Author Archives: Robin Horbury

The Pakistan floods of August last year were devastating. And like carrion crow picking a carcass, the warmists were all over them within days. Hillary Clinton was among the first to provide the link, and true to lapdog religious-zealotry form, the BBC was also quickly in on the act. Here, science “reporter” Howard Falcon-Lang assembled a catalogue of alarmist evidence to tell us (as the main message of the piece):

Professor Rajiv Sinha, from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, who has had first hand experience of Asian river floods, takes a more strident position.

“What all the climate models predict is that the distribution of monsoon rains will become more uneven in the future,” he told BBC News….Total rainfall stays the same, but it comes in shorter more intense bursts.”

Very little doubt there, and of course – as usual – Mr Falcon-Lang provides no alternative opinion from experts with different views, other than a brief nod to that deforestation of the Indus and poor management of levees may also have played a (minor) role. The inference is clear. The billions of pounds of damage and torrent of human suffering was exactly in line with the great-god climate models. And the people of Pakistan had better get used to it. The start of the Apocalypse.

Spool forward. A peer-reviewed paper to be presented to the American Meteorological Society (currently meeting in Seattle) says:

Last summer’s disastrous Pakistan floods that killed more than 2,000 people and left more than 20 million injured or homeless were caused by a rogue weather system that wandered hundreds of miles farther west than is normal for such systems, new research shows.

And, as Anthony Watts points out, the word “climate”, let alone “climate change” is not even mentioned in the findings of the paper. It was a highly unusual weather event in an area prone to unstable cyclonic rainfall. Full stop, capital letter.

I will await with bated breath for the BBC’s corrected take on this. And wait….

I wonder what goes on in Richard Black’s brain, though doing so is not easy.

On the one hand, you have this, a report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation – set up by a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and a raft of eminent UK citizens – stating that an investigation needs to be carried out into problems in the ways that the various investigations into Climategate were carried out. The conclusions could not be clearer; there are many unanswered questions. The press release is prominently available on the internet, most notably on the high profile sceptical site WUWT – hence not easy to miss.

On the other, published in the early hours of this morning by Mr Black, are claims by a parliamentary committee (packed with avowed warmists) that it’s time to completely forget the alleged problems in the Climategate investigations – irrespective of any doubts – and move on. They state:

“While we have some reservations about the reviews which UEA commissioned, the key point is that they have made a number of constructive recommendations.

“In our view it is time to make the changes and improvements recommended, and with greater openness and transparency move on.”

Now my first reaction to this sweeping statement – as a former newspaper and BBC journalist – was unease. When committees, however eminent or expert their members may be, want to move on in such a simplistic way, in effect to magic away any issues, I smell a huge rat. My instinct is to feel pressured, and uneasy that things are not what they seem. It makes me want to dig deeper to get at the truth. Words like “cover up” spring uneasily to mind.

But not our Richard. In fact, he’s demoted the concerns of GWPF and Andrew Montford, who have spent much careful time and effort explaining precisely why there are doubts, to the very end of his piece, and given their considerable evidence so little space that the whole thing looks like no more than a tacked-on genuflection. The GWPF release is well-crafted, and elements of it could easily have been lifted into Richard’s copy, just like he so easily and so often takes the words of climate change zealots.

My conclusion is that Peter Sissons is correct in his latest installment of concerns about standards at the BBC. The disease in the BBC mindset is truly profound. It goes so deep that they are delusional. They willfully downplay doubts to the extent that they give them no credence, despite their common sense ubiquity, the quality of the evidence involved and persistence of the sceptics against the might of the billions-of-dollars, highly corrupt climate change industry.

What’s even worse is that Mr Black backs the establishment (for that is what AGW now is) against those who advocate spirited, upstart concern.

James Delingpole has a stunning post on this BBC Horizon programme which sets out – as usual – to rubbish those who oppose the AGW orthodoxy. There is nothing I can add to Dellers, other than to say that the BBC is sinking to ever-lower depths in its climate change lying.

The story here is not that the BBC is cutting £34m from its web spending, axing 200 sites and “closing” 360 website posts. These may be minor, cosmetic steps in the right direction, but that’s all. No, the real isue here is that the corporation will continue to spend the obscene sum of £130m+ a year on its web operations for a cacaphony of services that are simply not needed. The BBC weather web service, for example, is simply a platform for inaccurate forecasts and propaganda for climate change politics. More seriously, the BBC’s websites have played a significant part in strangling both local journalism and major elements of web entrepreneurship in the UK. They are an integral part of the BBC’s imperialism (which it so despises in others!).

Peter Sissons’ attack on the BBC continues in the Daily Mail today. Though there are no startling revelations – the disrespect he chronicles that is shown to the Royal Family, as evidenced by the handling of the death of the Queen Mother, has been evident for decades – what strikes me is the strength of his writing, and his dignity. This is emphatically not a man expressing bitterness (as the BBC are already claiming), but simple, professional, concerned regret that standards were not met. I look forward to the next installment tomorrow…on climate change.

I don’t know Danny Cohen, the new Controller of BBC1, but I suspect that with his archetypal Oxbridge swagger, his highly-contrived casual BBC-Armani style and £250K daylight robbery taxpayer stipend, he’s going to become more than a regular here. He fits the Sissons mould to a beyond-parody T, and at the same time today confirms that he is on a Marxist mission to ram his cod working class values down our throats. Of course, some would say that this is only what the BBC has been doing for decades, though writers like the great Jimmy Perry (quoted in the Mail item), never claimed (to my knowledge) that they were trying to change the world, but merely to observe it in all its comic unpredictability.

God save us from BBC executives on a mission. The last one I recall was the chilling android himself, Blair acolyte and toady John Birt, who, you may recall, had an incomprehensible “Mission to Explain” that he enforced with vicious disregard for any normal values. That, in my book, is where the BBC rot really set in, though some would argue it was a lot earlier than that – including Anthony Jay (see his take on Cohen-style BBC values here), the writer of Yes, Minister, who, I suspect could tell Mr Cohen a thing or two about real comedy and what the BBC should actually be aiming to achieve. And ‘Allo ‘Allo writer Jeremy Lloyd delivers this sensible verdict here:

But you cannot write comedy through social engineering. Television is in enough trouble as it is without having to overcome prejudices about class.

The Palin/Arizona saga is easily the most important issue today; but meanwhile, Roger Harrabin here assembles a veritable usual-suspect army of green campaigners to shout at maximum volume that the government must appoint a GREEN MINISTER to make sure the “green agenda” continues to be adopted. The horror is that the Cleggerons probably will; but of course, our Roger utters not a peep about those who think that such a move will be a massive waste of our money. I’m all for sensible spending of taxes by cutting out waste and making efficiency savings – but this is not the way.

I’m adding monstrously to my carbon footprint to enjoy some glorious global warming in the tropics, so this will be my last posting for a while. The main task was avoiding dreaded “eco hotels” that ram AGW messages down your throat with every meal, but I have managed. And NO BBC! Whoopee!

I was very struck by this blog this morning, by Joseph D’Aleo, in which he relates that many diligent scientists – even thoose previously blinded by climate change fervour – are having doubts about the ozone hole scare. This, you may recall was the 1990-or-so sprinbgboard for the whole AGW industry, and showed the greenies how they could taste blood, make politicians jump and win their prized goal of new laws, if they yelled loudly enough on the save-the-world theme.

So I started digging into what the BBC has broadcast on this topic. It proved a fascinating and horrifying voyage. First, it was not long before I found the propagandist fingerprints of Richard Black. Here, he proclaims that it’s nasty capitalists who have made the hole worse, but also that AGW is in on the act, too. And here, in April 2010 – despite the fact that, as Joseph D’Aleo points out, those diligent scientists had been providing evidence since 2007 that the ozone scare was overblown – he now maintains that the threat is getting worse.

But this was all very predictable and is not what really caught my eye. I next found “My Risks”, a huge area of the BBC website previously unknown to me. The page I first came across explained that CFCs (the chemicals that greenies fingered as being responsible for ozone depletion) are being progessively banned by the EU towards a total ban in 2015. It makes very sure that the 18,000 boys and girls on the BBC payroll do not transgress. Here is what it says:

A refrigerant register is maintained at all BBC premises detailing: equipment containing ozone-depleting substances (e.g. air conditioning equipment, chillers, fire protection systems); type and quantity of gas used; any losses/replacements to demonstrate if losses have occurred.

Well blow me, so that’s where my licence fee goes; on tracking the minutest trace of CFCs.

I dug deeper into the environment section of“My Risks”. What I found is astonishing; it’s nothing less than a how-to-do, how-to-act manual on AGW fanaticism. It shows that every BBC employee is indoctrinated in the religion in literally a whole catalogue of greenie-infused regulations and instructions. I quote one page in full to show the full horror of what I am talking about and then you can dig for yourself.

All Managers should:

* Identify all environmental impacts associated with your activity
* Understand and keep up to date with BBC environmental management requirements associated with your work activity and communicate these to your staff.
* Ensure that your environmental impacts are reflected in your Division’s Environmental Risk Register
* Set local environmental objectives and targets in line with corporate and divisional environmental objectives and targets.
* Review activities that have an environmental impact to see whether they can be changed, if practicable, to stop or reduce the impact
* Plan environmental controls and measures in advance of activities. Obtain specialist advice at the early stages of planning activities if required.
* Ensure compliance monitoring is undertaken to ensure that the BBC’s environmental requirements are being met and control measures are being implemented effectively. If monitoring shows that controls are inadequate or could be improved, take action accordingly. Ensure any issues raised are logged and tracked through to completion.
* Ensure performance monitoring, including monitoring progress against objectives and targets, is undertaken in your area where applicable.
* Ensure the environmental training requirements of your staff are identified and implemented.
* Ensure emergency response plans are documented and tested for your area.
* Cooperate with the Management Review process as required.

There is much, much more, but I think I have made the point. It leads me to ask what the hell is the BBC? Is it a broadcasting organisation? I fear not. It seems that far more important are the rules for inculcating at every level the green creed.

I feel like a cracked record here but I am not going to let go. Another dime, another day, and Richard Black is at it again, illustrating that the climate alarmists are anxious for any new straw they can clutch. This time, it’s our old friend, the farting cow syndrome – if that nasty CO2 doesn’t get us, say dial-a-scare scientists, then methane will because billions of tons of it are trapped on the arctic sea bed and are about to be released by our grasping, capitalist ways. As usual, Mr Black doesn’t deign to bring us any contrasting views to his own fanaticism. He also glosses over somewhat what seems to me to be the real story, that microbes seem to absorb methane at an astonishing rate. It’s not scary, so let’s not draw too much attention to it. For the cracked-record record, here’s the in-proportion judgment about the importance of methane by a genuine scientist who hasn’t got a greenie scare agenda.

Update: There’s nothing a greenie likes more than the idea of a new tax, and Mr Black and assorted chums from the WWF and other zealot organisations are demanding one with menaces here. He really is in overdrive. I’m all for sensible conservation, and maintaining so-called natural habits up to a point (though spare me from any form of ludicrous back-to-nature idealism – there are 7bn of us), but I guarantee that anything adminstered by the UN (as he advocates) or the EU will end up as a corrupt, stand-and-deliver monstrosity. Isn’t it simply astonishing how greenies think the solution to everything involves handing powers to faceless, unelected, power-hungry, often corrupt bureaucrats? Actually, I think the wonderful Jo Nova could have been writing about Richard Black when she filed this. Enjoy.