Author Archives: Robin Horbury

BE AFRAID….

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Have you noticed how eerily silent the BBC has become on the topic of ‘climate change’ since the Copenhagen fiasco? Newspapers and the blogsphere are chronicling that we are in the midst of one of the coldest winters in decades, but on the BBC, there’s nothing – not even their usual counter-assertions that in our torrid era, temperature graphs only go upwards, so this is only a temporary respite before we all fry.

Be afraid, be very afraid. Harrabin, Black, Peter Thomson and whole cohorts of senior editors are probably meeting in darkened White City rooms to plan their new alarmist onslaught.

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MORE ON PETER THOMSON….

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On Monday, I posted about BBC The World editor Peter Thomson, who it turns out, is secretary of the fervent climate change group the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ). What actually does this mean? Well for starters, according to the SEJ website, he’s very keen on pushing, as well as his own organisation’s climate change guide, another publication that seeks to influence and underpin journalists everywhere. It’s called the CRED Guide: The Psychology of Climate Change Communication, published by the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University. CRED was established back in 2004 with a grant from the US National Science Foundation (another fervent warmist institution). Its master work is a truly terrifying document in terms of its ambitions in brainwashing and the patronising way it regards the public and – especially – non-believers in their religion.

For example, let’s start with how CRED suggests dealing with non-believers. It found that, stubbornly, despite the barrage of AGW publicity, people in the US are not convinced that it is something that affects them. So here’s what to do:

To counteract this problem, an effective communicator should highlight the current impacts of climate change on regions within the US. Research suggests that it may be more effective to frame climate change with local examples in addition to national examples. For example, references to droughts in the Southwest may resonate more with US audiences than talking about droughts in Africa. Similarly, climate change becomes a more personal threat to a New Yorker when hearing how New York City’s subway system will suffer as the result of a rise in sea level compared to hearing about the effect of a sea level rise in Bangladesh.

In effect, let’s make it up, never let the facts get in the way of a good story, and let’s scare them all to death. Note, especially, the scientific nonsense: the chance of the New York subway being inundated on current evidence of sea level rises is next to zero.

CRED’s pearls of wisdom continue:

Because such extreme weather events are vivid, dramatic,and easily understood, especially to the locals who suffer through them, they provide effective frames for the potential impacts of future climate change. The numerous examples of extreme events that may occur in a given year provide recurring “teachable moments” communicators can use to relate climate change to the experience of a local audience.

I’d love to go on. The whole publication is shot through with such alarmist, non-scientific nonsense. It truly is a textbook in propaganda. But this is a platform where brevity counts, so I will leave it there and recommend you to read it.

So what does that tell us about Peter Thomson? Presumably, as SEJ secretary, he practises what he preaches and is engaged in a crusade within the BBC and on a wider stage to implement what CRED suggests. That’s why people in general take office in such organisations. In so doing, Mr Thomson, I would submit, is acting well outside the normal accepted rules of conflict of interest. There is no consensus on “climate change’ yet he is pushing very hard that there is, and not only that, actively conspiring to persuade journalists throughout the world to say that there is.

The evidence of his campaign is not hard to find, it’s there in the deluge of ‘climate change’ claptrap that pours out of the BBC every single hour. Such as this New Year’s Eve propaganda-fest from our friend Richard Black in which he assesses (or rather, reflects gloomily about) the way forward after Copenhagen.

We know from the Harmless Sky blog that the BBC long since took a high-level decision to support the ideas of the kind advocated by CRED. Is that the result of the work of Mr Thomson and his ilk?

On that rather sobering note, I wish all Biased-BBC readers who wade through our postings a Happy New Year!

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HOLD THE FRONT PAGE: GREEN VICAR SHOCK

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It’s pretty darn unusual for the BBC website to cover the death of a local Church of England vicar; in fact, pretty much their only interest in Christianity and our established religion these days is in gay bishops. When I was in BBC local radio, it was only when a local bishop popped his clogs that we reached for our microphones.

Unless, that is, he’s a revered green camapigner. Such, apparently, was the Reverend Hereward Cooke, a vicar in the Norwich area, who cycled the 150 miles to Copenhagen to attend the UN summit in December, and there, tragically, died in his sleep. I’ve nothing against Mr Cooke, I am sure he was a god-fearing chap, though it is a pity that he thought ‘climate change’ so important.

But to the BBC, of course, he’s a saint. Any mention of ‘green’ and ‘climate change’ – no matter how inconsequential – is front page news.

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TRIFFID HORRORS

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Did anyone try watch, as I did, the BBC’s new adaptation of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids? This was one of the favourite books of my childhood, a cracking yarn in the HG Wells disaster tradition, and – more fool me – I was looking forward to it. Guess what? The producers, i.e. the BBC international conspiracists who see AGW as a religion, had tampered with the plot so that it conformed to their worldview. According to these morons, the triffids developed and got out of control because of global warming and because the wicked fossil-fuel oil companies had modified their genes. So, an old-fashioned morality tale about the problems of human nature descended into a zealous brimstone-and-treacle homily about ‘climate change’ and the horrors of capitalist greed. Brainwashing? John Wyndham, I am sure, will be turning in his grave!

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BBC EDITOR IS CLIMATE CHANGE ACTIVIST

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I’ve become increasingly convinced that the BBC is part of an international conspiracy about ‘climate change’. It isn’t simply that the reporting is so biased; it’s also because there seems to be a concerted effort to make sure that whatever so-called sceptics discover, for example over Climategate, the warmists bounce straight back with a new set of warped theories or bent facts to support their arguments. The feed of material is relentless, as if it is coming from an organised source. Over the holidays, I’ve been doing some digging on this, and I wanted to share one of my first findings.

A BBC journalist called Peter Thomson is not a household name in this country, but he’s the environment editor of the BBC programme (made jointly with WGBH Boston and RPI) The World, which on a daily basis pushes out climate scare stories to millions of people. Mr Thomson, it turns out, is also the secretary of the Society of Environmental Journalists, a US organisation, the main purpose of which is to spread alarmism through a ‘guide’ about ‘climate change'(masked of course, under the cloak of ‘objectivity’). There can be no doubt that this is a campaigining organisation which wants to achieve political change because it believes that the world needs to reduce CO2 emissions.

Mr Thomson’s activism does not stop there. He’s also a member of the advisory board of the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, yet another international organisation with alarmist goals. It, too, publishes a guide to how journalists should cover ‘climate change’; in truly chilling McCarthyite terms, the introduction explains how anyone who disagrees with “the consensus” should be ignored and that journalists should frantically pester editors to publish ‘climate change’ scare stories.

So, to recap. One of the BBC’s most senior editors responsible for environmental reporting has formal roles at the epicentre of a worldwide coinspiracy among ‘climate change’ alarmists. Not only that, he is assisting in the international propagation of so-called science communication guides, the main purpose of which are to enlist other journalists to spread the same lies in which he also believes. I suspect there’s a whole phalanx of Peter Thomsons, all feeding the BBC’s insatiable appetite to feed us with moonshine.

Update: Richard North, of EU Referendum, has kindly provided further information about BBC propagandists. Nik Gowing, a prominent – and rather humourless – BBC World Service presenter, has a no-doubt lucrative sideline in chairing ‘climate change’ conferences convened by the alarmist-in-chief, IPCC head Dr Ravendra Pachauri.

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BBC TRUST PROPAGANDA ROLE REVEALED

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The BBC remains predictably silent about the allegations against Dr Ravendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, despite further revelations about his conflicts of interests (to put it mildly) in the Sunday Telegraph and around the world. Meanwhile, the BBC World Service Trust, a body that soaks up cash from the UK Foreign Office and is the cosy-cosy gatekeeper to the UK’s international aid efforts, continues its frenzied efforts to spread Pachauri’s moonshine about ‘climate change’. This page says it all. In fact, the so-called Trust’s role is formally to spread such lies:

We aim to:
* Help people protect their food supplies and incomes as the climate changes
* Train and strengthen local media to raise environmental issues and stimulate debate
* Prepare local media to provide life-saving broadcasts during natural disasters; and
* Make sure all our work considers the effect on the environment

For “environment”, of course, read ‘climate change’. In the BBC’s eyes, the two are interchangeable.

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MORE BBC HOT AIR

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The BBC, as we well know, will bust a gut to report anything that supports AGW. It is now also resorting to staging ludicrously simplistic rigged scientific experiments on Newsnight to persuade viewers that its ‘climate change’ crusade is legitimate. A What’s Up With That correspondent explains:

Here’s something I found shocking and that you don’t see every day: the British government’s former chief scientific adviser Professor Sir David King flagrantly lying on national television to boost the dubious idea that some foreign agency (the Russian secret service?) was behind Climategate.

This was in the context of BBC 2’s Newsnight staging a peculiar experiment, with a politically-correct black female “space scientist” heating two bottles – one containing “air” (last time I looked, that included carbon dioxide anyway) and one containing “atmospheric air with a greater concentration of carbon dioxide” (they didn’t say how much they were adding, of course, but I’d bet it was substantially more than 0.000388%!). Surprise, surprise — the latter bottle grew hotter… Of course it did. A greater amount of carbon dioxide will be warmer when heat is applied. This is not a surprise! The proportions are key, of course, as you know.

Newsnight itself characterised the effort right at the start as a “very unscientific experiment” — so why do it at all?! In fact the “science” as presented was misleading and selective to the point of deception.

The WUWT entry goes on to explain in detail why the experiment is an indicator only of the complexity and pitfalls of setting up such scientific experiements. Deception? The BBC misrepresentation of ‘climate change’ goes well beyond that. It’s systematic fraud.

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CONSPICUOUS BY HIS ABSENCE

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The BBC also remains eerily silent (as in the previous posting) on the subject of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, whose multiple business interests linked messily to ‘climate change’ have been the subject of intense scrutiny in the dead tree press and here, here and here. It seems that the good doctor thinks nothing is wrong in being at the head of numerous banking and industrial groups that benefit from his committee’s alarmist pronouncements.

If this had been one of the BBC’s hate figures – let us say Tory funder Michael Ashcroft – they would have been on to the story like a rat up a drain pipe. Instead, the might of the BBC’s journalistic elite is still focused on bemoaning the lack of agreement in Copenhagen, and cheeerleading for Gordon Brown’s lunatic call for a “reformed UN process” – in other words, for more corruption, more bureaucracy and more wasting of billions of pounds of our money.

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CRU "FALSIFIED RUSSIA RECORDS"

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On the web, it’s everywhere. The Russian Institute of Economic Analysis yesterday released a report suggesting that the ‘climate change’ mob at East Anglia’s CRU deliberately and massively rigged Russian climate records, ignoring stations covering 40% of the landmass and choosing only those sites which showed evidence of warming. On the BBC, it’s nowhere. Step by step, the ‘climate change’ scam is disintegrating. But you won’t hear about it on the BBC.

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