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As widely predicted, the BBC4 programme on climate change last night was a ham-fisted stitch-up. Richard North ably explains here. It’s in their genes; anyone they think is outside their neme is isolated, gulled, done over and then ultimately ridiculed with all the grace and style of a two-dime huckster. The tragedy is that they genuinely think that this counts as legitimate programme making. I concur with Richard that this technique is deployed to salve their battered egos and shore up their belief systems, it is telling that this exercise has been on the drawing board for considerable time.

Meanwhile, last night’s Horizon – about latest research on pain – was also a gem of political correctness in the same mould. I deal these days a lot with people doing research into infant psychology. To cut a long story short, the central model of child development is called Attachment Theory, in which there is very substantial research that secure attachment to parents (or main carers) in the first years of life is essential in facilitating normal mental and social development. But in all the discussion about this said Attachment Theory(it was central to the argument about pain tolerance), the programme carefully and systematically – to the point of idiocy – avoided any statement that directly highlighted that a nurturing and relatively stable family life is important to a developing infant. The elephant in the room was glaringly not mentioned or circumlocuted. The BBC, of course, hates anything that supports the traditional nuclear family. Their response is Pavolovian.

Update: Here, from the WUWT blog, is a videotape editor’s review of last night’s programme on Lord Monckton. It’s long, but the guy has 25 years experience, and it is worth including in full to show the full extent of BBC bias:

Meet the Skeptics’ was a great example of clumsy, heavy handed storytelling. Nothing more. The most telling techniques include the way Monckton was seldom given more than 10 seconds to say anything, with cutaways covering obvious edits in his talking in order to make it seem like he is saying something he probably isn’t. It’s easy. I do it everyday, though I tend to do it to enhance understanding not to misrepresent. On the other hand, Monckton’s detractors were given free reign to speak with 30, 40, 45 seconds of screen time to expound their ideas and make their point.

The part where Monckton was caught (supposedly) looking forlorn as he read the (apparently) devastating report about his address to Congress was pure pathos, made all the more emotional by the sad piano music and then the cut to him sitting alone, in the distance, looking out onto the loch, no doubt contemplating the obvious and terrible mistakes he’d made. Except we didn’t learn what those mistakes were other than a rather lame mis-attribution which he owned up to.

Murray had a chance here to actually present the sceptics’ case, however much he disagreed with it. Instead he chose to malign and mis-represent through juxtaposition (witness the homophobe and gun-wielding bigots), through use of music (the mournful piano and the buffoonery of Gilbert & Sullivan telling us what to feel), through language (such as the repeated use if the phrase ‘what he thought was true’ and it’s variations and naturally, through selective editing,

Given the exact same material I could edit a programme that would tell a totally different story. Never be told that a documentary is truth.

It is rather disappointing, but James Delingpole and Lord Monckton have both been apparently duped into getting involved in tonight’s BBC Four hatchet job on climate change scepticism. I have been saying for years now that anyone who takes part in a BBC programme about anything that does not accord with the corporation’s worldview does so at their own risk; documentary producers – especially – long since abandoned any pretence of objectivity because they are on a mission. At core, everyone (Lord M and Mr Delingpole clearly included) somehow naively hopes and believes that the BBC will once, just once, be balanced, accurate and truthful, and that somehow, the truth will prevail. The sad reality is that it never will – Auntie is rotten to the core. The documentary tonight and the equally squalid Keith Nurse programme last week provide compelling evidence for this; this is now a full-scale propaganda campaign.

Richard Black unblushingly brings you “news” from those who spray cash around to peddle their warmist business interests. Now, as a result of a FoI request, it has been established that Roger Harrabin, his colleague in reporting BBC climate alarmism, not only hires himself out to warmist causes as “chair” but is also prepared to go to extraordinary prestidigitating lengths to back up the Met Office in their blatant spinning about the recent brutally cold spell. Autonomous Mind brilliantly tells the full saga here. I agree with him that it’s time that Roger (and Richard) got the chop, but chances of that happening at the weather-zealot infested BBC? Zero.

If anything, they are heading in the opposite direction. Here’s their colleague David Shukman outlining the patently lunatic plans by civil servants to deal with the warming that they (and Mr Shukman) so fervently believe is happening, despite the evidence. Fishes by moved from lakes in the Lake District to Scotland? Network rail worrying about heatwaves (when the grim reality is that one cold snap and they are on the knees?). It’s all recorded without a note of contrasting opinion, caution or common sense, and (straight from the BBC website textbook of scare techniques) illustrated with a train on a viaduct being splashed by a wave to ram home the alarmist homily-of-the-day. I weep.

You can’t make this stuff up:

Former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is to cash in on her dodgy expenses claims by presenting a documentary about pornography.
The ex-MP was one of the most high profile casualties of the expenses scandal after she mistakenly charged taxpayers for the cost of hiring two blue movies.
Now she is to present a documentary for BBC Radio 5 Live, entitled ‘Porn Again’, to be aired on 3 March.
The programme will investigate the pornography industry in the UK – meeting those who make, watch and comment on porn.

How much are we paying this expenses cheat (she lied to fiddle £116,000, remember?) to trade on her husband’s sleazy escapades and front this? It’s the unique way that…

I apologise for again posting about Richard Black, but he increasingly personifies all that is wrong with the BBC’s climate reporting. Last year, he went against form and posted this item, showing that research – for once, not based on models but actual observations – had illustrated that the Gulf Stream showed no signs of slowing down. This was a big poke in the eye for the alarmists who have repeatedly predicted that the switch-off would trigger ice-melt doom. Their fears were sensationally portrayed in the nonsense catastrophe movie The Day After Tomorrow as well as in the many spoutings of Mr Al Gore.

Today, though, Mr Black seems to have forgotten about all that, and like a faithful puppy, he is reporting with clear, unadulterated admiration the latest exploits of the egomaniac so-called polar explorer Pen Hadow. Here, in his description of Mr Hadow’s last polar expedition in 2009, Anthony Watts gives ten very simple reasons why anything this foolhardy would-be Scott does must be taken with a huge dose of cynicism, among them, that he has already made up his mind that he can swim most of the way to the Arctic Circle (yes, swim), and questionable competence (in having to be rescued at huge expense and leaving behind polluting supply oil). In short, the man is a fantasist.

Notwithstanding, Mr Black clearly believes that his new mission is important, and he repeats with odd disregard of his own writing, Mr Hadow’s fears that the Gulf Stream is in danger of switching off, as well – of course – as the usual scaremongering about the Arctic ice is melting “faster than the computer models predict”. In the real world, Arctic ice is low, but as real world observers have pointed out, there are clear natural reasons for it. And what Mr Black never mentions is that this is more than compensated for by the fact that Antarctic Sea ice is heading the opposite way, underlining that there is no danger of world indundation anytime soon.

What is even more sinister about this sensationlist, highly selective reporting is his pay-off line. In his latest so-called news report, he concludes, without a blush:

The £1m project is directed by explorer Pen Hadow and sponsored by the Catlin insurance group.

That will be the same Catlin group that a minute’s research confirms is among the world cheerleaders for climate change alarmism. In my book, they are using their so-called sponsorship of Mr Hadow to further their apparent goals of fannning warming fears so that they might attract more business. How does that square with the BBC’s Charter, Mr Black?

The Pakistan floods of August last year were devastating. And like carrion crow picking a carcass, the warmists were all over them within days. Hillary Clinton was among the first to provide the link, and true to lapdog religious-zealotry form, the BBC was also quickly in on the act. Here, science “reporter” Howard Falcon-Lang assembled a catalogue of alarmist evidence to tell us (as the main message of the piece):

Professor Rajiv Sinha, from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, who has had first hand experience of Asian river floods, takes a more strident position.

“What all the climate models predict is that the distribution of monsoon rains will become more uneven in the future,” he told BBC News….Total rainfall stays the same, but it comes in shorter more intense bursts.”

Very little doubt there, and of course – as usual – Mr Falcon-Lang provides no alternative opinion from experts with different views, other than a brief nod to that deforestation of the Indus and poor management of levees may also have played a (minor) role. The inference is clear. The billions of pounds of damage and torrent of human suffering was exactly in line with the great-god climate models. And the people of Pakistan had better get used to it. The start of the Apocalypse.

Spool forward. A peer-reviewed paper to be presented to the American Meteorological Society (currently meeting in Seattle) says:

Last summer’s disastrous Pakistan floods that killed more than 2,000 people and left more than 20 million injured or homeless were caused by a rogue weather system that wandered hundreds of miles farther west than is normal for such systems, new research shows.

And, as Anthony Watts points out, the word “climate”, let alone “climate change” is not even mentioned in the findings of the paper. It was a highly unusual weather event in an area prone to unstable cyclonic rainfall. Full stop, capital letter.

I will await with bated breath for the BBC’s corrected take on this. And wait….

I wonder what goes on in Richard Black’s brain, though doing so is not easy.

On the one hand, you have this, a report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation – set up by a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and a raft of eminent UK citizens – stating that an investigation needs to be carried out into problems in the ways that the various investigations into Climategate were carried out. The conclusions could not be clearer; there are many unanswered questions. The press release is prominently available on the internet, most notably on the high profile sceptical site WUWT – hence not easy to miss.

On the other, published in the early hours of this morning by Mr Black, are claims by a parliamentary committee (packed with avowed warmists) that it’s time to completely forget the alleged problems in the Climategate investigations – irrespective of any doubts – and move on. They state:

“While we have some reservations about the reviews which UEA commissioned, the key point is that they have made a number of constructive recommendations.

“In our view it is time to make the changes and improvements recommended, and with greater openness and transparency move on.”

Now my first reaction to this sweeping statement – as a former newspaper and BBC journalist – was unease. When committees, however eminent or expert their members may be, want to move on in such a simplistic way, in effect to magic away any issues, I smell a huge rat. My instinct is to feel pressured, and uneasy that things are not what they seem. It makes me want to dig deeper to get at the truth. Words like “cover up” spring uneasily to mind.

But not our Richard. In fact, he’s demoted the concerns of GWPF and Andrew Montford, who have spent much careful time and effort explaining precisely why there are doubts, to the very end of his piece, and given their considerable evidence so little space that the whole thing looks like no more than a tacked-on genuflection. The GWPF release is well-crafted, and elements of it could easily have been lifted into Richard’s copy, just like he so easily and so often takes the words of climate change zealots.

My conclusion is that Peter Sissons is correct in his latest installment of concerns about standards at the BBC. The disease in the BBC mindset is truly profound. It goes so deep that they are delusional. They willfully downplay doubts to the extent that they give them no credence, despite their common sense ubiquity, the quality of the evidence involved and persistence of the sceptics against the might of the billions-of-dollars, highly corrupt climate change industry.

What’s even worse is that Mr Black backs the establishment (for that is what AGW now is) against those who advocate spirited, upstart concern.

James Delingpole has a stunning post on this BBC Horizon programme which sets out – as usual – to rubbish those who oppose the AGW orthodoxy. There is nothing I can add to Dellers, other than to say that the BBC is sinking to ever-lower depths in its climate change lying.

The story here is not that the BBC is cutting £34m from its web spending, axing 200 sites and “closing” 360 website posts. These may be minor, cosmetic steps in the right direction, but that’s all. No, the real isue here is that the corporation will continue to spend the obscene sum of £130m+ a year on its web operations for a cacaphony of services that are simply not needed. The BBC weather web service, for example, is simply a platform for inaccurate forecasts and propaganda for climate change politics. More seriously, the BBC’s websites have played a significant part in strangling both local journalism and major elements of web entrepreneurship in the UK. They are an integral part of the BBC’s imperialism (which it so despises in others!).