Author Archives: Robin Horbury

SEASONAL HEADLIGHTS…

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Here for your seasonal delectation is a nice BBC picture of AGW in action – the River Wharfe at Bolton Abbey near Skipton (one of my favourite childhood haunts)covered in that warming icing for the first time in a generation. Paul Hudson – perhaps the one BBC employee who is prepared to occasionally look outside the warming frame – also notes that the River Humber and Whitby Harbour are both freezing over (last recorded in 1962/3), and even the Nidd at Knaresborough is solid. Meanwhile, the rest of the BBC remains eerily silent about the causes. Rabbits caught in the headlights? A merry Christmas to everyone!

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BBC TRUST

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Leverhulme is a £50m charitable trust which supposedly fosters academic work. But like so many such bodies, it long since decided that AGW was a certainty, and in 2008 held a symposium on the theme. The blurb declared:

The anthropogenic forcing of climate will be one of the major issues faced by Human society over the rest of this century.

And last year, according to its annual report, one of its main grants went to a no-doubt delighted Dr Ings, who is researching the impact of hot winters (like this year?) on bumble bees in deepest Somerset:

The buzz of foraging bumblebees is a quintessential sound of summer, yet since the 1990s the familiar buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) has been observed visiting garden flowersin the depths of winter!

Well golly gosh. Almost poetic, and hold the front page; no doubt his work will fit in neatly (so that he can keep that grant money coming) with the latest warmist contortionist back-somersault pronouncements from the Postdam Climate Institute about cold winters, that they are definitively caused by global warming. Warming, it has now been established by these gurus, causes extreme cooling, and warming, and cooler warmer winters. All, of course, at the same time in our headlong, unstoppable rush to climate change doom.

So what’s the relevance of this to the BBC? Well, this morning, the website has a prominent story (front page when I looked) about a grant being awarded by the Trust to investigate the log books of discovery and whaling voyages to the Arctic in past centuries. The purpose, of course, in line with the blinkered science which the trust pursues, is already decided, namely “to see if they shed light on climate change”. Dr Wheeler, the very happy and newly enriched research director says:

“The Arctic environmentally is a hugely important area, but we need to know how it’s behaved in the past in order that we can assess how it’s going to behave in the future. You can’t look forward without looking back. This is no longer just a scientific issue – climate change is of global, political concern.”

So that’s it then: what we have is an overtly political exercise paid for by a warmist trust to confirm warmist objectives. All very cosy. And why do the BBC publicise it? Why is it remotely a news story? Dozens of research grants are awarded every day and this is a tiddler in comparison to many of them. Well, could it be that Sir Michael Perry, the chairman of the Leverhulme Trust, has worked for the BBC World Service (already a full advocate of the warmist cause), and also because anything to do with global warming is pushed as hard as possible by the BBC? Even when it’s a non-story.

Everywhere you look on the topic of AGW reveals deeper and deeper links between the BBC and the warmist cause.

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OBAMA "LIKE DUBYA", SAYS BBC GREENIE

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Polar bears have long been the sacred cause of warmists, especially those at the BBC. This story from last year shows the ridiculous political lengths that they will go to to claim that despite abundant evidence to the contrary (most populations are actually rising), the species is at risk of extinction because of nasty emissions. Now BBC reporter Rajesh Mirchandani – who has secured a cushy beat with the BBC that allows him to pontificate freely about melting arctic ice, including this gem of a scare story – has filed this bellyaching piece bemoaning that the US government has shown a glimmer of sense for once and pulled back from declaring the bears as “endangered”. Such news perhaps could be seen as a sign for celebrations, especially for the biodiversity obsessives at the corporation; nice, cuddly polar bears aren’t going to leave us anytime soon. But no. Instead, it is used as a peg for Mr Mirchandani to give an airing to one of the most astonishing attacks on President Obama that I have seen in any BBC copy. He writes:

The Centre for Biological Diversity – one of the groups trying to get the polar bear listed as “endangered” – said the ruling showed that the administration of US President Barack Obama was continuing to defend Bush-era “anti-science decisions”.

Ouch! Not his words, admittedly, but he’s created the platform for them, and there’s no balancing copy. It shows in its rigid one-sidedness that greenies like Mr Mirchandani will savagely bare their ursine teeth and sink them into any target they want – no matter how venerated – if their inflexible religious view that the science must be obeyed is crossed. Come back McCarthy – all is forgiven.

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BLIZZARD CONDITIONS

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The BBC has been eerily silent about the causes of the latest cold snap. There’s nothing that I can find that suggests that its main weather information supplier the revered Met Office might be wrong; and the Quarmby report, saying that there is no evidence of clustering of cold weather, has been covered virtually without comment. Yet elsewhere, the internet is abuzz with stories that the Met Office is seriously at fault. I wonder why?

And I am intrigued by this item. Paul Hudson, the BBC weather reporter who has dared before to challenge AGW orthodoxy spells out that this December is in line to become the third coldest such month since the Central England Temperature (CET) record was started in 1659. He concludes:

This is the third winter running when we have had very cold and snowy conditions hitting the UK. It comes at a time of continued, unusually weak, solar activity. In my blog ‘could the sun cast a shadow on global temperatures’ I wrote about how Australian scientist David Archibald was convinced that prolonged weak solar activity could mean much colder winters in future. He wrote his paper in February 2009. Perhaps we all need to get used to colder winters across the UK in the next few years.

Stand by for a veritable flurry of denial statements from the warmists at the BBC. But thank God someone in the corporation (from Yorkshire, I note)seems to have a glimmering of common sense. In one report, at least.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the BBC, the blizzard of AGW nonsense continues.

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GREENIE POISON

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After my posting about Mark Thompson’s cod confession about past bias, it seems that the BBC College of Journalism (CoJo to its illustrious students)is continuing the tradition of inviting nice, unbiased speakers to address the future and current stars of the airwaves. Following the appearance back in September of biodiversity zealot Jonathan Baillie (whom Richard Black introduced by saying that a third of the species on earth had died over the last 30 years), we now have someone else who can provide a balanced perspective on matters to do with the environment. Step forward…er, John Sauven, the UK director of Greenpeace. Of course, Greenpeace is deeply revered by all at the BBC, and is seldom off the airwaves. No matter, CoJo students need to be told why these appearances muct continue. Mr Sauven therefore explains in his specially-edited feature lecture with cold, humourless precision how he completely ignores democracy and the needs of local farmers (whom he chillingly describes as collectively “out to lunch” because they want to earn a living) in deprived areas of the world in order to pressure multinationals into doing his unstoppable will as part of his saintly mission to Save the World. Essentially, all thirty minutes come across to me as an activist’s guide to forcing the green creed on the world. It’s nothing to do with journalism, other than a chilling insight to a form of political bludgeoning. I am sure that back in the 1640s, Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins talked in much the same coldly logical way about the need to rid East Anglia of witches.

I’ve checked the past list of CoJo speakers, and I don’t see a single person who is anything to do with climate scepticism or who holds different views of economic development. It seems to me that the aim of this so-called college is therefore simple: to invite speakers who are experts in aiding the BBC mission to spread greenie poison.

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TOMMYROT

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It seems from the Daily Mail today that Mark Thompson – perhaps stung by Jeremy Hunt’s comments earlier in the week – is accepting that the BBC may have been a tad biased in its past coverage of the EU and immigration. Of course, everything is perfect now, and he even has the temerity to claim that the corporation has played a role in making immigration policy tougher.

Over the six years that Mr Thompson has been director general of the BBC, I have been indirectly involved in a succession of very detailed reports that have chronicled in depth a sustained BBC bias in the coverage of (among other things)immigration and EU affairs. So I know a little bit about the background of his latest utterances. Each of these reports examined on a systematic, academic basis the ouput of hundreds of BBC news programmes (focusing esepcially on Today and other main news titles)and they have shown that:

***With the EU, there has been deliberate under-representation of those who oppose the EU project (so-called sceptics and withdrawalists)and an equally systematic ridiculing of those “sceptics” as being the equivalent of flat-earthers or BNP supporters. At the same time, there has been a massive under-reporting of the negative side of the EU, for example its budgetary waste and corruption, it’s manic drive to create new laws in every spehere of our lives, and its ecoloonery.

***With immigration, those who opposed unlimited immigration in line with new Labour zeal were regularly portrayed as BNP, foaming-in-the-mouth, right-wing nutcases. Their reasoned arguments for control of numbers were seriously under-reported, distorted or ignored. Dozens of detailed examples of this were provided.

Over the years, the BBC’s reponse to almost every one of these reports has been to stick its collective fingers in its ears, blow a massive raspberry and ignore the findings. Those who compiled the reports were called (usually behind their backs, but sometimes to their faces) right-wing zealots, incompetent bigots, anal retentive idiots, and on one occasion, one was the subject of an outright slanderous lie told in the Houses of Parliament by a senior BBC editorial figure. In short, the BBC mostly ignored the findings.

On one occasion, this did not happen. Michael Grade, when he was chairman of the BBC, got riled about the sustained criticism about EU coverage and he ordered a full inquiry. This was carried out by Lord Wilson of Dinton, the former cabinet secretary, and it was damning. It found systematic bias by ommission and warned that the corporation must ensure that all sides in the EU debate must be properly aired and treated with due respect. The response was predictable window-dressing; Mark Mardell was appointed EU editor (and promptly went native), but nothing changed. Exactly the same EU bias has remained to the present day.

Mr Thompson’s remarks yesterday therefore, have to be taken with a massive pinch of salt. Pressure is clearly being exerted from some quarter or another (Hunt’s lot?), and the director general is leading with his chin (to a very small extent) with the aim of batting the real issues involved well and truly into the long grass. Any idea that the BBC has any conception of the rotten, stinking morrass of bias in which it is mired, is easily dispelled by deputy DG Mark Byford’s latest interview with Ray Snoddy this morning on the ludicrously-mistitled Newswatch. Mr Byford tells us (with a very straight face)that every one of his BBC news staff works to his or her utmost in pursuit of “impartiality”. What utter tommyrot.

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WHO GIVES A FIG?

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As Richard North eloquently points out this global warming morning, the role of government is to ensure that the basic infrastructure of society runs as smoothly as possible. Upwards of 2m people in the UK depend on heating oil for their essential needs, but this government is so obsesssed in driving up the cost of power and fuel – as Chris Huhne the ecoloon announced yesterday – because of its greenie obsession that it doesn’t give a fig about actual energy needs. The Cleggerons are allowing a third world energy crisis to develop right under their noses while Mr Huhne pontificates about reducing carbon. For Sky News (and bloggers such as Richard North), this failure to make sure basic supplies are available is a major political scandal as it should be. For the BBC, it’s little more than an incidental footnote; Tracey of Lanark may be desperate, but who in the alarmist corporation cares? It’s far more important for their hotshot news staff to focus on renewable energy pipe dreams(but tell that to Tracey!. (I’m writing this early in the news day, and coverage may develop.)

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WHICH IS IT?

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The Telegraph is very clear: electricity prices are going to to rise £500 a year because of the government’s lunatic “clean” energy obsession. For the BBC it’s a different equation (written in matter-of-fact business need terms and a cue for pictures of useless windfarms):

Government to guarantee electricity prices

Yes, there’s mention of a possible price hike, but it’s well down in the story in the BBC’s version. The main thrust is to justify how necessary this price-rigging mechanism is. And of course, no BBC climate change story would be complete without a smug, patronising comment from Friends of the Earth that we are now on course for saving the planet, but it’s not enough.

Update: The BBC reporting of Huhne the loon’s crazy policies has become more and more obfuscatory as the day has progressed. They note the claims of a £500 increase mentioned in the Telegraph, but give by far the most weight to Huhne’s own preposterous assertion that the figure will be far less, and the headline is now that firms are being given ***new low-carbon incentives***. Me, I think today’s lunatic measures will go down as the longest suicide note in history, as James Delingpole brilliantly outlines. Margaret Thatcher bequeathed us arguably the most competitive power industry in Europe; the nutjob Cleggerons are busy dismantling it. And they have today condemned countless thousands of old people to die miserable, cold deaths. It’s unspeakable.

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TWITTERING AWAY….

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Mark Kinver, as I have pointed out before, is as fervent a BBC greenie as Richard Black and Roger Harrabin, if not more so. And here he is, given a political platform to comment on the Cancun so-called agreement. First he is worried that no “legally binding” deal was reached (that is, he is sad that we have not had billions of pounds of taxes imposed on us); second, he reports comment from the greenie extremist blog 350 or Bust (which believes that more snow is a sure sign of AGW), but – surprise, surprise – not from any of the sceptical commentators who have summarised the outcome of Cancun; and thirdly, he appears to think that a “twitter-storm” from disaffected youth (who know the truth about AGW) was responsible for keeping Chris Huhne at Cancun rather than dashing home to vote over student financing. Mr Kinver also appears (on my reading of his phrasing) to think that the attack on Camilla by these self-same students was rather amusing and inconsequential.

I have news for Mr Kinver. Chris Huhne stayed in Cancun for the reasons that our bloated politicians attend these junkets; he’s addicted to power and enjoys putting his fat, greedy snout in the trough. It’s true that he’s also a fanatic eco-fascist, but the idea that he would make decisions about his schedule because students are worried about global warming is risible in the extreme.

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