Author Archives: Robin Horbury

Scratch the surface, and there lies yet another BBC climate change fanatic. They are everywhere; they are proliferating and they rule our lives. Yesterday, I reported that Roger Harrabin was off on a jolly to Norway to discuss how the media should be forced into reporting more climate change lies. One of his companions on the carbon dioxide guzzling fest will be Paddy Coulter, who is one of the three bosses of the modestly titled consultancy outfit, Oxford Global Media.

This company, I found with weary familiarity, specialises in guess what? Giving alarmist climate change advice to a whole range of government agencies and organisations, and was recently reponsible, for example, for organising a seminar on why Copenhagen went so wrong, spreading propaganda about climate change in China, and “sustainability” strategy for the developing world (codeword for ensuring that everyone involved follows the climate change agenda).

One of his fellow directors on this august and enterprising body is the chap above – David A.L. Levy. And surprise, surprise, he’s a former BBC senior manager – Controller of Public Policy, no less. In his own words:

…in charge of UK & EU policy, engagement with the converged communications regulator, Ofcom and government affairs. He successfully led the BBC’s Charter Review & Licence Fee policy through its most testing review to date and was responsible for the management dimensions of the pioneering Public Value Test as applied to new services. He has long experience of the regulatory framework for broadcasting, having led the BBC’s input to the 1996 Broadcasting Act, the 2003 Communications Act, the European Communications Framework review, and the first Ofcom Review of Public Service Television.

Phew! And not only that. He was also clearly a toady to Peter Mandelson, because during the last couple of years of of NuLabour, he was appointed to the Department of Business Innovation and Skills to their Science and Media Expert Group. This body was – again, surprise, surprise – packed with warmist acolytes including Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute, and Fran Unsworth, the head of newsgathering at the BBC. Oh, and it was chaired by none other than one Fiona Fox, of the Science Media Centre….who, as I said yesterday, is also off on the jolly jaunt to Norway with our friend Mr Harrabin.

The findings of the said Science and Media Group were very predictably that nasty influences are keeping the true reporting of the full horrors of climate change out of the media, and steps must be taken to counter this. Exactly the same as Carbonundrum this Tuesday. It’s the same people singing from the same zealot’s hymn sheet. What is truly worrying is the depth to which this disease has infected the BBC, the extent to which the BBC is connected to these groups (and works with them), and the amount of our resources they collectively squander.

Funny, isn’t it, that Roger Harrabin’s worries about climate change don’t preclude jet travel? And funny, too, that he mostly turns up to demonstrate his knowledge at climate events organised and run by warmist fanatics. Next Tuesday, he’s off to Carbonundrums (geddit? what a fabulous wheeze of a title) in Oslo with his chum Fiona Fox, she of the Science Media Centre, along with a chap called Paddy Coulter, who runs the equally eco-crazed Oxford Global Media group. As usual, there’s not a sceptic in sight; they are worried, poor dears, that the media is not doing enough to spread climate change lies. I wonder which of the organisers is paying our Roger’s CO2-fest fare? The BBC? the British Council? The Norwegian Government? Himself?…somehow I doubt the latter. I look forward to their conclusions – no doubt those nasty, evil, sceptics will get fingered again.

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?

It’s becoming increasingly clear, thanks to a series of posts from Autonomous Mind, The Register and Katabasis, that the Met Office is not only seriously incompetent but also full of viperous spin doctor “spokesmen”, whose sole aim is to dissemble and obfuscate. The facts are emerging piece by piece through persistent FoI requests. Thanks to these latest FoI revelations, it now seems that our £100m-plus-a- year Met Office weather service did not see the severe cold of December coming, unlike numerous lesser-funded services who actually are in the business of forecasting rather than politics. Not only that, when it saw its mistake, it then set out to create a massive smokescreen to suggest that it did actually see it coming, but could not communicate the message publicly because –bizarrely – people could not really be trusted to understand and deal properly with such information. It defies belief and common sense that the Met Office should act in this way, but that it what happened. It’s confirmation, perhaps, that the Met Office’s main purpose is no longer forecasting – which it patently can’t do competently – but spreading climate propaganda.

One of its chosen messengers to spread this mis/disinformation was, of course, the ever-faithful Roger Harrabin of the BBC. It’s underlined his role yet again as warmist lapdog-in-chief. Mr Harrabin reported emphatically in early January that the Met Office told him that they had briefed the government in October about the coming cold snap, but had kept it secret because of the possible consequences. He – being a very highly paid BBC senior journalist – must have had some inkling of the furore that this would unleash because the unavoidable conclusion of his story was that one way or another, someone was spreading porkies or disinformation. Mr Harrabin seemed to imply at that stage that he thought it was the government.
What has now emerged from the excellent blog work by AM and Katabasis is that the Met Office forecast about December was at best wrong and more likely useless unscientific gibberish.

So why was Mr Harrabin taken in? Over the past couple of days, he has been trying desperately to explain, here and here. The impact on me of his posts has been to create even more confusion. He seems on the one hand to be insisting that, despite the evidence that the Met’s October forecast was at best unsure about December’s weather, someone (unnamed and mysterious, the Deep Throat of the Met Office) did tell him that the secret forecast about severe cold had been delivered to the government in October. On the other hand, he’s deploying the “move-along there, nothing-to-see” argument by drawing attention to a half-baked experiment he claims will make forecasting better. And thirdly, he’s saying that anyway, even if the Met Office had delivered the October forecast, there would not have been enough certainty in it for local authorities to take decisive action by buying more salt or snowploughs. As Autonomous Mind notes, never mind the facts, Watch the Birdie!

Where does all this leave the truth? At best, very seriously compromised. The politicians at the Met Office (for that is what they are) have woven a very, very intricate web that has at its heart quantum physics-style precepts, such as the creation of a new category of non-forecast forecasts. And I await new developments in Mr Harrabin’s textbook presentation in the art of journalistic contortionism with interest. This is fast developing into one of the blogsphere’s most exhilarating moments. The ride’s not over yet.

As widely predicted, the BBC4 programme on climate change last night was a ham-fisted stitch-up. Richard North ably explains here. It’s in their genes; anyone they think is outside their neme is isolated, gulled, done over and then ultimately ridiculed with all the grace and style of a two-dime huckster. The tragedy is that they genuinely think that this counts as legitimate programme making. I concur with Richard that this technique is deployed to salve their battered egos and shore up their belief systems, it is telling that this exercise has been on the drawing board for considerable time.

Meanwhile, last night’s Horizon – about latest research on pain – was also a gem of political correctness in the same mould. I deal these days a lot with people doing research into infant psychology. To cut a long story short, the central model of child development is called Attachment Theory, in which there is very substantial research that secure attachment to parents (or main carers) in the first years of life is essential in facilitating normal mental and social development. But in all the discussion about this said Attachment Theory(it was central to the argument about pain tolerance), the programme carefully and systematically – to the point of idiocy – avoided any statement that directly highlighted that a nurturing and relatively stable family life is important to a developing infant. The elephant in the room was glaringly not mentioned or circumlocuted. The BBC, of course, hates anything that supports the traditional nuclear family. Their response is Pavolovian.

Update: Here, from the WUWT blog, is a videotape editor’s review of last night’s programme on Lord Monckton. It’s long, but the guy has 25 years experience, and it is worth including in full to show the full extent of BBC bias:

Meet the Skeptics’ was a great example of clumsy, heavy handed storytelling. Nothing more. The most telling techniques include the way Monckton was seldom given more than 10 seconds to say anything, with cutaways covering obvious edits in his talking in order to make it seem like he is saying something he probably isn’t. It’s easy. I do it everyday, though I tend to do it to enhance understanding not to misrepresent. On the other hand, Monckton’s detractors were given free reign to speak with 30, 40, 45 seconds of screen time to expound their ideas and make their point.

The part where Monckton was caught (supposedly) looking forlorn as he read the (apparently) devastating report about his address to Congress was pure pathos, made all the more emotional by the sad piano music and then the cut to him sitting alone, in the distance, looking out onto the loch, no doubt contemplating the obvious and terrible mistakes he’d made. Except we didn’t learn what those mistakes were other than a rather lame mis-attribution which he owned up to.

Murray had a chance here to actually present the sceptics’ case, however much he disagreed with it. Instead he chose to malign and mis-represent through juxtaposition (witness the homophobe and gun-wielding bigots), through use of music (the mournful piano and the buffoonery of Gilbert & Sullivan telling us what to feel), through language (such as the repeated use if the phrase ‘what he thought was true’ and it’s variations and naturally, through selective editing,

Given the exact same material I could edit a programme that would tell a totally different story. Never be told that a documentary is truth.

It is rather disappointing, but James Delingpole and Lord Monckton have both been apparently duped into getting involved in tonight’s BBC Four hatchet job on climate change scepticism. I have been saying for years now that anyone who takes part in a BBC programme about anything that does not accord with the corporation’s worldview does so at their own risk; documentary producers – especially – long since abandoned any pretence of objectivity because they are on a mission. At core, everyone (Lord M and Mr Delingpole clearly included) somehow naively hopes and believes that the BBC will once, just once, be balanced, accurate and truthful, and that somehow, the truth will prevail. The sad reality is that it never will – Auntie is rotten to the core. The documentary tonight and the equally squalid Keith Nurse programme last week provide compelling evidence for this; this is now a full-scale propaganda campaign.

Richard Black unblushingly brings you “news” from those who spray cash around to peddle their warmist business interests. Now, as a result of a FoI request, it has been established that Roger Harrabin, his colleague in reporting BBC climate alarmism, not only hires himself out to warmist causes as “chair” but is also prepared to go to extraordinary prestidigitating lengths to back up the Met Office in their blatant spinning about the recent brutally cold spell. Autonomous Mind brilliantly tells the full saga here. I agree with him that it’s time that Roger (and Richard) got the chop, but chances of that happening at the weather-zealot infested BBC? Zero.

If anything, they are heading in the opposite direction. Here’s their colleague David Shukman outlining the patently lunatic plans by civil servants to deal with the warming that they (and Mr Shukman) so fervently believe is happening, despite the evidence. Fishes by moved from lakes in the Lake District to Scotland? Network rail worrying about heatwaves (when the grim reality is that one cold snap and they are on the knees?). It’s all recorded without a note of contrasting opinion, caution or common sense, and (straight from the BBC website textbook of scare techniques) illustrated with a train on a viaduct being splashed by a wave to ram home the alarmist homily-of-the-day. I weep.

I apologise for again posting about Richard Black, but he increasingly personifies all that is wrong with the BBC’s climate reporting. Last year, he went against form and posted this item, showing that research – for once, not based on models but actual observations – had illustrated that the Gulf Stream showed no signs of slowing down. This was a big poke in the eye for the alarmists who have repeatedly predicted that the switch-off would trigger ice-melt doom. Their fears were sensationally portrayed in the nonsense catastrophe movie The Day After Tomorrow as well as in the many spoutings of Mr Al Gore.

Today, though, Mr Black seems to have forgotten about all that, and like a faithful puppy, he is reporting with clear, unadulterated admiration the latest exploits of the egomaniac so-called polar explorer Pen Hadow. Here, in his description of Mr Hadow’s last polar expedition in 2009, Anthony Watts gives ten very simple reasons why anything this foolhardy would-be Scott does must be taken with a huge dose of cynicism, among them, that he has already made up his mind that he can swim most of the way to the Arctic Circle (yes, swim), and questionable competence (in having to be rescued at huge expense and leaving behind polluting supply oil). In short, the man is a fantasist.

Notwithstanding, Mr Black clearly believes that his new mission is important, and he repeats with odd disregard of his own writing, Mr Hadow’s fears that the Gulf Stream is in danger of switching off, as well – of course – as the usual scaremongering about the Arctic ice is melting “faster than the computer models predict”. In the real world, Arctic ice is low, but as real world observers have pointed out, there are clear natural reasons for it. And what Mr Black never mentions is that this is more than compensated for by the fact that Antarctic Sea ice is heading the opposite way, underlining that there is no danger of world indundation anytime soon.

What is even more sinister about this sensationlist, highly selective reporting is his pay-off line. In his latest so-called news report, he concludes, without a blush:

The £1m project is directed by explorer Pen Hadow and sponsored by the Catlin insurance group.

That will be the same Catlin group that a minute’s research confirms is among the world cheerleaders for climate change alarmism. In my book, they are using their so-called sponsorship of Mr Hadow to further their apparent goals of fannning warming fears so that they might attract more business. How does that square with the BBC’s Charter, Mr Black?