Category Archives: BBC bias

Just a reminder of the BBC’s Inquisition-like tendencies in regard to climate change or indeed any right-wing person who dares to speak against the Orthodoxy…..and how ready it is to apologise to those who object to anyone being given a platform on the BBC who might wish to do so.

You may recall that the BBC Trust stated that ‘The programme would not be repeated in any form.’

Hmmmm…OK…so here’s the transcript of Quentin Lett’s programme on the Met. Office once again for your delectation….and to prove just how absurd, dishonest and almost sinister the BBC Trust’s conclusions were……

Source: BBC Radio 4
URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06418l5
Date: 05/08/2015
Event: What’s the Point of…? The Met Office
Credit: BBC Radio 4
Also see:

• Aug 07: BBC Radio 4: Roger Bolton discusses feedback to: “What’s the Point of…? The Met Office”
• Oct 09: BBC Radio 4: BBC apologises for “What’s the Point of…? The Met Office”

People:

• Helen Chivers: Head of News & Social Media, the Met Office
• Piers Corbyn: Astrophysicist and weather forecaster
• Michael Fish: Weatherman at the BBC
• Eric Freeman: Farmer
• John Kettley: Weatherman, previously with the Met Office
• Quentin Letts: Journalist and sketch writer
• Peter Lilley: Conservative MP, UK Parliament
• Angus MacNeil: Scottish Nationalist MP, UK Parliament
• Ken Nottage: Chief Executive, Royal Three Counties Show
• Catherine [?] Potts: Historian
• Group Captain Sir James Stagg: British RAF meteorologist
• Graham Stringer: Labour MP, UK Parliament
• Andy Silvester: Campaign Manager, Taxpayers’ Alliance
• Mark Vogan: Amateur weatherman

[Sound of sheep bleating.]

Male voice [over loudspeaker]: So we’d like to extend a very warm welcome to everybody here at the Royal Three Counties Show. Indeed, the forecast was for a thunderstorm – luckily, that hasn’t happened. But then you can never trust the weather forecasters.

Quentin Letts: Can’t trust weather forecasts?! Why not? Most forecasts come from the Met Office, a government body which receives hundreds of millions of pounds of public money. The Met Office employs 1,800 people, some of them on big money. It does a great deal more than predicting the next “barbecue summer”. It has military links. It takes a not uncontroversial position on climate change. If we don’t believe its weather forecasts, what about the rest of its activities? Is it a national asset? A much-loved institution? Or a historic throwback, in need of reform? What’s the point… of the Met Office?

Quentin Letts: The weather forecasts down the ages, Met Office voices broadcasting on the BBC, for the past 90 years. An official take on the weather was the idea of a Royal Navy admiral, Robert FitzRoy, who had sailed to Australia with some chap called Charles Darwin. He started data-based predictions of the weather in 1854, but set up a forerunner of the Met Office five years later, when a bad storm off Anglesey sank the clipper Royal Charter, with the loss of 450 lives, mostly gold miners returning from Australia. FitzRoy used the latest technology for his forecasts, as historian Catherine Potts explains.

Catherine Potts: Instrumental meteorology had been improving for the last 50 or so years, so we had much better instruments to measure, to understand changes in pressure which were crucial, self-recording anemometers for the wind had been invented in the previous 20 or so years – just take the Beaufort Scale, which was invented in 1806, and that enabled people to measure wind in the same way across the world.

Quentin Letts: Was it based in London?

Catherine Potts: Yes it was, it was based in London, um, and it had stations – what we term stations, recording sites – around the UK at the ports, and they sent their information in via telegraph, the Met Office basically couldn’t have actually started doing anything without the invention of the telegraph.

Quentin Letts: What was the size of the thing, at the start, and who was funding it?

Catherine Potts: It was funded by the government and it was absolutely tiny – there were three staff and they were headed up by Admiral Robert FitzRoy, who was our founder and actually the inventor, essentially, of the science of forecasting.

Quentin Letts: The science of forecasting? The latest technology? These terms evoke egg-headish certitude, yet can we ever be sure about the climate? The weather forecast is 154 years old, but not everyone agrees with the way the Met Office boffins concoct their forecasts. They still get the weather wrong! Now, we – the British public – are buying them a £97 million computer to improve the accuracy of those forecasts. Mark Vogan is an amateur weatherman who uses ocean temperatures and soil moisture for his predictions.

Mark Vogan: The Met Office methods are based around computer, and unfortunately computer isn’t going to necessarily always give us the answers, you know. It’s human input into that computer, and the computer obviously just runs through various equations to come up with scenarios, and obviously, accuracy-wise, once you get out past 10 days, the accuracy greatly drops off. For example, we’ve got a strong El Nino developing in the East Pacific – that has a big impact on the atmosphere, so if you can understand what response that water has to the atmosphere, then you can have a rough idea as to what’s going on. For example, the North Atlantic – I’m 32 years of age, I don’t recall the last time the Atlantic has been as cold as it is, compared to normal, in my lifetime, and that has a big impact, I think that’s going to rule a cooler summer, I think it’s had an impact on the last couple of winters, so if you can understand what ocean temperature does to the atmosphere, then I think that can give you a reasonably good idea as to what kind of weather you can expect, further down the road.

Quentin Letts: Cooler summer?! I’m melting here, in 36 degrees – that’s 96 Fahrenheit, in old money. Piers Corbyn, brother of Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, runs his forecasting service WeatherAction from a cramped basement office in South London. He uses sunspots and other non-mainstream methods, yet has a strong record of accuracy. And he has some quite strong words about the Met Office.

Piers Corbyn: They spend hundreds of millions on supercomputers. Those supercomputers will – even if you spend ten times that – would not improve forecasting skill one jot. They’ve reached the limit. The reason why they’ve reached the limit is they’re ignoring external influences – solar activity and the modulation of solar effects by the Moon. If those are not in there, whatever goes in will produce what comes out, and rubbish in is rubbish out. What those supercomputers do is enable them to get short-range right answers quicker, but when it goes to anything like a few days ahead, it enables them to get the wrong answers quicker.

Quentin Letts: The title of this programme is “What’s the Point of the Met Office?”. Can you answer that question – what’s the point of this organisation?

Piers Corbyn: The point for them and the government is it’s primarily was set up to do weather forecasting, to the best of its ability and to the best available science. They fail in that, because they’re not using the best available science. The reason is, they’ve had another purpose latched on them, which is to – and you read it in their blurb on the TV – it’s to promote and defend and propagate the man-made climate change theory, and suggest what horrors are going to come, allegedly, from more CO2, which is fiction.

Quentin Letts: A contentious point, and one we’ll come back to. [James Bond signature music plays in the background.] By the way, did you know that all Met Office forecasters must sign the Official Secrets Act? Civil servants, you see… “It may drizzle in Droitwich tomorrow, 007. But if you tell anyone, I shall have to kill you”. One operative, who spent three decades at the Met Office is John Kettley, now running a weather consultancy of his own. What, for him, is the point of the Met Office?

John Kettley: The point of the Met Office is that it provides fantastic information worldwide but particularly in the UK, using the skills of experienced forecasters and the power – fantastic computer power – that is now available to organisations like the Met Office and others around the world, to provide excellent computer analysis for the future. So, you know, we are looking, these days, not only at weeks and months ahead but years ahead, if you’re looking at the fact that we’ve got the Hadley Research Centre within the Met Office, which has got to try and analyse to see just exactly where this globe is going, really, what’s going to be the position on the globe in the next century or two. So we’ve got to look ahead with these computers, which, you know, Joe Bloggs like myself, we cannot be involved in that.

Quentin Letts: In his small-screen days, was bearded, rangy meteorologist John Kettley a scientific figure or something more than that? Teatime crumpet, companionship? Are TV forecasters – “presenters”, they are now called – figures of dry, impartial fact or are they – dread word – “celebrities”, pin-ups. They tell us to take brollies or wear sun cream. Is this the duty of a meteorologist or a nanny? And need they emote so much when they tell us it might be chilly?

John Kettley: Many of us did get fan mail. Some of us did get items of clothing sent through the post –

Quentin Letts: Did you?!

John Kettley: Um…

Quentin Letts: Did you get knickers sent through the post to you?

John Kettley: Not necessarily that sort of thing but sweaters. Which may seem a little bit boring to you… [Laughs.]

Quentin Letts: I see… [Laughs.]

John Kettley: But we did get clothing sent through the post. But yes, it was just fan mail but it was all friendly stuff, and you knew where to stop.

Quentin Letts: So that’s interesting, because that’s an idea of the weather presenter, weather forecaster, being a friend –

John Kettley: Yes.

Quentin Letts: – and being almost a member of the family. So that’s part of the role of the Met Office, is it, to be companionable?

John Kettley: Yes, you go right back to the beginning, when I had my first ever audition- and it’s an awful long time ago – I had my first audition through Pebble Mill, and the presenter from Pebble Mill came in and he said to me “The first time you go on television, John, nobody’s invited you into their lounge. You’ve got to be there as a friend. If you upset them, they’ll never turn on again”. That is so vital, that is so important, it’s important now as it was then – you’ve got to be somebody who people can associate with, you’ve got to be trustworthy and you haven’t got to be talking down to them, either. You are a scientist, first and foremost, but you’re now a presenter and you’ve got to speak language over the garden fence.

Quentin Letts: Some forecasts can seem almost Biblical, these days. Heatwaves, floods, “weather events” – to use a term not found in Genesis. We once spoke of natural disasters, but they may, in part, be the fault of mankind. One enters the foggy debate about climate change at one’s peril, but is the Met Office, with its attachment to the state and its emotionally splashy presenters, truly impartial here? Its work is open to political scrutiny, not least by the Commons Select Committee on Climate Change. One recent member has been Labour’s Graham Stringer.

Graham Stringer: They’re very good and getting better, when it comes to 1 to 5-day weather forecasting and getting the detailed weather forecasts down to very small areas – I think they’re excellent at that. Er, their climate predictions are – and their medium-term predictions – are pretty random and they are very poor.

Quentin Letts: Random? That’s a bit worrying, isn’t it?

Graham Stringer: Well, it is. I mean when, at the start of last year, they said we could expect less precipitation than normal, in January and February – and the whole country was flooded. [Quentin Letts laughs.] And then the Chief Scientific Officer said that this was undoubtedly due to climate change, and most of the scientists – even in the Met Office – looked askance at that, because there’s no scientific evidence whatsoever that that rain was related to climate change. So, good at the short term, very poor at medium and long term.

Some of the scientists who believe that they’re absolutely right are saying we must save the planet, we must change the way we produce energy and therefore we will have lots of alternative renewable forms of energy which, at the moment, are very expensive. The money that my constituents are paying, effectively as a flat tax on their energy bills, I think would – that money would be better spent, i.e., not on a flat tax way but would be better spent on research so we could genuinely produce clean and cheap electricity, rather than very expensive, ugly electricity.

Quentin Letts: Another member of the committee has been the veteran Conservative Peter Lilley. Does he get lobbied by the Met Office?

Peter Lilley: I suppose we do get lobbied by them. They come before the Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change, on which I sat, and tell us they need even more money for even bigger computers so they can be even more precisely wrong in future.

Quentin Letts [laughing]: That’s one way of looking at it – they would say it’s going to help them to be ultra, um, long-termist and being able to tell us what the weather’s going to do and also what the climate’s going to do.

Peter Lilley: Well, in 2004 they put out a very glossy document –

Quentin Letts 2004, so 11 years ago…

Peter Lilley: – called “Forecasting the Next Decade”. So they say the Met Office Hadley Centre has pioneered a new system to predict the climate a decade ahead. “We’re now using the system to predict changes up to 2014” – this was in 2004, they made this prediction. “By the end of this period, the global average temperature is expected to have risen by around 0.3 degrees Centigrade, compared to 2004”. That’s a huge increase, because in the previous 150 years, the increase was about 0.7 degrees, so it’s nearly half as much again in the next decade, was what they were expecting – and they were 90% sure that it would be within 0.2 and 0.4 degrees.

Quentin Letts: And what actually happened?

Peter Lilley: Nothing. Zilch. There was no global warming over the ensuing decade.

Quentin Letts: Are you a total sceptic, on man-made climate change?

Peter Lilley: No, I studied physics at Cambridge, so I accept the basic thesis that a bit more CO2 in the atmosphere, or a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere, will marginally warm up the Earth. But I’m what’s known as a “lukewarmist”, one who thinks that there won’t be much warming as a result of it, and that’s the scientifically proven bit of the theory – anything going on the alarmist scale is pure speculation. The sad thing is that they’ve become committed to a particular pseudo-scientific doctrine and now are unwilling to change their doctrine when the facts refute it.

Quentin Letts: By that, you mean man-made climate change.

Peter Lilley: Alarmist man-made climate change – there is a certain amount of man-made climate change going on but not very much, and they’re pretending that there’s a lot and going to be a lot. And when their predictions turn out to be false, then they don’t change their theory. Dame Julia Slingo, the Chief Scientific Officer of the Met Office, now says that the heating must have taken place but it hasn’t shown up on the surface of the Earth because it’s been swallowed by the deep oceans, a sort of new version of “the deep oceans swallowed my homework” thesis.

Quentin Letts [laughing]: Does this lead you to think that the Met Office should be privatised?

Peter Lilley: I’m not sure anyone would want to buy it.

Quentin Letts: What a voice… For some, the Met Office’s forecasts, of weather on land and at sea, are crucial. The new Chairman at Westminster’s Climate Change Committee is Scottish Nationalist MP Angus MacNeil from the Western Isles, near Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides.

Female voice: Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey. Northwest, backing southwest 4 or 5, increasing 6 at times. Showers good, occasionally moderate…

Quentin Letts: Angus, you have an amazing journey to your constituency every week – you land on a beach, in an aeroplane. You must listen to the weather forecast with some attention.

Angus MacNeil: Absolutely, and particularly the wind speeds are absolutely vital to me, to make my journey, because sometimes the journey doesn’t happen or you can’t land – you go to the island, you look down and you return to Glasgow for the evening, so weather is absolutely vital and knowing what the weather’s going to do.

Quentin Letts: And your constituents are in that rare part of the population who actually listen closely to the shipping forecast, because it affects their lives. Which bit of the shipping forecast affects you?

Angus MacNeil: Well, I’ve listened to shipping forecasts since I was a child, and when the words “Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides” would come up, “Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides” was the cue to be quiet. And particularly the weather in Malin and Hebrides – it was always important to us to give us a guide as to what was coming.

Quentin Letts: Your new position, as Chairman of the Climate Change Select Committee at Westminster, means that you’re effectively, um, you know, you’ve got a vested interest in the Met Office. Are they right to get into the climate change issues or should they concentrate on just plain short-term weather forecasting?

Angus MacNeil: The primary point is providing the data. If they want to inform with their knowledge and provide us with a view on that data, I think that’s a useful contribution to the debate. I think what is also and must be respected is: other people might have a view on that data as well.

Quentin Letts: And is it good that they are a state body. Does that affect things?

Angus MacNeil: It’s better to be privately owned by the taxpayers than privately owned by some private individuals, if you like. They’re using data from Norway, from Ireland, from Faroes, from wherever, and I think they do a good job at that, and I think they’re very much trusted in the job they do, and that trust is vital and important.

Quentin Letts: We can laugh about the “barbecue summer”, but weather forecasting acquired a graver significance 71 years ago. Tens of thousands of lives, and even the freedom of Europe, depended on the Met Office getting its forecast right. The Normandy invasion of early June 1944 was delayed by storms. One of those waiting for the off was my maternal grandfather, a sapper, one of the first to land. He and his advance team needed the high seas to abate. It was down to Group Captain James Stagg from the Met Office to let military commanders know when the weather would improve. Advised by Stagg, Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower ordered the invasion to go ahead.

[Soundtrack of Frank Sinatra: “Stormy Weather”.]

Quentin Letts: The Met Office’s customers – yes, they pay – include the Civil Aviation Authority, Heathrow Airport, Thames Water and – keep this to yourselves – the Ministry of Defence. Former weather presenter Helen Chivers is now the Met Office’s corporate spokeswoman.

Helen Chivers: The Met Office is the UK’s national meteorological service, and we deliver the public weather service to the UK. So what we’re doing there is providing forecasts and severe weather warnings that protect lives and livelihoods and critical national infrastructure for the UK. But we work wider than that – we work across the whole of the world and we provide, sort of, a joined-up area that will work for the different needs of everybody within the UK. So we’re global and we’re – got a real focus on saving lives and helping people be prosperous in the UK.

Quentin Letts: Makes you sound like an emergency service.

Helen Chivers: I suppose we are, in a strange way. I mean, when it comes down to it, our history and where we started was saving lives at sea, and in essence, that is still very much at the heart of our ethos. But it isn’t just at sea, now, it’s on land as well, and not in the UK – it’s across the world.

Quentin Letts: Country lore has much to say about the weather. “Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight”, if bees stay at home rain will soon come, sheep climbing a hill a clear day – sign of a clear day, pigs gather leaves and straw before a storm. I’ve come to the Three Counties Show in Malvern to talk to some rural weather experts – farmers. Eric Freeman, 83 summers young, has squinted at some weather in his time. How does he work out what’s coming?

Eric Freeman: I think when you’ve been around a long time, you get a feeling. You get up in the morning, don’t you, and you think “Ah, there’s a drop of rain”, but that’s the pride [?] of the morning, isn’t it, and it comes out nice later on.

Quentin Letts: If your beasts are sitting down, in the field, does that tell you something? Because there’s that old saying, that when the cows are sitting, it’s going to rain.

Eric Freeman: I think they get up and feed when, you know, if there’s some weather coming, I think they tend to be up and about. [Sound of cow mooing.]

Quentin Letts: Here we are, talking to Ken Nottage, Chief Executive of the Three Counties Show – Royal Three Counties Show. Ken, weather is a very big thing, it’s a very big consideration for you, isn’t it.

Ken Nottage: It’s huge, and you know, it’s probably the most important factor, pre-Show [?].

Quentin Letts: To the people who’ve come here today, it’s a question of whether or not we wear gumboots, whether or not we bring a mac. But to you, it’s a question of finance.

Ken Nottage: It is, indeed. It’s not just finance, it’s also safety, for the visitors that are here. But a bad Show – one that needs to be cancelled due to weather, be that rain, be that wind, whatever it is – can be very, very expensive.

Quentin Letts: There was one year, I think, when the weather forecaster said “Whatever you do, today” – this was during your Show – “whatever you do today, folks” – he said, on the radio – “don’t go out”.

Ken Nottage: Disastrous! I can remember it – they said, they said “Stay indoors today – it’s going to rain everywhere.” And it didn’t rain here. And that cost us – you know, that was getting on for a six-figure sum, just that, you know. I wanted to kill that weather forecaster, you can imagine.

Quentin Letts: Here is perhaps the most spectacular example of the Met Office getting it wrong.

Quentin Letts: There was. Michael Fish, not predicting the Great Storm of 1987, which left 18 people dead. But it’s not just dicey forecasts, that riles Andy Silvester from the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

Andy Silvester: New Zealand has an equivalent to the Met Office called Metro, which has a commercial arm which outsources weather forecasting to things like Tesco and Sainsbury’s, so they can predict when they need to get the strawberries on the shelves for a hot weekend, or something, and so forth. So I think what we’d like to see there again, is the Met Office have to deal with a bit more competition. It seems, at the moment, to have a bit of a monopoly, largely because it’s an institution.

Quentin Letts: Oh, so the very fact that it is official – does it give it commercial advantage, or does it give it a moral, um, advantage? A sort of sense, among the public, that somehow it’s more reliable.

Andy Silvester: Well, I think, on the former point, on the commercial advantage, getting a huge amount of money from taxpayers, of course makes it infinitely more competitive than it would be, otherwise, because its commercial competitors don’t have to deal with that pressure. You know, you look at the supercomputers that have been bought, you know, huge amounts of money spent, 2009, 2014, on these grand new bits of technology. Of course that gives it an advantage, and that means it doesn’t have to deal with competition in the same way that any normal business would. And –

Quentin Letts: It can go to the state for its funding, rather than going to banks.

Andy Silvester: Yes, given a supercomputer, you know – they spent an awful lot of money in 2009 on the supercomputer, forecasting didn’t necessarily improve, they got a nice bigger and shinier one in 2014, we’re yet again to see the results and whether that’s actually improved it. And so I think we’d like to see a bit more competition, we’d like to see these things opened up, and we’d like to see the Met Office, as I say, get back to focusing on what it should be doing, and I think that’s around predicting severe weather, you know, flood patterns and so forth, which necessarily it doesn’t do as much as it might do now.

Quentin Letts: I asked Helen Chivers how accurate the Met Office’s predictions were.

Helen Chivers: On average, we’re accurate – if you look at a great big basket of, you know, sunshine, rainfall, temperatures – round about 80% of the time. That, actually, is a really good figure, because weather is not a simple thing to forecast – the atmosphere is chaotic, it’s a really complicated thing to try and forecast. And we’re not only trying to forecast it for today or for the next hour, we’re trying to forecast it for weeks and months and years and hundreds of years ahead, so it’s a really complicated thing to do. And we verify our forecasts all the time for all of our customers, so for the aviation industry we’re verifying what the winds have been at 25,000 feet, um, for the Maritime Coastguard Agency we’re looking at how accurate were the gale warnings, the shipping forecast, and for – let’s say, winter maintenance on the roads, we’re looking at how was the temperature and the ice forecasts on the roads, how accurate were they. So, you know, we measure it in all sort of different ways, depending on who the customer is.

Quentin Letts: You mention there that you are forecasting centuries ahead, or trying to have an idea of what’s going to be happening in a couple of hundreds of years. This is where some of your critics say you are far less reliable. Peter Lilley MP has shown us a document from ten years ago where you were forecasting for now that it was going to be a lot warmer than it actually is, and this was leading to a certain alarmism, a political alarmism, of the sort that a scientific body really shouldn’t be getting into.

Helen Chivers: Yeah, I mean, we provide the best evidence-based science that we can provide, and of course, you know, science changes and technology moves on, and as things evolve and as you understand how the Earth system – so the connection between the atmosphere and the oceans and what’s going on, on land – all of that knowledge is evolving, so things change over time.

Quentin Letts: Very good to hear those caveats, I might say – we don’t often hear those –

Helen Chivers: No, true.

Quentin Letts: – when we hear Met Office people telling us we’re all in a terrible gloom and doom, and like Noah, you lot are saying, you know, “Leap for your Arks, because the floods are coming”. I mean, it is getting almost Biblical, some of the stuff coming out of the Met Office.

Helen Chivers: Sometimes, but I think that’s more on –

Quentin Letts: It is, getting more Biblical, you agree, good, a point of agreement.

Helen Chivers: I think sometimes it – but it depends how you interpret it, of course.

Quentin Letts: But how can you interpret the top Met Office executives earning more than the Prime Minister? I’d expect them to know all about the gold at the end of rainbows – it’s in their bank accounts.

Helen Chivers: We have a total revenue of around about £200 million – this is a big company, providing services to the UK and services globally. And you have to, like any business, attract the best people. Now, we are bound by our salary structure.

Quentin Letts: You could be paid much, much more, of course, were the Met Office to be privatised. [Helen Chivers laughs.] Would that be a good idea?

Helen Chivers: Would it be a good idea? I think, because of the range of the work that we do and the huge volume of information that we have to operate with, here – so we’re providing data free that’s available on our website, we’re doing forecasting for space weather and how that might impact on technology, we’re doing all the safety of life information that I’ve been talking about. Every review of how we operate has said that it wouldn’t be possible to privatise us.

[Soundtrack of Crowded House: “Weather with You”.]

Quentin Letts: That “barbecue summer” fiasco betrayed ambition among the isobars, a hunger for public attention, a desire deep in those Barograph Berties to be noticed. This is an urge better resisted. It’s hard to place a value on the secret work the Met Office does for the Ministry of Defence. Emergency planning, a seat on Whitehall’s COBRA crisis committee, warnings to mariners, cooperation with international allies in times of ash clouds and so on – such work demands our respect. But how does that sit with sexed-up press releases, ditzy autocuties and yes – with politically risky interventions on climate change, said by some fellow scientists to be plain wrong? As the shipping forecast might put it, sober predictions of short-term precipitations, good. Longer-term visibility and political lobbying, poor. And that’s your weather.

Beeb spanked over Lawson interview. But it’s hard for generalist presenters when interviewees just make up “facts” https://t.co/mX03HzE5Ou

— roger harrabin (@RHarrabin) October 25, 2017

The only person who makes up facts is Harrabin, along with his mates at the East Anglia climate centre amongst so many others who promote the idea of man-made global warming…especially due to CO2……the world may be warming but is it due at all to CO2, or if it is to what extent?  No proof CO2 is the driver of any warming, the available proof is to the contrary…CO2 is a result of warming.

Harrabin and his chum, Dr Joe Smith, succesfully rigged BBC reporting on climate change to practically exclude climate change sceptics from the debate.   The infamous seminars set up by Harrabin and Smith were given the nod by one Lord Hall Hall…then Director of News at the BBC.  The Tyndall Centre explains why it sponsored Harrabin…..to close down the debate…..

Email 2496 explains why the Tyndall Centre funded the Harrabin/Smith seminars – the Real World seminars of the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme
Mike Hulme:
Did anyone hear Stott vs. Houghton on Today, radio 4 this morning? Woeful stuff really. This is one reason why Tyndall is sponsoring the Cambridge Media/Environment Programme to starve this type of reporting at source

From a BBC insider…

‘Following their lead [Harrabin and Smith’s] has meant the whole thrust and tone of BBC reporting has been that the science is settled, and that there is no need for debate,’ one journalist said. ‘If you disagree, you’re branded a loony.’

Harrabin boasts of the power and influence he has wielded and scarily wants to replicate his duplicity around the globe…

“The seminars have been publicly credited with catalysing significant changes in the tone and content of BBC outputs across platforms and with leading directly to specific and major innovations in programming,” – Dr Joe Smith
“It has had a major impact on the willingness of the BBC to raise these issues for discussion. Joe Smith and I are now wondering whether we can help other journalists to perform a similar role in countries round the world” – Roger Harrabin

Remember it was Harrabin who whipped up the Twitterati into a frenzy when Quentin Letts upset the Green Gestapo…

‘BBC journalists are meant to be impartial, but climate change hack Roger Harrabin is whipping up criticism online among Greens of a programme made by his own employer. Radio 4’s What’s The Point Of . . . ?, looked at alleged politicisation of the Met Office.

The show was made by the Mail’s Quentin Letts. ‘From what I can gather, Comrade Harrabin has blown his top,’ Letts says. ‘All the hot gas he is producing may rupture the ozone layer.’’

And as QL tells us himself…

‘All hell broke out. Cataracts and hurricanoes! The Met Office itself was unfazed but the eco-lobby, stirred by BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin, went nuts.’

If you flip this graph horizontally and vertically and then add additional graphics to it you can see that it actually reads ‘Allah loves Roger Harrabin’…..

And as the weekend approaches, here is a NEW Open Thread on which you detail the bias spewing out of the BBC!

The BBC continues to play its very dangerous game of divisive and toxic racist identity politics the like of which has already led to police officers being murdered on the streets of America because of a narrative that they are killing Black men because of the colour of their skin…a narrative that has been proven to be untrue but which the BBC still peddles even today as it reports on the NFL protests.

Listen to the Afternoon Edition on 5 Live and you may feel sorry for Sarah Brett as she is hung out to dry and left like a rabbit in the headlights by racist anti-racism campaigners who rant on about middle-class white women’s racism because they, apparently, do not include ethnic minorities, including ‘Trans women of colour’, in their considerations in their feminist campaigns.  Brett is of course white and middle-class and ironically oh so achingly wannabe friend of the ethnic minorities, as are all her guilty white colleagues at the BBC, and not only curls up into a little ball in a corner of the studio proclaiming her guilty white privilege she keeps on telling these racists that they are right…..white, middle-class feminists just don’t represent ethnic people and are not inclusive.  Her co-host Nihal loves it, he havng a problem with white people himself judging by the comments he often makes, so in effect we have a gaggle of black and Asian feminists being racist about white women and the BBC is happy to promote that narrative…..white people are all racist even when they are not.

How did the subject come up?  Muslim comedian Shaza Mirza claimed that when she went on the women’s march against Trump earlier in the year she saw absolutely no black or Asian women there and she realised these white, middle-class racist feminists just didn’t represent her.  Brett tells us that when she saw that comment she knew she just had to talk about the issue on the programme.  Trouble is Mirza is either completely blind or lying.  Any look at videos or photographs of the event will show plenty of Black, Asian and Muslim women there…as the video above shows….and look at the video from the march website in which they tell us they are in solidarity with sistas across the world…note the many black speakers…

The politics of fear and division have no place in 2017.

Mirza tells us…

‘You can only measure something, and how well it’s working, by what it does for you. If you’re struggling, yet every other woman is benefiting from this new wave of feminism, you can’t help but feel it isn’t for me. It’s a fashion. It doesn’t include me, it doesn’t say anything to me about my life. A lot of black and Asian women that I speak to don’t know what the hell is going on.’

Which is odd really as you can find her all over the internet working with white feminists…hardly excluded….

Just another ‘ethnic’ using their ethnicity as a lever to further their careers  by playing the race card and playing the ‘victim’.  You might have more sympathy for her if she didn’t proclaim proudly that she is a Muslim when she knows full well Islam is a misogynist religion, anti-Semitic, very divisive and warlike…she herself makes jokes about the misogyny…and yet she remains in the religion…and proudly so…..

Look at this photo….apart from Khan there are several Black and Asian people in the picture…at least six visible plus Khan….

Yep…no Blacks, Asians or Muslims at the march….just more dangerous BBC race-baiting, divisive radio.

Here’s the latest Brexit scaremongering from the BBC…

Warning over NHS Wales Brexit ‘catastrophe’

Pretty scary eh?  The BBC tells us…

Any Brexit which means leaving the single market could be catastrophic for the NHS and particularly devastating in Wales, a health academic has warned.

Nick Fahy, a health policy senior researcher at the University of Oxford said a hard or no deal Brexit could leave patients “at immediate risk”.

He also warned if EU staff left the UK, London could “suck in” Welsh NHS staff.

Way down the long article the BBC admits…

Mr Fahy is a specialist adviser to the Commons health committee and has worked for both the Department of Health and European Commission.

You’d hardly notice it would you…and of course you’re not meant to….and as for ‘worked for the European Commission’…that hides the real scale of things…..Fahy played a pretty central role in the EU’s health policy making  spending more than a decade at the EU commission and he has set up his own consultancy.….eager to connect all European health services…and to lobby for a ‘soft Brexit’….ie no Brexit….

Nick Fahy has nearly 20 years of experience at senior level in European health policy, the last ten years in the Health and Consumers Directorate-General of the European Commission.

Nick Fahy is a well embedded part of the EU establishment and his commercial, and no doubt political interests, lie in keeping very close ties to the EU.

Why does the BBC present him as an almost impartial commentator when he quite clearly is an EU insider?

Ok, half way through the week and we need a new OPEN thread to highlight the BBC’s egregious bias! Off you go…

Maybe I don’t hear all the BBC reports about Catalonia but the ones I do hear and read always leave out one obvious parallel…Brexit.  How can that be when it is such an obvious link?

The Today show discussed Catalonia today [08:40] but remarkably made no mention of Brexit, then they moved on to Italy where two regions want more autonomy and we heard that they were ‘following Catalonia’….really?  And who was Catalonia following?  Again no mention of Brexit.  Extraordinary omission….the BBC happy to link Brexit to 1930’s Nazi Germany making parallels to that but not to modern day European independence movements.

Why does the BBC make so much effort to distance Brexit from these other independence movements?  Does the BBC not want you to think there is widespread feeling across Europe that leans towards some form of nationalism and local identity and control and that the grand EU project so beloved of BBC liberals is not in the interests nor in the hearts of the people of Europe?

The BBC manipulating the news in order to manipulate your minds.

 

The six o’clock pips sound across the nation. The red lights flash and the studio blinks to life and the familiar old juices stir. Three hours of live broadcasting lie ahead with an audience of millions leaning on our every word. Three hours in which to wield the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play. Three hours to educate the audience with stuff they didn’t even know they wanted to know and to enrich the democratic process by giving them information they will store away, the better to make a wise choice at the ballot box when next called upon.

How we miss Jim Naughtie…don’t we?  Having listened to him[08:15] give the Governor of California, Jerry Brown, complete free range to malign and smear Trump you have to think not so much.

Brown, a Democrat of course, laid into Trump on the usual subjects with Naughtie feeding him the right cues for the next slander.  It was a shameful piece of ‘journalism’ that should embarrass any of the Today presenters who have to persuade us that they are worth listening to, that they will bring us the truth, unvarnished and impartial.  So-called interviews like this one discredit the programme and undermine their integrity.

We’re in an age of darkness, Trump is immoral, maybe evil, he’s wrong about everything and he’s dangerous.

Trump, Brown tells us, has created a massive polarisation in politics [hmmmm…just as he made America misogynist?]…trouble is it is not Trump who has caused polarisation but the Left who have become ever more aggressive in their tactics trying to close down anyone who doesn’t agree with them and by adopting militant identity politics to further their own interests.

All this of course mirrored by the Left’s supporters in the media such as the BBC….Naughtie not raising a word of dissent to challenge Brown at all….it is the BBC  narrative that Trump is beyond the pale and unacceptable as a President and thus anything can be said about him however malicious, however wrong.

And note Naughtie’s use of the phrase ‘undocumented migrants’…..that is a very loaded and misleading term meant to ‘humanise’ illegal migrants and intended to make people feel more sympathetic towards them…highly political whereas the correct term, illegal migrant, is actually neutral as it merely describes what they are.  ‘Undocumented’ gives the impression that they have just forgotten their passport or it is some stupid bureaucratic cock-up that will get sorted out, they’re entitled to enter the US they just need the paperwork to ‘rubberstamp’ that…it’s in the post no doubt…no, they are entering a country illegally, taking jobs by undercutting wages, taking housing and school places, using up local resources and not paying taxes….of course the BBC doesn’t want you to think about the downsides to illegal immigration, never mind the exploitation of the migrants themselves by employers and criminals.

The Today show….becoming more of a joke everyday.

And you don’t sound like a public service broadcaster anymore https://t.co/1YGJW43oSs

— Tim Montgomerie (@montie) October 24, 2017

MP wants details of anti-Brexit univ teachers. Decent folk deported on technicalities. Daily hate in press. Doesn't feel like my country now

— John Simpson (@JohnSimpsonNews) October 24, 2017

[H/T Guest Who]

LOL…..A BBC über liberal grand-dame journo now declaring his patriotic love for his lost country…..the country that he and his colleagues have spent their careers rubbishing and selling out to the EU and to the Islamists.

His claim that this is not the country it was, #duetoBrexit, is not new….note his condescending sneer at the voters who were too wilfully stupid and ignorant, too lazy to find out the truth….

“It’s fine for politicians to take that kind of approach, but for the British people to simply buy these things sight unseen, I’ve really found that quite disturbing.

“All my life, British voters seem to have been really sensible and balanced and it was as though during the debate – and I have to say it was both sides – people threw that balance away. It’s a different country now from what it was.”

That of course is the biggest lie of all…and a constant one that the BBC itelf broadcasts long and loud.  The voters knew exactly what they were voting for….to leave the EU, single market and all.

Brexit ‘McCarthyism’ is unacceptable to universities. Free speech must flourish

Unless you are a Tory MP holding university lecturers to account….then you must STFU.

Where are all these brave defenders of freedom of speech when right-wing speakers are silenced and no-platformed on campuses…where is the Guardian and the BBC then?  What does the Guardian think we should do with people who merely think and write about what they call ‘Fascism’ and ‘Neo-Nazism’…..labels that the Guardian chooses to put on them…..

To tackle neo-Nazis, we must treat its ‘thinkers’ like thugs

An ageless concern was that far-right intellectual heft matters: violent outbursts rely on the build-up of argument. Thugs look as though they have gone past the point of debate because their rage is physically iterated, but in fact they have gone through debate first to get there. Furthermore, the tie Nazis lend a respectability that draws in a new crowd. 

Claim the argument and intellectual thinking leads to violence and then use that as an excuse to stamp on the intellectual and their freedom of speech….just a way of silencing your opponents by demonising them….treat them like ‘thugs’.

LOL……the Remainers have launched a incredible assault with the aid of their media friends at the Guardian and BBC on a Tory MP who had the temerity to ask what universities were teaching about Brexit….

Tory MP’s Brexit demand to universities ‘offensive’ – Lord Patten

A Eurosceptic Tory MP has been accused of compiling a “hit list” of university professors who teach Brexit courses.

Chris Heaton-Harris has written to universities asking for names of such professors and the content of their lectures.

A lecturers’ union said the letter had the “acrid whiff of McCarthyism” – and Tory peer Lord Patten called it “idiotic and offensive”.

Mr Heaton-Harris said he believed in “open” debate on Brexit.

Mr Heaton-Harris is a member of the pro-Brexit European Research Group of Conservative MPs.

Note how the BBC is quick to label him eurosceptic and mention what pro-Brexit group he belongs to.  No such information about the pro-EU fanatic Patten [BBC stooge of course] until well down the article and no such information about other ‘outraged’ personages such as Professor David Green at all…..

Professor David Green, vice-chancellor at the University of Worcester, said: “When I read this extraordinary letter on Parliamentary paper from a serving MP, I felt a chill down my spine. Was this the beginnings of a very British McCarthyism?”

He said he feared he would be denounced in Parliament by Mr Heaton-Harris as an “enemy of the people” if he did not supply the list – something he said he had no intention of doing.

He added: “I realised that his letter just asking for information appears so innocent but is really so, so dangerous.

“Here is the first step to the thought police, the political censor and Newspeak, naturally justified as ‘the will of the British people'”.

Extraordinary scaremongering  and alarmist language about a simple request asking if ‘Brexit’ was being taught in a balanced and impartial manner.

The BBC also quotes Sally Hunt…

Sally Hunt, chairwoman of lecturers’ union the University and College Union, said: “Our society will suffer if politicians seek to police what universities can and cannot teach.

“This attempt by Chris Heaton-Harris to compile a hit list of professors has the acrid whiff of McCarthyism about it and (universities minister) Jo Johnson must disown it in the strongest terms.”

You’ll note that in neither of these cases do we get told their position on Brexit.  Let me enlighten you….

THE University of Worcester’s vice-chancellor has signed an open letter warning higher education investment faces a hit under Brexit.

Professor David Green has joined 103 other university heads in adding his name to a note expressing deep concern about the crunch referendum vote.

Professor Green, a strong backer of the EU, says he felt compelled to sign it because the risks to universities are too great.

So not only is he a strong backer of the EU but he has signed a letter demanding his view predominates….and yet he complains about someone asking not for one-sided teaching but for balanced and impartial teaching…Professor Green is a hypocrite and somewhat of a McCarthyist himself using such intemperate, alarmist language in a deliberate attempt to demonise and make toxic Chris Heaton-Harris in the same way the BBC tried to make Farage a pariah in ‘decent’ society and how they labelled Leave voters as racists and bigots.

Sally Hunt is similarly minded as a Remainer and pro-EU advocate….

I voted Remain

We get a few words of support for Heaton-Harris from Andrea Leadsom but the vast bulk of the article is a poisonous hatchet job on a Brexit supporting Tory MP.

The BBC just doing what comes naturally….fake news, poisoning the well of democracy.

University suspends lecturer in racism row who praised BNP

Dr Ellis’s latest book argues that political correctness is strangling western society. In it he also expresses his admiration of the BNP. “The British National party is the only party in Britain that has consistently attacked the scandalously high levels of legal and illegal immigration.”

Naturally the lecturer didn’t praise or ‘admire’ the BNP, he merely stated a fact….however…he history.