Category Archives: Uncategorized

The BBC’s job is to report impartially what goes on in the world. To pursue that task, it receives at least £750m of your money every year, and it has almost 5,000 staff who are directly involved in journalism. So when steel-making on Teeside, one of our oldest manufacturing industries, faces closure, with the loss of 300 years of tradition and 10,000 jobs, you would expect the corporation to be in the forefront of explaining why.

You would be wrong. Richard North, writing on his excellent EU Referendum blog, brings us today in glowing technicolour the real reasons why Tata steel have mothballed the Redcar steelworks (losing immediately 1,700 jobs, but in the longer term almost 9,000 more who support or whom are dependent on the plant). In an nutshell, it is being “mothballed” (but more likely permanently closed)not because of “falling demand“, but as a direct casualty of the pernicious gravy train that is the EU emissions trading scheme. This makes it more lucrative for the host company to suspend production at the plant and use it instead to accumulate ‘carbon credits’ on its balance sheet. The cumulative worth of this sleight-of-hand juggling is, according to Richard, a staggering £1bn+. Against such forces, the poor saps in Middlesbrough did not stand a chance.

I searched the BBC website for more than half an hour looking for any mention of this. There are dozens of stories and backgrounders about the closure, and lots of hot air from Mandelson and his henchmen, but not a whisper of this crucial angle. It seems also that BBC reporters were present at the press conference where Kirby Adams, the Redcar divisional boss, told the Times that the EU rules were behind the closure. They ignored what he said. So when it comes to climate change issues, the BBC are not only not reporting the truth, they are in cahoots with government ministers in deliberately hiding it. Their passion for global warming zealotry is so great that they simply cannot bring us facts that do not support it. And one man and his blog are more effective in bringing us the truth than all the wind and puff of the BBC’s £750m news machine.

Even the BBC’s coverage of bias is biased when it comes to the climate change debate. This, posted today, is the BBC’s attempt to create “balance” in the debate about AGW. I haven’t the time now to go into detail about why this is a blatant, pathetic whitewash. I am sure others will in due course. But how about for starters, the words devoted to the AGW case are far more than those on the “sceptic” side? Why are the “sceptic” points so crudely put? And why are the vast majority of linked sites pro-AGW? Dozens of climate realist sites are missed out, including Bishop Hill and Harmless Sky – those that have done most to expose the gross BBC bias.

Further to Robin’s post yesterday about this week’s Newswatch, here are the transcripts of the exchanges between presenter Raymond Snoddy and environment correspondent Richard Black.

First exchange:

Snoddy: Richard Black, as a journalist do you think the BBC really underplayed this story despite Today and Newsnight items?

Black: In quantitative terms I’m not sure that we have underplayed it. I don’t think that stands up. But there is another side to – certainly comments I’ve had in from the public – is that, which talk about the way we’ve treated it and whether we’ve asked the kinds of questions that Chris and Anthony [the guest viewers in the studio] are suggesting that need to be asked.

Snoddy: In science terms the Newsnight science correspondent said this was as bad as it gets in science. I mean, has the BBC really reflected the enormity of this controversy?

Black: Well there are different views about how enormous it really is. There are many in the scientific community who say that it actually doesn’t alter the scientific picture one jot. To start with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is just one of a number of institutions in the world that keep records of global temperatures so even if all the CRU interpretations and analysis turned out to be wrong it doesn’t invalidate all the other analyses. And they also point out the fact that the raw data is not something that’s gathered by CRU – it’s used by CRU and analysed by CRU, but the raw data is still out there.

Black admits that there was a failure to ask the questions that viewers wanted answered, but then in his response to Snoddy’s point about “the enormity of this controversy” he reveals the very mindset that made the asking of those challenging questions so unlikely. Clearly Black doesn’t think that this is a big deal at all.

Second exchange:

Snoddy: Richard Black, Steve Mitchell actually said that it’s the BBC’s aim to reflect the whole range of views on this issue. Here’s two viewers who don’t think the BBC does. What have you got to say to them?

Black: The guidelines, the sort of broadest guidelines in terms of our climate change coverage are set by the BBC Trust. They issued a document a couple of years ago on impartiality that dealt with many issues. On climate change they made it clear that in their view the sort of old balance that we used to have between two equally weighted sides of a debate were simply out of date. That doesn’t apply any more, and the sort of weight of the scientific evidence lies with the IPCC view. But they do also explicitly say that sceptical, contrarian views – whatever you want to call them – should not be absent from the coverage, that we cannot neglect them. I think it is a bit of an urban myth that we do neglect them.

As Robin pointed out, Black is referring to the guidelines laid down in the BBC Trust document From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel – Safeguarding impartiality in the 21st century (2007). From page 40:

“The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus.”

TonyN at Harmless Sky put in an FoI request to find out more about this seminar. He was told that it took place in January 2006, but the BBC refused to name the “scientific experts”, fobbing him off with the same “editorial policy” excuse used to hide the Balen Report:

In this case, the information you have requested is outside the scope of the Act because information relating to the seminar is held to help inform the arc’s editorial policy around reporting climate change.

I notice that at least one more FoI request concerning the January 2006 seminar has been made recently and is currently under consideration by the BBC. If the BBC once again fails to release the names of the scientific experts upon whose advice climate change editorial policy was determined then we will draw our own conclusions.

[Incidentally, Newswatch is worth seeing for no other reason than the amusing “nods” of Snoddy (Snods?) inserted into his interview with the BBC’s Steve Mitchell. What’s with all the licking of lips? Had Snoddy just eaten a sugared doughnut? Was it some sort of piss-take? Odd.]

I listened carefully in BBC bulletins last night and this morning to David Shukman spreading AGW panic about melting glaciers in Bolivia, which he left no doubt were because of “climate change”. Poor, hapless Bolivians were dying of thirst because of Western greed, etc.

I decided to do a bit of google-digging to find if this, indeed, was the “consensus”. It turned out to be like wading through treacle because the topic is dominated by NGOs and other propagandists, who are as fanatical as Shukman. But without too much difficulty, I came across this(you need to scroll down a bit to get to the relevant entry):

It is ironic that the melting Chacaltaya glacier has become such an important symbol of the AGW theory, when in fact the evidence from Chacaltaya seems to refute this theory. (In contrast, the evidence from Chacaltaya is fully consistent with Svensmark’s cosmic ray theory (5), but that is another story).

At the very least, what this shows is that the science behind Shukman’s melting glaciers is highly complex and the subject of debate. To suggest that there is “consensus” or agreement is nonsense.

Yet again, the BBC’s so-called “experts” on this topic are found to be pushing in the crudest way questionable theories in the hyping up of the need for more taxes in Copenhagen. No doubt Mr Shukman had a nice trip to Bolivia (at our expense) and enjoyed speaking with activists who agreed with him. The Bolivians themselves obviously want to press the “we’re doomed” button because they want cash from Gordon Brown. But pushing their views in this unfiltered, unbalanced way is not journalism. It’s propaganda.

The BBC positively ejaculates at the thought of “climate change” demonstrations. You can tell by the reverential tone in which it reports the sorry sight of government ministers, the primate of England and sundry law-breaking thugs telling us that we must spend billions on doing a King Canute.

The BBC is still giving massive prominence to those who, against all the evidence, dismiss Climategate as inconsequential. Have they not read this, which shows that the CRU records were based on the crudest of computer programmes? Meanwhile, as our economy collapses, the jerk Ed Miliband is conspiring to give away billions of our money in the Copenhagen Treaty, not just this year, but forever. Our leaders are about to commit to the largest blank cheque in history, as well as to send us back to the dark ages. What have we told about this by the BBC in all its hot air about AGW? Nothing.

Update: Steven Mitchell, the BBC’s deputy director of news, told Ray Snoddy on the BBC’s Newswatch programme this morning that the BBC has not made a collective decision about the science of ‘climate change’. Minutes later, Richard Black, his environment correspondent, said on the same programme that the way the BBC covered said ‘climate change’ was dictated by the BBC Trustees (he was referring here, I think, to the improbably named ‘From See-saw to Wagon Wheel’), which categorically ruled that the science that proved AGW was “overwhelming”. So put a different way, the man who dictates most aspects of the BBC’s news coverage has not got a clue how his correspondents operate.

Meanwhile, back on Newswatch, Richard Black continued to argue that black was white, by claiming that it is an “urban myth” that the BBC’s coverage of ‘climate’ change’ has been one-sided. If it wasn’t all so serious, you’d have to laugh. The killer fact to emerge (from a disgruntled viewer who was a studio guest) was that one week after the CRU scandal broke, the BBC website search engine found just four mentions of the word Climategate.

(Thanks to several Biased BBC readers for spotting the Newswatch exchange. You can see it here)

You’ve got to laugh. Or cry. For two weeks, the internet has been smoking hot with thousands of reports about Climategate and its implications. EU Referendum has a very interesting post this morning showing that, according to an ingenious new method of measuring interest in a particular topic, the public are very interested, too.

What about the BBC? Well, of course, they have virtually ignored it, preferring to concentrate instead on putting their £750m news resources into reporting subjects they like, such as the embarrassment of Tiger Woods and whether we should withdraw from Afghanistan. It’s only when their revered UN weighs in with a promised inquiry – that will no doubt be as much of a whitewash and a charade as everything else the UN does – that the BBC deigns to elevate the matter to lead item. Written, of course, from the UN’s perspective.

Proving yet again, that where the UN leads, the BBC slavishly follows.

Update: the discussion at 8.10am on Today, featuring green fanatic Jonathan Porritt and – miracle of miracles – a “sceptic”, Philip Stott, was an indication of how far on the ropes the warmists are. Porritt admitted through gritted teeth that there was something to investigate in Climategate (though of course still maintaining that “most scientists” say there is a consensus), while Stott skifully painted the picture of why there are major doubts about the causation of warming, and that taxation of CO2 would not in any case solve the problem.

But, and there was a big but, John Humphrys still accepted far too easily that “glaciers melting” was a definite sign that catastrophe was upon us. Who briefs these people? Laughable.

As a number of commenters pointed out over the weekend, the first in the new series of The Now Show (Friday 27 November) chose to deal with Climategate by circling the wagons around the poor put-upon scientists and mocking the sceptics. The best that the collected comedy geniuses could come up with was a crap James Bond evil villain conspiracy sketch, the set-up for which was an absurd straw-man quote that Steve Punt claimed to have seen somewhere. The underlying message was, “Nothing to see here, move along.”

In contrast to this predictable response from Radio 4’s group-thinking leftie establishment comedians, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart set aside his own ideological leanings and took aim:

(There’s more but this was the first Youtube clip I could find. Newsbusters has the full transcript in which Stewart goes on to mock climate sceptic Senator Inhofe, and to express despair at the contempt for the scientific method revealed by the emails.)

American viewers get a challenging take on the subject. UK licence payers get a pathetic wet fart of an effort from Radio 4’s tired old comedy echo chamber.

Isn’t it time for a shake-up, Ms Raphael?

Update. Full clip can be viewed courtesy of none other than Senator Inhofe.

How ostrich-like is Roger Harrabin? Very, is the answer. His latest post on ClimateGate discusses the veracity or otherwise of the IPCC. Yet again, he deals with the topic without reference to a single climate realist. And throughout, he assumes that the IPCC is, and has been, a legitimate scientific undertaking.

He also asserts that irrespetive of what happened at CRU:

Other scientists tell me they doubt the inquiry will affect the main course of scientific opinion, as the CRU temperature data set is very similar to the two other global sets, both in the US.

Does he read anything but that which confirms his own views? Bishop Hill has this about GISS (the main US equivalent of CRU):

Since about 1990, there has been a reduction in thermometer counts globally. In the USA, the number has dropped from 1850 at peak (in the year 1968) to 136 now (in the year 2009). As you might guess, this has presented some “issues” for our thermal quilt. But do not fear, GIStemp will fill in what it needs, guessing as needed, stretching and fabricating until it has a result.

Who do you believe? A snake-oil salesman from the BBC or someone who actually researches and writes honestly about a topic which he knows about?

So far, the BBC has done virtually nothing about Climategate, and as David notes in the previous post, if anything, has cranked up its AGW reporting to fever pitch. This is what Richard Black says on his blog this morning:

As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, climate politics elsewhere remains unimpressed by allegations that the CRU documents undermine the very basis of the forthcoming negotiations; but it’s a question that I will be asking when the Copenhagen talks open.

I don’t know where he’s been doing his “ascertaining” (he could try, for simple starters, here,here or here)but such a response is deeply, deeply dishonest, and illustrates just how seriously wrong the BBC is on this issue.

I will await with interest to hear just how hard he pursues the question he intends to put. But don’t hold your breath. He’ll probably be as tough and persevering as Evan Davis was when he ‘interviewed’ Bob Geldof this morning on Today (that is, he listened admiringly to every word of nonsense he uttered).