle and the girls. And would only come back if Israel’s prime minister said sorry for being a naughty boy.

David Miliband’s speech about the expulsion of the Israeli diplomat received a chorus of approval from MPs of all shades, and though he stressed that the issue in question was the cloning of passports rather than the assassination, the BBC doesn’t make that distinction.

Time after time people have been allowed to assert, unchallenged on the BBC, that the ‘victims’ of the cloning, the ‘British’ citizens who have been so wronged, risked being mistaken for terrorists. The final question on Thursdays QT was phrased strangely. Something like: “Is expulsion the appropriate penalty for an act of terrorism?” Dimbleby seemed happy enough with that.

In the eyes of the BBC and consequently, the public, Israel is a terrorist state, therefore Mossad, the IDF and whoever assassinated a ‘senior Hamas Commander’ are terrorists. Unless it transpires that it wasn’t Israel, in which case they’d be militants or freedom fighters.

David Miliband said the victims of the cloning woke up to find themselves ‘wanted terrorists.’ Denis MacShane on the Today programme bemoaned the fact that they had had their pictures splashed all over the papers.

Well, a) I thought the passport pictures were of the actual assassins, not the genuine passport holders, and, b) when the word terrorist is avoided like the plague by the BBC, why is it suddenly applied with gay abandon to assassins who targeted a scoundrel, doing what many other countries, including Great Britain, allegedly get away with all the time without a ripple. Is it coz they is (possibly) Joos?

See Robin Shepherd on the odious Richard Ingrams who has written more bile on this topic. Famous for:
“I have developed a habit, when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government, to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.”

I have developed a habit, when confronted by articles in the Guardian or the Independent, to look at the signature to see if the writer is Richard Ingrams. If so, I tend not to read them.”

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GREEN WASTE…

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Here’s the BBC’s Richard Black at his best, positively beside himself with glee because China is now wasting more money on “renewables” than that nasty place of over-production and excess, the USA. His tone throughout is one of adulation for what China (and Britain – alarmingly for us now in third place) have achieved in tipping money down the drain. Note, too, that there is no mention in his report of the most crucial factor, namely that Spain’s policy over eight years of busting a gut to invest in green projects was a national disaster. A survey – the most detailed of its kind – by Spanish academics found:

Optimistically treating European Commission partially funded data, we find that for every renewable energy job that the State manages to finance, Spain’s experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the US should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about nine jobs lost for every four created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created.

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