Category Archives: Uncategorized

If I were writing this story, the headline would be clear: “Tory eurofanatics kill UK train-building industry”. For the BBC, however, the real meat is little more than a footnote in a quote from a union spokesman to the bloody-minded, blinkered decision by the callous Cleggerons to stick to EU tendering processes and award a train-building contract to the Germans, thereby condemning thousands of people in Derby to the dole queue and mercilessly wrecking yet another of our manufacturing industries. The reporter, as usual, bends over backwards to explain everything but the real story…and of course, those nice people at Siemens are our eurobuddies. So that’s OK then.

Great stuff.

(h/t Sres)

Professor Paul Valdes of Bristol university has been working assiduously for years to induce panic about the climate using models. He’s very unhappy that the level of panic is not high enough. He’s produced a new report that tells us that the problem with existing models is that they are too stable – they don’t show the sort of catastrophe that has happened in the past. The greenie message is loud and clear. We must spend billions more a year on taxing industrial production and end human activity as we know it.

Richard Black, of course, loves his message and seeks to report on it by making it clear that he approves of every syllable, while at the same time, putting two fingers up at sceptics. His way of doing so is ludicrous even by his standards. First he tells us patronisingly that models predict metal fatigue in aircraft. Gosh, what a revelation. Then he says:

In the acrid climate blogosphere there are many commentators who would agree with Professor Valdes’ contention about lack of confidence in computer models.Their conclusion, typically, is that society should not take any steps to mitigate emissions until the projections are surer. Going back to the analogy of aeroplanes, this is tantamount to arguing that it’s fine to get on board any craft unless it’s been shown to be unsafe.

Let’s get this straight. What a BBC so-called science correspondent clearly believes is that because “models” can predict metal fatigue (a relatively simple function of stress and a few other variables), they must also be able to predict climate (a system with so many variables that experts in the field can’t even agree on even where to start in their analysis).
This is a sub-moronic argument that I would blush to feed event to a three year old. Meanwhile, in the real world, genuine scientists are pointing out how complex the climate system actually is. Well worth a read.

Check out this BBC article about the Obama impersonator whose act at the Republican Leadership Conference was cut short. It’s basically an excuse for an unnamed anti-Republican BBC hack (ie any BBC journalist covering US affairs) to reproduce some jokes at the expense of the leadership contenders, but it’s also noteworthy for this piece of anti-Tea Party propaganda:

The ultra-conservative Tea Party wing of the Republican Party had questioned the legitimacy of Mr Obama’s presidency, claiming he had been born outside the US and was thus ineligible to hold the highest office in the land, as mandated under the constitution.

The, ahem, “ultra-conservative” Tea Party (Wiki offers the somewhat less loaded “conservative and libertarian“) is not a birther movement. Linking the two is a ploy by opponents (eg lame comedians, lefty hacks) to discredit the Tea Party – which is of course why the anonymous lazy biased idiot who wrote the piece included it. There are undoubtedly some birthers who would also call themselves Tea Party supporters but Obama’s citizenship is a fringe issue and has never been central to the small government movement. It’s worth remembering that the midwife of birtherism was the contest for the Democrat nomination between Barack and Hillary, but you won’t find a BBC article which makes sweeping birther generalisations about Clinton supporters. That’s because they’re Democrats – the good-guy Americans – and BBC journalists are only interested in making the American Right [cue scary music] look bad.

You can call the Tories whatever you want on Radio 4, but just be careful what you say if you’re writing the live cricket updates for BBC Sport:

England fans will be pleased to know that nighT WATchman Jimmy Anderson survived until the end of play. Good job they’re not playing the test match at Scunthorpe.

It’s 18 months ago since I revealed that the investment strategy of the BBC pension fund is run on a day-to-day by Peter Dunscombe, who was then the chair of the steering committee of the Institutional Investor Group on Climate Change (IIGC) an allegiance of climate change fanatics who now boast that between them, they manage $12 trillion of assets. Mr Dunscombe openly flaunts his own climate change credentials, as here:

In 2000 he joined the BBC Pension Scheme to head up their small in-house team to oversee investment strategy and investment manager relationships. Over the last 9 years the Scheme has developed a significant exposure to alternative assets and has been active in the areas of responsible investing and climate change.

The one ray of good news for BBC pensioners is that Mr Dunscombe (info in latest BBC pension fund report here) has since resigned that IIGC post, but – surprise, surprise, – the BBC Pension Fund Trust still boasts openly that it is a member of the IIGC and meanwhile, the IIGC itself is pushing flat out to force its climate change policies on government and investors alike. Its efforts, outlined in a press release issued this week, include trying to jackboot Australia into carbon taxes, as revealed in this chilling phrase from their Australian spokesman:

We will strive to make thematic allocations but reallocation of substantial investment to the low-carbon economy requires policy makers to step up with certain and long term investment signals.

The IIGC is also pressuring our own government to adopt ever-more-stringent green policies as this patronising release from last month shows:

The new carbon budget set out today by the UK government demonstrates determination, is ambitious in scope and sends a signal to the UK public, financial markets as well as the wider international community. We hope that the ambition shown by the UK government sets a benchmark and has a wider impact at international level. However, the suggestion that the UK could review, and potentially weaken, its own commitments depending on progress elsewhere needs to be clarified to ensure certainty forinvestors beyond 2014.

So let’s get this clear. The BBC pension fund (on which Helen Boaden, its head of news, sits as a trustee) openly supports an organisation that is brazenly using immense financial muscle in pressuring governments round the world and here at home to adopt mad greenie policies.

Call me cycnical, but Richard Black’s efforts to stongarm us all into supporting climate change agendas assume a very, very sinister and conflicted light in this context.

But it doesn’t stop there. The BBC pension fund has now also openly signed up to another international greenie organisation to guide its investment strategy, the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI). This – masquerading, of course, like all UN activities, under a deluge of Newspeak – is another front organisation for greenie jackbootery. Its agenda is to attack every element of industrial activity. And, of course, it holds regular jollies around the world to discuss how better to enforce climate change fascism.

This, like Richard Black’s reporting efforts, stinks to high heaven.

Richard Black has posted yet another warmist homily, this time rubbishing the widely-reported claims here and here that a fall in solar activity could lead to a medium-term fall in global temperatures.

The claims originate from a warmist organisation and he can’t therefore use his usual ploy of shooting the messenger. So his first tactic is to say that the relevant paper is not yet “peer reviewed”. Not everyone in the science community has yet seen the paper and some don’t like it – so it might be suppressed. No doubt Mr Black is hoping that will happen.

Kick two is that he then points that the predictions “might not turn into reality”. Funny though, Mr Black rushes in to print as fast as his little legs will carry him when Phil Jones tells us that global temperatures are on the increase, or Greenpeace invent a cock and bull story for the IPCC that renewable sources will provide most of the world’s energy by 2050.

Kick three is that the sun’s activity would in any case have to fall more than the “man made contribution to the greenhouse effect”. Here, he descends yet again into blatant advocacy and puts a tendentious theory at the level of being beyond reasonable doubt Some people, Mr Black, outside your zealot’s bubble, don’t accept that the greenhouse effect is as important as you do. But of course that does not matter – the BBC has weighed scientific opinion, and has decided that the said “greenhouse effect” is as serious as any greenie wants it to be.

Kick four is that he reverts to his own authority. Mr Black reviewed solar activity four years ago and found that

• It is not the major issue on human timescales
• Any effect from modern changes in solar activity is likely to be dwarfed by greenhouse gas emissions and associated issues such as sulphate aerosols.

Well, Mr Black, all I can say is that David Whitenouse – unlike you a genuine scientist – reviewed your scientific endeavours recently and found them to be, well, lacking. Of course, you think more highly of your own efforts – otherwise you would not have invoked your own authority in this way – but I think I know who I would prefer to believe.

I’m getting bored with this – the litany of biased handling continues – and I won’t deal with every single point that I would challenge, including the perennial tiresome reliance on models that don’t prove a thing. But then, finally Mr Black invokes his usual trump quote card – evidence from a solar physicist who he believes shows beyond doubt that the predictions of cooling don’t count. It turns out that the said Joanna Haigh – surprise surprise – is a Met Office alarmist and an IPCC stooge who believes that CO2 warming will dwarf that of any sun cycle. That will be the same IPCC that publishes Greenpeace agitprop as fact.

I would expect better, even of Richard Black. This piece of writing stinks to high heaven for all the usual reasons and could have been compiled by a seven-year old climate change student.

The BBC is eerily silent – as usual – about the Exocet attack by warmist Mark Lynas in which he notes that the IPCC deployed Greenpeace evidence to justify a preposterous claim that 80% of the world’s energy could be derived from renewables by 2050. The report has been ripped to shreds piece by piece on the blogsphere over the last 48 hours. Yet, surprise, surprise, Richard Black was obscenely hasty in endorsing the original proposals.

I am tired of writing about Richard Black’s bigotry and zealotry, but I will continue tracking it. One day, he will realise…

The BBC’s self-declared flagship of so-called quality journalism, Panorama,has been found seriously lacking by the BBC Trust. In short, it fabricated evidence disgracefully in order to attack Primark, a store which the boys and girls at the BBC no doubt view with horror because it provides cheap, affordable clothes for the masses.

I know from personal experience that the BBC Trust will normally go to the ends of the earth to support BBC journalists, so this is an earthquake of sorts. But note the way the BBC website has handled the story. Nice Roy Greenslade – so old fashionedly left-wing that by his own admission he makes Arthur Scargill look moderate – of the Guardian has been wheeled out to defend the offending piece. The intro is also mealy-mouthed and begrudging – there’s no direct acknowledgement that Panorama got it wrong, only that the BBC must say sorry. And as the icing of the cake of the denial, news boss Helen Boaden says that this is wholly exceptional and everything else that the BBC does is beyond reproach, always, always, always….

In fact, the ruling is among the strongest upoholdings of a journalistic complaint that I have ever seen and the corporation should be utterly ashamed that it used such cowboy, slipshod methodology. Although that’s par for the course.

Last week, I noted that Richard Black had sunk into blatant advocacy – again – in his obscenely hasty support for the fanatical Phil Jones’ claims that global warming has been proved (again) by his crooked statistics. Now David Whitehouse, a former BBC correspondent who, unlike Richard Black does have science qualifications, has waded into the debate. In a masterclass of accurate reporting and reporting technique, he agrees with me that Mr Black’s so-called journalism in this instance is nothing but warped advocacy, and this is what he concludes:

It is a sloppy, skimpy article in the extreme. It provides little in the way of analysis and that which it does is one-sided. But even if one did not look at the accuracy of the statements it has, not for the first time, an air of triumph, as if those whom it deems skeptic (and it has a strange definition of skeptic) have been overcome. It is not impartial.

In its selective coverage of climate change science BBC News has become not a reporter of climate change, but a supporter of it. It has, as this regrettable article shows, veered into advocacy. Science and Environmental journalists are often enthusiasts for the subject but as reporters they must not become cheerleaders and uncritically use shoddy science in a one-sided attempt to trounce those whom, as is obvious from this piece, the reporter thinks are wrong. There is no mention in the article that the statistics for the post-2001 temperature standstill are accepted by the scientific community. This changes the story completely.

I recommend you to read the whole thing. Not so long ago, the BBC could attract reporters of his class and pedigree; now they have only agitprop lefties. Once again, it is clear beyond doubt that Mr Black is nothing but a warmist zealot. Not only that, he’s not fit to lick David Whitehouse’s boots.