Author Archives: Robin Horbury

I increasingly believe that BBC journalists bust a gut each morning to find the best climate scare story and then plot how to write it in the scariest way they can. Good game! A latest effort is this Richard Black scarefest which tells us in familiar tones and structure that a new paper has established that the IPCC “landmark” report (note the reverence – I personally would call it the “botched science” report)of 2007 is wrong and that sea level rises as a result of ice loss from the poles is going to be a phenomenal 23 inches by 2100. Cue the usual images of Al Gore horror – we are all going to drown.

Let’s look instead at why this picture should be treated with extreme caution rather than being pumped out as gothic horror. First, sea levels are currently not rising. Bangladesh and the Maldives and Tuvalu are all still there despite the false, systematic panic. Second, this paper has not even been published yet and the BBC is champing at the bit to make it as sensational as possible. And third, when you read the abstract of the paper, the reality is that the writers themselves admit that their methods of prediction are subject to very significant error – but then go on to make firm everybody-panic predictions. This is exactly the problem with climate scientists that has been highlighted time and time again on the blogs doing the real work on climate change, such as What’s Up With That? These climate change zealots conducting so-called research want to find horror stories and they do so. Richard Black and co then slavishly and reverentially amplify them. It should be the BBC’s job to highlight and expose such uncertainty and charlatanism, but it actually does the reverse.

Richard Black, again, I’m afraid….today he’s in propaganda overdrive about the US, those nasty republicans won’t allow CO2-curbing measures to be passed, and they are even daring to challenge the idea that those mercury-filled greenie light bulbs should be foisted upon us all. Most of all, though, he’s praising that democratic paradise called China. The reason? Well China, unlike the US, is going to join the EU in curbing emissions. For Richard, that’s enough for sainthood and a big plug on his blog, no matter how repugnant the regime.

But, er, Mr Black, have you not heard of propaganda, and divide and rule, and all the other treacherous techniques used by every despotic regime since Darius? No, of course, not. Those who follow the green creed are virtuous choose what. Four legs bad, two legs good.

For the record, Mr Black, China’s goals are simple. They want economic expansion and total domination of the west. They are well towards achieving what they want and the crippling EU green bureaucracy is assisting them by pushing up the West’s Labour costs and strangling innovation. And as for green promises, they aren’t worth a straw. A few minutes’ digging shows that China consumed 3bn tons of coal in 2009 and is easily the world’s biggest gobbler of the fuel, accounting for almost 50%. It has no intention of stopping anytime soon, despite its rhetoric. For greenies, though, that’s immaterial – they say they are going to do something and that’s enough. The US, by contrast, consumes just 14%.

The green creed’s obsession with CO2 is a dangerous and mindless, but economy-crippling, obsession. And Mr Black is pursuing it with every sinew.

The Cleggeron transport minister Phillip Hammond has caused hoots of derision with his ludicrous claims – made on the BBC Daily Politics Show last Wednesday – that wind turbines do not attract subsidy. They do, and they also benefit from an electricity tariff that forces us, the suffering public, to pay ludicrously high charges for this so-called “renewable” energy.

Andrew Neil, the host of the show, has decided to check out the veracity of Mr Hammond’s claims and he has blogged about his efforts. Good on him, but what he has written shows that when anyone, absolutely anyone, at the BBC writes about climate change, they get it wrong. Mr Neil claims that the only “subsidy” that windfarms receive is through the the higher electricity charges. He ignores/misses/doesn’t know the full facts, namely that these monstrosities do receive direct subsidies through a variety of routes, including help with so-called infrastructure development. The truth may be deliberately buried under screeds of bureaucracy and regulation, but the subsidy gravy train is definitely in motion. And of course, Cleggeron climate change nutter-in-chief Chris Huhne sings their praises at every opportunity, as well as preventing any possibility of the UK adopting sensible energy policies.

Oh, and Mr Neil, windfarms also wreak huge environmental damage by killing wildife, destroying the countryside, bringing misery to rural communities and by gobbling up huge quantities of rare earth metals in their maunufacture.

Autonomous Mind waspishly but brilliantly explains here why David Cameron’s claims today that he will get rid of bureaucracy and stimulate enterprise are a load of hot air. The BBC, of course, uses the speech mainly as yet another pretext to pursue the corporation’s anti-cuts we-want-Labour-back agenda; there’s not a whisper in their Cameron coverage about the real enemy to growth and enterpise, which is the EU.

Meanwhile, without any sense of irony, Roger Harrabin reports about one of the most chilling documents I have ever seen. It was slipped out last week by DEFRA and is called Mainstreaming Sustainable Development. What it means in practice is that the incompetents at DEFRA (who have already wrecked huge parts of British agriculture, slavishly follow EU diktats, and masterminded such debacles as the response to foot-and-mouth) henceforward have a mandate to meddle in every sphere of British life to ensure that eco-loon measures are adopted at almost all and any cost. This really is eco-fascism in action and will ensure that taxes are jacked up in the effort to reduce CO2; all efforts to start new businesses in the UK are swamped by eco-regulations (on top of the thousands of pages already enacted by the EU); and waste management – already a total sick joke – will become even more complex.

For Harrabin and his cronies, of course, even this is not enough. His entire article is taken up by the usual eco-loons like Jonathan Porritt who are bellyaching and moaning that much stricter measures must be introduced and jackboot government must enforce them. Already we have been warned that electricity is going to become an intermittent commodity, and Britain’s energy policy is simply dangerously complacent. Mr Harrabin will not stop his one-sided ranting until we are back in the stone age.

If you examine the 2005 report by Lord Wilson of Dinton into the BBC’s coverage of EU-related matters, what leaps out is bias by omission, the crude but systematic ignoring by BBC journalists of important EU issues. Six years on, nothing has changed. Transcripts of relevant items on yesterday’s main news programmes on BBC radio and television show that there was scarcely any discussion of UKIP’s remarkable second-place result in the Barnsley by-election. There was a 20-seconds soundbite from Nigel Farage on Today, but that was virtually it; UKIP was airbrushed out and the only angle that was covered was that the Lib Dems got a good kicking – giving BBC journalists another excuse to continue with their cacophony of anti-cuts stories. This fits in with their long-term agenda to both brand UKIP as loonies and otherwise ignore the party. The idea that UKIP reflects a major and fast-growing anti-EU swell of opinion is repugant to all BBC journalists.

In fact, the EU only ever comes under criticism from the BBC when there is worry that Brussels is not doing enough about climate change. Here, Richard Black sets out at length and without balance the views of those who think that an already suicidal 20% cut in C02 emissions should be increased to a lunatic 25% or more. To enliven his argument, he highlights a quote from a group of his eco-zealot chums called Sandbag, the jolly members of which are pictured above. They say, no doubt exactly in line with Mr Black’s own views:

“The scaremongering tactics of a handful of industrial lobbyists have successfully castrated Europe’s climate ambitions”

As I have noted before, there’s a clear link between Sandbag and the Futerra PR camapigning group which trains BBC personnel in propaganda techniques. That aside, as far as I can see, the only qualifications that this loathsome self-important, eco-fascist group have to lecture us are that they have spent years on fat salaries working for groups such as Oxfam and WWF. For Mr Black, of course, they are demi-gods.

I have reported before that the PR outfit Futerra is a BBC-linked organisation that trains BBC people on how to spread climate change propaganda. Here, Richard Black, bemoaning the scrapping of the useless quango the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), fantasises that it might wash its hands of dirty government funding and transmute instead into a body that becomes “a people’s watchdog” on green government. He spouts with enthusiastic glee:

The new body would use techniques such as crowdsourcing and social media to dissect data and lobby government. There is no funding for the new group, although conversations are underway…The proposed body would monitor all government departments and follow all relevant issues, providing a running audit of the coalition’s pledge to be the “greenest ever government”.

I haven’t the faintest idea what the jargon he deploys actually means (have you?) but no doubt it chimes loudly with the messages that Futerra have been spreading amongst the BBC climate-zealot community; it’s clear that this is the case, because he goes on to quote the Futerra boss as saying that this people’s SDC would become a pressure group like the Taxpayers’ Alliance. Laying aside that the Taxpayers’ Alliance actually condemns the spending of our money on green scams, the messages involved certainly fit neatly also with what Mr Black has been doing for years, that is, rammming climate change propaganda down our throats under the totally misnomer of “news”.

What’s even more chilling is that among the senior staff of the SDC is a lady whom Mr Black also adoringly quotes, one Rebecca Willis. Her credentials for this role as high-priestess of global warming and higher energy bills and fuel tax surchages?

Rebecca is a regular speaker at conferences and seminars, and has written for The Guardian, New Statesman and the journal Renewal. She is an Associate of Green Alliance, the leading environmental think tank, and from 2001-4 was the organisation’s Director. Before joining Green Alliance in 1998, Rebecca spent two years as a policy adviser at the European Parliament in Brussels, specialising in international environmental issues. Rebecca has a first class degree in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, and a masters degree in Environment, Development and Policy from the University of Sussex.

I rest my case. Mr Black is in bed with, and unquestioningly and uncritically recycles, the nonsense of Guardian-loving activists whose mission in life is to send us back to the stone age, and to make misery – through higher taxes – the lives of millions.

Here, miracle of miracles you might at first think, the BBC website has reported a survey from the respected consultancy Verso Economics showing that the obscene rush to create renewable energy (mainly wind farms) in Scotland is actually losing 3.7 jobs for every one that it generates. The findings chime with dozens of other surveys, as is reflected in this article today by Christopher Booker. Credit to the BBC for publishing it.

But hang on to your wallets, there is a catch – as with everything the BBC does. When Richard Black and his cronies publish their climate change propaganda, such as here, or here, the stories are accompanied by scores of quotes from so called experts agreeing with the alarmism in all its varied forms. Not so with the Verso Economics story. Spot the difference. Less than a half of the story is about the actual report, and there is not one word about how the economists involved have carefully reached their conclusions.

The rest of the item is from those who are determined to shout Verso down, and those who financially benefit from wind farm development, including, of course, the Scottish government itself, which as Verso points out, is laughing all the way to the bank with its barrow-loads of subsidies from taxpayers elsewhere in the UK. The other objector is Scottish Renewables, a propaganda-scavenger, eco-fascist organisation that seeks to make maximum amounts of money from any damn green scan it can. One of the chief speakers at its forthcoming conference is Yvo de Boer, the former Executive Secretary of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and now an advisor to scam-consultant in chief KPMG, where surprise surprise, there is a BBC link – it’s where Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick, the former BBC director of corporate social responsibility, also works.

So fanatical are the said Scottish Renewables about climate change that they actually believe the upheavals in North Africa have been caused by it. Shame on the BBC for including such a ludicrous end-of-the-world quote. And how predictable that they cover the Verso Economics report with such blatant bias.

The Daily Mail today notes that more than 3m legal immigrants were allowed into the UK under new Labour, with the total swelled by a further 1m illegals. This, it observes, has been the biggest invasion for a thousand years, even though their election manifesto in 1997 vowed to control our borders. (Presumably it means proportionately the largest, because the population of the UK was only around 3m in total 1,000 years ago) Sir Andrew Green, the persistent, well-researched and erudite head of Migration Watch UK, says that a major factor in allowing the influx was the attitude of the BBC. He writes:

Another major factor was the attitude of the BBC and, in particular, its devotion to multiculturalism. For years it avoided discussing immigration if it possibly could.

Although in the autumn of 2005 official statistics for the previous year showed an increase of 50 per cent in net immigration, there was no mention of this on the BBC.

Its own report into impartiality, published in June 2007, concluded that its coverage of immigration amounted to bias by omission.

Last December the corporation’s director-general admitted: ‘There are some areas, immigration, business and Europe, where the BBC has historically been rather weak and rather nervous about letting that entire debate happen.’ Indeed so.

The overall effect was to deter any serious discussion of immigration and to give plenty of space to the Left to accuse anyone who raised the subject of being a covert racist. On this matter the BBC failed to meet its own standards of objectivity.

Back in 2003/4, I did research into the BBC’s coverage of immigration, and it was blatantly clear that all those who opposed Labour’s policy were ignored, the only people interviewed about the topic were fervent multi-culturalists, and people like Sir Andrew Green were cast as bigoted xenophobes. As usual, what I submitted was ridiculed. Not much has changed, even though Mark Thompson has now admitted that there was a problem. The real issue is that no matter what it says, the corporation’s desire for what it sees as multi-culturalism is an integral part of its credo. I can hear their purring agreement with Labour’s verdict on the figures:

This is an unbalanced, misleading and highly political report. Migration levels increased initially because of the strength of the British economy over many years.

The UN wants to rob £800bn every year from the global economy to tip down the chute of eco-worship and send us back to the stone age. The BBC faithfully reports this mania , without a word of dissent or common-sense. In the BBC’s green-creed book, it must be worth reporting because 100 ministers (no less!)along with a clutch of “experts” say so. And in the world of eco-fascism, what ministers and experts say must be obeyed. Actually, I agree with some of what these UN nutters are advocating. For starters, let’s scrap the Common Agricultural Policy, the Common Fisheries Policy, and with them, the whole shooting match of corruption in Brussels. The reality is that none of that will go, all that will happen is more bloated, corrupt globocrats will harry and scour the world finding fantastical ways of frittering our cash. And the BBC will carry on reporting.

Here, Richard Black sets out to mount what he sees as a balanced discussion of the much-mulled-over disagreement between Eric Steig and Ryan O’Donnell about the Antarctic climate record. He fails miserably, first by firmly nailing his colours to the mast of the warmist approach of Mr Steig, and secondly for his sneering, patronising assertion that he – unlike bloggers – bases his observations and reporting on “peer-reviewed” papers. Putting aside the rather major point that the central issue of the Steig-O’Donnell spat was that Mr Steig was a so-called peer reviewer who sought to block the publication of Mr O’Donnell’s paper (thus highlighting yet again what a warmist-rigged snakepit the whole peer-review system is), it also shows that Mr Black’s stance is based at core on smug, holier-than-thou hectoring. He is clearly having a swipe at those he perceives as his hated, inferior, right-wing enemies, such as the redoubtable James Delingpole – who published this searing analysis of the O’Donnell saga. Who would you trust most?