Richard Black ploughs on with his eco-scares. Today he yells ‘fire!‘ about fish – they are going to become extinct by 2050 thanks to our greed. He frames the topic entirely in terms of the agenda of greenie fanatics, and fails to deal properly with the real villain of the peace, the EU. Its insane Common Fisheries Policy (under which millions of dead fish are slung back into the sea), combined with rapacious buying up of African fishing licences, have combined to create scarcity from plenty.
Meanwhile Mr Black and the rest of the legion of BBC greenie reporters studiously avoid the real environment stories of the day. First, as Richard North has masterfully shown, IPCC claims about the impact of climate change on the South American rain forests were the worst kind of unsubstantiated bunk; second, the Muir Russell committee’s so-called investigation of Climategate, which the BBC thought proved that the scientists involved had been exonerated, failed to deal properly with the main issues and made judgments about the science involved which were clearly outside its competence; and third, Lord Oxburgh’s report – which the BBC has claimed showed that the science of climate change was vindicated – also failed to do its job properly, to the extent that the one scientist on the House of Commons Science and Technology committee has bravely said that parliament was misled.
Meanwhile Roger Harrabin, that other doyen of BBC environment reporting, here treacherously claims to address sceptics’ concerns about Oxburgh, while sticking to the ludicrous BBC line that 98% of climate scientists believe in man-made global warming so it must be true, and – the corollary – that sceptics must be idiots.