Category Archives: Richard Black

Richard Black here chillingly relates – without an ounce of balancing comment – how our lunatic leaders in Cancun are hatching a plot to deprive us of £100bn a year (of which the UK’s share will be at least £1.5bn a year, enough to pay for legions of university students to avoid going into debt)by ludicrously jacking up “carbon” taxes. Christopher Monckton spells out here what Mr Black doesn’t – that the cash will actually be used by the UN to construct a massive new, unaccountable world government that will spend the billions on self-aggrandisement and delusion. As usual, the bilge is illustrated with alarmist pictures. I surmise in this case that the water is made up of not of melting glaciers but of the tears of the Statue of Liberty as she realises what crimes are being committed in her name. Shame on the BBC for reporting this outrage in such partisan terms.

As we miserable lot in Blighty shiver and freeze, Richard Black is there at Cancun in the nice 79 degrees heat (no doubt in a luxury hotel) at our expense, complaining plaintively that the talks may be to no avail , but at the same time warning that – because CO2 levels are going to start rising again – we are all in dire danger because of our complacency. He (and/or the story sub)are also concerned to warn us that climate change has already done for the mangroves on the Cancun coast, though how they know that with certainty escapes me.

What Mr Black wilfully ignores is the rather more negative reports about Cancun that are impossible to avoid everywhere on the internet. This editorial, for example, from the Washington Times which says the talks are doomed quite simply because AGW was built on a tissue of lies and scientific twisting. I also spotted this, which nails the central Cancun-IPCC alarmist porkie that sea levels are rising faster than in the past. And finally, it escapes Mr Black that one of the core alarmist prediction of warmists/Met Office/UEA – that snow would become a thing of the past in the UK within a few years – has also rather convincingly been found to be hot air. One of my favourite ladies, Jo Nova nails the UK snow lie admirably.

Enjoy the Cancun sun, Richard, and never let inconvenient truth get in the way of your worldview.

What turns my stomach completely about BBC reporting of so-called climate change is that reporters systematically ignore the key issues such as that the rise in fuel prices demanded by eco freaks is causing massive hardship. Meanwhile Richard Black goes on reporting the frenzied but trivial outpourings of the world global warming industry scam – those thousands of “scientists” engaged in alarmist frenzy that are paid by governments, multi-nationals and tranzis to jack up hysteria and pump out lies. Today he is focusing on the fears of the Global Carbon Project that even thought we have had a recession, CO2 emissions have only gone down by “peanuts” (such is the eloquence of these brilliant minds). And as Cancun approaches, he naturally ramps up the solemn GCP prediction on that the “carbon” rise is about to start again (according to the models) condemining us all to certain and imminent blistering, heat exhaustion and, of course, death. Mr Black also blatantly misreports the main point of his story; India and China do not give a stuff about CO2 emissions (which rose by an average of a healthy 7% or so) and are getting on with their main tasks of generating wealth and economic expansion. The horror of Black’s reporting is that he wilfully ignores the elephant in the room: the only way out of poverty is through cheap electricity and power. What the greenies want is the reverse.

I have just spent two days at a conference about “ethical” investment. The reason is that I am trying to raise money for a charity that is aiming to improve services for deprived children. Thus the aim of the Good Deals event seemed laudable enough – to bring those with funds (banks, trusts, etc)in contact with humble supplicants like myself. There were many senior figures there such as the head of Deutsche Bank in the UK, the government’s minister for social responsibility, and his equivalent at Marks and Spencer. But what I didn’t bargain for was the extent that the agenda of the conference would be totally hijacked and infected by greenies. Every participant semed to be a rabid supporter of AGW. It felt as though I had woken up in the middle of a strange horror movie and I think if I had mentioned any opposition to their crusade, I would have been lynched. One guy, for example, wanted to raise about £1m for a “community energy” (ie useless windfarms)in Cornwall. The contempt with which he dismissed his “opponents” – those hapless individuals who did not want the beautiful Cornish landscape to be despoiled – was blood-curdling.

And so it is in the BBC’s reporting. Here is our friend Richard Black in full flow about the importance of an Anglo-Indian agreement – announced a couple of days back when I was being indoctrinated – to work together to on the path of a “low-carbon co-operation”. What’s chilling is that it seems that everyone – Marks and Spencer, government lackeys, the CBI, and no doubt a whole army of financial advisers – now agree with Mr Black that such econut zealotry is essential for progress. Not only that, they also seem to believe in cult-like fashion that farting cows are the answer to India’s energy problems. Strange however,isn’t it, that India is building coal fired power stations at a rate of knots while Chris Huhne and call me Dave are busy dismantling our capacity to generate cheap electricity? And note how Mr Black’s true sentiments about the crusade he’s engaged in are expressed. The Copenhagen negotiations last year were “brutally ended”. What can he mean? And how does that square with balanced journalism?

Richard Black’s at it again, this time claiming to discuss objectively whether meat rearing is sustainable. His agenda of course, is that he is a greenie and greenies such as IPCC boss Patchy Pachauri and his acolytes make no secret of their contempt for human carnivores. They want the world to become vegan in the name of “sustainability”. Mr Black sticks closely to this script and uses as the main fulcrum of his bleatings a paper by two eco-nuts from Canada, who have done what such people always do, created a snappy model of “earth boundaries” and then said that by 2050, we will all be dying because of our nasty meat-lust.

As usual, Mr Black chooses to ignore alternative viewpoints, such as this admirable discussion by Willis Eschenbach, in which he shows that if meat production stopped tomorrow, more, not less, land would be needed to grow replacement vegetable protein, and we would also lose the ancilliary products from animal husbandry such as leather and feathers – all of which would take extra resources to produce. In other words, the Canadian model, along with the greenie obsession with vegetarianism, is a load of cobblers (of course you might not want to eat meat for other reasons, but that is a separate debate). Yet again, Mr Black ignores the key facts.

Today’s a bit of a red-letter day in that the Royal Society – the BBC’s favourite bunch of warmist zealots – has been forced by its members to modify its predictions about climate change so that it now says, according to today’s Times:

“The size of future temperature increases and other aspects of climate change, especially at the regional scale, are still subject to uncertainty.”

Nothing so far on the BBC website about this, but Richard Black ploughs on relentlessly in his warmist furrow. This morning, he reports another of the endless stream of alarmist features in Nature, this one about “water security”, another greenie obsession. From my reading, the article itself does not mention much about climate change, concentrating instead on pollution. But have no fear, our non-scientist Richard is determined to put his own spin on things, so he turns to the world’s most alarmist organisation, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, despite the fact that – as he himself acknowledges – they had nothing to do with the report or the research it is allegedly based upon. This is what they say, with wearying predictability:

“Climate change is going to affect the amount of water that comes in as precipitation; and if you overlay that on an already stressed population, we’re rolling the dice.”

With Alice in Wonderland erudition and sophistication like that, you can really tell where the BBC’s £1bn a year expenditure on broadcast journalism is going.

So-called charities like Oxfam and WWF are without doubt the leaders of climate change hysteria. They demonstrated this at the recent formal UN climate change talks by smashing the Saudia Arabia nameplate in pieces and despositing it in a hotel lavatory bowl, sparking a diplomatic incident. Their grievance was apparently that the Saudi desire to keep selling oil so that our cars can run and we can keep warm was blocking their desire for new, more extreme climate change measures. The behaviour of the WWF and Oxfam delegates offended even the climate change loonies who attend such events and now the offenders have been ‘disciplined’ and suspended from future talks for a limited period.

In his report of the furore, Richard Black, that continually objective BBC doyen of climate change reporting, makes no bones that he is displeased. But not with with the nutters at Oxfam and WWF – in his book it seems that they have every right to be frustrated. No, his real worry seems to be that despite the wonderful Obama, the US is unlikely to pass anti-emissions legislation any time soon. His attitude is illustrated graphically by the picture chosen to accompany the story: of a giant Saudi oil tanker. It’s big oil stopping progress on climate change, don’t ya know? And against that, any yobbery is fine.