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The Sunday Times reports today that the IPCC 2007 report perpetuated a massive untruth about global warming, that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It’s a truly astonishing story of how a supposedly scientific body that preaches unassailable ‘facts’ will take any alarmist titbit and magnify it to the nth degree. Guess who was foremost in reporting this nonsense? The BBC of course. To be fair, it has reported some doubt about the 2035 figure, but overwhelmingly, it has supported the ‘we are all doomed’ line. This, for example, is from June:

Glacier melting in the Himalayas is virtually certain to disrupt water supplies within the next 20 to 30 years. Floods and rock avalanches are virtually certain to increase. Heavily-populated coastal regions, including the deltas of rivers such as the Ganges and Mekong, are likely to be at risk of increased flooding.

Kevin Marsh is probably not a well-known name outside the rarified corridors of the BBC. But as head of the BBC’s College of Journalism and also a former editor of Radio 4’s Today, he’s one of the corporation’s top news wallahs, shortly due to retire on an obscenely fat pension. So how does he practise his trade? As a scion of public service broadcasting, with its binding principles of fairness and lack of bias? Er, no. Well not according to Antonia Hoyle, writing in today’s Mail on Sunday. Mr Marsh did not like former BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan’s (he who broke the story of the dodgy Iran intelligence dossier) rather positive entry on Wikipedia, so he doctored it, adding the telling phrase that his reputation for breaking news ‘was not always deserved’. Likewise, our Kev thought the Wiki entry for his predecessor as editor of Today, Rod Liddle, was a tad too nice. Originally the Liddle section said that he had used Today to ‘break’ new stories. Kev’s neatly edited version said that he had ‘tried with limited success to switch the programme to a more tabloid approach’. Maiow. That, in BBC speak is the highest form of insult.

Mr Gilligan claims that Mr Marsh is not happy with him because, as a result of the Hutton report – which considered the BBC’s handling of the Iraq dossier- his career as an editor ended and he became instead ‘deputy head of training’.

I should add that Mr Marsh strongly denies that he was acting inappropriately; he is quoted as saying he was merely ensuring accuracy. Of course. All I will say is that I made a number of complaints against Today items when dear Kev was editor, and attended meetings where he was there, so I saw his style first hand. His approach was always to bend the facts in every way he could.

I never thought I would write this, but three cheers for a Labour peer. Their lordships debated ‘climate change’on Thursday. Predictably, in the most part, it was an alarmfest about the need for more taxes, laced with endless religious warnings that the end of the world is nigh; the idiotic peddling of moonshine. But there was one ray of sunshine. Step forward Bernard Donoghue, the former policy adviser to Harold Wilson (a job from hell, if ever there was one!), who is now Baron Donoghue of Ashton in the county of Northamptonshire. He said (his contribution is about three quarters of the way through the debate, and sadly, I couldn’t find a way of linking precisely to it):

In relation to the media coverage of this important issue, the BBC should follow its charter and cover global warming impartially, not as a cheerleader for the alarmist side. It is counterproductive and provokes, like manipulation of statistics, the kind of public scepticism which the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, fears. As for the Met Office, it should go back to objective science and try to get its forecasts right and cease blatant campaigning for one side. I note that it has just inevitably forecast that 2010 will be a very hot year-noble Lords should stock up on their long-johns and fur boots.

Here, here, hurrah, and all that. It shows that at least one of the lunatics who supposedly represent us has got the picture and has also sussed the BBC and its pernicious propaganda. His lordship also pinpointed something that is deeply alarming: the BBC and politicians – Labour, Conservative, the whole damn lot of them – are totally out of touch with the real world and don’t give a straw about what people actually think. Roll on the revolution!

When I worked at the BBC, many moons ago admittedly, the main justification for the licence fee was that people actually watched BBC shows. Peak time audience share for BBC1 regularly nudged the 40% mark, and over a week, most people actually tuned in to the channel for a significant amount of time. Latest official figures, however, show that BBC1’s overall audience share during December was down to 21.5%, and that the peak average (between 7pm and 10pm) during the month – even though BBC shows easily dominated Christmas Day – was only 23.4%, down a whopping 4.7%. So millions of viewers are deserting the BBC’s flagship shows. In an internal BBC meeting yesterday, director general Mark Thompson reportedly vigorously defended his salary of £834,000 a year on the ground that he was worth it. On these latest viewing figures the case for his monstrous level of pay – and the BBC licence fee at all – is vanishing almost as fast as snow in summer. If ever there was one. Even his own staff think Thompson’s salary is “corrosive and wrong”.

Fishy. Some days ago, the excellent Bishop Hill site broke the news that – rather bizzarely – the police National Domestic Extremism Unit is involved in investigating the ClimateGate leak at the University of East Anglia. The BBC has finally woken up to the story, and there are worrying signs that it is somehow part of the saga. First of all, it adamantly describes the leak as a “hack” even though this has not yet been established. Second, they have this extremely odd quote from the police:

“At present we have two police officers assisting Norfolk with their investigation, and we have also provided computer forensic expertise. While this is not strictly a domestic extremism matter, as a national police unit we had the expertise and resource to assist with this investigation, as well as good background knowledge of climate change issues in relation to criminal investigations.”

If I had been the journalist covering this story, I’d be asking first of all what the hell a terrorist unit is doing involved in ‘climate change’and what “expertise” in this field they claim to have. Second, with the world still on terrorist alert after the latest attempt to blow up a plane, how can a terrorist unit spare resources to investigate file hacking (if indeed, that is what it was) when the only ‘victim’ of this alleged crime is academic internal mail – and the leak was in any case in the public interest?

But not the BBC. It’s creepy beyond words that Climategate should be bracketed by the police as a terrorism incident, and equally so that the BBC should broadcast this chilling quote without asking such basic questions. My guess is that the police asked the BBC to carry the story as damage limitation because they suddenly realised that linking Climategate to terrorism was extremely questionable. In overall terms, the BBC has dismissed the importance of Climategate, but if it will provide material to attack ‘deniers’, they are on the case like a rat up a drain pipe.

One of the defining features of the BBC’s ‘climate change’ coverage is that they give almost daily unmoderated airtime to government-funded fake charities such as the Royal Society for the Protection for Birds to spout their propaganda about habitats being under threat because of the relentlessly rising heat. Typing ‘RSPB climate change’ into the BBC website search engine yields a love-in orgy of hits, such as this one; such items have been a staple of Today for years. How ironic then, to read this story, in which an RSPB spokesman says not only that the current arctic weather was seriously putting wildife at risk, but also that the 1962-3 cold winter was “arguably the single event that had the greatest impact on wildlife within living memory.” Chances of this admission being properly reported and analysed by the BBC’s cadre of ‘climate change’ fanatics? Like the weather, sub zero.

Following yesterday’s item aimed at making sure the kids are still on message about MMGW, today we had Newsround for grown-ups. In a report which aired on the 6 pm news on both BBC 1 and Radio 4 this evening, David Shukman explained:

“The key thing is that there’s a difference between the weather and the climate. The weather’s what you get day by day, month by month, like this cold spell. But the climate is the kind of weather you get over a thirty year period, and that’s what the scientists say is changing.”

He was a little less clear about any distinctions back in May 2008 when he reported on a dry spell affecting Spain:

In a year that so far ranks as Spain’s driest since records began 60 years ago, the reservoir is currently holding as little as 18% of its capacity – at a time of year when winter rains would usually have provided an essential boost by now…
And it may also remind people of the forecasts from climate scientists of still drier conditions to come in the approaching decades.

As soon as Shukman left the area, it rained. A lot. From the Guardian, 7 June 2008:

After months of the worst drought for 60 years, Spain has experienced the wettest May since 1971; it rained on 18 days of the month. Heavy rains have continued into June, which is rare during the Spanish summer…
In Catalonia, the worst affected area, reservoirs whose levels had been reduced to only 20% are now nearly half full.

A proposed water pipeline, cited by Shukman as evidence of the changing climate, was cancelled. From New Europe, 16 June 2008:

The Spanish government recently cancelled a controversial plan to build a 62-kilometre pipeline to divert water from the river Ebro in the Tarragona region to the Catalan capital Barcelona, Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said. There was no longer the situation of “extraordinary necessity” that had prompted the plan, Vega said.

If Shukman did a follow-up pointing any of this out, I can’t find it online.

Here are some images from his May 2008 report. This, remember, was explained with reference to climate change:

And here are some images taken from a Spanish blog in October 2009 showing the blogger’s recent kayaking trip to the same Sau reservoir:

The blogger states (via Google Translate):

This year the Sau had a significant level in the water, exposing only the latest instalment of the famous bell tower of the church of Sant Romà de Sau.

As far as the BBC is concerned, some weather events are more climate change than others.

Update 8 January 10.40am. The BBC School Report website offers children the benefit of David Shukman’s top ten tips for reporting the environment. In tip 7 Shukman tells the kids:

If it’s about a drought, stand in a dried-out reservoir.

If the drought then suddenly ends, thus undermining your narrative, don’t worry – just move on to the next alarmist story.

Best of all is this sentence from tip 9:

You’re an ambassador for common-sense in a world of spin.

Who knew Shukman had such a sense of humour? (Hyphenating “common sense” in that context isn’t setting a very good example to budding journalists, though.)

While the rest of us freeze, the BBC website is still fervently pushing global warming. The main goal continues to be to give a platform to greenie fanatics who want to increase the hatred between the developing world and the West, by cultivating the line that the West is responsible for a whole catalogue of ‘climate change’ crimes. This latest ‘opinion’ piece is by Greig(sic) Whitehead, of International Climate Challenge, another of the type of brainwashing organisations that the BBC help sustain by giving them unmoderated publicity. His piece is about Kenya, a country I love and know well, and it’s typical of the genre. Opinions, of course, are the stuff of democratic discourse, but there are limits. This greenie is a preacher of hate.

It took me two minutes on the internet dispel his preposterous lie, that ‘climate change’ is creating widespread devasatation in the country.

Climatic risks are the norm in the dry pastoral areas of East Africa and often account for widespread social and economic costs and human suffering. Nowhere is this more apparent than in northern Kenya and southern Somalia, which in 2000 were once again caught in the throes of a terrible ‘natural’ disaster.

Kenya has always suffered from droughts, not because of ‘climate change’ but cyclical weather patterns that are highly complex. On top of that, the population has risen from 5m to 35m in a little over 50 years, and the result has been widespread timber felling, affecting rainfall, the water table and waterflows from the crucial Mount Kenya region.

Extremists in countries like Kenya with a colonial legacy will use any excuse they can to attack their white ‘enemies’. So, too, will Muslim fundamentalists, of which there is a significant minority in Kenya. I sympathise deeply with the plight of Kenyans, but what is needed is genuine understanding of their problems, not the spreading of baseless propaganda. What Greig Whitehead is doing by filing such pieces is adding highly-toxic tinder to the complex political set-up in the country. Such men are dangerous, and the BBC should hang its head in shame for encouraging and spreading such naked agitprop.

It’s pretty darn unusual for the BBC website to cover the death of a local Church of England vicar; in fact, pretty much their only interest in Christianity and our established religion these days is in gay bishops. When I was in BBC local radio, it was only when a local bishop popped his clogs that we reached for our microphones.

Unless, that is, he’s a revered green camapigner. Such, apparently, was the Reverend Hereward Cooke, a vicar in the Norwich area, who cycled the 150 miles to Copenhagen to attend the UN summit in December, and there, tragically, died in his sleep. I’ve nothing against Mr Cooke, I am sure he was a god-fearing chap, though it is a pity that he thought ‘climate change’ so important.

But to the BBC, of course, he’s a saint. Any mention of ‘green’ and ‘climate change’ – no matter how inconsequential – is front page news.

Did anyone try watch, as I did, the BBC’s new adaptation of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids? This was one of the favourite books of my childhood, a cracking yarn in the HG Wells disaster tradition, and – more fool me – I was looking forward to it. Guess what? The producers, i.e. the BBC international conspiracists who see AGW as a religion, had tampered with the plot so that it conformed to their worldview. According to these morons, the triffids developed and got out of control because of global warming and because the wicked fossil-fuel oil companies had modified their genes. So, an old-fashioned morality tale about the problems of human nature descended into a zealous brimstone-and-treacle homily about ‘climate change’ and the horrors of capitalist greed. Brainwashing? John Wyndham, I am sure, will be turning in his grave!