Author Archives: Robin Horbury

All the MSM were as bad, but the BBC, as usual, was a cheerleader in whipping up a major storm in a teacup over hurricane Irene. Of course severe bad weather on the eastern seaboard of the US is potentially news. But the BBC is now so determined to ram down our throats that all climate events prove its alarmist narrative that coverage of such events loses all proportion. By the time Irene hit New York it was not a hurricane but a storm with 50mph winds. And of course, 21 lives lost is always tragedy, but it is not a catastrophe or a disaster. It’s a shame that the corporation can’t spend more time frothing at the cause of most climate-related deaths – bitter cold.

A disaster it is. That’s how the BBC is still casting it this morning:

The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan in New York says Irene threatened 65 million people along the US east coast – thought to be largest number of Americans ever affected by a single storm.

The clear intent is to raise Irene to the level of the worst storm in US history. What utter tosh. Try these, for starters, nine out of 10 from the days when alarmists say that CO2 levels were safe. The entire feature is larded with the same immoderate language: “deep scars”, “billions of dollars”…and so on, and of course, there’s an obligatory warning that another such catastrophe could be on its way. Plus – the ultimate BBC bonus – the sainted Obama says the worst is not yet over.

Alan Caruba of the Canada Free Press has coined a word for it – a newsgasm.

The reality is that the US has always been subject to the risk of hurricanes. This one was bad weather but it was not anywhere near as devastating as the alarmists predicted, thank goodness. The BBC can’t acknowledge this because it is locked in an end-of-the-world narrative.

I love this one. According to BBC eco-warrior Matt McGrath, the number of mosquitoes is in sharp decline in parts of Africa because “climate change” has (without question) changed rainfall patterns and “disrupted” (poor darlings!) their breeding cycle. Could this be a cause for celebration – a positive outcome despite our wicked carbon dioxide emitting ways? Er, no. He’s dug out a quote from a gloom merchant who warns that children growing up in mosquito-free areas will suffer all the more in future epidemics when the blood suckers return. So to the BBC, “climate change” makes things worse even when it makes things better.

I note that Richard Black is back, and is adding to the BBC’s propaganda drive by the bucketload. I can’t face discussing the totally predictable drivel he has written about Arctic ice melting and climate change causing civil war. My conclusion? There is no climate change without Richard Black.

More digging…it turns out that the outfit that was hired by the BBC trustees to monitor BBC output in connection with the Steve Jones whitewash report on science coverage was the Imperial College Science Communications Group (SCG). Surprise, surprise, they are active in promoting climate change communications. And you can read SCG report co-writer Alice R.Bell’s guide to indoctrinating children about climate change on her blog, here.

It seems that the SCG’s conclusions about the BBC’s news coverage of climate change reporting were based primarily on the analysis of just one (yes one) news story, the report of the Independent Climate Change E-mails Review into the “climategate” affair over the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in July 2010 (p75 et sequi in the report). The main concern of the group is that Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation was given too much space and misleadingly introduced as an expert in climate when he is an athropologist. In fact, other experts were given far more airtime, but no matter; and Benny Peiser is more qualified to comment on climate change than Richard Black and Roger Harrabin are to write about it. The SRG don’t say in so many words that overall, coverage of the Climategate story was wrong, but their haughty disdain and disapproval for allowing such a man and such a group airtime is written between the lines in 72point.

It is astonishing that the analysis of one news item about climate change should form the evidential basis of a major review of science coverage. Had the SRG done sustained monitoring of coverage of greenie issues on the website or the Today programme – for example – they would have found a picture of serial distortion and misinformation on an epic scale (as the David Vance example from today shows). Instead, they chose the one climate change story of 2010 where “sceptic” opinion could not be avoided, even by the BBC.

I’m head down at the moment helping to write a long paper on BBC bias that I hope will appear in print in due course. I missed – Autonomous Mind and Harmless Sky didn’t – that the BBC trustees had issued a grovelling retraction about the Steve Jones paper that is being used by the corporation to support its climate change activism. In a nutshell the public school hating Professor Jones – in a key section where he argues vehemently for the suppression of all dissent – fingered Lord Lawson and Lord Christopher Monckton for making crassly erroneous statements on specific BBC programmes. He simply did not check his facts. What he said was wrong and now the Trust has begrudgingly owned up, although – par for the course – they haven’t the grace to call it an apology or properly acknowledge their mistake. The retraction has instead been quietly attached to the latest version of the report.

It beggars belief that £140,000 of our cash was spent by the so-called regulatory body of a £3.5bn organisation on this report and that it saw the light of day with such crass errors. It confirms the vindictiveness and hate against “deniers” at the top levels of the corporation and the obscene rush to suppress them.

Part of my current research covers the operations of the BBC Trust. I will make my revelations soon. But what has happened here fits perfectly with what I have uncovered so far…the “trust” is anything but trustworthy on this and other editorial issues.

The BBC trust’s propaganda campaign about climate change is taking shape. Alison Hastings, chair of the editorial standards committee, it will be recalled, has decreed – on the authority of IPCC diktats – that the views of dissenters will not be covered. Indoctrinated BBC acolyte Jennifer Carpenter is hot on the case. She reports this preposterous paper about species “fleeing faster than previously thought” to the poles and up mountains as if it were gospel truth; it’s part of the creed. This is a highlight from Ms Carpenter’s breathless diatribe:

Animals like the British comma butterfly, for example, has (sic) moved 220km northward from central England to southern Scotland in the last two decades.

She doesn’t report the rather key information that the author, Chris Thomas, a York University so-called “academic”, has been ploughing his alarmist furrow for a decade and that he’s got form as a fantasist. His technique of using Species-Area Relationship (SAR)to measure what is happening to individual animal types was comprehensively rubbished – nay, eviscerated – in this paper published by the Royal Society. Basically, the writer, Owen T.Lewis, points out that the methodology is so flawed and lacking in vital data that it’s got more holes than a colander. More on why Mr Thomas’s work isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on here from the excellent Donna Laframboise. But, of course, Ms Carpenter doesn’t care. She’s pursuing the corporation’s climate change agenda, so stuff the facts. It’s the message that counts. Expect more of the same when Richard Black returns from his holidays.

The BBC College of Journalism – the fulcrum of BBC indoctrination of its reporters – has recently undergone a re-vamp of its website. At the heart of this vastly expensive concatination is a section which instructs staff how to report science. Here – this defies belief – it becomes clear that the corporation has now fully sub-contracted its responsibilities to the Science Media Centre, an organisation, which as I have pointed out before, is run by Fiona Fox, a man-made climate change fanatic with no real journalistic experience. At the heart of the instructions of how to report science is a major homily on how those who “deny” climate change should not be granted airtime (about seven minutes into the video). And meanwhile, the so-called “Science” Media Centre continues its own multi-pronged rubbishing of the hated deniers, featuring prominently this disgraceful ad hominem attack on Peter Sissons. one of the corporation’s most distinguished journalists:

The former newsreader, Peter Sissons, claims in his autobiography that the BBC Trust report was commissioned in January 2010 as a response to blog campaigns by self-proclaimed ‘sceptics’ against the Corporation’s coverage of climate change. But one major response to this important report should be for the BBC to make stronger efforts to uphold the public interest by challenging the inaccurate and misleading claims of bloggers, campaigners and politicians who reject and deny the findings of mainstream science for ideological reasons. The BBC is required by law not to sacrifice accuracy for impartiality in the coverage of controversial scientific issues such as climate change. Yet, it is well known that there are particular BBC presenters and editors who allow self-proclaimed climate change ‘sceptics’ to mislead the public with unsubstantiated and inaccurate statements. For instance, the BBC TV programme ‘The Daily Politics’ recently allowed one ‘sceptic’ to assert, unchallenged, that “pensioners will literally die” as result of the UK’s climate change policies…

I have news for the BBC. Severe hardship is being caused because of green policies. The corporation’s nakedly political activism on this subject is beyond contempt – and an insult to genuine science and scientists.

As esteemed B-BBC contributor David Preiser has repeatedly noted, one of the main BBC denigrators of the Tea Party movement is the US bureau’s Katty Kay. See here for an explanation of her venom. Ms Kay, as an activist liberal and Obama lover, is also – naturally – a climate change zealot, as David points out here.

But that’s not Ms Kay’s only involvement in greenie/lefty issues. Donna LaFramboise does excellent work on No Frakking Consensus tracking down linkages of greenie activists, and in this item she has pointed out that the Pew Charitable Trusts are pumping millions of dollars into training scientists who will spout climate change lies to order. I did a bit of digging, and before too long, up popped the name of Ms Kay.

During last autumn, she was “moderator” at an event that, even by the standards of eco-loonery, was rather intense fare. The title?

Women Heroes of Global Conservation – Repairing Nature, Empowering Communities

Right on, sisters. Straight from the handbook of female liberationist agritprop. And this is what Ms Kay cheer-led in the opulent surroundings of the Cannon House building in Washington:

During the luncheon panelists will describe the ways in which many women in their countries are negatively impacted by environmental destruction. They will also discuss the urgent need for the U.S. to make protection of forests and other natural ecosystems a central strategy in its efforts to improve the lives of women around the world. The speakers include Afghanistan’s only female Governor, Habiba Sarabi, and Nobel laureate Dr. Wangari Maathai.

WHO:
* Dr. Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize;
* Habiba Sarabi, Afghanistan’s only woman governor, founder of Afghanistan’s first national park;
* Maria Otero, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs;
* Suzan Baptiste, chairman and founder of Nature Seekers in Trinidad;
* Sangduen “Lek” Chailert, founder of Elephant Nature Park in Thailand;
* Mary Mavanza, manager of the TACARE program of the Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania;
* Lucy Aquino, Paraguay country director for the World Wildlife Fund; and
* Katty Kay, the Washington Correspondent for BBC World News America – moderator.

Not many signs of climate change dissenters in those ranks. So Ms Kay, as well as taking the award for the most vehement anti-Tea Party BBC reporter, is also in there fighting with the sisters on the Pew gravy train for an end to nasty CO2 emissions. One of the signficant contributory causes of economic meltdown is the adoption of greenie anti-industrialist and anti-enterprise measures; the BBC, as usual, has an activist at the heart of the action.