Monthly Archives: November 2011

I was tied up yesterday when this story about the BBC trustees investigation of dodgy environment programmes broke. This morning, I’ve been digging further, and I suspect we only know a fraction of what’s gone on. I think there’s evidence of a a frantic but very extensive cover-up.

The Television Trust for the Environment (mentioned here in the BBC’s sanisitised version of their investigations) was for years one of the BBC’s biggest suppliers of environment programmes. There are dozens of items like this about its programmes. But – astonishingly – TVE itself has disappeared and its website is now defunct. Here’s proof that it once did exist, but this morning, this is the only type of reference to it that I can find.

I know the executive director of the organisation, Cheryl Campbell (used to work with her, many years ago), and quite a lot about the charity because I had dealings with it a few years back. It was founded in 1984 by Central Television and had grown to be a huge greenie outfit producing dozens of films a year for the BBC, with funding derived from a range of sources, including the Swedish and Dutch governments and the usual suspect greenie foundations. I wrote about it in previous posts, for example, here where I posed questions about funding and support of the sort now supposedly being investigated by the trustees.

Maybe readers with better internet skills than me can find it, but I’ve been trying every variation of the name and web address and not managed to trace anything but cross-references that go nowhere.

So where has it gone? And why? But it surely can’t be coincidence. And one thing that I am certain about is that, meanwhile, Richard Ayre, the BBC trustee appointed to investigate this rather fetid affair is emphatically not in any sense independent. First, he worked for the BBC for almost 30 years before becoming a trustee, and as a former controller of editorial policy, is unquestionably one of the main architects of the current BBC editorial approach. Second, he has direct greenie form. Mr Ayre was chairman of Article 19, a body that claims to be about journalistic freedom, but is in fact an organisation enforcing the UN rights agenda, including its belief that all the world’s ills are caused by nasty, carbon belching westerners. Put another way, Mr Ayre is an unqualified supporter of the lefty greenie agenda, and not only that, openly boasts about his Article 19 links on the trustee website. So how on earth can he be trusted to investigate venality among greenie activists and programme makers?

I keep saying it: the BBC, rotten to the core.

If Richard Black is to be believed, he has a real world scoop; he’s got his eco zealot little mitts on a draft of the latest IPCC report several days before publication. Now in my journalist manual, that’s a hold the front page scoop if ever I saw one – especially as the BBC has been the main conduit of publicity for the IPCC’s faked exaggerations for more than a decade. But it hasn’t happened. He’s instead got a modest down page lead, and his exclusive – far from being trumpeted – is rather buried in a load of verbiage about the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a grouping of developing world countries who are hollering loudly for buckets of cash because the nasty west has caused flooding, droughts and all the pestilence they have ever known.

So why the reticence? Could it be that, as Benny Peiser deftly points out here, that the IPCC is saying that – far from the Armageddon they’ve been predicting for years – the latest data shows something very different:

“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.

Shock horror! No doomsday, so Mr Black glosses over the seemingly seismic shift – but blethers on regardless about the various countries’ tiresome complaints like rising sea levels, all of which have been rehearsed a thousand times before and all of which have been debunked. I must say, I smell a huge rat. If the IPCC really does come out with a report that suggests natural variability as the main driver of climate change, it will be astonishing. Of course, they will (almost certainly) also say that their models show that warming will resume later…and that, I predict, will be Mr Black’s focus.