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Dumb Jon, who’s (wo)manfully taken on the task of watching BBC Breakfast so you don’t have to, reports on the shock BBC revelation about the Battle of Britain – women were involved, too !

“This is the other thing about the BBC’s crappy reporting. Not only is the bias bad in and of itself, it also blinds them to actual points. It is genuinely interesting to hear from a – still lifey – 100 year old veteran plotter, and there is a serious point here about how the real difference wasn’t Britain’s technically meh radar, so much as that it integrated with a purpose-designed home defence system. But no: chicks fought too, that’s all you need to know. “

At the time, of course, in the bad old sexist world of the 1940s, the existence of women in air defence roles was a little-known secret.

The BBC’s report of the resignation of Lord Pearson of Rannoch as leader of UKIP makes drearily predictable reading. The stress in commentary by Ross Hawkins is totally on what the BBC perceived he did not do well, most notably that he regarded a question about banks as “minutiae”. But what Mr Hawkins fails to mention is that Lord Pearson was by this time deeply frustrated by the BBC’s systematic avoidance during the election campaign of raising anything that would cut across the desire by the three main parties to avoid the EU as an election issue. Note, too, the choice of the picture of Lord Pearson. Not his best side, as they say. The corporation hate UKIP and everything to do with it, so yet again, this is seen as an open goal to knock the enemy.

The BBC hate the royal family and all that it stands for. Except, of course, when it’s Prince Charles on one of his many loony green missions. Then they choose a very nice smiley picture of him and drone on about greenie nonsense such as that the royal train is running on “sustainable biofuel” and that he’s encouraging that the people of Wales to help the rainforests. Then they become ardent royalists.

Hold the front page! Richard Black has told Anthony Watts that he is correcting a story in which – using all his scientific brilliance – he told the world that rice yields are falling “because of global warming”. The reality is that over the past few decades rice yields have grown hugely thanks mainly to brilliant agricultural scientists who understand the relationship between optimum plant breeding, soils, temperature, irrigation and growth. Mr Black plainly did not read the press release and he got completely the wrong end of the stick, presenting – as usual – warmist twaddle. It will, of course, be interesting to read what Mr Black has to say and I welcome his willingness to acknowledge his error. But, call me a cynic, I am expecting a sting in the tail…especially in view of what Bishop Hill calls Mr Black’s “slack-jawed” acceptance of the alarmist narrative being applied to biodiversity. Is this the BBC’s latest crusade? Mr Black has certainly got form, in this area.

Warmists have been at it for at least a decade: publishing dire predictions that heatwaves are going to kill us by thousand, we’ll all drop like flies as the mercury rises. Here’s CNN in 2000. And here’s the BBC yesterday. Note the similarities, the same strident language, the same ‘we are all doomed’ rhetoric. Like a cracked record.. When I see this statistical hogwash – which comes from the school where if you pay people to find a problem, they will find it – I ask if heat is such a problem, why do Brits flock to Greece and Florida and Spain every year? And why does California continue to grow? Is it so those involved will increase their chance of a heart attack? Er, I don’t think so.

BBC reporter Richard Stott purred with delight when the Cleggerons confirmed that they were going to chuck bucketloads of our money into electric car subsidies, despite the recession. No stone was left unturned in his report in telling us that production is both necessary and what consumers want. Today’s report from Spain about the reality of the virtually non-existent demand for these useless, expensive, greenie toys – just 16 have been sold in a year despite massive publicity and taxpayer cash – is rather more terse and bald. No explanation of the disastrous attempt to fool consumers; just an insane and throroughly misleading quote that implies millions will be sold, because electric cars are the same story as “mobile phones and computers”. Er, both these products have a clear use and fit consumer needs. And they don’t cost the earth. They took off when they became affordable. By contrast, electric cars are – and will remain for the forseeable future, despite the greenie propaganda and massive subsidies – expensive, inferior in range and performance, and be restricted in appeal by the need to recharge for long periods. In other words, they are in almost every respect inferior to petrol cars and are only being produced because they fit the greenie-global warming propaganda narrative. Why can’t the BBC be honest and say that?

The eco-loons are at it again on the BBC: this time quoting that impartial body the WWF (aided an abetted by nutters from our own Met Office)as saying that the heat and smog in Moscow, as well as the cold in Siberia, the number of jellyifish seen this summer – not to mention a “large number of birds dropping dead in the skies” (to throw in the kitchen sink) – are all the result of global warming and a lack of a centralised plan by Russia to deal with it. Katia Moskvitch, who has form in terms of her reporting fantasies, has filed a story that reads more like a medieval end of the world diatribe than science. But as Richard North so deftly pointed out on Sunday, what’s going on in Russia is balanced by unseasonal cold in Siberia, and one of the coldest winters on record in the southern hemisphere. It used to be taught in elementary geography that weather is not climate – but not to the BBC; every weather event (selectively chosen, of course) is an opportunity to praise the zealots of WWF and spread the false mumbo-jumbo creed of AGW.

The full facts are not yet up on the BBC complaints site, but the Mail on Sunday today reports that the corporation has apologised to the vice-chancellor of the University of East Anglia because John Humphrys suggested on the Today show back in December that the Climategate emails may have shown that Phil Jones, the head of UEA’s climate research unit (CRU), had manipulated data. Stephen Mitchell, the BBC’s head of news programmes, has reportedly written to the vice-chancellor apologising for such impertinence and stating that the question was “misconceived”.

The corporation clearly operates in an alternative universe. Climategate showed beyond doubt that those involved were – to put it mildly – lacking in transparency in the way they handled and presented climate data. But to the BBC jackboots who now control editorial policy, even hinting that something may be amiss with the climate change scam is now officially considered a crime. The Today programme’s coverage of climate change is already ludicrously one-sided; the editor, Ceri Thomas, is an activist in the cause. It now seems that the Ministry of Truth has fully taken over.

Melting glaciers are an essential part of the BBC’s AGW alamist narrative. Yesterday it was Greenland alarmism; back in June, it was that Mount Everest is becoming treacherous because of a deluge of meltwater. Mark Hendrickx has done some very thorough digging into the Everest claims, and found that at their root, as usual, is exaggeration and distortion. The source was a paper quoted in the IPCC AR4 report which – it was claimed – showed that Himalayan weather station readings showed rising temperatures. Mr Hendrickx notes first that none of the stations are actually in the most mountainous parts of the Himalayas; and second that they show rises that are so small as to be statistically insignificant. Two of the stations actually showed falls. As Mr Hendrickx concludes:

The case for dangerous man made global warming hangs on the wall like a frayed medieval tapestry. By pulling just one loose thread the whole thing starts to unravel. We pulled one of those threads recently…

But the BBC goes blundering on, always reporting the alarmist drivel and never the work of those who show the lies for what they are.

An iceberg four times the size of Manhattan has calved from one of the main Greenland glaciers. As What’s Up With That? quickly pointed out last night, it’s entirely normal for this to happen; a far bigger iceberg similarly calved from the same glacier in 1962, well before even the most ardent warmists claim that CO2 was fomenting our doom. WUWT also warned that the media would be swift to blame AGW, even though the press release from the university that noticed that calving was careful not to do so. True to form, first off the block in warmist zeal is the BBC. The web story doesn’t actually say that AGW is to blame, but the prominence given to the story, together with the immediate juxtaposition of the bald statement (hotly disputed in sceptic circles) that the first six months of 2010 have been “the hottest on record” make it plain that as far as the BBC is concerned, this is global warming writ large. The only thing missing from their alarmism is the Richard Black by-line.