An Expert Is Someone Who Knows More And More About Less And Less.

‘The physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: ‘l don’t intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of God.”Don’t you think God knows the facts?’  Bethe asked.   ’Yes,’ said Szilard. ‘He knows the facts, but He does not know this version of the facts.‘

 

The BBC continues its cover up of wrong doing and the obscuring of the evidence trail when asked to be fully transparent and accountable for its actions.

We have had the Balen Report and its evidence of anti-Israeli reporting kept under lock and key, now the BBC has decided that the ‘expert’ people who influenced one of the most important strategic changes in its stance towards reporting climate change should be kept anonymous….as related by Bishop Hill.

‘My long struggle to find out who attended the BBC’s seminar on climate change has come to an end (if you are not familiar with the story, see here). Readers here will recall that the seminar appears to have been attended by a bunch of NGO people, who decided that there was a consensus on climate change that meant that sceptics could be sidelined in the corporation’s output. The BBC Trust then falsely reported that the decision had been made by leading scientists.

My FOI request, dating back several years, has been repeatedly turned down and the appeal has gone all the way to the Information Tribunal, a rather more formal process than the Information Commission, being overseen by a judge.’

 

Bishop Hill also releases his submission to the Leveson inquiry which includes a section on Roger Harrabin’s CMEP which he ran in conjunction with climate change activists and was partly funded by the University of East Anglia…of CRU Climategate fame..

Here is some of that submission:

On 6th January 2010, and in the wake of the Climategate scandal that had engulfed the University if East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Professor Richard Tait, chairman of the BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee (ESC) announced that the BBC would conduct a review of impartiality and accuracy of their coverage of science.

It seemed to us that if such an exercise was to be useful, then input from the BBC’s critics would be essential, therefore we wrote a very constructive joint letter to Professor Tait asking if we could make a submission to the inquiry.

In spite of an extensive correspondence with the BBC Trust over a period of four months, we were unable to obtain confirmation that the letter had been delivered to Professor Tait.

The view that we formed was that the last thing the BBC Trust wanted for their review of the impartiality and accuracy of its science coverage was any input from critics.

We ask that the Inquiry should look at the submission that we then sent to Professor Jones too.

In summary, it identifies a rather shadowy organisation called the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme, set up and co-directed by the BBC’s Environment Analyst, Roger Harrabin, and Dr Joe Smith, a lecturer and environmental activist from the Open University.

We provided evidence that CMEP had been financed by a leading climate research institute, a major environmental NGO and a government department among others.

The purpose of CMEP was to organise seminars at which senior BBC staff would be joined by specialists in particular fields relating to environmental matters. CMEP’s partners in these ventures were the BBC itself and an environmental lobby origination called the International Broadcasting Trust.

We provided evidence that these events had a real impact on programming.

We also drew the BBC’s attention to a statement in John Bricut’s seminal report From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel: Safeguarding impartiality in the 21st Century, adopted and published by the BBC Trust in 2007 and signed off by Professor Tait.

This notes the care that the BBC takes to preserve impartiality in reporting controversial subjects such as climate change by saying:

‘The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus.’

This event took place in January 2006 and was organised by CMEP…meantime, an eyewitness account of the seminar posted at Harmless Sky indicates that the experts advising the BBC at this seminar were in fact climate change activists.

Between the time when Professor Jones was appointed by the BBC and the publication of his report, he had things to say about climate sceptics in an article for the Daily Telegraph headline “Gods, floods – and Global Warming’:

’Global warming is a myth.

‘Type that into a search engine and you get thousands of hits – but global warming is not a product of the human imagination; or no more so than any other scientific claims for – like them – it depends on its data, the accuracy of which has been affirmed by the inquiry into the leaked East Anglia documents. The subject has, alas, become the home of boring rants by obsessives.’

This hardly suggests that the professor would be likely give anyone who might question the current dogma on climate change, or the way in which it is reported by the BBC, a fair hearing…BBC news gathering and editorial staff had got far too close to environmental activism for impartiality to be preserved.

Over five years after we started to try and discover who the “best scientific experts” that the BBC relied on when it first decide to limit coverage of climate scepticism in its output, we still do not have an answer.’