I wonder what goes on in Richard Black’s brain, though doing so is not easy.
On the one hand, you have this, a report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation – set up by a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and a raft of eminent UK citizens – stating that an investigation needs to be carried out into problems in the ways that the various investigations into Climategate were carried out. The conclusions could not be clearer; there are many unanswered questions. The press release is prominently available on the internet, most notably on the high profile sceptical site WUWT – hence not easy to miss.
On the other, published in the early hours of this morning by Mr Black, are claims by a parliamentary committee (packed with avowed warmists) that it’s time to completely forget the alleged problems in the Climategate investigations – irrespective of any doubts – and move on. They state:
“While we have some reservations about the reviews which UEA commissioned, the key point is that they have made a number of constructive recommendations.
“In our view it is time to make the changes and improvements recommended, and with greater openness and transparency move on.”
Now my first reaction to this sweeping statement – as a former newspaper and BBC journalist – was unease. When committees, however eminent or expert their members may be, want to move on in such a simplistic way, in effect to magic away any issues, I smell a huge rat. My instinct is to feel pressured, and uneasy that things are not what they seem. It makes me want to dig deeper to get at the truth. Words like “cover up” spring uneasily to mind.
But not our Richard. In fact, he’s demoted the concerns of GWPF and Andrew Montford, who have spent much careful time and effort explaining precisely why there are doubts, to the very end of his piece, and given their considerable evidence so little space that the whole thing looks like no more than a tacked-on genuflection. The GWPF release is well-crafted, and elements of it could easily have been lifted into Richard’s copy, just like he so easily and so often takes the words of climate change zealots.
My conclusion is that Peter Sissons is correct in his latest installment of concerns about standards at the BBC. The disease in the BBC mindset is truly profound. It goes so deep that they are delusional. They willfully downplay doubts to the extent that they give them no credence, despite their common sense ubiquity, the quality of the evidence involved and persistence of the sceptics against the might of the billions-of-dollars, highly corrupt climate change industry.
What’s even worse is that Mr Black backs the establishment (for that is what AGW now is) against those who advocate spirited, upstart concern.
The only MP on the Select Committee with a scientific background is Labour’s Graham Stringer. As usual, he was outvoted – including by ignorant Tories.
But Select Committee reports record the views of dissenting members and the Committee minutes show votes that overrule such opinions or proposed amendments.
In this case, Stringer’s scathing view of the ClimateGate “enquiries” really is a corker :
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2011/1/25/words-that-must-remain-unspoken.html
The AGW fix is still in. But even Black’s report shows how frayed it has become. The majority of the Select Committee says “Move On” – and that is Black’s headline, of course, not the fact that the Select Committee records some serious concerns.
The problem is – in the Internet age, parroting “Move on, there is nothing to see here” doesn’t work any more. Even Black, an arch-propagandist for AGW and all manner of greenie hysteria, seems to realise this. Time was, he would not have given nearly as much space to the views of the GWPF and Andrew Montford – or any space at all.
But in a report on a Select Committee report – should he not have found space to include Stringer’s succinct statement of dissension ?
Stringer was not nit-picking around the edges – he was effectively saying that the previous enquiries into the CRU were a whitewash.
Excellent post as always.
Bishop Hill is unhappy as well.
It is possible to believe that in the hectic rush to complete their original inquiry before the general election, the committee might have overlooked the McKitrick allegation, the ousting of Saiers, the allegations of `pal review’, the cherrypicking and the bodging. Well…maybe.
To miss half a dozen allegations of wrongdoing could be considered a trifle careless. To miss them all twice, on the other hand, seems to represent a wilful disregard for the interests of the general public.
I love this summary of the various ClimateGate enquiries – from a comment at WattsUpWithThat.com :
We went out to the CRU and took the guided tour.
Then we asked “Have any of you boys and girls done anything naughty lately?”. Headshakes.
So we said “OK, good enough for us”.
The same comment on ClimateGate concluded :
“Those who claim there is nothing worth bothering about have not studied it.
Those who claim to have looked at it and found nothing are lying”
Climategate? Nothing to see here, lessons learned lets move along eh?
The haste to move along is just a little bit too urgent, it feels as if the coverup merchants know full well that the whitewashes didnt wash.
Its not the crime that gets you in the end its the cover up.
The establishment enacted a cover up, the mistake wa to include an MP with high moral principles, ooops. Graham Stringer had and still does have grave doubts but he is just one man. But even just one honest man is too many hence the unseemly rush to move along. The BBC usually so keen to interview any labour MP is suddenly not so keen.
Liars,crooks and cheats can thrive as long as they can hide the evidence of their crimes but as the old saying goes, be sure your sins will find you out. Honest men are the bane of corruption, they are the achilles heel of a corrupt establishment, they expose the crookery in the end.
The establishment uses its position to protect and nurture corruption, it has become corrupt, litlle lies for the public good has morphed into gigantic lies for the benefit of the establishment, the bigger the lies the more eager the esablishment is to cover up by lies an ever decreasing circle with ever decreasing returns, lies piled upon lies upon more lies and all it takes is just a few honest men to bring it crashing down.
Move along there nothing to here? When the establishment makes this claim you just know that there is something to see. The cover up is being exposed bit by bit and the stooge MSM like the BBC are complicit in a cover up, not only that but they are engaged in covering up for a ‘conservative led’ coalition nows that ironic.
As Burns put it :
“Truth’s a chiel that winnae die, and cannae be disputed”.
Graham Stringer’s short paragraph says it all. And his words are all true.
We can at least now look forward to Congressional grilling of Michael Mann. Black is trying to say “The show is over”. Not by a long chalk, sunshine. As you say, Cassandra, it is the cover-up that is the killer – the Profumo affair and Nixon’s Watergate spring to mind.
ClimateGate is called ClimateGate for very good reason. Scientists tried to cover up lies. And enquiries then tried to cover up their cover-up of lies. But the moggie is out of the rucksack, folks.
As any schoolteacher knows it is essential to keep the message simple when teaching lower ability children.
Richard Black is environmental correspondent to the Eastenders and Casualty watching classes, the type of person who watches half hour long dumbed down BBC news bulletins to break up the monotony of one contrived and absurd ‘drama’ after another.
Of course, these people have no interest whatsover in the global warimng scam, but it is on the goverment’s national news curriculum so Mr Black gives them the approved version nice and simple.
Sir Brandon Gough, Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, is accused of being complicit in academic fraud and corrupt abuse of public funds in relation to Climategate.
More here: http://www.stopcp.com/cpclimategate.php
And so the charade goes on.
We all know that the likes of Black are never going to give in, or backpedal – they are married to the cause be it right or wrong. We all know, too, that the BBC is riddled with bias and will go out of it’s collective way to push the agendas in which it blindly believes. WHY it should believe them, is another matter – I think we can all see the common purpose writing on the wall.
What we really need, is another instalment of Climategate, as the frevent hope within the BBC is that time will erase the conspiratorial enormity of it all.
As has been already pointed out, the Eastenders arm of the dumbed down common viewer is way out of the loop when it comes to the intricacies and more esoteric factes of the climate “debate”. It will only hurt them when their pockets rapidly empty on their energy and transport costs.
Only as the next decade progresses, and things get noticeably cooler, will they sit up and take notice, and realise that a static windmill is spoiling every view in the country, their power is rationed, and running a car will become a perk for the privileged few.
We know of the myriad of scientists who no longer have confidence in this scam, they are slowly but surely making their presence felt, having realised that, perhaps, science is more important than pal-reviewing ideological (and false) output by others. We can only hope that this process gathers pace.
The interesting aspect of Climategate for me wasn’t the emails which confirmed pretty much what I suspected but were never a smoking gun. The real smoking gun was the computer source code and the famous README files. These appeared to show young research assistants who didn’t have much training in programming or statistics using an elderly programming language with no modern programming tools and it appeared no oversight or management from the senior academics. Looking at the README file you can’t help to feel sorry for them as they struggle to complete a task they don’t have the tools or the training to complete. A real enquiry would have looked at these files and called some of these young assistants to ask them what was going on.
Somehow I doubt that will happen however !
I agree – the Read-Me files were an appalling indictment of CRU inefficiency. Nowhere has there been any enquiry into the fact that they appeared to suggest that huge amounts of the CRU’s work were a total mess and therefore totally unreliable.
I think that has been the general view expressed by all the computing experts whose comments I have seen, across quite a few websites.
If even Loiuse Gray (“Queen of the Press Release”) is forcing herself to give an unusually (almost) balanced report on the parliamentary inquiry into the inquiries
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8279368/Official-inquiries-into-the-Climategate-scandal-unsatisfactory.html
then Black must feel even more exposed. Luckily he can go down to the BBC canteen clutching his Guardian and moan to Harrabin and Shukman about how horrible those deniers are.
I found the climategate reporting from the BBC fascinating, immediately after the story broke there was intense speculation about the identity of those responsible. The amount of data taken was too well planned to be the work of one of the anti-AGW groups. To the neutral observer the finger of suspicion would immediately look towards an employee of the CRU accidentally releasing the data.
But over the following days and weeks we were treated to the BBC and Guardian performing amazing contortions to put the finger of blame on the anti-AGW brigade, this was done with the hope that the content of the information in the emails would be ignored and that instead the hacking of the CRU would show how criminal the forces opposed to AGW were.
After a period of time the coverage started to change in a almost pythonesque manner. The tone of the articles and BBC coverage started to concede that perhaps the emails were not hacked but unknowingly leaked. This was as close as the BBC was prepared to go to admitting that one of the most explosive stories regarding climate change was caused by the so called victims.
The fuuny thing is that as the main political and media establishment were all supporting the man made climate change position there was no need for the BBC to attack anyone who held a counter postion, and absolutly no need to bring the sceptical position to a wider audience.
The effects of incidents like this -and there have been many of them, has been to tempt the anti-AGW group to keep up the offensive as they can see the growing unease within the climate change grassroots since the release of th CRU emails. Certainly the BBC has continued to behave as before, disguising and misrepresenting the warming data to the British public, however, the dam has been broken and no amount of repair work can hold back the flood of contrary information which is now being produced.
Joseph – My view has always been that Climategate wasn’t a hack. Had it been we would have see a huge number of private emails , reminders about meetings etc etc. Instead what we have are carefully gathered emails and other files from different computer systems which I believe were put together by someone in response to a FOIA request. But then before the data was released someone senior has ordered them not to be released. However copies of the file weren’t deleted or were copied. It is this file that an insider has then released.
Having looked at the emails and seen how badly senior academics treat legitimate requests from other academics we can bet they treat their researchers and support staff in an even worse manner. So I bet there are no shortage of suspects for the leaking insider.
The thing I will always remember about Climategate was that week of total silence by the Beeb after it happened. Everyday I logged onto Google Reader and learned something new from the people looking into the files. It was fascinating stuff about one of the biggest stories around but there was nothing on the Beeb.
I would love to know what was going on then. Was it conspiracy (they were hoping the story would go away) or cock up (no one had sent them a press release about it) ?
The silence reminded me of Pravda in the 1980’s keeping silent when a Soviet leader died even though they knew the rest of the world and even their own people knew.
‘The thing I will always remember about Climategate was that week of total silence by the Beeb after it happened…. I would love to know what was going on then.’
Ah, to be reminded of one of the better Beeboid hole-diggers: ‘watertight oversight’. If only to be applied when things look bad for the narrative. If not, it’s ‘sources say’ and publish with no chance of being damed, well, losing one’s job (credibility long flushed).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2009/11/copenhagen_countdown_17_days.html
Happy days.
The final point is the key one. For all that the BBC loves to yammer about its independence and fearless questing after truth, on this issue, and on so many others, they’ve adopted the tactic of speaking truth from power.
The BBC’s position is not biased in the sense of pushing on particular view over others, it’s biased in the sense of refusing to acknowledge that there even are other views.
All the usual excuses about bias being a matter of perception don’t apply. It’s simply an objective fact that the BBC refuses to cover any allegations which might disrupt the narrative.
I liked Sissons’ line :
“Scepticism should be the outlook of any scientist, and the default position of any journalist”
I don’t think you should get too hung up on the ‘Climate’ aspect. The bBC are prepared to shape the populations minds and opinions with any message that would help ‘Liebour’. The UN is good, the EC is good, etc The next unbelivable story will be that Brown, Balls, Cooper and Miliband can sucessfully run an economy.
How come Richard Black’s report does not provide a link to the Select Committee report so that people can see for themselves all the detail – including MP Graham Stringer’s broadside at the whitewashes ?
The BBC is very ready to give links to reports that support its groupthink.