Author Archives: Robin Horbury

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!

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.

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.

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.)

Time for a new open thread…

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.