Author Archives: Robin Horbury

When will the BBC finally wake up to the fact that ‘climate change’ is a scam? When will some light penetrate the thick skulls that inhabit the corridors of the corporation of overspend? When will they start writing balanced journalism instead of agitprop? The evidence of this piece about river flooding is not for a very long time. Lord Smith is a Nu Labour ex-minister who in his new role in charge of floods propaganda has become a latter day Cnut. The picture illustrating the alarmist hogwash is near the King’s Arms riverside pub at York which I know very well. It has been flooded regularly by the Ouse since it was built in medieval times, so often that on the wall is a horizontal bar which charts the level of each incursion. It’s a well-know tourist attraction. The reason for the floods is quite simple: the Ouse has been directed into a man-made narrow channel that can’t cope if there’s heavy rain in the Yorkshire Dales catchment area. For the BBC, of course, that’s not important; it’s proof of Lord Smith’s moonshine.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) since 2006 – and thus the world’s climate change fanatic-in- chief – is stepping down from his lofty role. He’s off to make megabucks as a consultant at KPMG, the multi-national accountants and business consultants who are leaders in the carbon market scam, their efforts aimed at making sure their clients benefit from the trillion dollars bonanza. He will be joining in his new job Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick, KPMGs international boss of corporate social responsibility, who had the same role at the BBC and is still an advisor to the BBC World Service Trust and Comic Relief on its climate change policies. And Mr De Boer will also surely soon be sharing platforms again with the BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin, who in March 2009 was chair (no doubt for a fat fee) of the Carbon Market Insights conference (also attended by KPMG) which was an international glutton-fest of all those groups who want to get their snouts into the CO2 trough. Mr Harrabin led Mr de Boer in the in-depth discussions about how the new CO2 regime would be introduced and policed.

In the corrupt world of climate change it’s all very, very cosy for those who make the running.

Apologies for returning to him so soon, but Roger Harrabin has become in some senses the story; his endless spinning, dissembling and contorting are at the heart of why BBC so-called journalism is rotten to the core. His latest posting gives – in reverential tones that Wackford Squeers himself would have been proud – Professor Phil Jones’s account of why he is right about climate change and the rest of the world is wrong. To be sure, Mr Harrabin has clothed the good professor’s utterances with weasel words that acknowledge that sceptics exist and that he might have handled the odd bit of data, the odd fact, ineptly. But Harrabin’s overall message is that professor Jones is right, the facts and the datasets prove global warming, and it is a tragedy that Copenhagen did not achieve the world governance that he so desperately craves. Bishop Hill has a very different take on the professor’s words.

Every time there is an opportunity to put the warmist case like this, Mr Harrabin takes it, savours it, and embellishes it; and he never troubles to give another side of the story, even though Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, Anotny Montford (Bishop Hill)and others have shown time and time again that the very data that Professor Jones so exults is as full of holes as a colander. One final point. Surely, even Mr Harrabin does not believe this (at the end of the latest story)?

He said many people had been made sceptical about climate change by the snow in the northern hemisphere – but they didn’t realise that the satellite record from the University of Alabama in Huntsville showed that January had been the warmest month since records began in 1979.

But because Professor Jones said it, perhaps he does. In the world of alarmists, the words from on high must be true.

Mark Kinver, one of the BBC’s most prolific global warming alarmists,was quick off the mark today to say that an “independent panel” is going to review the leaking of the Climategate file from UEA, and also whether climate research has been accurately conducted there. Mr Kinver is telling monstrous economies-with-the-truth and he knows it. The panel is anything but independent; as Bishop Hill points out with his usual eloquence, most of them are solidly wedded to to climate change in the same way that quacks are to snake oil. Not only that, the Royal Society are involved, whose website already proclaims that the world is coming to an end – based on material almost exclusively provided by the UEA climate change mob. Oh,and last but not least, the head of the inquiry has announced he’s investigating a hack, not a leak – thereby showing his true colours from the outset. Mr Kinver was no doubt fed news of the inquiry because of services by him and his employers to the cult of climate alarmism; they knew he would loyally trumpet their “independence”.

Update: No sign yet on the BBC website that Phil Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, has already resigned from the panel because he patently and blatantly was not ‘indepedent’. I wonder why?

The newspapers are well-and truly laying into jailed Met Commander Ali Dizaei this morning; it seems that the world and his wife knew about his corruption and his bullying, but the Met sought to cover it up as best they could because they feared his chants of racism – and shared his ‘equality’ agenda. So of course did the BBC. They disgracefully made his pack-of-porkies autobiography Not One of Us Radio 4’s book of the week when it was published, despite its lack of obvious literary flair (to put it mildly!); and then there’s this gem of an interview by Andrew Marr soon afterwards. Here’s a small extract of the gut-wrenching exchange to illustrate how avid Marr and his cronies are to hear and air such claims:

ANDREW MARR: Just to be clear, you’re saying that the police are still institutionally racist?

ALI DIZAEI: Yes they are. We are less institutionally racist than ten years ago. Have we got a clean bill of health? No. Is it within our grasp? Possibly. And I think the reason this is very important, and I think politicians ought to really take this very seriously, because there is direct correlation in the way the police service looks in terms of this composition, and the way we deliver a service to our community.

ANDREW MARR: You have become Commander at the fifth attempt, which of itself suggests that you are abnormally tough and determined to keep going when other people might have given up long ago. Was it frankly humiliating to have to do, go through that process five times…

Just to make it absolutely clear: the Sunday Express page one story here about BBC pensions and climate change follows on from what B-BBC exclusively revealed on Monday.

What’s fascinating about how fast the warnming bubble is now bursting (in some quarters – not the BBC!) is that the MSM are now falling over themselves to follow up blogs like this – three months ago they didn’t give a hoot. But of course, in the world of the MSM, credit where credit is due is not a term they recognise.