Category Archives: Richard Black

NUCLEAR SKEW

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A Biased BBC reader draws our attention to some interesting information concerning one of our ..ahem..favourite BBC propagandists….

“For further analysis of how the BBC’s environment correspondent Richard Black can misread and skew data in regard to climate change go here. Now, in a news report of major importance regarding Anglo-French cooperation in the future of nuclear power, his fingerprints are all over the BBC’s web page report here

There are three mini headlines at the top of the BBC’s web page. They are:

UK and France sign nuclear deal (the real, important news) a treaty signed by the prime minister and French president no less (not known recently as a loving couple) which will create ‘a number of commercial deals in the nuclear energy field, worth more than £500m and creating 1,500 UK jobs… and even,‘…. helps to deliver our emission reductions targets..’

Given equal prominence is this: UK nuclear subsidies ‘unlawful’ (by Mr Black) Wow, this is big news! But wait, hold! Read on. It’s not a fact. And it’s not even new. It‘s certainly not news. It’s simply another Greenpeace eco-fanatic move reported last January, now recycled by Black as a headline.

He starts: “Green energy campaigners are attempting to block new nuclear power stations in the UK by complaining to the European Commission that government plans contravene EU competition regulations.” It’s an old complaint. But on the BBC it gets equal news billing. Which conventional newspaper would publish a story first published a month ago, as a news headline at the top of its front page? The editor would get the boot. But BBC headline readers will get the message.

Black and the BBC doesn’t finish rubbishing the nuclear plans there. Its next equal prominence headline is: Nuclear power ‘has small support’. (by Mr Black). His story is about a global poll, ‘…..BBC News, polled 23,231 people in 23 countries from July to September this year… (wait for it)…. ‘..several months after an earthquake and giant tsunami devastated Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power station.’ The question asked by the pollsters, while the terrible events and clean-up in Japan were still being actively reported, started with, ‘Agree: Nuclear power is relatively safe….’going on to ..’..should build more plants.’

If you continue to read halfway down all the detail, you will find, ‘In the UK, support for building new reactors has risen from 33% to 37%.’ A view from nuclear spokesman John Rich is provided right at the end of the piece including, ‘..(nuclear) facts warrant a better educational effort from industry, from governments and from journalists.’

From ‘green’ journalists too? Skew must be joking.”

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DON’T MESS WITH THE MISSIONARY MAN…

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Richard Black attracts a lot of attention in these pages. Biased BBC’s Alan notes…

“You have probably heard that the science is settled, that the debate is over….because the consensus is that AGW is real. However that may not be the case…it seems the consensus is only of importance when it ostensibly backs up your own case…or in this case, Richard Black’s case.

As the remorseless tide of public opinion and mounting evidence says the science is far from settled Black has decided that the consensus is irrelevant…what counts is the truth:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16906738

‘The numbers tell you precisely nothing of value….and may not matter very much.
A couple of years back, at one of the UNFCCC meetings in Bonn, I had a long chat with Viscount Monckton. As a scholar of Classics, he was able to detail with Classical derivation the reasons why consensus matters far less than simply being right. And he is surely correct; after all, in more recent times, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein and Hawking are among those whose work broke with the consensus, yet turned out to be correct. But if the presence of a consensus is irrelevant, so, logically, is its absence; which makes the continued use by sceptics’ groups of the “consensus is cracking” meme a bit mystifying.’

So you see when the consensus is no longer a consensus….it no longer matters what the numbers say.

So you see the BBC’s refusal to allow sceptics a fair hearing based on numbers of scientists who oppose them is, according to Black, wrong….what matters is what is right….so before it seems that if enough people claimed something was true the BBC science journalists would print the legend as fact!

Black is very definitely on the defensive now….he firstly reduced the amount of space for comments on his blog…presumably because that makes it so much harder to rebut his fallacious claims, and now he has retreated behind Twitter from where you have to track down his blog.

I guess he doesn’t really want to engage with the public because the public were having great fun shooting ‘fish in a barrel’…namely his journalism, so called.

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TWITTER YE NOT…

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I’m not sure why BBC correspondents are on Twitter. When I was trained to be one, the emphasis was in ensuring balanced reports that gave all sides of a story. Twitter is deliberately designed to push one-sided opinion. Richard Black, however, has been increasing his carbon footprint over the weekend by visiting Washington and he’s keen to tell us all about his excitement via Twitter.

So far, there’ve been two posts…the first is in support of a blog by Bob Park, a retired US academic, who, over many years has been warning – in greenie militant fashion – of the dangers of the population explosion. In the post liked by Mr Black, he admires the way the Chinese have brought down the birth rate (now how was that achieved, Mr Black?) and then takes a hefty kick at the two front-runner Republican presidential candidates for daring to have five and seven children children respectively. They are compared by Mr Park to the peasants in Afghanistan – unlike the great Obama, who has only two. Mr Black is clearly in ecstasy over the subtlety of the venom.

His second herogram is reserved for the Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who has told a meeting of energy executives that there can be absolutely no doubt about climate change. Personally, as a trained BBC correspondent, I reach to check my wallet every time a politician tells me there’s a dead certainty about anything. And the redoubtable Donna Laframbois has a brilliant posting here about the economic gullibility of politicians. But Mr Black clearly doesn’t operate with such complexity. He – rather than going to the trouble of filing a balanced report which might have to deal with inconveniences like verifiable evidence – prefers to nakedly and unashamedly puff the words of the deluded Scandinavian by Twitter.

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RICHARD BLACK ’97: 1 METRE SEA LEVEL RISE IN 30 YEARS

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Richard Black 1997:

The best models we have predict a range of effects on climate as the Earth warms up. The biggest global effect will be a rise in sea level – warmer water simply takes up more room, and some of the world’s ice will melt.
The seas could rise by up to a metre in 30 or 40 years’ time. That might not sound much but it could lead to whole nations disappearing beneath the waves.

It’s 2012 and we’re half way there. I guess those “best models” must have indicated that the next 15 years are the really bad ones.

UPDATE 5.15PM. He’s still banging on about it. This tweet appeared yesterday: That link takes you here:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts a sea-level rise of up to 59 centimetres over the next century, a level that would inundate most of the Maldives’ inhabited atolls. Low-lying Pacific island nations, such as Kirabati and Tuvalu, would also face being flooded.

Yeah, whatever. “Wolf!”

As Tim Blair points out, the Maldives has more pressing concerns. And boy does it know how to play gullible fools such as Richard Black – when the president isn’t blubbing about climate refugees he’s breaking ground for new airport terminals.

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CHINA "SHOULD ACCEPT EU TAX"

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The BBC’s love of the EU is blind and knows no bounds. Here, Richard Black – showing crass ignorance of the laws of supply and demand – bellyaches that the nasty Chinks (his spitefulness makes Diane Abbott look tame, but this is a greenie item, so no holds are barred) are daring to complain about Brussels’ puntive new aviation tax. His breathtakingly naive argument is that Chinky airlines make obscene, nasty capitalist profits so why worry – and in any case it only amounts to a few dollars a ticket – so who gives a stuff? Actually Mr Black, US airlines – never mind China for a second – say it will cost them billions of dollars. But in Mr Black’s lavish never-never land of cash-from-the licence fee will buy my air ticket to Durban or wherever I please, such trifles clearly do not matter.

In the real world of competition and tight margins,a dollar remains a dollar – no matter how devalued it has become under Obama – and this new tax is a pointless, nasty piece of legislation that is one more nail in the coffin of European competitiveness. The BBC should be highlighting its likely negative impact rather than offering such repression an unqualified puff.

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MAKES NO DIFFERENCE IF YOU’RE BLACK…

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Biased BBC’s Alan notes;

“Richard Black illustrates why he is not a good journalist…allowing prejudice and bad judgement to influence his reporting. On Twitter he claims people who don’t follow the ‘consensus’ in science damage the planet…meaning the ‘Sceptics’ on AGW except his example would actually denounce the BRIC countries that are being allowed to carry on pumping out CO2 to enable them to industrialize (if the CO2 issue is so important, ie the planet is going to die if we continue producing CO2, how is possible to allow that?).

14:31 UK time, Thursday, 29 December 2011
@BBCRBlack via Twitter
‘Record year’ for ivory seizures – or how beliefs that run counter to science damage the environment http://t.co/Ad80vi3J
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16353204
“I fear the criminals are winning,” he said.
‘Some environmental campaigners say the decision to allow some southern African countries, whose elephants populations are booming, to sell their stockpiles of ivory has fuelled the illegal trade.
Those countries – South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe – however, deny this and argue they should be rewarded for looking after their elephant populations.’

Black also links to one of his stories, sorry, reports, from 2006 about Canada, the evil planet destroying Conservatives, and Kyoto…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4650878.stm
Will Kyoto die at Canadian hands?
By Richard Black
Environment Correspondent, BBC News website
Is Canada’s newly elected Conservative Party now preparing to don the mantle of Darth Vader and emasculate the protocol to the point of impotence?

In this Black claims only the Canadian Conservatives believe the Kyoto Protocol is completely ineffective…..history now tells us most countries think that. What is interesting is that Canada has now pulled out of the climate agreements….it was a big story….but Black ignore’s this event….

Canadian Senate Climate Science and Economics Hearing – 15/12/11
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMQk-q8SpBU&feature=player_embedded#!
  ….which has prominent and qualified sceptics reporting to the Canadian Senate.
I wonder why Black isn’t too keen to have you see this…could it be that the arguments made are compelling and credible whilst pro AGW voices have been shown to be corrupt, inept and unscientific?

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INFANTALIZED…

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Michael Buerk, for years one of the main BBC newsreaders, and now presenter of the R4’s Moral Maze, has long been a trenchant critic of the BBC’s climate reporting. Almost a year ago, he took a direct kick here at the rampant eco-loonery when Peter Sissons savaged the corporation’s espousal of climate alarmism in his memoirs. This week, he’s renewed his attack on the BBC Trustees – along with Harrabin, Black and their crusader colleagues – in a new blog called The Fifth Column. He points out that although he himself does believe in anthropogenic warming, the BBC’s reporting of the issue is a pile of odure. He says:

What gets up my nose is being infantilized by governments, by the BBC, by the Guardian that there is no argument, that all scientists who aren’t cranks and charlatans are agreed on all this, that the consequences are uniformly negative, the issues beyond doubt and the steps to be taken beyond dispute.

There’s much more in his short, punchy essay (hinged on the BBC’s reporting of the Durban summit), all of it brilliantly crafted to say that the corporation’s stance on this topic is indefensible.

The only question now is whether Mr Buerk will be ignored (as usually happens), fired, or someone is paid to ridicule him. My guess is that it will probably be Fiona Fox. She’s got form.

PS: I missed this pre-Christmas piece of naked agitprop from Richard Black attacking those who dare to challenge that nice EU’s punitive new tax on air travel. Jaw-dropping, even by his standards.

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FOLLOW THE MONEY…

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As Durban fizzles out – much to Richard Black’s chagrin– and the wheels spectacularly fall off the renewables frenzy, Christopher Booker has summed up brilliantly the saga of how the corporation has abandoned its impartiality. There’s no hiding place from his searchlight; what has happened has been a deliberate, sustained climate alarmist campaign sanctioned from the highest levels and pursued with a vigour that would have impressed even Goebbels and Speer. The stench is now firmly at the door of the trustees, those “independent” citizens who are supposed to be the watchdogs of the BBC’s £3.5bn budget and its journalistic integrity.

This morning, to me, Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky – whose impressive work Christopher Booker’s paper is based upon – has posed the most interesting question about their behaviour in this massive breach of the Royal Charter. For years the trustees claimed they had commissioned the Jones report into their science coverage only because it was part of a regular cycle of such reviews – it was not linked at all to mounting evidence of bias in their output and deliberate sidelining of sceptics. But Mr Newbery has spotted that Roger Harrabin, in his defence of his seedy links with the UEA Tyndall Centre, has let the cat out of the bag and given lie to their posturing. He said in a recent interview:

Climate sceptics seeking more space on the BBC helped provoke the Trust’s investigation into science impartiality but the Trust said we were already giving them too much space – not too little.

This means that without a shadow of a doubt, the trustees have known all along that they are engaged in a window dressing exercise and cynically commissioned the Jones nonsense both to cover their backs and to ram home even further that they did not give a stuff about sceptic opinion.

Could that be because at least three of them – Lord Patten, Diana Coyle and Anthony Fry – have direct pecuniary interests in the climate change scam? And I note that the latest trustee appointment (on December 1), Lord Williams of Baglan (who worked for the BBC World Service and then became a UN envoy) is also a climate change fanatic. The fact that he worked for the UN is enough to damn him, but he also lists among his financial interests membership of the international advisory board of CITPAX, a body that claims it supports peace, but in reality is engaged in climate change propaganda at the core of his activities.

To me, the BBC trustees are nothing more than a cosy club of climate change activists. Richard Black and his chums are scurrying around doing their bidding.

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BBC SCIENCE SYCOPHANTS…

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Former BBC science reporter David Whitehouse explains with masterful precision here why BBC science journalism has turned into sychophantic political drivel. Basically, Mr Whitehouse says that the corporation should be challenging eveything it hears from scientists; instead it is recycling their words as if they were gospel. To me, the most telling blow is when he compares science reporting now to how political reporting used to be in the 1950s before Robin Day and the young Turks at ITN broke the mould.

Proof that he’s right is not hard to find in today’s wearisome quota of alarmist propaganda put out by the posse of so-called BBC science correspondents. Here Richard Black continues his strident eco-tub thumping from Durban, his homily this morning based on a slavish regurgitation of a press release from an outfit called ECOFYS, a group of eco-whack subsidy looters who are busy fuelling Chris Huhne’s insatiable desire to cover the United Kingdom with bird-slicing rotor blades. And here, one of Mr Black’s colleagues, Joanthan Amos, feeds the world-is-melting frenzy with a piece of recycled pap from another alarmist boondoggle, this one the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

BBC “science” reporters: strenuously working to peddle you unfiltered alarmist propaganda from freebies everywhere.

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BOOKER REPORT

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As John Anderson has already pointed out in comments, Christopher Booker has written a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation about the BBC’s reporting of climate change and it’s due out tomorrow. Not sure what he will reveal that has not already been reported here or on other blogs like Bishop Hill or Harmless Sky – but Booker is always sharp and to the point and I’m looking forward to it. Hugely.

Meanwhile, liked a stuck vinyl record – and underlining that BBC relentless bias – Richard Black continues his dire refrain from the carbon-guzzling fest in Durban. Today’s homily is about the need to protect nations vulnerable to climate change from the impacts of nasty CO2, including “rising sea levels” and “droughts”. Er, But Mr Black, the rising seal level threat has been exaggerated by a factor of 10. And droughts happen, irrespective of rising CO2. Actually, Africa and the developing world is far more at risk from tranzis and government aid – especially when they focus on the climate – than such alleged impacts, but that doesn’t fit the hate-the-capitalist creed.

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