Author Archives: Robin Horbury

HOW TO DO BBC RESEARCH – LESSON 1

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This, on Bishop Hill, says it all about the BBC mindset. Note the worship of the greenie bible Since Silent Spring (which condemned millions of Africans to death in its total villification of DDT); the belief that the NASA warmist lunatic and eco-thug James Hansen is an authority worth consulting; and the idiotic, arrogant certainty that such an investigation on these terms is terribly important. Truly toxic!

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POLAR POSTURING

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I’ve said it before, but the BBC greenie fanatics are forever on the hunt for new scares, even when it’s so cold that global warming stories are scarce. Today’s alarmfest centres on the cuddly polar bear. Overpaid ecofreak scientists in Denmark have now decided that it’s not only melting polar ice that’s a threat to our ursine friend, but also nasty chemicals from industrial activity. There’s no such thing as a happy greenie, of course; if it’s not ‘climate change’, it’s breathing, farting or simply being here at all that’s putting us in peril. The BBC loves to report it all, with knobs on; note especially the rigged graph in the item, and the complete lack of mention – as usual – of alternative views, such as this, which points out that even the alarmists-in-chief, the World Wildlife Fund, say that polar bear numbers are on the up.

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SAINT BONO RAPPED

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The BBC’s complaints unit have rapped the knuckles of BBC producers who decided to give the execrable Bono and his band U2 acres of free publicity at the launch of their latest boring album back in February. But what about removing the hundreds of free plugs on the BBC website? The admiring boys and girls at the corporation chart his and the band’s every move, short of when they go to the lavatory. He repays them by spouting foul-mouthed abuse on air. But no matter, Bono ticks every box for BBC sainthood; he’s a lefty, he hates Britain, and he believes Africa’s salvation is through bucketloads of aid from ‘climate change’ supporting NGOs.

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CLIMATEGATE BBC TERROR ALERT

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Fishy. Some days ago, the excellent Bishop Hill site broke the news that – rather bizzarely – the police National Domestic Extremism Unit is involved in investigating the ClimateGate leak at the University of East Anglia. The BBC has finally woken up to the story, and there are worrying signs that it is somehow part of the saga. First of all, it adamantly describes the leak as a “hack” even though this has not yet been established. Second, they have this extremely odd quote from the police:

“At present we have two police officers assisting Norfolk with their investigation, and we have also provided computer forensic expertise. While this is not strictly a domestic extremism matter, as a national police unit we had the expertise and resource to assist with this investigation, as well as good background knowledge of climate change issues in relation to criminal investigations.”

If I had been the journalist covering this story, I’d be asking first of all what the hell a terrorist unit is doing involved in ‘climate change’and what “expertise” in this field they claim to have. Second, with the world still on terrorist alert after the latest attempt to blow up a plane, how can a terrorist unit spare resources to investigate file hacking (if indeed, that is what it was) when the only ‘victim’ of this alleged crime is academic internal mail – and the leak was in any case in the public interest?

But not the BBC. It’s creepy beyond words that Climategate should be bracketed by the police as a terrorism incident, and equally so that the BBC should broadcast this chilling quote without asking such basic questions. My guess is that the police asked the BBC to carry the story as damage limitation because they suddenly realised that linking Climategate to terrorism was extremely questionable. In overall terms, the BBC has dismissed the importance of Climategate, but if it will provide material to attack ‘deniers’, they are on the case like a rat up a drain pipe.

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Dead as a dodo?

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Greenies, supported tirelessly by the BBC, never give up in their efforts to persuade us that we are all going to hell in a handcart. The UN, of course is the revered cheerleader, and today – as their ‘climate change’ fascism seems to have stalled a tad after Copenhagen – this corrupt Hydra has turned its attention to the need for ‘biodiversity’. There’s a special year devoted to it. So seriously does the BBC take this threat that it has sent Richard Black on a jolly to Berlin to watch the revered secretary-general deliver his hellfire sermon that we must stop our wicked ways. To him, there is no doubt what’s wrong:

The expansion of human cities, farming and infrastructure is (sic) the main reason. Dignitaries including UN chief Ban Ki-moon…will speak at the launch in Berlin. Mr Ban is due to say that human expansion is wiping out species at about 1,000 times the “natural” or “background” rate, and that “business as usual is not an option”.

As usual, Mr Black – in pursuit of his greenie zealotry – obviously thinks the science is totally settled and the words of Mr Ban are the Holy Writ. It’s the Wicked West to blame, as always. Shame that he could not do a little journalism and look for alternative views – this, for example from the Watt’s Up With That? blog. It points out that despite all the hot air about extinction:

Very few continental birds or mammals are recorded as having gone extinct, and none have gone extinct from habitat reduction alone. No continental forest bird or mammal is recorded as having gone extinct from any cause. Since the species-area relationship predicts that there should have been a very large number of recorded bird and mammal extinctions from habitat reduction over the last half millennium, I show that the species-area relationship gives erroneous answers to the question of extinction rates.

Complex stuff, but it shows just how deeply, deeply one-sided the BBC always is in its science coverage.

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Hold the front page!

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Shock, horror! Paul Hudson, the Yorkshire-based BBC weather reporter who caused a furore last year when he dared to break ranks from his warmist fanatic colleagues and suggested that the sun, not CO2, might be responsible for perceived global warming, has entered the fray again. This time, he’s pointed out that Joe Bastardi, of the climate realist weather service Accuweather, correctly forecast back in September that we were in for a tough winter, while the buffoons at the Met Office were busy using their new £170m computer to tell us that it was going to be – as ever- much milder than usual. Mr Hudson asks how this could have happened and poses in response a question which will no doubt leave his warmist colleagues speechless:

Could the model, seemingly with an inability to predict colder seasons, have developed a warm bias, after such a long period of milder than average years? Experts I have spoken to tell me that this certainly is possible with such computer models. And if this is the case, what are the implications for the Hadley centre’s predictions for future global temperatures? Could they be affected by such a warm bias? If global temperatures were to fall in years to come would the computer model be capable of forecasting this?

How long before Black, Harrabin &Co pile in with a horrified rebuttal?

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BIRD-BRAINED BBC

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One of the defining features of the BBC’s ‘climate change’ coverage is that they give almost daily unmoderated airtime to government-funded fake charities such as the Royal Society for the Protection for Birds to spout their propaganda about habitats being under threat because of the relentlessly rising heat. Typing ‘RSPB climate change’ into the BBC website search engine yields a love-in orgy of hits, such as this one; such items have been a staple of Today for years. How ironic then, to read this story, in which an RSPB spokesman says not only that the current arctic weather was seriously putting wildife at risk, but also that the 1962-3 cold winter was “arguably the single event that had the greatest impact on wildlife within living memory.” Chances of this admission being properly reported and analysed by the BBC’s cadre of ‘climate change’ fanatics? Like the weather, sub zero.

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FRYING KENYANS

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While the rest of us freeze, the BBC website is still fervently pushing global warming. The main goal continues to be to give a platform to greenie fanatics who want to increase the hatred between the developing world and the West, by cultivating the line that the West is responsible for a whole catalogue of ‘climate change’ crimes. This latest ‘opinion’ piece is by Greig(sic) Whitehead, of International Climate Challenge, another of the type of brainwashing organisations that the BBC help sustain by giving them unmoderated publicity. His piece is about Kenya, a country I love and know well, and it’s typical of the genre. Opinions, of course, are the stuff of democratic discourse, but there are limits. This greenie is a preacher of hate.

It took me two minutes on the internet dispel his preposterous lie, that ‘climate change’ is creating widespread devasatation in the country.

Climatic risks are the norm in the dry pastoral areas of East Africa and often account for widespread social and economic costs and human suffering. Nowhere is this more apparent than in northern Kenya and southern Somalia, which in 2000 were once again caught in the throes of a terrible ‘natural’ disaster.

Kenya has always suffered from droughts, not because of ‘climate change’ but cyclical weather patterns that are highly complex. On top of that, the population has risen from 5m to 35m in a little over 50 years, and the result has been widespread timber felling, affecting rainfall, the water table and waterflows from the crucial Mount Kenya region.

Extremists in countries like Kenya with a colonial legacy will use any excuse they can to attack their white ‘enemies’. So, too, will Muslim fundamentalists, of which there is a significant minority in Kenya. I sympathise deeply with the plight of Kenyans, but what is needed is genuine understanding of their problems, not the spreading of baseless propaganda. What Greig Whitehead is doing by filing such pieces is adding highly-toxic tinder to the complex political set-up in the country. Such men are dangerous, and the BBC should hang its head in shame for encouraging and spreading such naked agitprop.

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BLACK IS WHITE (AGAIN)

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Is this a greenie fanatic, our friend Richard Black, in retreat? Lost for words, so therefore back-pedalling madly? At bay? Or just more BBC hot air? You decide! One thing is for certain. Writers like Black would never accept for a second that there might be something wrong with their over-arching ‘climate change’ fantasy.

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BBC Spins Cherrapunji Myth

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This is a long post, for which, apologies. Ever heard of Cherrapunji, in the remote north-east of India? No? Well neither had I. But it does have a place in the Guinness Book of Records because it is the wettest place on earth, with up to 1,000 inches of rain falling in a year, though the average is nearer 350 inches.

What’s the relevance? You may recall from previous postings that BBC environment editor Peter Thomson is part of the Society of Environmental Journalists which pushes a Columbia University guide on brainwashing techniques to persuade people of ‘climate change’ alarmism. So I have been digging further to see if there is any hard evidence on the BBC website that Mr Thomson has been evangelising among his colleagues, and if so, whether it has had an impact.

It’s here that Cherrapunji becomes interesting. Apparently, it’s been a little drier of late and this has attracted the interest of BBC Calcutta correspondent Subir Bhaumik at least three times. Back in 2003, he filed a story explaining that water holes were drying up out of the monsoon season and that locals were worried about the impact on tourism. Mr Bhaumik is quite clear about the causes. Quoting SC Sahu, deputy director of the Central Meteorological Department of the local India region, he says:

Mr Sahu blames it (the drop in rainfall) on the deforestation in the area and environmentalists agree. “Ever since Meghalaya became a separate state, there has been a rise in deforestation,” says Ba Mark West, convenor of the Cherrapunji Soil Research Society. “Tree felling is rampant and the loss of forest cover around Cherrapunji is more serious than ever before,” he says. In 1960, Cherrapunji was still a town of just 7,000 people. Now, there are 15 times that number and a cement plant at Mamlukcherra, a few kilometres away, was built 20 years ago. The cement plant polluted the environment and added to the population pressure in the area. And if there are more people, the pressure on the forests will increase.

I’ve quoted that at some length, because it could not be more specific. No mention of global warming at all, and none, of course of ‘climate change’ in its current loaded sense, because it had not yet been invented. According to Mr Bhaumik, Cherrapunji’s woes are the result of mushrooming population (from 7,000 to 105,000 in fifty years), industrialisation and reckless tree-felling. Of that, the local met office is sure.

Spool forward to August 2007, Mr Bhaumik, seemingly with total amnesia about his previous report, said:

Khasi tribes people in the Indian state of Meghalaya have decided to honour former US Vice President Al Gore for promoting awareness on climate change. They say changes in the weather are devastating the picturesque hill state. The tribes people say that they also want to honour him for his award-winning 2006 documentary…which….dramatically highlights changes to the environment because of global warming. The award will be handed over at the second Dorbar Ri (People’s Parliament) on 6 October near a sacred forest at the village of Mawphlang, which has been preserved untouched for more than 700 years.

Astonishing! Then shortly before Christmas just gone, Mr Bhaumik revisited Cherrapunji again and now, the propaganda message is complete. Hey presto!

Residents say their heavenly abode in the clouds is hotter and drier than ever before – and they blame it on global warming.

He then quotes Millergrace Symlieh, no less, a senior member of Sohra Science Society, who seemingly either doesn’t know the area or has had a remarkable loss of memory. He states:

“We never cut a branch in these sacred forests. So you cannot say this adverse weather change is our creation. We are affected by what’s happening all over the world. This hot weather and less rain here is not due to huge deforestation or massive industrialisation,” says Mr Symlieh. “We only have a cement plant near here.”

Over the next three pages, Mr Bhaumik gradually embroiders –without providing a scrap of hard evidence – this alarmist picture and readers are left in no doubt: the locals need more money to be compensated for the terrible injustice they have suffered. It’s the terrible West and its ‘climate change’ pollution that’s to blame, and Cherrapunji is on the edge of the abyss. The role of the locals in this alleged catastrophe has been totally airbrushed out.

So what has happened between 2003 and 2009 to account for this? I can only assume that Mr Bhaumik has read very carefully and ingested fully the Thomson/Columbia University diatribe, or perhaps been on a BBC brainwashing weekend.

The evidence of his writing elsewhere is that Mr Bhaumik is a typical BBC lefty. For example, on his rather polemical and partisan blog, he spouts vitriolic anti-UK anti-US sentiment and lauds the EU as the model to answer India’s prayers:

We cannot trust…the US because (it )…would not hesitate to use military force and other forms of power against us. As they say, if US is your friend, you really don’t need an enemy. The European Union is our long term ally of choice. But India has this huge problem of looking at Europe through Britain and Britain is in the European Union but not quite in it. It has still not accepted the Euro and it wants to retain its national identity and it is behaving like a surrogate of the US. India will not only have to look closely at the European model to create a new kind of union, so that we can handle the separatist tendencies and other internal conflicts – India will have to befriend the European Union as its ally of choice in the global arena in years to come.

So perhaps Mr Thomson didn’t have a very difficult task in converting Mr Bhaumik. I think that all adds up to a bit of a smoking gun. We know that between 2003 and 2009 the BBC news top brass all became fanatical ‘climate change’ acolytes; and we know that people like Peter Thomson took up positions in AGW organisations, who in turn proselytise that reporters should find local examples of their creed. Here, from the north-eastern frontier of India, is firm evidence that there’s been a concerted effort to make sure that when it comes to lying to the world about ‘climate change’, facts should never get in the way of the BBC mission to deceive. And Mr Bhaumik, it seems, is happy to do his masters’ bidding because it ties in nicely with his anti-US venom.

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