Author Archives: Robin Horbury

A RAY OF SUNSHINE? – MAYBE NOT…

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The BBC has finally woken up to some elements of the deluge of climate realism that has emerged via blogs over the past months, and has reported that the CRU may have acted illegally in not complying to freedom of information requests about its data. But have no fear, behind the scenes, its propagandists are working as assiduously as ever to produce ‘climate change’ moonshine. Back in November, I found that BBC journalists and others were being brainwashed on special courses by the green fanatical PR outfit Futerra. Now a BBC reporter called Helen Grady has filed this, pointing out that alarmists use too much religious end-of-the-world nonsense in attempting to terrify people. Her source for this concern? Why, none other than Futerra, those same ‘experts’ to whom the BBC shells out thousands of pounds of our hard-earned cash – in order to spout such nonsense.

Meanwhile, Harrabin continues to report faithfully as ‘the science’ a bogus survey which claims that CO2 feedback loops are going to cause out-of-control temperature rises. It takes two minutes on the blogsphere to find that these alarmist lunatics are recycling entirely unreliable proxy data to back up their theories, along with the same bogus computer models that underpin the whole ‘climate change’ edifice. So why does he report it all as the gospel truth?

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BBC CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

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Today, it seems that the false ‘consensus’ around global warming is melting at a faster rate than ever before. Richard North has shown that the head of the IPCC solicited EU grants to research Himalayan glacier melt even though the claims of that melt were totally bogus; David Rose on the Mail on Sunday has evidence that the IPCC deliberately inflated melting ice theories to make the world pay attention; and the Sunday Times has further evidence that other parts of the 2007 IPCC report also deliberately falsified the records about alleged increases in the damage caused by hurricanes. It adds up to an avalanche of fraud that is building up momentum daily – for the first time the MSM is following what blogs have been saying for years.

So where is the BBC on all this? Not very far, to put it mildly. There’s virtually nothing on the BBC website that reflects the turmoil. Harrabin posted on Friday a pessimistic blog containing the old warmist lie that the lobbying firepower from oil corporations was the reason why ‘climate change’ legislation has not been passed; and Richard Black, though admitting that the ‘climate change’ suicide rush to enact globally-binding targets has faltered, still refuses to to discuss or even properly mention the catalogue of lies and distortions that are now being exposed. It’s BBC cloud cuckoo land, as usual.

Update: the blogsphere has been buzzing all day with new revelations about Pachauri and his henchmen. Even warmist journalists such as Charles Clover and Geoffrey Lean are calling for Pachauri’s resignation. On the BBC, with its £700m-a-year news budget – zip.

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GOOD LORD!

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I’ve previously posted this about how senior BBC personnel such as Peter Thomson, environment editor of The World, influence and peddle the ‘climate change’ alarmist mantra. Today I am focusing on a completely different kind of BBC figure who is working at an international level to force the world to adopt climate change measures. Step forward Michael Hastings, who boasts the title Baron Hastings of Scarisbrick in the County of Lancashire after he was ennobled by Tony Blair in 2005. Our good lord is now head of “corporate citizenship” at the multi-national accountants KPMG. But before that, he was a political lobbyist at the BBC – prepared like many of his cronies to bend the rules if they got in his way – and despite that, or perhaps because of it, he rose to become founder head of corporate social responsibility at the BBC.

In this role, I know that he was extremely influential, responsible for projects such as Comic Relief – with its strident Bob Geldof ‘climate change’ agenda – and also for making sure that the BBC met green targets by reducing its CO2 footprint. Somewhere along the way, it’s clear that he became a greenie fanatic. It is therefore highly likely that he was instrumental in pulling together, if not leading, the steps towards the BBC accepting that climate science is settled (at a seminar held in January 2006), and that the corporation must have a role in ‘educating’ the rest of the world about the need for alarmist measures.

When he was created a life peer, it was decided that being an active politician – albeit ostensibly a crossbench one – would represent a conflict of interest with his BBC job, and he took up his present role at KPMG in June 2006. However, this was partly window-dressing. He remains a board member of the BBC environment committee, the BBC World Service Trust and also a board member of Comic Relief (heavily linked to the BBC, of course), so his ties with the corporation are still strong. In his new role at KPMG – an organisation with 137,000 employees – he travels the world telling people that they must reduce carbon emissions. He is also at the top table of those who buy into the climate change agenda, to the extent that he chaired a session at Copenhagen COP15 in December.

His lordship, of course, projects all this effort as pure philanthropy, because, like all climate alarmists, he believes he’s saving the world. But delving a little deeper shows that the driving force is actually corporate greed. For KPMG also has its own Global Energy Institute, the job of which is to lobby for CO2 taxes, and to make sure its clients (and KPMG) get rich through this seemingly unstoppable gravy train that is worth billions.

Thus, Lord Hastings is working away to ensure that, on the one hand, through his continuing ties with the corporation, the BBC spreads the alarmist message as far and as loudly as possible. On the other, he is pushing fervently that, like KPMG, businesses everywhere must adopt ‘social responsibility’ targets underpinned by leftie greenie zeal.

Some of this is frustratingly circumstantial. It’s impossible to know his precise role in persuading the BBC that climate science was settled (as they fervently believe), because efforts to find out have been thwarted by the fact that the corporation hides behind Freedom of Information Act exemptions granted to journalistic organisations. What is certain, however, is that Baron Hastings is a climate change fanatic; he still has active and extremely influential ties to the BBC; when he was at the BBC, they became formal converts to the greenie ‘climate change’ cause, and his agenda was precisely in this area; he is now part of a major effort spearheaded by KPMG (an in tandem with the BBC) to persuade the world that it must pursue ‘climate change‘ alarmism and to impose CO2 taxes; and he is – palpably – highly adept in the art of persuasion. There, I rest my case.

Baron Hastings of Scarisbrick, I contend, demonstrates both that the tentacles of the ‘climate change’ monster are everywhere, and that the BBC is at the epicentre of the massive international propaganda effort to enforce a battery of new measures to restrict our freedom and squeeze more taxes out of us all in a demented effort to save the world. At the very least, the BBC gave his lordship the platform to peddle his greenie creed; and they are still working with him in its fanatical propagation.

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RAIN DANCE

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One of the great greenie apocalyptic lies is that flooding is on the increase because of ‘climate change’. Every time a river breaks its banks, Richard Black and his cronies mutter with smug satisfaction that it proves yet again that the science is ‘settled’. Their main partner in crime in this alarmism is the so-called Environment Agency, who have been proudly trumpeting – with full BBC assistance – a new report purporting to show that unless we cough up an extra £1bn a year in flood defences, we are all going to drown. As usual, in such BBC reporting, there’s not a flicker of a mention of factors such as building on flood plains or – shock horror – that it has always rained in the UK, sometimes quite a lot.

A few minutes browsing on this rather neat little archive shows that not only has Britain frequently experienced floods, but also that they were happening long before BBC greenie panic merchants fingered CO2 as the cause. I was particularly chilled by this, from 1770:

The accounts that have been received during the course of the present month…of the floods in several parts of the Kingdom, exceed any thing of the kind that has happened in the memory of man. The cities and towns situated on the banks of the Severn have suffered very great distress; those on the Trent have suffered still more; the great Bedford Level is now under water; horfes, mills, bridges, in almost every brook, have been borne down; but the most affecting scene of all happened at Coventry, where the waters in the middle of the night came rolling into the lowermost street of the town, and almost instantaneously rose to an alarming height. The poor there, fill the houses from top to bottom; those who occupied the lower apartments perished immediately…

And this, from a couple of years earlier:

The heaviest rain fell at London and the country round it that has been known in the memory of man. It began in the evening, and in a few hours the waters poured down Highgate Hill with incredible violence; the common shores in several parts of the town not being able to carry off the torrent, the adjacent houses were filled almost to the first floors; immense damage was done, and as it happened in the night, many were awakened from sleep in the greatest consternation. The Serpentine river in Hyde-park rose so high, that it forced down a part of the wall and poured with such violence upon Knightsbridge, that the inhabitants expected the whole town to be overflowed…

I noted especially the rather sonorous apocalyptic tenor of the newspaper reports; would that BBC journalists could command such lyricism to leaven their contemporary leaden reports of doom.

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THE TRUTH – BBC STYLE (PART 2)

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The Sunday Times reports today that the IPCC 2007 report perpetuated a massive untruth about global warming, that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It’s a truly astonishing story of how a supposedly scientific body that preaches unassailable ‘facts’ will take any alarmist titbit and magnify it to the nth degree. Guess who was foremost in reporting this nonsense? The BBC of course. To be fair, it has reported some doubt about the 2035 figure, but overwhelmingly, it has supported the ‘we are all doomed’ line. This, for example, is from June:

Glacier melting in the Himalayas is virtually certain to disrupt water supplies within the next 20 to 30 years. Floods and rock avalanches are virtually certain to increase. Heavily-populated coastal regions, including the deltas of rivers such as the Ganges and Mekong, are likely to be at risk of increased flooding.

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THE TRUTH – BBC STYLE

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Kevin Marsh is probably not a well-known name outside the rarified corridors of the BBC. But as head of the BBC’s College of Journalism and also a former editor of Radio 4’s Today, he’s one of the corporation’s top news wallahs, shortly due to retire on an obscenely fat pension. So how does he practise his trade? As a scion of public service broadcasting, with its binding principles of fairness and lack of bias? Er, no. Well not according to Antonia Hoyle, writing in today’s Mail on Sunday. Mr Marsh did not like former BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan’s (he who broke the story of the dodgy Iran intelligence dossier) rather positive entry on Wikipedia, so he doctored it, adding the telling phrase that his reputation for breaking news ‘was not always deserved’. Likewise, our Kev thought the Wiki entry for his predecessor as editor of Today, Rod Liddle, was a tad too nice. Originally the Liddle section said that he had used Today to ‘break’ new stories. Kev’s neatly edited version said that he had ‘tried with limited success to switch the programme to a more tabloid approach’. Maiow. That, in BBC speak is the highest form of insult.

Mr Gilligan claims that Mr Marsh is not happy with him because, as a result of the Hutton report – which considered the BBC’s handling of the Iraq dossier- his career as an editor ended and he became instead ‘deputy head of training’.

I should add that Mr Marsh strongly denies that he was acting inappropriately; he is quoted as saying he was merely ensuring accuracy. Of course. All I will say is that I made a number of complaints against Today items when dear Kev was editor, and attended meetings where he was there, so I saw his style first hand. His approach was always to bend the facts in every way he could.

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MORE HARRABIN CONTORTIONS

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I asked, last week, how long it would be before the intrepid Roger Harrabin came up with a defence of the Met office, after his Yorkshire-based colleague, Paul Hudson, dared to suggest that Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi (among others) was more accurate with his weather-forecasting than the Met and its £170m global warming lying machine (aka a supercomputer). Well, it’s taken him all week. And if you can understand his back-flipping, contortionist – nay, fantastical – reasoning, you deserve a prize. As I see it, our friend Mr Harrabin believes that when the Met Office is wrong, they are actually right, because they are nearly right; and that in any case, it doesn’t matter, because it’s getting much hotter, and their supercomputer can see that, whereas the day-to-day incidences of freezing etc, don’t really count because they are part of the ‘frying tonight’ overall trend – and on that, of course, the Met Office is always right. As for those who doubt any of this, well, according to Mr Harrabin, he doesn’t give a damn, because they don’t count, and of course, they can’t count (unlike the Met). Something like that. Me? I’ll stick with Mr Bastardi. His writing style might not be the most elegant, but his message is crystal clear and honest. The Met Office are warmist crooks.

Update: it’s reported in the Sunday Times that the BBC is fed up with the inaccuracies in Met Office forecasts, and might appoint instead the New Zealand outfit Metra. Pigs might fly, they are too enmeshed. It’s a BBC press office ruse to drive prices down because the Met’s contract is up for negotiation.

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LABOUR RAY OF SUNSHINE

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I never thought I would write this, but three cheers for a Labour peer. Their lordships debated ‘climate change’on Thursday. Predictably, in the most part, it was an alarmfest about the need for more taxes, laced with endless religious warnings that the end of the world is nigh; the idiotic peddling of moonshine. But there was one ray of sunshine. Step forward Bernard Donoghue, the former policy adviser to Harold Wilson (a job from hell, if ever there was one!), who is now Baron Donoghue of Ashton in the county of Northamptonshire. He said (his contribution is about three quarters of the way through the debate, and sadly, I couldn’t find a way of linking precisely to it):

In relation to the media coverage of this important issue, the BBC should follow its charter and cover global warming impartially, not as a cheerleader for the alarmist side. It is counterproductive and provokes, like manipulation of statistics, the kind of public scepticism which the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, fears. As for the Met Office, it should go back to objective science and try to get its forecasts right and cease blatant campaigning for one side. I note that it has just inevitably forecast that 2010 will be a very hot year-noble Lords should stock up on their long-johns and fur boots.

Here, here, hurrah, and all that. It shows that at least one of the lunatics who supposedly represent us has got the picture and has also sussed the BBC and its pernicious propaganda. His lordship also pinpointed something that is deeply alarming: the BBC and politicians – Labour, Conservative, the whole damn lot of them – are totally out of touch with the real world and don’t give a straw about what people actually think. Roll on the revolution!

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BBC1 AUDIENCE PLUMMETS…

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When I worked at the BBC, many moons ago admittedly, the main justification for the licence fee was that people actually watched BBC shows. Peak time audience share for BBC1 regularly nudged the 40% mark, and over a week, most people actually tuned in to the channel for a significant amount of time. Latest official figures, however, show that BBC1’s overall audience share during December was down to 21.5%, and that the peak average (between 7pm and 10pm) during the month – even though BBC shows easily dominated Christmas Day – was only 23.4%, down a whopping 4.7%. So millions of viewers are deserting the BBC’s flagship shows. In an internal BBC meeting yesterday, director general Mark Thompson reportedly vigorously defended his salary of £834,000 a year on the ground that he was worth it. On these latest viewing figures the case for his monstrous level of pay – and the BBC licence fee at all – is vanishing almost as fast as snow in summer. If ever there was one. Even his own staff think Thompson’s salary is “corrosive and wrong”.

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