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.)

I’ve become increasingly convinced that the BBC is part of an international conspiracy about ‘climate change’. It isn’t simply that the reporting is so biased; it’s also because there seems to be a concerted effort to make sure that whatever so-called sceptics discover, for example over Climategate, the warmists bounce straight back with a new set of warped theories or bent facts to support their arguments. The feed of material is relentless, as if it is coming from an organised source. Over the holidays, I’ve been doing some digging on this, and I wanted to share one of my first findings.

A BBC journalist called Peter Thomson is not a household name in this country, but he’s the environment editor of the BBC programme (made jointly with WGBH Boston and RPI) The World, which on a daily basis pushes out climate scare stories to millions of people. Mr Thomson, it turns out, is also the secretary of the Society of Environmental Journalists, a US organisation, the main purpose of which is to spread alarmism through a ‘guide’ about ‘climate change'(masked of course, under the cloak of ‘objectivity’). There can be no doubt that this is a campaigining organisation which wants to achieve political change because it believes that the world needs to reduce CO2 emissions.

Mr Thomson’s activism does not stop there. He’s also a member of the advisory board of the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, yet another international organisation with alarmist goals. It, too, publishes a guide to how journalists should cover ‘climate change’; in truly chilling McCarthyite terms, the introduction explains how anyone who disagrees with “the consensus” should be ignored and that journalists should frantically pester editors to publish ‘climate change’ scare stories.

So, to recap. One of the BBC’s most senior editors responsible for environmental reporting has formal roles at the epicentre of a worldwide coinspiracy among ‘climate change’ alarmists. Not only that, he is assisting in the international propagation of so-called science communication guides, the main purpose of which are to enlist other journalists to spread the same lies in which he also believes. I suspect there’s a whole phalanx of Peter Thomsons, all feeding the BBC’s insatiable appetite to feed us with moonshine.

Update: Richard North, of EU Referendum, has kindly provided further information about BBC propagandists. Nik Gowing, a prominent – and rather humourless – BBC World Service presenter, has a no-doubt lucrative sideline in chairing ‘climate change’ conferences convened by the alarmist-in-chief, IPCC head Dr Ravendra Pachauri.

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.

Yesterday, I said that remarkable things seemed to be happening at the BBC in terms of reporting that there were problems in the global warming/climate change scam. I spoke far too soon. Roger Harrabin and his fanatical, deeply politicised lefty chums have clearly been fighting behind the scenes to push warming up the agenda to blitz levels. Today on the website are at least four stories all of which illustrate just how deeply enmeshed in the scam the corporation is.

First there’s a report that African conflicts go up when the weather is warm, thus showing that global warming is to blame for the continent’s miseries in more ways than one. The idiotic compilers even blame the Darfur fighting on carbon dioxide. I have read a lot of history that is deterministic tosh, but that takes the biscuit. I suppose the boys and girls at the BBC think the heat is more important than fanatical Islam fundamentalism?

Second on the list, is the news that the government/quango employees at the Forestry Commission, aided an abetted by environment secretary Hilary Benn are wasting millions more of our money by urging the planting of millions of trees “to suck carbon out of the atmosphere”. Of course, there may well be some environmental sense in planting more trees, but hoovering up CO2, a perfectly harmless gas, is not one of them. To the BBC, of course, it’s the number one reason.

Third is that the Met Office – which works closely in tandem with the discredited CRU centre in Norwich – is predicting that this year could be the third hottest in the history of the world, ever. Putting aside that such data is hotly denied by “sceptics” (why can’t we call them something less negative, such as “realists”)because the methodology of measurement is hotly disputed, Harrabin has reported such baloney yet again as accepted fact.

And fourth, heavy prominence is gven to the idea that part of East Antarctica may be melting. There’s hardly a peep in the report that, even according to the paper itself, it might not be – because the measurements involved are highly speculative.

What is entirely missing from the BBC website (as far as I could see) is a report about the real impact of all the “climate change” measures the government are introducing. Namely, that thousands more pensioners die in winter than summer because they can’t afford the fuel bills that have been vastly inflated by the EU’s emissions directives and the madacap rush to build hugely expensive and inefficient renewable sources of energy.