Author Archives: Robin Horbury

The BBC is eerily silent – as usual – about the Exocet attack by warmist Mark Lynas in which he notes that the IPCC deployed Greenpeace evidence to justify a preposterous claim that 80% of the world’s energy could be derived from renewables by 2050. The report has been ripped to shreds piece by piece on the blogsphere over the last 48 hours. Yet, surprise, surprise, Richard Black was obscenely hasty in endorsing the original proposals.

I am tired of writing about Richard Black’s bigotry and zealotry, but I will continue tracking it. One day, he will realise…

The BBC’s self-declared flagship of so-called quality journalism, Panorama,has been found seriously lacking by the BBC Trust. In short, it fabricated evidence disgracefully in order to attack Primark, a store which the boys and girls at the BBC no doubt view with horror because it provides cheap, affordable clothes for the masses.

I know from personal experience that the BBC Trust will normally go to the ends of the earth to support BBC journalists, so this is an earthquake of sorts. But note the way the BBC website has handled the story. Nice Roy Greenslade – so old fashionedly left-wing that by his own admission he makes Arthur Scargill look moderate – of the Guardian has been wheeled out to defend the offending piece. The intro is also mealy-mouthed and begrudging – there’s no direct acknowledgement that Panorama got it wrong, only that the BBC must say sorry. And as the icing of the cake of the denial, news boss Helen Boaden says that this is wholly exceptional and everything else that the BBC does is beyond reproach, always, always, always….

In fact, the ruling is among the strongest upoholdings of a journalistic complaint that I have ever seen and the corporation should be utterly ashamed that it used such cowboy, slipshod methodology. Although that’s par for the course.

Last week, I noted that Richard Black had sunk into blatant advocacy – again – in his obscenely hasty support for the fanatical Phil Jones’ claims that global warming has been proved (again) by his crooked statistics. Now David Whitehouse, a former BBC correspondent who, unlike Richard Black does have science qualifications, has waded into the debate. In a masterclass of accurate reporting and reporting technique, he agrees with me that Mr Black’s so-called journalism in this instance is nothing but warped advocacy, and this is what he concludes:

It is a sloppy, skimpy article in the extreme. It provides little in the way of analysis and that which it does is one-sided. But even if one did not look at the accuracy of the statements it has, not for the first time, an air of triumph, as if those whom it deems skeptic (and it has a strange definition of skeptic) have been overcome. It is not impartial.

In its selective coverage of climate change science BBC News has become not a reporter of climate change, but a supporter of it. It has, as this regrettable article shows, veered into advocacy. Science and Environmental journalists are often enthusiasts for the subject but as reporters they must not become cheerleaders and uncritically use shoddy science in a one-sided attempt to trounce those whom, as is obvious from this piece, the reporter thinks are wrong. There is no mention in the article that the statistics for the post-2001 temperature standstill are accepted by the scientific community. This changes the story completely.

I recommend you to read the whole thing. Not so long ago, the BBC could attract reporters of his class and pedigree; now they have only agitprop lefties. Once again, it is clear beyond doubt that Mr Black is nothing but a warmist zealot. Not only that, he’s not fit to lick David Whitehouse’s boots.

The really chiling element of climate change activism is the extent to which it has taken hold. Take Forest Europe, a co-operative body which sounds on the surface to be a sensible initiative. It is not part of the EU, exists independently, and should be playing a sensible, active role in encouraging strategic cross-border co-operation in the management of one of Europe’s biggest assets. Not a bit of it. The whole shebang was actually set up as a front for alarmist, nonsense messages about “carbon”, to ram down our throats the need for “sustainability” above all things, as well as to convey gloom and doom predictions about how using wood is bad for the planet. Greenpeace are involved, as is the dread, dead hand of the UN, and of course the BBC loves it. Mark Kinver has been on a jolly to their annual conference, and he’s come back dutifully with the main message that forests can play a key role in achieving climate targets.

The real story is that forest cover in Europe is on the increase, and that, despite all the alarmism over-exploitation, European forests continue to provide millions of people with food, fuel and medicine. But Mr Kinver doesn’t give a stuff about that – it’s all part of the BBC carbon panic crusade.

As David Vance pointed out yesterday, Lord “I love my EU Commission pension” Patten had his begging bowl out for the World Service yesterday and was moaning loudly that a reduction in its budget would lead to loss of British influence round the world. Actually, the BBC’s main message to the world these days is what a lousy, nasty, colonial influence the UK is. Meanwhile, the BBC World Service Trust, its so-called charitable arm, continues its poisonous full-bloodedly political efforts to turn the world into eco-crusaders who despise the West. I hadn’t looked at the site for a while, but a little digging showed that its anti-capitalism drive is at full throttle and is now its primary purpose.

Take for example, this report commissioned by the Trust – conducted with its close alarmist chums in Oxfam and the UN – about peceptions of climate change in Cambodia. The whole alleged survey actually assumes from the beginning that catastrophic climate change is definitely happening, and that this will have a terrible impact on the country. Not surprisingly when an army of NGO activists told them this, local people – who previously didn’t have a clue what the concept meant – were a tad worried. But what is really outstanding about whole enterprise is how crassly incompetent it was. This sentence sums it up:

There are different ways to know about climate change. One is to understand thescience: that human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels or energy, are increasing the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, which harm the earth and affect its climate system. Another is to experience it first hand: to witness, over alifetime, changes in rainfall patterns that affect the harvest; to suffer from increased droughts, floods and other climatic disasters that can wipe out comes and crops; or to be at the receiving end of the spread of vector-borne diseases, such as dengue and malaria.

What a load of claptrap. The report – all lousy 207 pages of it – is written by activist bigots with no grasp of basic science whose only intent was to find ways of confirming their own political prejudices.I’m sure the lot of many Cambodian farmers is tough. But the last thing they need is being bombarded with these lies.

Thus my response to Lord Patten’s pathetic begging is that he and the rest of his BBC cohorts should be ashamed of themselves. The BBC World Service has become nothing more than a showcase of BBC alarmist ideology and does not deserve a single extra penny; in fact, it should be axed.

My beef with Richard Black, repeated in more posts than I care to remember, is simple. He has become an advocate, not a reporter. I am not a scientist, but was once a BBC producer and reporter – who became a very senior executive of a news organisation – and so I do have the competence to judge him in this respect. Today, in this piece claiming that global warming is now proven, he has yet again crassly demonstrated that he is not doing his job.

True to style, he has picked one remark by a constroversial climate scientist called Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia and elevated it to the level of a major news story. The point that Mr Black has chosen to exaggerate and thus endorse in this way is that the said Professor Jones has now found evidence that the warming of the past fifteen years is a “real” phenomenon because global temperatures over the past year have again been high.

Why is this approach so wrong and so fundamentally at variance with his duties as reporter? First Mr Black knows that because of Climategate, Professor Jones is a highly controversial figure who in some quarters (to put it mildly) does not have credibility. He would be an idiot not to. Chosing him is thus deliberate confrontation, akin to asking Goebbels to give Hitler a character reference.

Second, the statistical concept which Mr Black maintains confirms Professor Jones’ observations, is not accepted in the way he suggests. Bruce Hoult, for example, on the Bishop Hill site, notes succinctly:

To put explicitly what others have alluded to: significance at the 95% confidence level (2 sigma) is generally accepted as the threshold for saying “gee, this looks interesting, more research is justified to see if we can tighten up those bounds a couple more sigma and see whether there’s really anything here or not”.It is most definitely NOT grounds for saying something is proven beyond reasonable doubt or to a level warranting policy action.

This is a point about elementary scientific methodology – as always Mr Black takes the side of the advocate he wants to believe. He further puts two fingesr up by stating:

Since then (Climategate investigations), nothing has emerged through mainstream science to challenge the IPCC’s basic picture of a world warming through greenhouse gas emissions.

Third, Mr Black never ever provides balancing comment or evidence. He wants instead to blare out that Professor Jones is right. Yet he ignores (in his piece today and always) evidence like this, the much-discussed and publicised G.G.Koutsoyiannis paper (fully peer-reviewed)which throws serious doubt on the theorising about rising global temperatures. The BBC has broadcast or published not a peep about this paper and yet carries on regardless pumping out endless climate change drivel.

I repeat. For all these reasons – and more – Mr Black is a cheap propagandist, not a reporter. I’m spelling it out yet again because I believe that one day, someone at the corporation will realise that such agitprop has made the BBC’s alleged journalism into a laughing stock.

Since Britain joined the EU, a deluge of laws have been enacted that have curtailed our freedoms and have ceded power to the faceless, unelected and unaccountable European Commission. The BBC website charts on a daily basis their encroachment into our lives, but there is never a questioning of our slow, agonised, descent into rule by tryranny. Here, there’s a story about a nasty little exercise – triggered by EU recycling laws – by money-to-burn researchers at Newcastle University encouraging students to snitch on their fellows who don’t contemplate every tin can before ditching it. Here, there’s coverage of a disaster entirely triggered by EU greenie laws which have encouraged a switch to biofuels. Surprise, surprise, hedge funds – as often as not advised now by greenie fanatics like KPMG – have dived in and are pushing poor African farmers off their land. The reality is that they have simply pursued – like rats up a drainpipe – the “opportunities” that EU biofuels policies have created. And here, Richard Black is in full gloating flow about how our masters in Brussels are opening their greedy maws to fine us millions of pounds for not reducing trace elements of “pollutants” enough, in line with their ludicrous green targets. As usual, Mr Black accepts hook, line and sinker all the propaganda about the alleged hazard, exactly conforming to EU groupthink.

None of these laws have been passed with the approval of the British people, and all of them are inspired by lunatic idealism on behalf of the socialist-Marxists who dominate EU decision-making. The BBC supinely reports their actions, but never, ever joins up the dots to show how we are becoming vassals of a vast superstate subjected to pointless, costly, unwanted laws.

The BBC’s climate change page is aptly named. There is a torrent, a blizzard, a hurricane of the stuff – with helpful links to almost every piece of claptrap alarmist propaganda that the corporation has ever published.

The Conservative MEP Roger Helmer is not happy about this and he wrote to DG Mark Thompson to tell him so. Of course, Mr Thompson was too busy to answer directly matters he regarded so trivial, especially, no doubt, as Mr Helmer is a hated eurosceptic and totally unimportant in the BBC worldview, so he delegated the task. And here’s the surprise. The woman he chose for the task is Liz Howell, who – it seems – has just been appointed to the post of Head of BBC Weather. Quite what the qualifications are for this elevated, role, I don’t know.

So I googled her. I expected a Met office lackey, but no; – I could find no trace of any such mention of related qualifications. She has also risen virtually without trace, her previous post being only a new media editor. Despite this apparent significant lack of relevant scientific training, she nonetheless has been swift to put one of our elected representatives in his place. This is the opening paragraph of her reply to Mr Helmer’s complaint:

Thank you for your correspondence concerning the Climate Change page on the BBC’s Weather website. Firstly, it is worth pointing out that in terms of impartiality, the BBC has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus.

There, straightaway, re-iterated, in 35 words, we have all the arrogance, the partisan politics, the nonsense and the lies contained in he BBC’s stance on this topic. Miss Howell betrays that she hasn’t got a clue about or interest in scientific methodology, and also that she will pig-headedly stick to the carefully-concocted major lie that there is a “consensus” on the topic. She also confirms, creepily, that the BBC has “come to a view” on this topic. Of course, she doesn’t say how; evidently, transparency does not come into such corporation deliberation.

Ms Howell further demonstrates – as this reply will have been approved by His Highness Mr T himself – that this attitude has been engineered, is condoned and has been approved at the very apex of the corporation.

Ms Howell goes on to provide an excuse for why there might not many climate sceptic stories on her propaganda page (I could find none today) – apparently her “aggregation index” means that any such material – being “transient” – would only be there for a few weeks.

Finally, she condescendingly tells Mr Helmer as a sop that his worries might not be in vain. She states:

…it might be possible to add something to the permanent links on the page which gives a clear sense of the divisions that exist on this issue.

And pigs, I suggest, might fly. Test one might be at least a mention of yesterday’s report by the Global Warming Policy Foundation that energy bills have risen by hundreds of pounds a year because of ludicrous warmist stealth taxes. It’s reported by the Daily Mail here and here; but there’s not a peep about the Foundation or the report on the BBC website.

h/t a Cambridge friend – thank you. Mr Helmer’s letter and its reply are not available, as far as I can find, online. I have a copy but have not posted it in full for reasons of space. The key points are above – there is nothing that qualifies Ms Howell’s position.

There’s nothing that greenies at the BBC like more than wallowing in dung. They’ve been doing it for years, and there’s an obsession to find out how much of the “potent” (BBC word) greenhouse gas methane cows expel. Here, for those who might rub their eyes with disbelief, is a nice BBC propaganda film devoted to the pursuit. And here is the latest report in the obsession, a detailed paper into processes within cow faeces conducted by a whole phalanx of “researchers” with loads of funding but nothing-better-to-do, including one gentleman – I kid you not – with the surname Bull.

I would laugh if the BBC coverage of this idiocy wasn’t so vomit-making. it’s a whole article devoted to such tommyrot, with the usual one-sided invocation of the alarmist creed at the end:

Dr Gill stressed that larger studies will be needed to pin down a more precise functional relationship between the two. But because methane is a greenhouse gas more than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, such precise numbers will be of great use. “There definitely is a need for better estimates of methane emissions from animals,” she said.

I’ve commented before on the close links between the BBC and the fanatical lobby group Sandbag, which it now seems is now directly involved in writing greenie government policy – to the extent that at least 1,500 UK jobs have been lost because of the insane, unilateral desire to implement carbon taxes. This is beyond a joke. These pig-ignorant greenies are wrecking people’s lives on an increasingly massive scale and there is no way of stopping them. It’s Terminator time. These nutters really do have the keys to the madhouse and the BBC – as ever – is in on the act, spreading its eco-nut masters’ bidding.

Update: And as the BBC supports the de-industrialisation of Britain, Richard Black continues his one-sided trumpeting of those who want to tip money down the drain on projects that will shore up and accelerate the process. His favoured scheme today is the “greening” of Britain, when what we actually need is encouragement of business development. His chosen interest group is the Woodland Trust, an innocent sounding, tree-hugger-type organisation – in reality, they spread climate change lies to schools on an organised basis and are part of the quangocracy of government-backed green activists (in this case, the National Environmental Research Council whose board includes the notorious Juliet Slingo of the Met Office)who are spearheading our decline. And meanwhile, the corporation reports energy price rises – and the misery caused to our old folk – without a breath of a mention that the reason for these obscene hikes is entirely the government’s green policy.