Category Archives: Climategate

CLIMATEGATE 2

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Understandably there’s a great deal of discussion about Climategate 2 in the comments. I’m sure Robin will be along to give us his take but in the meantime here’s a thread dedicated to the subject. There’s a searchable database here (those with time might like to start sifting through the results for “BBC“).

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"The unbelieving… shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone"

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Further to Robin’s post about Richard Black’s “nothing much to see here, move along now” article about the Climategate inquiries – I was amused to see that the BBC chose to highlight the significance of CRU data on climate models with a ludicrous alarmist image which appears to show bubbling oceans of lava.

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STILL ABLE TO SHOCK

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I tuned in very briefly this morning to Today and was taken aback by the gushing admiration that one of the BBC’s legion of eco-warrior reporters bestowed upon the speech at the Climatecon in Copenhagen by Hugo Chavez. It verged on hero-worship and shocked me because anyone who knows anything about this Venezuelan tyrant will know that he is an evil man, a thug, a clown. And yet, to at least one of our State Broadcaster reporters, he is man worth listening to. The BBC – still able to shock me.

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Today Again

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I’m not the biggest fan of the Cameron-led Conservative Party, but even I was forced to wonder where the Today programme gets balls big enough to follow yesterday’s double-team attack on Tory spokesman Phil Hammond with another one-sided assault on Tory policy this morning. Daniel “Danny” Dorling, a socialist professor of human geography, was given the prime-time slot following Thought For The Day to promote the idea of expanding public sector employment and increasing taxation. Conservative-proposed spending cuts were singled out for criticism by Dorling and his softball-tossing interviewer Sarah Montague. There was no one to offer a counter opinion and not the slightest pretence of balance. It’s not just the political parties that are already in election mode; the Today programme’s manifesto is taking shape too. (Interview can be heard here)

Immediately after Dorling, Justin Webb interviewed Sir David King about his proposal to have a climate scientist on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee. King got very irate when Webb brought up the CRU emails. Even though Webb wasn’t challenging the consensus view, the very mention of the emails is now considered off-limits as far as the high priests of the Warmist cult are concerned. Webb took his punishment meekly, like a good on-message Today presenter should. (Interview can be heard here)

Here’s a rushed transcript of the relevant segment:

King: It’s rather like the fact that there’s a labour market economist on the MPC itself, on the group, designed to stop monetarists riding roughshod over the jobless people. In other words that person has a particular hat to wear, and I’m saying why not put someone on there who understands energy, energy technology, low carbon moves and wears that hat and can express it right there when policies are being decided on our finances.

Webb: You look at the University of East Anglia emails and you do wonder, actually, whether putting someone there would just make them a target, quite apart from anyone else, a target from their own colleagues. It’s not settled enough, is it, to have someone doing the job and everyone accepting that they are doing the right job?

King: Good heavens. What are you saying is not settled enough? The science of climate change?

Webb: No, not the science, but the arguments, the flurries of discussion and dissent among the scientists themselves, and that to have someone there…

King: There is very little discussion and dissent among the scientists. That’s a total misreading of the theft of the UEA emails.

Webb: Well you can see it in the emails, can’t you?

King: (getting angry now) I’m sorry, that is an interpretation of the emails – the scientific community is of one voice on the issue. Is the planet warming up at the moment? That was the issue around the emails, and our Met Office, not involved in the issue, has published its own set of data this week demonstrating that of course we know icebergs are melting, we’re losing ice around the planet, every single piece of evidence from satellites, from temperature measurements is showing that the temperature has risen by three quarters of a degree centigrade.

Webb: OK, and you want that information to be there at the top table in the Treasury, in the Bank of England. Sir David, thank you very much.

“Sir David, thank you very much. May I have another?“

Does anybody else get the impression that Sir David has been rattled by Climategate? As more and more holes appear in their theory, King and his fellow zealots become ever more shrill in their declaration that the science is settled and that all dissent should be crushed. Talking of which, check out the Stalinist heading to King’s article in the latest Prospect magazine:

The Bank’s green future
Darling is getting it wrong on climate change. Now scientists must shape monetary policy.

Update 13.30. Just noticed that Umbongo mentioned these two interviews in the comments to an earlier blog post. Don’t want to deprive anybody of a tip of the hat.

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Deniers

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The BBC Trust’s From See-saw to Wagon Wheel, p 40:

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus. But these dissenters (or even sceptics) will still be heard, as they should, because it is not the BBC’s role to close down this debate. They cannot be simply dismissed as ‘flat-earthers’ or ‘deniers’, who ‘should not be given a platform’ by the BBC. Impartiality always requires a breadth of view: for as long as minority opinions are coherently and honestly expressed, the BBC must give them appropriate space.

Evan Davis on the Today programme this morning: “climate change deniers”

BBC Scotland political editor Brian Taylor on his blog today: “climate change deniers”

BBC presenter Ros Atkins on the World Have Your Say blog: “climate change deniers” (and on more than one occasion during this programme, even after Christopher Booker had pulled him up on it)

The advice of the mysterious “experts” they take. The rest of it, not so much.

(Reminder re. that seminar of scientific experts – there is at least one FoI requestoutstanding.)

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Eco PR group on the BBC

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The Kate Silverton programme on Radio Five Live this morning dedicated a segment to telling us about all the wonderful positive things that will flow from the challenge of combating climate change (more recharging points for electric cars, refurbished homes, new factories, green jobs, a unicorn for every home, trees with money growing on them, that sort of thing). The guest they had on to help promote these lovely fluffy thoughts was none other than Solitaire Townsend, co-founder of Futerra Sustainability Communications, the PR agency behind the Rules of the Game propaganda document mentioned in the CRU emails. Of course none of that was brought up this morning (no talk of Climategate at all), nor was it pointed out that Futerra has advised the BBC on how to promote the eco agenda through workshops on “communicating sustainable development”. (An email promoting these Futerra workshops can be found in the CRU batch, coincidentally). It would appear that the latest element of the BBC/Futerra communications strategy is simply to let the green PR wonks have the airtime themselves to get their message across.

(Townsend doesn’t seem to be on top of her subject. During the discussion she came out with following: “Obama has a Green Jobs Czar who is to make sure the USA can make the best of this transition to a low carbon economy.” I don’t believe he does. Van Jones, the Green Jobs Czar, went under the bus when it emerged that he was a 9/11 truther with radical leftist links, and I can find no mention of a replacement. I suppose Townsend can be forgiven for not knowing about Jones’ “resignation” – even the BBC’s director of global news Richard Sambrook admitted that the Beeb didn’t give the story enough coverage.)

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Two "gates" and a couple of degrees of separation

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A few weeks BC (Before Climategate) there was another “gate” controversy which, I have to concede, generated slightly less interest among the Biased BBC readership. Well, you’ll all be pleased to read that F-Bombgate has just about reached its denouement:

The BBC investigation into the sabotage of an early morning 5 Live sports news bulletin with obscene material has concluded that chief suspect Ben Jacobs will not be offered any more freelance shifts. But the Beeb will be extremely careful with any statement for fear of legal action by Jacobs, who has kept silent since denying any involvement. He claims someone logged on to the BBC computer system in his name.

Now, bear with me here. Via Richard North at EUReferendum I see that Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson (who has apparently re-reinvented himself as the sword of truth against the evil forces of the Right) blames us all for Climategate:

“The CRU theft was a criminal attempt to sabotage the Copenhagen climate summit, and the entire right wing blogosphere is complicit in the crime.”

Apart from his role as the sanctimonious conscience of the blogosphere, Johnson is also a jazz musician who, according to Wikipedia, has featured on a couple of albums by bassist Stanley Clarke. And with that as my tenuous link, here’s the moment once again (possibly for the last time, but I can’t promise) when a blooper reel of BBC racing correspondent Cornelius Lysaght was sneaked into a sports report by person or persons known or unknown:

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Harrabin: media wrong, science not settled!

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Make sure you’re sitting down for this one.

BBC environment correspondent Roger Harrabin on Radio Five Live Breakfast this morning:

“There is a sort of misapprehension here that we in the media have probably helped to perpetuate: that the science of climate change, all the details, are settled. In fact there’s a lot of uncertainty about big areas of the science as to what will happen.”

A frank admission from an unexpected quarter. The fallout from Climategate continues.

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CLIMATEGATE – THE BBC SMOKING GUN?

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There’s an interesting post from Ben today about my post on Saturday outlining BBC environment correspondent Richard Black’s response to Climategate. Ben says:

The “climate scientists” implicated in Climategate clearly think of Black as one of their own. When the fair article “Whatever Happened to Global Warming” (written by Paul Hudson, weatherman with a First in Geophysics and Planetary Physics) appeared on the BBC website, the Team were not amused. Here’s Michael Mann in one of the emails:

“extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC. its particularly odd, since climate is usually Richard Black’s beat at BBC (and he does a great job). from what I can tell, this guy was formerly a weather person at the Met Office.
We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might be appropriate for the Met Office to have a say about this, I might ask Richard Black what’s up here?

And in another post, Will S suggests that a FoI request is put in to the BBC to see what email exchanges there have been between Black, Harrabin et al and the CRU unit. An intersting idea. The Mann email clearly suggests much closer links than is normal between journalists and their sources – (to me) it sounds as though he knows Black will do his bidding. Is this the smoking gun showing that the BBC is in bed with the whole climate change scam?

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