Category Archives: Richard Black

Richard Black plumbs ever-lower depths in his distortions. Here, in his latest Earth Watch posting, he claims – without an ounce of qualification – that most Americans want climate change measures to be introduced, and that Obama has disappointed them. He’s being disingenuous in the extreme. Pew, as Mr Black should well know, is one of the main polling organisations in the US, and their latest findings on climate change – available with two seconds’ effort on Watt’s Up with That? – found that only 28% of voters thought it was a priority, and it was bottom of 20 topics of urgent concern, behind even the esoterics of trade policy. A recent Gallup poll asked slightly different questions and found that 48% of Americans think that claims about climate change are exaggerated. This was the highest total for this belief in a decade, and it came despite the torrent of climate change scare stories emanating from the pens of doomsayers like Mr Black.

Our friend Richard also claims that the reason Oz PM Kevin Rudd was booted out in April was because voters were unhappy that he had diluted plans to tax CO2 producers. This, even by Mr Black’s standards, is utter tosh. Rudd went because his eco-freak CO2 trading plans had so enraged the opposition and voters that even his lefty Labour colleagues realised the game was up. It takes Herculean efforts to throw away a landslide victory in less than a full term, but Rudd did it. Don’t take my word for it, Richard – have a look at analysis in the Australian. It makes it pretty damn clear that you are talking a load of limey cobblers.

Richard Black’s relentless search to attribute every event in the universe to climate change continues unabated. Today, he’s reported the lunatic findings by the British Dragonfly Society (no less) that the rather charming and beautiful dainty damselfly – a relative of the dragonfly – has returned, after an absence of almost 60 years, to a habitat in England, in Kent. The reason, Mr Black predictably reports, is global warming; Britain is getting alarmingly warmer, and the creatures have therefore been able to hop across the English channel. He adds that other cousins of the damselfly – also encouraged by “climate change” – are ready to join the Sangatte-style insect throng.

Even by his own standards of ecofreakery and flawed science, though, this story is full of holes. First, because he tells us that this same dainty damselfly used to be found in Essex, but its habitat was washed away in 1952 in the disastrous east-coast floods. Prior to that, it presumably existed in the UK for centuries. But,er, Richard, it was a lot, lot colder in the past (according to you and your warmist fanatic chums who worship the hockey stick) and our insect friend was already here, so why is its return the result of warming? Second, I thought one of Richard’s main concerns (a topic he returns to time and time again) was the worship word “biodiversity”. Surely, Mr Black (on your own logic), if warming is triggering the return of more species to Britain that’s a good thing?

Personally, I’d put the whole thing down to the ebb and flow of nature. But then, I’m not a BBC environment correspondent with a major political agenda.

The BBC in general, and Richard Black in particular, have been warning us for years, in typical alarmist fashion, that Greenland’s ice is melting and we are all going to drown. This is what Mr Black wrote in 2009:

The Greenland ice sheet is losing its mass faster than in previous years and making an increasing contribution to sea level rise, a study has confirmed…The team used weather data, satellite readings and models of ice sheet behaviour to analyse the annual loss of 273 thousand million tonnes of ice…Melting of the entire sheet would raise sea levels globally by about 7m (20ft).

There are dozens more references to this Doomsday picture over the years; the tone throughout is that we are in serious danger; the sort of scenario that gives our kids nightmares. I searched in vain for any mention on the BBC wenbsite that such fears might be doubtful, that other scientists thought differently. Steve Goddard, though, on Watt’s Up With That? is more rigorous in his approach. He’s actually checked the Greenland ice records (unlike, it seems, Richard Black et al – never let the facts get in the way of good climate change scare), and found that not only were the stories based on cherry-picked data, but also that even those scientists who were predicting Armageddon some time back have now retracted:

Ice loss in Greenland has had some climatologists speculating that global warming might have brought on a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level. But glaciologists reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting that Greenland ice’s Armageddon has come to an end.

Chances of Black and co reporting this? And of noting that Greenland, despite their scare stories, remains as cold and icy as ever? Zero.

I don’t know how much Richard Black is paid by the BBC. They spend almost a billion a year on their newsgathering and news programmes, but don’t reveal individual salaries. I do know, however, that a friend of mine who is a BBC presenter is paid north of £150,000 a year; on that basis Mr Black, as a specialist correspondent, probably gets at least £70K and probably substantially more.

He is presumably asked as part of his responsibilities to be reasonably thorough in his assessment of material.

But is he thorough enough? On July 5, he filed an analysis of three reports into aspects of climate change, by Oxburgh, the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee and the Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL). Yesterday, I wrote about severe reservations about the first two. Mr Black,however, was convinced of their rectitude, and wrote that:

…none is judged….to undermine the central tenets of man-made climate change.

He singled out from the Dutch report these paragraphs:

Our findings do not contradict the main conclusions of the IPCC on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability related to climate change… The negative impacts under unmitigated climate change in the future pose substantial risks to most parts of the world, with risks increasing at higher global average temperatures.

This, he clearly believed, particularly supported his conclusion. In other words, he took the PBL report as a massive vindication of the BBC’s stance in support of AGW.

But was he correct? Indur M Goklany, by contrast, is a scientist, and has been writing about these issues for decades. There isn’t space to summarise here all his arguments, and I urge you to read the piece, which was filed on the What’s Up With That? website a few hours ago. But his conclusion about PBL?

To summarize, the PBL gave the IPCC’s summary statements on regional impacts a relatively clean bill of health because it only looked for errors of commission in a limited number of chapters while deeming errors of omission to be an acceptable part of a “risk-oriented approach.” Under the latter approach, it would be acceptable for executive summaries to emphasize costs and, moreover, highlight the upper end of these costs, even as they eschew information on benefits. And providing policy makers with the broader context might be nice, but optional.

PBL may label this a “risk-oriented approach”, but most rational people would label it “biased and unbalanced”.

So where does that leave Mr Black? I contend with egg all over his professional, highly-paid face. He was eager to rush into print in support of the climate science conclusions of PBL (and the other two reports), but unlike Dr Goklany, seemingly did not sufficiently analyse the core issues, or whether the extravagant press-released claims of the authors were properly supported.

As expected, the Muir Russell report into Climategate is a complete, farcical whitewash. People who know far more about the issues involved are still digesting the horror of it all, but it’s already clear, here, here and here, that Sir Muir and his cronies from the scientific establishment grotesquely misrepresented or ignored the key points made by sceptics. The BBC of course, is in a completely different groove. To Richard Black, the headline is straightforward – vinidcation. The sceptics are nutters.

I will post more when the dust settles, but prepare for an evening of the sounds of BBC reporters applying that white paint. Meanwhile, James Delingpole carries on reporting the full horror of what Black and his cohorts are supporting: the spending of £50bn a year of our money on lunatic climate change schemes. I weep.

Richard Black continues his distinguished record today of unbiased reporting. His theme is to give his wholehearted support to lunatic calls made by climate alarmist-in-chief Lord Adair Turner that would de-industrialise Britain, hobble our economy and force millions into fuel poverty. Mr Black faithfully reports the Committee on Climate Change’s calls for more electric cars (insanely expensive and with the range of a hobbled llama), “clean” energy (technology that is not practical and will add billions to the cost of generation)and for farmers to use fertilisers more efficiently (thereby vastly reducing crop yields and forcing them into bankruptcy). For “balance”, he has comments from government eco-fanatic Chris Huhne and a chap from the Green Council, who,surprise surprise, agree (or want even more drastic measures).

Strangely, Mr Black doesn’t see fit to mention this hugely relevant story; it shows the real consequences of the green policies of the sort Mr Black so ardently advocates. Britain’s first green energy area, the island of Eigg, off Scotland, has been forced to introduce severe power cuts and electricity rationing because of a lack of rainfall and wind. When will Black and his cronies deal with the real facts?

Update: Today carried an item on the Eigg farce, but completely devoid of context.

Here we have the BBC’s Richard Black in the oleagenous, snake-oil-salesman mode he adopts whenever he seeks to tell us that he’s listening to sceptics. He tries to convey that the Oxburgh report into Climategate had an important core message; that it’s vital that climate scientists ensure that their work is accompanied by suitable warnings about its limitations. Yet he omits to tell us the most crucial fact in this particular equation – that in reaching their conclusions, Oxburgh and his fanatic cronies chose just 11 papers as a “representative sample” to verify whether porkies were being told. And when asked, the Royal Society (the body which was behind the enquiry) come up with completely fishy explanations like this about how these papers were chosen. As Bishop Hill points out, it’s a bit odd – to put it mildly – that the 11 were exactly the same as those also chosen by the House of Commons for its recent Climategate report. These people obviously think we are total, utter imbeciles.

Such contradictions are clearly far too complicated and too inconvenient for Mr Black to even consider.

Here’s the BBC’s Richard Black at his best, positively beside himself with glee because China is now wasting more money on “renewables” than that nasty place of over-production and excess, the USA. His tone throughout is one of adulation for what China (and Britain – alarmingly for us now in third place) have achieved in tipping money down the drain. Note, too, that there is no mention in his report of the most crucial factor, namely that Spain’s policy over eight years of busting a gut to invest in green projects was a national disaster. A survey – the most detailed of its kind – by Spanish academics found:

Optimistically treating European Commission partially funded data, we find that for every renewable energy job that the State manages to finance, Spain’s experience cited by President Obama as a model reveals with high confidence, by two different methods, that the US should expect a loss of at least 2.2 jobs on average, or about nine jobs lost for every four created, to which we have to add those jobs that non-subsidized investments with the same resources would have created.