Monthly Archives: February 2011

Well, he’s had his say. What do you think of the BBC today?

Barry Woods, in a long and thorough post on WUWT, asks whether the BBC has broken faith with the general public in its conduct in the production of the Horizon programme presented by Keith Nurse, in which climate sceptics – and their arguments – were badly treated or ignored.

There is much that is important in Mr Woods’ post, but I don’t think the principal question he poses is quite the issue. The programme was a product of a much deeper and much older malaise. The “breaking of faith” by the BBC with audiences, its Charter and common sense – as has been admirably documented by Bishop Hill and Harmless Sky – happened several years ago, when, in a secret meeting crammed with political activists and warmists, it bizarrely decided that the science behind climate change was settled.

This decision was taken by an organisation already infected with the zealotry of the rectitudes of corporate social responsibility, and stuffed full of staff recruited through the pages of the Guardian whose tendencies were to support left-wing liberalism and ideology.

Ever since then, the BBC has pursued an open but unspoken agenda of pushing the alarmist cause, and it has led to every arm of the imperialist corporation embracing a form of bigoted zealotry unprecedented in its history. I do not believe (as some reaction to my post yesterday seemed to assume) that this means that the BBC from the top down is nakedly pursuing a ham-fisted climate alarmism strategy to make money for the pension fund. And nor are reporters like Roger Harrabin and Richard Black driven by the desire to make money for their own pension pots. But they have been given a carte blanche licence to pursue their prejudices. They are trapped in a paradigm of political activism and cannot see it, as Roger Harrabin’s post on WUWT in defence of his Met Office hide-the-decline shenanigans vividly testified.

Because of this, the deeply-worrying revelations of Peter Sissons in his autobiography about the one-sidedness of BBC climate change reporting make no sense to most of those working at the corporation. There has been, as is usual with such attacks against the BBC, a virtual wall of silence, and no effort to engage with the important issues he raises. Roger Harrabin wrote baldly to the Daily Mail in response that, “he did not recognise” the BBC that Mr Sissons was talking about. This llustrates par excellence that talking to Mr Harrabin about his climate change prejudices is like trying to explain colour to a blind man.

I believe that the consequences of this approach are manifested on a daily basis. An organisation that sets out its stall on the basis of fair and accurate reporting cannot see that it has become a travesty of those goals. Take for example, the reaction of the BBC’s College of Journalism (the self-declared “centre of excellence” in journalism skills) to the Keith Nurse Horizon programme. What does it do? Seek out a genuinely independent sceptic to give reaction and to allow the alternative case to be aired? No, precisely the opposite.

It goes instead to what it laughingly describes as an “independent” commentator – Fiona Fox. But Ms Fox, as I have chronicled on this blog, is anything but independent; she is one of the most strident advocates of the BBC alarmism worldview. And a board member of her Science Media Centre is Ceri Thomas, the editor of Today – another ardent activist. This is what Ms Fox says about the programme:

This was in some ways a gentle and simple film which managed to focus on the battles over climate change without descending into the nasty, polarised style that has for too long characterised that debate. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should do so.

Her inflammatory. crass comments have generated a torrent of counter-opinion pointing out the programme’s inaccuracies, unfairness and bias. But as I have already noted, this will be seen by those at CoJo and in the wider BBC not as a reasonable reaction, but simply as more evidence that the sceptic community is a bunch of nasty, raving nutters: water off a duck’s back. Nothing but a major earthquake will change this rigid zealotry; the BBC is trapped in a massive delusion of its own making.

I have just listened on Radio 4 to the latest programme in the eco-crazy strand Costing the Earth. I don’t, unfortunately, have a transcript, but from beginning to end, this was a scare-fest about the dangers of melting ice. It was taken as read by Tom Heap, the presenter, that the science has been proved, that there is major catastrophic warming. He stuffed it full with researchers who are being paid to find climate change, and – lo and behold – have found it. Not a sceptic in sight. He even spoke to the British ambassador to Canada, who magically appeared to be able to pronounce on the danger of escaping methane and knew with certainty that everything was collapsing on an unprecedented level. Mr Heap told us, too, that the North-west passage had opened up in 2007 for the first time as part of the inexorable, irreversible melting.

This was CAGW propaganda at its most stridently political. Not a dissenting voice, not an ounce of doubt. In a sense, such programmes are now so common that they are not even noteworthy. But I’m going to go on writing about them because the BBC is crassly, arrogantly, dangerously wrong in the way it is handling such topics. And as BBC staff like David Gregory prove in their contributions to the debate (see my previous posting) they don’t even begin to get it.

Shame the Costing the Earth researcher did not look – even for a second – at this masterly piece of research; it would have shown him the true perspective on melting Arctic ice. It happens, it’s cyclical, it’s unpredictable and we don’t understand yet why. But sure as hell, it’s been happening for a very long time and “global warming” is only a tangential part of the story. The incontinent outpourings of Mr Heap and his cronies contribute nothing to our understanding of what actually goes on there.

I do need to scotch one particularly bizarre bit of blogbabble, though. Some bloggers depict me as a puppet for the BBC’s pension fund trustees trying to boost their investments in green technology.

This is definitely going in my book – it is the most entertaining and baroque allegation I’ve ever faced. The truth is that BBC bosses issue very few diktats and most programme editors are stubbornly independent. I offered the recent Met Office stories from my own contacts and knowledge. No-one else asked me to do them. I don’t even know the pension fund trustees.

There are some very clever and inventive people out there in the blogosphere. Some are laudably engaged in a pursuit of facts about climate change and weather. Others might serve more use by trying to locate Elvis.

This is the last part of Roger Harrabin’s lame and disingenuous WUWT defence of his conduct in the Met Office-did-warn-the-government saga. I found it particularly interesting, especially as he firmly puts those who think there are links between the BBC pension fund’s eco investment policies and the BBC’s fervent climate zealotry into utter-nutter territory; exactly the sort of insults that BBC reporters routinely also lodge against those who oppose unlimited immigration and who support UKIP.

I will modestly claim that I was among the first bloggers to note the links between eco-wackery and the BBC pension fund last February, when I reported that Peter Dunscombe, the operational head of the said fund, was also then the chairman of the Institutional Investment Group on Climate Change(IIGCC), which has 47 members, managed four trillion euros’ worth of investments and had a goal of finding as many ‘climate change’ investment opportunities as possible.

The reason I wrote the story was in the public interest; it seemed to me on the one hand astonishing and foolhardy for pension fund trustees to be speculating in this way, and on the other, to be clear evidence that the BBC’s climate change fervour might be financially motivated, hence the zealotry and bigotry involved.

The second leg of the story was in October, when BBC journalists went on strike over changes in rules in their pension fund at a time when there were also concerns that the yields were not all that they might be. I speculated legitimately that this might be because of their eco investment policy. I also noted that the green focus of the fund might have intensified because, according to latest accounts, the trustees had since formally adopted a code of investment advocated by Hermes EOS, which was entirely driven by “environmentally-friendly” investments on principles dictated by the UN, arguably the world’s most eco-zealous organisation.

The final leg of the pension story is that there has been speculation over the past few days about Mr Dunscombe’s conduct. I have not had chance to check this out, but it seems that all is not well in the world of eco investment.

For Roger to dismiss these facts about the pension fund as being akin to a search for Elvis is both gratuitously insulting and fatuous. He might claim that BBC journalists are too independent to be swayed in their reporting, but that’s nonsense. I have published clear evidence that diktats have gone out from senior members of BBC staff stating categorically that the sceptics must not be given equal airtime to warmists because the warmist case has been proved. The facts speak for themselves. The BBC issues torrents of climate change propaganda, and Roger is one of the main proponents, even though his WUWT “defence” vividly illustrates that he is incapable of seeing it, or of engaging in sensible debate with those who think otherwise.

My final point in this rather long post is that Roger claims not to even know the BBC pension fund trustees. Does he actually expect us to believe he doesn’t know at all (however tenuously) Helen Boaden, the director of BBC news, who is also a trustee? It’s true that Peter Sissons says in his autobiography that he never met her in the five years he worked there while she was boss (the subject of a future post), but I cannot believe that also applies to Mr Harrabin. If I am wrong, I will be happy to correct my observations; but in the meantime, pull the other one, Roger.

Update: I note that BBC “rationalist” David Gregory, who clearly thinks he is able to tell the objective truth about science issues, has pointed out in the comments that the BBC pension fund only has investments in two green companies, and even invests in that nasty oil company BP. To him, that’s clearly game set and rational match – my post is invalidated and Harrabin, Dunscombe et al are in the clear. But Mr Gregory, this doesn’t alter the fact that, as I have pointed out in detailed posts, most of the major blue chip companies – including BP – are now fully on board the climate change scam because they see it as a wonderful way of screwing more subsidies and jacking up energy prices. Ex-BBC corporate social responsibility chief Lord Hastings exemplifies how deeply pervasive and octopus-like is this culture. I would also cite this post on former BBC news chief Richard Sambrook, now also apparently an ardent advocate of climate change strategies in a big company PR outfit. Mr Gregory’s observation also doesn’t change the point I made that not only is the pension fund run by an eco-fanatic, it also invests in accordance with the UN’s eco principles. Why has it seen fit to support such nonsense if that’s not its central goal?