Chjris' Global Warming Blog

BBC abandons 'impartiality' on warming

Again and again the BBC has been eager to promote every new scare raised by the advocates of man-made global warming, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:50PM GMT 01 Feb 2009


The iconic beast of global warming, as seen in the Thames Photo: PA

Londoners might have been startled last Monday to see a giant mock-up of a polar bear on an iceberg, floating on the Thames outside the Palace of Westminster. They might not have been so surprised to learn, first, that this was a global warming propaganda stunt and, second, that the television company behind it is part-owned by the BBC.
I was surprised by it. . .ok, I wasn't.

It was ironic that, last week, while the BBC was refusing to show an appeal for aid to the victims of Israeli bombing in Gaza, on the grounds that this might breach its charter obligation to be impartial, a rather less publicised row was raging over Newsnight's doctoring of film of President Obama's inaugural speech, which was used to support yet another of its items promoting the warming scare. Clips from the speech were spliced together to convey a considerably stronger impression of what Obama had said on global warming than his very careful wording justified. While that may have been unprofessional enough, the rest of the item, by Newsnight's science editor, Susan Watts, was even more bizarre. It was no more than a paean of gratitude that we now at last have a president prepared to listen to the "science" on climate change, after the dark age of religious obscurantism personified by President Bush.
Yeah, we should be so glad that America have a dictator. . .sorry, a president, who wants to tax us for breathing.

At last, after years when they could not speak openly on this subject, chirped Ms Watts, "scientists calculate that President Obama has just four years to save the world". She failed to explain (although she was later forced to clarify this on her blog) that the only scientist to say anything so silly was Dr James Hansen of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose utterances on climate change have lately become so wild and extreme that they have made him a laughing stock. (He was last week publicly disowned by his former supervisor Dr John Theon, who said that Hansen's unscientific claims had been an embarrassment to Nasa ever since he joined Al Gore in whipping up panic over global warming back in 1988.)
The Goddard Institute for Space Studies said last year, along with seven other independent centres in the US who track temperature, said that 2007 was the coldest year of this century.

In all this, however, Newsnight only reflected the shameless way in which the BBC makes not the slightest attempt to provide impartial coverage of this issue. As its editorial guidelines make clear, "mainstream science" is now so overwhelmingly agreed on global warming that the BBC sees no reason to give balancing coverage to the views of a minority of "sceptics"; and examples are now legion of how it loses no opportunity to propagandise for the cause.
MINORITY?? Hahaha. Yeah, 600 (must of who don't agree) compared with 31,072. I think the 31,072 is a minority. . .but then, the BBC don't know about the 31,072 scientists in the US alone because they haven't covered it (trust me, I have looked for it on their website). This paragraph shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's followed the coverage of global warming on the BBC. I mean, after the BBC put out their fictional propaganda piece called “Burn Up”, I emailed the BBC to complain about it and they replied with (if you hold on just two seconds while I find it. It wasn't where I thought it was because when I set up my Windows Mail it downloaded all my emails ever and deleted them from the Yahoo server). I know I posted it all as a blog somewhere. I want to put it all in here because while looking over it again, it's like they're saying, “yeah, everything we say on the subject of climate change is just bullshit really”. Anyway, here's the bit I'm looking for, “We are more than aware of the debate over the causes of climate change”. Yeah, they're aware of it, but do they cover the other side?? I think the closest they've come to it was by having Nigel Lawson on Newsnight. . .in which, I'm sure you know (mainly because I use it to show the BBC's bias on the subject), all Paxman did was hush Lawson. . .despite Lawson's research. . .but then, the BBC wouldn't know research even if it jumped up and bit them on the butt. Anyway, back to Booker.

One of the madder instances was the 15 hours of airtime it gave in 2007 to the dreary Live Earth pop concert at Wembley, which was no more than a commercial for the views of Al Gore. Another was last year's lavish Climate Wars series, designed by the BBC's science team as an answer to Channel Four's The Great Global Warming Swindle. Nothing was more laughable than the sequence showing a huge poster of the infamous "hockey stick" temperature graph being driven round London on the back of a lorry, without any mention of the expert studies which have made the "hockey stick" one of the most comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history of science.
I was so glad I missed Live Earth. It was before I broke into the world of climate change and I was in Florida and it would have made me feel bad for not giving Al Gore an over priced amount of money by offsetting. . .you know what?? If you remember a month back, I wrote a blog about British Airways and they couldn't tell me WHERE the money actually goes. Well, knowing what I know about the global elite, I wouldn't be surprised if the money went to Al Gore's offsetting company. Anyway, Christopher Booker needs to break down his paragraphs more. I mean, I only read up to Live Earth and already I'm butting in my a whole load of my comments. So where was it, so I can but in some more. And already, I read to the end of that first sentence and I want to but in with more of what I have to say. It wasn't a commercial for the views of Al Gore, it was a commercial for Al Gore's offsetting company. . .just like An Inconstant Lie (BTW, that reminds me, Play.com published my comments on Al Gore's film in which I say more or less the same thing as I just said here). Back to the article. Oh, the “hockey stick” graph. I've said this before but I'll say it again, someone finally managed to get Mann's computer coding (yet, science is meant to be open, so it shouldn't have taken him as long as it did), and they found that no matter which numbers they punched into the model, it still came up with a “hockey stick”. . .even a phone book.

Again and again the BBC has been eager to promote every new scare raised by the advocates of man-made global warming. As late as August 28 this year it was still predicting that Arctic ice might soon disappear, just as this winter' s refreezing was about to take ice-cover back to a point it was at 30 years ago. Inevitably it fell for that "iconic" picture of two polar bears standing, seemingly forlorn, on a melting ice floe, despite the photographer's explanation that it had nothing to do with global warming and that she had only wanted to capture a dramatic snap of wind-sculpted ice.
Yeah, the BBC were fast to swap over this year. They started on the Arctic on the 1st of March. . .I normally say they're gonna swap over around late March / early April. And I'll tell you something. On the 25th to the 28th of February they were still in Antarctica (in which they mad a ludicrous claim that if the ice on Antarctica melts, sea levels will rise by 70 meters (that's 230 feet)). And, you've also got to take into account that polar bears are the strongest land mammals when it comes to swimming. They can swim up to 200 miles a day.

The BBC couldn't wait to publicise the recent study claiming that Antarctica, far from getting colder over the past 50 years as all the evidence suggests, has in fact been warming. It didn't, of course, explain that the new study is based on a computer model run by the creator of the "hockey stick", which, in the absence of hard data, allows for inspired guesswork – what the study's authors call "sparse data infilling".
Haha. The BBC are quick to announce something from a phony scientist (Michael Mann), but when it comes to 31,071 scientists, it's taken them over a year to say anything. . .in fact, I doubt they will ever mention the 31,072 scientists. I just saw “Sir David Attenborough” in the next paragraph and I'd just like to say, he pisses me off more than most. Last Friday he was on Jonathan Ross's show (on the BBC) and said, “Humans have definitely made a difference to climate” and that “It's not reversible, there's no way of going back to where it was, we just have to slow it down”. Utter utter bullshit. The commercial for his show pissed me off as well. They show the planet and it's speeded up and you see the ice caps shrinking by hundreds of miles. And then in the next clip they show two polar bears on thin ice. Anyway, onto the next paragraph.

It was typical that, when that plastic polar bear was floated up the Thames last week, the BBC's favourite naturalist, Sir David Attenborough, should be wheeled on to claim that, although he once been a "sceptic" on global warming (a fact we had all somehow missed), he now found the "science" entirely convincing.
Christopher Booker wrote this on the 1st Feb, so this was published before the Attenborough commercial and appearance on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. . .no doubt he would mention them had he written it after the fact.

In terms of journalistic professionalism, the sad thing about all this is that the debate about global warming has now entered a fascinating new stage. Honest coverage of all the new information coming to light would be vastly more interesting to the BBC's audience than the vapid propaganda which is all they get.
Having written a book called “Scared to Death (From BSE to Global Warming: How Scares Are Costing Us The Earth)”, Christopher Booker should know by now that the BBC are a government public relations corporation that is only out to scare you to accept the dystopia lifestyle we'll be living in once we accept all these forced cuts in carbon and accept carbon tax (which is ultimately a tax on human life). I mean, it's taken me a year and a half a researching it to understand that and Chris Booker has been researching it a LOT longer than me. But then, he works for a mainstream media outlet (The Telegraph), so he's limited to what he can say.

But inevitably this also exposes the hollowness of all those claims that the BBC still has a duty to remain "impartial", which on this issue is belied by own guidelines. As a particularly glaring example of how the BBC has, on so many issues, abandoned any pretence of impartiality, this can only provide more ammunition to those who argue that it no longer deserves that compulsory licence fee.
You should know by now that the BBC are about as impartial as Al Gore on this subject. I've been saying this for as long as I've been researching global warming, the BBC should not be taking money from the tax payer if their only going to use it to produce this global warming bullshit. The BBC aren't for the people, they're for the government. Another thing I'd like to mention, and I should email this to Christopher Booker sometime, the BBC's bias on this subject is proven by the article about the Northern Irish energy minister who refused to put out the British Government's CO2 propaganda. The BBC ONLY interviewed environmental activists. Which then makes the BBC so easy to predict that I could tell who they were going to talk to next before I had seen it (BTW, I saw Attenborough because I've imported this into OpenOffice.org instead of writing it in the Opera blog, so it's filling more of the screen, whereas the Opera blog box it like a small section of the whole thing, so I didn't see “Friends of the Earth” on the next line when I mentioned them in the blog about the Northern Irish energy minister). And this is where I end the article. . .because Booker write one article a week, in the Sunday Telegraph, in which he covers all the government public relations article that stood out to him, so the other two stories in this whole article really have no relevance to the story I want to cover. To end this all I will say, the BBC are so easy to predict, bias when it comes to global warming, and still haven't, as yet, published an article on the 31,072 scientists. I look every day. And I also have to say, Christopher Booker is real inspiration, and he writes some of the best articles and books on the subject of global warming. And if you want to subscribe to his RSS feed, click this link. He posts an article every Saturday night, so you can read it for free instead of having to get up early on a Sunday morning and paying however much it is for the Sunday Telegraph, just so you can read his column and throw the rest of the paper away. And another thing, if George Monbiot of The Guardian is reading this, I would be more than glad to accept your "Christopher Booker Prize for Climate Change Bullshit" because I'll make a statement out of it, shove it up your proverbial arse and make your views on climate change laughable, in public, using FACTS. . .something you clearly haven't heard about. ~Chjristopher