Author Archives: Robin Horbury

Bishop Hill has unearthed this gem, a presentation to the Cambridge Science and Policy Group by Sarah Mukherjee, the BBC’s former environment correspondent, who in her time at the corporation filed hundreds of alarmist, hell-in-a-handcart reports. Admittedly the delivery was some time ago, but her lecture is a major statement of the BBC’s green creed, and an insight into the madcap and deeply biased thought processes that are involved. It therefore deserves further airing.

The main contentions across 76 minutes of unrestrained greenie bias are that, without a doubt, the science of climate change is proved; that Climategate was a load of nonsense perpetrated by the tabloid press (and the scientists involved have been fully absolved), that we are not doing enough to counter the climate threats facing us, that politicians – despite having passed the climate change act (which commits to 80% CO2 reductions by 2050) – have shamefully reneged on their commitment and – horror of horrors – they will dare to start mining coal again soon. She clearly wants us to go back to the stone age. It’s exactly the same agitprop fervour that permeates the work of Roger Harrabin, Richard Black and the whole phalanx of other BBC activists, the difference being that she has left the corporation and lets rip with a splenetic stream-of-consciousness prejudice that surpasses almost anything I have heard on this topic to date.

BBC prejudice is also writ large in that there’s no doubt of her main targets, identified by the contempt in her voice and her braying, annoying, stoccato laugh. One by one in the firing line are the Tories, the Daily Mail, and Boris Johnson (the latter, I concede, a pretty easy target on this topic).

Actually, having listened to Ms Mukherjee, what alarms me most is that this presentation is so substandard that it defies belief that she was allowed to present to such a supposedly august body. Her homily is both deeply condescending and contains not a shred of hard evidence that climate change (whatever it is) is a genuine threat. Instead, she makes vacuous assertions such as “climate change….it takes 30 years for something to happen”. Shame on Cambridge that – no doubt because of its own prejudices about climate change – it has abandoned its normal intellectual high standards.

Nonsense like that characterises all the outpourings of Black and his cohorts; but still the BBC ploughs relentlessly on.

A so-called “investigative” scoop in the Daily Telegraph suggesting that the BBC is involved in the organisation of COMplus, an international group that supports climate change alarmism, has also caused ripples in the blogsphere. Richard North and WUWT have followed up. I’m totally in favour of enterprising, sceptical journalism, but I’m afraid on this occasion, the Telegraph is more than a year behind. I filed this story (based on research I carried out after an item by Richard North) on COMplus – whose acolytes include toerags such as former Labour ministers Eliot Morley and Stephen Byers – on March 15, 2010 (with a follow-up amplifying some of the key points on the same day) and gave chapter on verse why it was an insiduous menace in which the BBC was playing a major role. EU Referendum also had this, detailing the full scale of COMplus linkages. What was unearthed back then went far beyond the Telegraph’s latest revelations, and I spelled out one aspect of the way the influence operated:

The scale and modus operandi of this activity beggars belief, and the BBC is in every sense a key component, putting it firmly in bed with the main greenie activists around the world. Look for example, at just one of the COMplus partner organisations, the Television Trust for the Environment (TVE). Naturally, its main goal is to make greenie propaganda (the annual report is a manual about the chilling art). The main outlet is on the BBC World television service; its programmes such as Earth Report reach 172 countries and notch up audiences of 100m plus. Principal funders of TVE include the World Wildlife Fund, Christian Aid, and Oxfam – the usual suspect NGOs who, in their pursuit of climate change nonsense, have become polticial activists whose main aim is to spread the lie that the West is to blame for all the developing world ills. Predictably, TVE is run by one Cheryl Campbell, a former BBC journalist (and greenie fanatic) who was also communications chief of Christian Aid.

Also in on the act is the Reuters Foundation, which, as B-BBC also established in a previous post is the founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. This body is run partly by BBC journalist James Painter, a climate change activist who is a model of his type; Goebbels would have been proud of him.

I don ‘t want to be churlish, and I am pleased that the Telegraph is finally looking at the rat’s nest of establishment money-down-the-drain activity that supports climate change hysteria. But if investigative ace Jason Lewis properly read blogs such as EU Referendum and B-BBC, he’d truly be ahead of the pack. The real scandal here is that the BBC is not only involved in COMplus, but also directly part of a huge related network of climate change activism.

There’s nothing that BBC greenies like better than to make us feel bad. It’s glorious spring weather and it’s a holiday, but David Shukman is at pains to warn us that our enjoyment should be limited…and that our unpleasant polluting habits like driving cars and should be reined in. The eco-bogey this time is smog, that nasty, indeterminate stuff (fully of menacing green-creed stuff like PM10s) that will kill us all even if other greenie threats like rising sea levels don’t. True to form with such scare stories, it’s the perfect occasion for Shukman and his chums to give a platform for eco-warriors like Green Party London Assembly member Jenny Jones (the BBC’s favoured candidate to become next London mayor) to pontificate that London is a very dangerous place (the most polluted in Europe, donchya know)where unwitting victims should be warned that they will enjoy the royal wedding at their peril – all very reminiscent of the crews who were paid during plague years to tour the capital intoning “Unclean, unclean”.

It’s a perfect opportunity, too, for the BBC to act as propaganda conduit for the EU and to tell us triumphantly that draconian new emissions fines will be forcibly extracted soon. How wonderful; not only is the EU going to force us to pay more simply to be members (and we have no choice)- it also has a new wheeze to cane us for daring to use cars.

Actually, for the record, it seems that smog “pollution” is on the decline in the developed world , but of course there is no mention of that in this latest BBC sermon.

Update: I don’t often respond to B-BBC comments; I respect other people’s views and that’s what the site is for. However, Alfonso Paulista is an exception. I’ll ignore – though I loathe it – his gratuitous use of the ‘f’ word (I’ve always believed the English language can be powerful enough without the use of expletives); but the claim that WUWT is “not a credible source of information” typifies greenie arrogance and is a gross misunderstanding of how sceintific debate is conducted. Dozens of experienced academics contribute to the site, and on this occasion, the information about smog levels in the US was based on research by the Scientific Coalition of America, the advisory board of which contains 12 leading experts in directly relevant fields. My point is not that smog is harmless or should be ignored – it’s the one-sided, alarmist way the BBC reports such matters that is in question.

I go to WUWT because it is a credible multiple source of information. But it is inaccurate to say that I do not quote from elsewhere. As for my ‘denialism’ – here intended I presume as a gratuitous insult – I wear my doubt and scepticism about climate alarmism (especially when it is based on propaganda spread by government agencies, the EU, and multi-national power companies) and greenie lies as obstinate badges of honour.

Mr Paulista appears to believe that because the smog story was based on a government warning, the BBC should report it; my training as a journalist – admittedly in a different era – was to scrutinise very carefully any government information or press release. Here it was re-cycled without further question, and the message was slavishly embellished by the inclusion of unsupported Green party propaganda about the levels of pollution in London.

And finally, what evidence do I have that greenie Jenny Jones is the BBC’s favoured candidate for mayor of London? The fawning, almost worshipful tone of the link I provided is one clue. So, too, is the number of times that this charisma-free lady is being quoted on BBC outlets. How did she get her free pass to pontificate? She got 458 votes from Green party members. Well golly gosh.

I had the misfortune to work on a freelance basis a couple of times for Richard Branson. My conclusion? He’s a greedy, publicity-mad, calculating, self-serving, tight-fisted egomaniac (objectionable enough to make even the Adam Smith Institute into anti-capitalists). So I find this cat-spat between Richard Black and said Mr Branson tiresomely engaging. In the one corner, eco-nut Black is busting a gut to tell us that the Branson publicity wheeze to introduce lemurs to his Caribbean tax-dodge Mosquito Island is very, very bad, because it breaches the UN hallowed rules about biodiversity and the import of foreign species. How is it – I sometimes muse – that BBC reporters don’t apply the same lip-curling xenophobic contempt to immigration stories? The irony would be lost on them, I suppose.

On the other hand, our BBC environment campaigner is lost in admiration and reminds us that Mr Branson’s Necker resort is all about the saintly pursuit of eco-tourism. What a fantastic puff…the highest acccolade in greenieland is to be called “eco”. This $2,000-a-night retreat is obviously somewhere Mr Black dearly wants to go. In glowing Technicolor – the dilemmas and conflicts of BBC green-creed journalism.

Call me old-fashioned, but to me, a cat-fight between the zealots at Greenpeace and the creepy control freaks at Facebook over whether the latter has or has not done its best to use green energy in its new server centre ain’t news. It’s simply a greenie bar-room brawl over who has the biggest organ (so to speak), and a massive puff for the corporation’s in-house social networking tool. But to the BBC green gaulatiers, it’s worth a straggering 902 words of coverage, a discussion about the cost of LEDs (yawn!) and the merits of paint-stripping, plus, of course, a lecture from the Facebook boss about how everyone else should follow his holier-than-thou green-creed energy-saving lead. What next? The battle between Nether Piddle and Piddletrenthide Mothers’ Unions about what is the best setting agent for jam?

I think increasingly that a major twist in Britain’s slide into decline began in the 1980s because a number of liberal jurists – who cut their teeth in the so-called siwnging sixties – rose to power and did inestimable damage with their touchy-feely rulings. One such of these lefty lawyers was Lord Scarman, the Law Lord who paved the way for the disastrous Human Rights Act to be incorporated into British law. He also levered his way into a whole range of high-level commissions from 1977 onwards, including the one that looked into the Brixton riots of 1981, the 30th anniversary of which is being celebrated in true BBC-bash-the-police fashion today.

Said Scarman it was who ruled that the riots had been caused by one factor above all – our nasty, racist, stop-and-search police. The good lord did not call the police racists, it’s true, but it was an official opening of the floodgates that culminated in the McPherson ruling in which the Met was branded “institutionally racist”. In the backwash, the police have become increasingly hidebound, touchy-feely and – above all – “multi-cultural”.

I was a BBC reporter when the riots happened, and I was out on the streets of Brixton in the aftermath. I was aware that a lot of people were angry about the police, and in particular, the idea that they had prevented medical help getting to a young man who had been stabbed, the alleged trigger of the mayhem that ensued. But what I also observed was a strong feeling – among the law-abiding – that this one incident had been the pretext for factions within Brixton to go wild and act in a totally uncivilised and unwarranted fashion. Not only that, it was the culmination of such lawlessness. Liberals at the time pointed the finger of blame at the police, of course, but Margaret Thatcher – in the days when we had a true Conservative leader with vision and resolve – was equally adamant that what went on was simply a criminal riot – nothing more, nothing less. She discounted racism and unemployment.

Cue today. A BBC reporter called Ed Davey has written the official BBC version of the events of April 1981, and guess what? According to him, what went in the streets of Brixton was straightforwardly, one-dimensionally the result of crass police racism, and not just that – (a new one on me) they also deployed “torture”. The anniversary is mainly an excuse for him to marshal and give a platform for a raft of anti-police opinion, to warn that despite changes, they must never be allowed to rest on their laurels, and then to rehash yet again the idea that it was police brutality that was responsible for everything that went on in the streets of Brixton on those long ago nights.

There’s a begrudging acceptance at the end by Mr Davey that the police may have changed. But the account itself – overall – is simply an exercise in propaganda. I despair that the police have become so supine in the face of such opinion that they now accept (and told Mr Davey) that effectiveness in their job can be measured by the number of ethnic minority officers they have or how many community meetings they hold. If you doubt this, see also here.

I saw at first hand the horrors of the crimes of Brixton, and I heard the stories of lawlessness that the police then were dealing with. This re-writing of history by the BBC is dangerous, poisonous bunk. It is a national tragedy for which Scarman must take some of the blame. But the BBC are just as guilty – they only ever tell one side of the story.

I am getting bored with this, but Matt Ridley, one of the most respected commentators on sustainability and climate issues, wrote a long and learned piece in the Times of April 5 in which he carefully mapped out why the response to supposed climate change was hugely disproportionate because the tenets of the creed did not stand up to scientific scrutiny. He SPECIFICALLY said this about rising sea levels:

The…paper appeared in the Journal of Coastal Research (salute the web, in passing, for its extraordinary capacity for giving us access to such sources) and it concludes: “Our analyses do not indicate acceleration in sea level in US tide gauge records during the 20th century. Instead, for each time period we consider, the records show small decelerations that are consistent with a number of earlier studies of worldwide-gauge records. The decelerations that we obtain are . . . one to two orders of magnitude less than the +0.07 to +0.28 [millimetres per year squared] accelerations that are required to reach sea levels predicted for 2100 by [three recent mathematical models].”

To translate: sea level is rising more slowly than expected, and the rise is slowing down rather than speeding up. Sea level rise is the greatest potential threat to civilisation posed by climate change because so many of us live near the coast. Yet, at a foot a century and slowing, it is a slight nosebleed. So are most of the other symptoms of climate change, such as Arctic sea ice retreat, in terms of their impact. The rate of increase of temperature (0.6C in 50 years) is not on track to do net harm (which most experts say is 2C) by the end of this century.

I quote this is full because it is directly relevant. RICHARD BLACK MUST HAVE SEEN THIS. But completely undaunted by such inconvenient facts (note that Ridley’s are based on measurements, not models), Mr Black has today filed this pile of sensationalist gutter-press tut warning that massive sea-level rises are imminent. As usual, he worships at the altar of the IPCC (ignoring, too, this very recent post by Donna Laframbois – in future the IPCC should be known as Pachauri’s political poodle); as usual, his alarmist claptrap is based purely on modelling; and as usual, he does not deign to quote anybody who opposes these grant-guzzling buffoons.

The reason I am bored is that such utter bull-necked, crass, mis-reporting is simply beyond belief. I continue to churn out these observations because one day, one day soon, I hope and pray, he and the rest of the alarmist goons at the BBC will be held to account for the poison they are spreading.

Spot what’s missing and what’s included in this BBC account of a damning, slamming report about the inadequacies of windpower. The report, by the John Muir Trust, a conservation organisation (so definitely not in the pockets of big oil or the nasty industrialists that greenies claim are behind anything that goes against their creed) concludes that windpower is not available when it’s most needed, that windfarms routinely generate substantially less than their claimed capacity, and that peak demand for the output from the turbines usually happens when there’s little or no wind.

James Delingpole spells out here what the report actually means to the government’s energy policies. Given that the government is spending billions on these monstrosities, not to mention moulding most of our energy strategy around them, you would think the BBC would treat the report as high priority, a subject that needs just as much scrutiny as – let’s say – spending cuts.

Well, er, no. First, the account of the John Muir report merits just 450 words, compared to the 1,200 words that were deployed earlier in the week when Roger Harrabin bust a gut to tell us why we should not exploit shale gas. Second, there is no quote from anyone involved in the preparation of the report, and only around 20 words from the report itself. Let me remedy this omission by spelling out what Stuart Young, the author of the report, actually said:

“Over the two-year period studied in this report, the metered windfarms in the U.K. consistently generated far less energy than wind proponents claim is typical. The intermittent nature of wind also gives rise to low wind coinciding with high energy demand. Sadly, wind power is not what it’s cracked up to be and cannot contribute greatly to energy security in the UK. It was a surprise to find out just how disappointingly wind turbines perform in a supposedly wind-ridden country like Scotland. Based on the data, for one third of the time wind output is less than 10% of capacity, compared to the 30% that is commonly claimed”.

Rather interesting, and very relevant don’t you think? Not to the BBC reporter, though. In addition, the press release about the report actually very lucidly spells out five main findings. With greenie press releases, Richard Black and his cohorts routinely regurgitate every single word and every nuance. Not so here, only two findings are referred to, and the rest are ignored.

Finally, having thus glossed over most of the report’s findings, a full 125 words (more than a quarter) of the BBC account are taken up by Jenny Hogan, of Scottish Renewables (no axe to grind there, then). By contrast, with pro-green creed reports, Black, Harrabin and company usually completely ignore any idea that there might be opposition to the nonsense being spouted. The said Ms Hogan actually tells us that “no form of electricity worked at 100% capacity, 100% of the time”. The inclusion of such vapid drivel in a so-called serious piece of journalism defies belief. First because the Muir report does not mention anything about 100% delivery, it actually spells out that wind turbines are routinely working at less than the 30% that is claimed, and often only at 10%. The rest of her quote is simply green-creed propaganda and not related in any meaningful way to any of the report’s findings at all.

Overall, therefore, this feature adds up to a clumsily-contrived effort to actually bury the report. The contortions involved are par for the course. This is not journalism – it’s lip service hot air.

Here we go again. Like a rat up a drainpipe, Richard Black gleefully regurgitates the outpourings of research scientists who are being paid – in this case indirectly by the EU – to find climate scare stories. This one is the old chestnut the ozone layer, a favourite of greenies the world over since the 1980s and the topic on which, as this post points out, they cut their teeth in their shamanism and political agitation, the warm-up, as it were, for the global warming and climate change activism that has ensued. Mr Black accepts unquestionably – as usual – claims from these grant-guzzling warmist zealots that there’s a big new hole over the Arctic caused by a lethal mix of nasty industrial chemicals and climate change. The subtext of his every word is triumphant panic: “I told you so”.

There’s a major problem with this theory, as Joseph D’Aleo ably points out in the link above from January. A paper (actually in the warmists’ handbook Nature) has noted that much more research needs doing on this topic before conclusions can be reached, because the processes involved are highly complex and not yet understood. The basic problem is that the Antarctic hole in the ozone layer has not gone away, despite the Montreal Protocol ban on CFCs in 1987. Others have warned that much of the data on which the panic that led to the Montreal Protocol was based was crudely rigged to fan political activism.

That doesn’t stop Mr Black, and nor does he quote a smidgeon of doubt. I don’t pretend to fully understand the science behind this highly complex subject. But I am sure that what Mr Black presents is one-sided, purposeful propaganda. Much is yet to be done before we understand the processes. So why the hell does he present it in the way he does?

Today, we have a corking example of the brazen articulation of the BBC green creed through one of their self-appointed “experts” and prophets. Step forward the totally self-regarding (see here) wildlife programme presenter Chris Packham who is telling us solemnly from his corporation eyrie that we must stop breeding, tax those who do not, buy local food, and Generally See The Error of Our Ways. Packham, in fact, is an interesting specimen of the BBC greenie zealot breed. This is how he describes himself on his website:

A precocious young scientist, swat and nerd in training he studied Kestrels, Shrews and Badgers in his teens and undergraduate days at the Zoology department of Southampton University. He also embraced Punk Rock and played in a band and the DIY ethos and determination to never take ‘no’ for an answer are forcefully retained. Post graduation and a cancelled PhD, (the Badgers were getting a bit much), he began taking still photographs and trained as a wildlife film cameraman.

Well slap my thighs. And with those impeccable credentials in green activism, he’s now taken on a new role at the head of the BBC green crusade. His main beef is that we are breeding too fast, and that leads this “cancelled PhD” expert to a call for sweeping new taxes to encourage those who, exactly as under Chinese state fascism, restrict themselves to one child. His message in morals and life management is coupled with an equally solemn intonation that we must buy and cook ourselves local food (and presumably therefore forget the Africans who rely on food exports to avoid starvation). It’s clear that in Mr Packham’s books, those who don’t are plebeian oiks who don’t know what is good for them.

Mr Packham’s message – passed from on high via the official BBC mouthpiece, the Radio Times – is liberally larded with the usual offical greenie-line claptrap. he says:

‘There’s no point bleating about the future of pandas, polar bears and tigers when we’re not addressing the one single factor that’s putting more pressure on the ecosystem than any other – namely the ever-increasing size of the world’s population.’

I note, however, that Mr Packham’s homily on the evils of mankind and its nasty proclivity to breed, does not mention a BBC unmentionable word – immigration. Actually, Britain’s headlong hurtling towards a population of 70m+ is being caused almost entirely by largely uncontrolled immigration, a tide that the government is powerless to stop because of their worship of the EU.

And beautifully crafted as it may seem (in BBC green propaganda terms), on close inspection, I think Mr Packham’s message may actually be strangely off-message. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I think there is a blatant racist slant in what he saying. Those who are breeding most in the UK are the so-called ethnic population. So his sermon is thus aimed directly and disproportionately at the said ethnic minorities.

I thought that doing that was the biggest sin in the BBC right-on/Human Right manual. It’s probably OK in this case, though, because the need for greenie propaganda, however clumsily formed, out-trumps everything else.

Update: I see my post has attracted comment from a pro-Malthus acolyte. I deliberately did not analyse that part of the Packham message here, because I am so tired of it, but I will leave it to the very capable Willis Eschenbach to do so. Malthusian pessimism is bunk that is at at the heart – as well as a prime driver – of the greenie creed. If you doubt me, try this.