Monthly Archives: June 2011

My beef with Richard Black, repeated in more posts than I care to remember, is simple. He has become an advocate, not a reporter. I am not a scientist, but was once a BBC producer and reporter – who became a very senior executive of a news organisation – and so I do have the competence to judge him in this respect. Today, in this piece claiming that global warming is now proven, he has yet again crassly demonstrated that he is not doing his job.

True to style, he has picked one remark by a constroversial climate scientist called Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia and elevated it to the level of a major news story. The point that Mr Black has chosen to exaggerate and thus endorse in this way is that the said Professor Jones has now found evidence that the warming of the past fifteen years is a “real” phenomenon because global temperatures over the past year have again been high.

Why is this approach so wrong and so fundamentally at variance with his duties as reporter? First Mr Black knows that because of Climategate, Professor Jones is a highly controversial figure who in some quarters (to put it mildly) does not have credibility. He would be an idiot not to. Chosing him is thus deliberate confrontation, akin to asking Goebbels to give Hitler a character reference.

Second, the statistical concept which Mr Black maintains confirms Professor Jones’ observations, is not accepted in the way he suggests. Bruce Hoult, for example, on the Bishop Hill site, notes succinctly:

To put explicitly what others have alluded to: significance at the 95% confidence level (2 sigma) is generally accepted as the threshold for saying “gee, this looks interesting, more research is justified to see if we can tighten up those bounds a couple more sigma and see whether there’s really anything here or not”.It is most definitely NOT grounds for saying something is proven beyond reasonable doubt or to a level warranting policy action.

This is a point about elementary scientific methodology – as always Mr Black takes the side of the advocate he wants to believe. He further puts two fingesr up by stating:

Since then (Climategate investigations), nothing has emerged through mainstream science to challenge the IPCC’s basic picture of a world warming through greenhouse gas emissions.

Third, Mr Black never ever provides balancing comment or evidence. He wants instead to blare out that Professor Jones is right. Yet he ignores (in his piece today and always) evidence like this, the much-discussed and publicised G.G.Koutsoyiannis paper (fully peer-reviewed)which throws serious doubt on the theorising about rising global temperatures. The BBC has broadcast or published not a peep about this paper and yet carries on regardless pumping out endless climate change drivel.

I repeat. For all these reasons – and more – Mr Black is a cheap propagandist, not a reporter. I’m spelling it out yet again because I believe that one day, someone at the corporation will realise that such agitprop has made the BBC’s alleged journalism into a laughing stock.

Since Britain joined the EU, a deluge of laws have been enacted that have curtailed our freedoms and have ceded power to the faceless, unelected and unaccountable European Commission. The BBC website charts on a daily basis their encroachment into our lives, but there is never a questioning of our slow, agonised, descent into rule by tryranny. Here, there’s a story about a nasty little exercise – triggered by EU recycling laws – by money-to-burn researchers at Newcastle University encouraging students to snitch on their fellows who don’t contemplate every tin can before ditching it. Here, there’s coverage of a disaster entirely triggered by EU greenie laws which have encouraged a switch to biofuels. Surprise, surprise, hedge funds – as often as not advised now by greenie fanatics like KPMG – have dived in and are pushing poor African farmers off their land. The reality is that they have simply pursued – like rats up a drainpipe – the “opportunities” that EU biofuels policies have created. And here, Richard Black is in full gloating flow about how our masters in Brussels are opening their greedy maws to fine us millions of pounds for not reducing trace elements of “pollutants” enough, in line with their ludicrous green targets. As usual, Mr Black accepts hook, line and sinker all the propaganda about the alleged hazard, exactly conforming to EU groupthink.

None of these laws have been passed with the approval of the British people, and all of them are inspired by lunatic idealism on behalf of the socialist-Marxists who dominate EU decision-making. The BBC supinely reports their actions, but never, ever joins up the dots to show how we are becoming vassals of a vast superstate subjected to pointless, costly, unwanted laws.