Richard Black unblushingly brings you “news” from those who spray cash around to peddle their warmist business interests. Now, as a result of a FoI request, it has been established that Roger Harrabin, his colleague in reporting BBC climate alarmism, not only hires himself out to warmist causes as “chair” but is also prepared to go to extraordinary prestidigitating lengths to back up the Met Office in their blatant spinning about the recent brutally cold spell. Autonomous Mind brilliantly tells the full saga here. I agree with him that it’s time that Roger (and Richard) got the chop, but chances of that happening at the weather-zealot infested BBC? Zero.
If anything, they are heading in the opposite direction. Here’s their colleague David Shukman outlining the patently lunatic plans by civil servants to deal with the warming that they (and Mr Shukman) so fervently believe is happening, despite the evidence. Fishes by moved from lakes in the Lake District to Scotland? Network rail worrying about heatwaves (when the grim reality is that one cold snap and they are on the knees?). It’s all recorded without a note of contrasting opinion, caution or common sense, and (straight from the BBC website textbook of scare techniques) illustrated with a train on a viaduct being splashed by a wave to ram home the alarmist homily-of-the-day. I weep.
Katabasis is good but Autonomous Mind completely skewers them:
This leads us to ask a serious question that must be answered: How is it possible that Roger Harrabin could claim the Met Office line he was retailing was the ‘truth’ with such certainty?
If Harrabin had seen the evidence and still spun his line then he has knowingly lied to the public
If he spun his line without seeing the evidence then he is utterly incompetent and the public can have no faith in the stories he broadcasts and publishes on the BBC
Either way Roger Harrabin’s position is now untenable and in addition to resigning he must make a full public apology. As for the Met Office, the buck stops with the Chief Executive, John Hirst, who has looked on as this false narrative was constructed and insinuations were made to deflect criticism from his department, yet did nothing to correct it.
In the real world though, we know what will happen. Nothing.
He’s NOT the new BBC climate messiah, he’s a very naughty boy…
The “preparing for heatwaves” piece is particularly amusing – since a couple of days ago, in another piece, they were plugging the old “….the North Atlantic Drift is stopping – we’re all going to freeze our nuts off” meme:-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12279028
<i>The North Atlantic Drift (commonly called the Gulf Stream) brings warm water from the tropics into northern latitudes, where it gives up some of its heat to the air – keeping the UK and neighbouring countries warmer than their latitude alone would suggest………………….
“Overall, if these changes… contribute to a lowering of the salt content of the North Atlantic, it could have a major impact on the entire planet – from significant temperature drops in Europe to intensified monsoons in Asia,” said Richard Zimmerman, a bio-optics specialist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, US.</i>
As David Jones writes – correctly – “in the real world though, we know what will happen. Nothing.”
The only way Harrabin could possibly get fired is for Caroline Thomson, chief operating officer at the BBC on diversity to stumble on an email from Harrabin to Michael Mann in which Harrabin referred slightingly to the gender of Jo Abbess ( http://portal.campaigncc.org/node/2089 ). His feet wouldn’t touch the ground. To the contrary, as David Jones implies, deliberately lying in a cause backed by the BBC is OK. He’ll probably get a bonus.
Polar bears can swim for nine-days thanks to climate change. Looks like evolution is working faster than Darwin ever imagined !
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9369000/9369317.stm
The only way haribo will ever be fired is if he turns out to be a Tory !
I’m always amazed at the constant equable nature of Steve McIntyre and his willingness to see good in everybody. He commented on WUWT (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/28/the-met-office-and-the-bbc-caught-cold/#more-32637 ), in respect of Harrabin’s latest nod to the Goebbels School of Journalistic Integrity highlighted by autonomus mind ( http://autonomousmind.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/the-met-office-winter-forecast-lie-is-finally-nailed/) thus
“I’ve met Roger Harrabin and am completely confident that he behaved with total integrity in this matter. I am sure that he was misled by his sources.”
Considering the abuse thrown at SM by climate “scientists” and their propagandists in the media since his first foray into the mirror world of AGW, I think SM is being both incredibly generous and incredibly naive but that’s his opinion of the matter.
BTW Anthony Watts of WUWT has offered Harrabin the (unedited) freedom of his blog to post “his side of the story” (which, to my mind, is also very generous of AW).
So, as if the “secret” prediction wasn’t awful enough, any claim that the Met Office actually warned the government of an impending harsh winter, and by implication that the government therefore did not act responsibly is a 100% complete and utter lie.”
http://i-squared.blogspot.com/2011/01/revealed-mystery-of-mystic-met-office.html
“Speculation in newspapers and the blogosphere has festered for the past week as Chris Huhne, minister in charge of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) stubbornly remain silent. I contacted the BBC’s Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin, one of the world’s senior journalists on such matters to ascertain if the Beeb had a better handle on the story.
Harrabin advised me, “I phoned the Met Office about this statement and the Met Office press office told me they’d given information to the Cabinet Office that we were facing an early cold winter.”
Giving a strong hint that a major rift appears to have opened up between Met Office chief executive, John Hirst and Climate Minister, Huhne, Harrabin further revealed, “The Beeb now has an FoI [freedom of information request] to Cabinet Office requesting verbatim info from [the] Met Office.”
In what may well be an orchestrated manoeuvre between the Met Office and Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC the freedom of information demand will heap huge embarrassment on David Cameron’s gaffe-prone coalition government.”
http://www.glebedigital.co.uk/blog/?p=1377
Is Black or Harrabin reporting this?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1351341/Relief-pumps-Revolutionary-hydrogen-fuel-cost-just-90p-GALLON-run-existing-cars.html
I expect they will not like this development.
On the contrary, the BBC is upping the ante in their war.
Meet the climate sceptics
Filmmaker Rupert Murray takes us on a journey into the heart of climate scepticism to examine the key arguments against man-made global warming and to try to understand the people who are making them.
Do they have the evidence that we are heating up the atmosphere or are they taking a grave risk with our future by dabbling in highly complicated science they don’t fully understand? Where does the truth lie and how are we, the people, supposed to decide?
The film features Britain’s pre-eminent sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton as he tours the world broadcasting his message to the public and politicians alike. Can he convince them and Murray that there is nothing to worry about?
So it’s being made from the perspective that Warmism is real, and it’s Monckton who is on the outside of science trying to convince people. Note the accompanying picture they use of a dry, cracked landscape. Narrative? What Narrative?
I bet that title had the student uni production meeting falling about at how clever they are.
I wonder who will be playing Dustin, Barbra & Ben in their heads as they ‘craft’ this next piece in the edit suite.
At risk of getting Godwin out of bed early, maybe it will be balanced by ‘Climate Warmists’ – A Warning from History.
Or not.
This is the case against “Man Made Global Warming”
“Reports from Network Rail and Natural England say disused railways could reopen if higher summer temperatures foster greater domestic tourism”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/28/climate-change-uk-rail-tourism
“Climate change means we will be skiing in Yorkshire rather than sunbathing under palm trees, experts warn”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/8281655/Climate-change-means-we-will-be-skiing-in-Yorkshire-rather-than-sunbathing-under-palm-trees-experts-warn.html
“… the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. … To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. ”
Doublethink – Orwell
Good article by Chris Booker this evening (Saturday):
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8290469/How-BBC-warmists-abuse-the-science.html
Dellers and Simon Singh are having rather more than a spat about the Nurse carve-up of Dellingpole. In his post on this at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100073913/the-curious-double-standards-of-simon-singh/ Dellingpole sums up exactly why criticism of the corruption of science is not something that can be left to scientists – particularly climate “scientists” – and people like Singh. Dellers wrote:
What I am saying, and I say almost every day, is that the evidence is not as robust as the “consensus” scientists claim; that there are many distinguished scientists all round the world who dispute this alleged “consensus”; that true science doesn’t advance through “consensus” and never has; that the Climategate emails threw the peer-review process into serious doubt by demonstrating how eminently corruptable it is; that there are many vested interests out there determined and able to spend a great deal of money by making out that the case for catastrophic, man-made global warming is much stronger than it is. And on these specific issues I can reasonably claim to be better informed than Sir Paul Nurse, regardless of how many PhDs he has, because I’ve spent much more time than he has researching them and because they are not issues which require an exclusively scientific knowledge to understand. They just require the basic journalistic skill of being able to read and analyse.
It’s a pity Harrabin and Black don’t actually practise journalism. Mind you, if they acted like journalists rather than mouthpieces for the AGW narrative, their careers, at the BBC anyway, would have ended long ago. As journalists they are kin to the “journalists” who worked at Pravda, Isvestia and Radio Moscow in the golden years of Soviet Russia so loved by the BBC.
It’s interesting to note that those who have contributed to Mr. Delingpole’s blog have passed the 2k mark quite quickly.
Of course not closing for comments does help, but CiF can stay awake for longer periods and only seems to get such numbers when they dig a hole, such as the 10:10 promo and subsequent ‘defence’.
It would appear there is a large body of folk who are less than impressed with being fed bullsh*t dressed up by having a tame ‘scientist’ to present the narrative shaped by a bunch of media studies and PPE grads in the edit suite.
If it looks liek a Fokker, sounds like a Fokker and smells like a Fokker, it’s probably a piece of warmist ad-hom propaganda.
They have, literally, lost the plot, being far more focussed on petty smears of perceived ‘enemies’ than appreciating that most simply want the facts laid out to make their own minds up. It’s like the PR guys from ‘No Pressure’ have teamed up with Gordon Brown’s dirt diggers to make documentaries themselves. And the hell with serving anything other than their own narrow, petty, selfish view of how things ‘should’ be.
I used to have some respect for Singh and Goldacre, but it seems that the value being big fish in small ponds lauded by a minority has more attraction than simply serving the majority honestly and with integrity. And they are outing themselves by their own words and deeds better than any critique could manage. .
Unique, certainly, but they are in bad company. It’s hardly the best way for a once respected national broadcast institution to regain its credibility and reputation.
Delingpole’s blog ALWAYS draws a good rating in terms of numbers of comments, unfortunately a large number of posts are from those who would wish him ill, not because they disagree with the piece he writes (though most do), but because it’s him, and he’s a journalist who, like Booker, has the balls to speak out against this nonsense. I hope he keeps up the pressure – somethings got to give, eventually.
More on BBC/Pension Funds and Harrabin.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=7126
Oh, golly.
Meanwhile, in other news much more likely to be covered…
Harrabin and Black must not be sacked. Their antics are harmful to their own cause.
No, it’s about time we had a head on a spike.
That will be far more harmful to their cause.