James Delingpole under threat:

@JamesDelingpole Hey scumbag, just remember they hanged Lord Haw Haw. #Haiyan

This post is just something to suck on and give you pause for thought before I look at the BBC’s recent bit of climate propaganda…Is there a Green Hush?

The BBC has maintained a constant narrative that climate scientists are ‘under attack’ from sceptics and therefore such pressure explains the scientist’s refusal to explain their actions or indeed their ‘science’.

The trouble is it is in fact the sceptics who are under the worse attacks, led it might be said by the mainstream media…such as the BBC and the Guardian.

Harrabin admitted he was a climate change campaigner:

I have spent much of the last two decades of my journalistic life warning about the potential dangers of climate change.

Roger Harrabin complaining about the sceptics:

In the absence of any formal inquiry, trial by internet will continue. For better or for worse.

The BBC has been at the forefront of attacks on climate sceptics….and is still at it.  Roger Harrabin is the BBC’s environmental correspondent who has helped orchestrate those attacks.

Here is a Harrabin email  organising the troops, trying to develop a party line on how to react to, how to report, Al Gore’s setback:

In any future reporting of Gore we should be careful not to suggest that the High Court says Gore was wrong on climate…….

We might say something like: “Al Gore whose film was judged by the High Court to have used some debatable science” or “Al Gore whose film was judged in the High Court to be controversial in parts”.
The key is to avoid suggesting that the judge disagreed with the main climate change thesis.

Please pass to presenters because this issue about Gore will arise again.

…and it must be squashed!

Delingpole again is under threat…from the BBC’s very best:

“I’m not sure whether I should shake your hand. I want to punch you.” He sounded jolly cross indeed – and ranted that I was utterly irresponsible and had disseminated lots of lies – though he later apologized to me saying he was jet-lagged and had confused me with Christopher Booker.

Phew..that’s OK then!

Here Harrabin lays the groundwork for what follows:

Over two decades I’ve spoken to mainstream scientists who are sick of hearing their work attacked and their motives questioned. In this world, climate science extends beyond arguments about trend-smoothing to become a matter of life and death for millions of people, according to the mainstream projections on temperatures.

Can there be much doubt that such sentiments lead to this type of thinking from the Green Lobby?:

With high probability GW will cause hundreds of millions of deaths. For this reason I propose that the death penalty is appropriate for influential GW deniers.

Below is a selection of voices articulating what measures should be taken to silence or punish climate sceptics….if you think calls for death might be a little extreme you might ask why the BBC’s favourite ‘caring’ activist, Richard Curtis, also ‘jokingly’ implies that might not be a bad idea in his climate video for the 10:10 campaign.

‘Execute’ Skeptics! Shock Call To Action: ‘At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers’ — ‘Shouldn’t we start punishing them now?’

NASA’s James Hansen has called for trials of climate skeptics in 2008 for “high crimes against humanity.” Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. lashed out at skeptics in 2007, declaring “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors” In 2009, RFK, Jr. also called coal companies “criminal enterprises” and declared CEO’s ‘should be in jail… for all of eternity.”

In June 2009, former Clinton Administration official Joe Romm defended a comment on his Climate Progress website warning skeptics would be strangled in their beds. “An entire generation will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds,” stated the remarks, which Romm defended by calling them “not a threat, but a prediction.”

This video highlights the Green’s campaign of vilification against climate sceptics…by terrorizing children…as someone put it, an ‘eco-snuff movie’.

And…all lovingly written by the man who is is allowed by the BBC to use its massive broadcasting platform to pump out ‘poverty porn’ and when he’s not doing that filling the airwaves with Green hype and misinformation..Richard Curtis:

The Guardian, of course:

There will be blood – watch exclusive of 10:10 campaign’s ‘No Pressure’ film

Here’s a highly explosive short film, written by Richard Curtis, from our friends at the 10:10 climate change campaign

“Clearly we don’t really think they should be blown up, that’s just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?” jokes 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid film maker Franny Armstrong.

Why take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask her: “Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that’s not worth jumping up and down about, I don’t know what is.”

“We ‘killed’ five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change,” she adds.

Jamie Glover, the child-actor who plays the part of Philip and gets blown up, has similarly few qualms: “I was very happy to get blown up to save the world.”

Here the ‘Tallbloke’ reveals the thoughts of another eco-fascist who wants to punish sceptics by killing them, though he thinks freedom of thought is a ‘very valuable thing’!:
The opinions of everyday GW deniers are evidently being driven by influential GW deniers who have a lot to lose if GW is taken seriously, such as executives in transnational oil corporations.
I have always been opposed to the death penalty in all cases, and I have always supported the clear and consistent stand of Amnesty International on this issue. The death penalty is barbaric, racist, expensive, and is often applied by mistake.

Even mass murderers should not be executed, in my opinion.….[but]…….GW deniers fall into a completely different category. They are already causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of future people. We could be speaking of billions, but I am making a conservative estimate.
With high probability GW will cause hundreds of millions of deaths.

For this reason I propose that the death penalty is appropriate for influential GW deniers. More generally, I propose that we limit the death penalty to people whose actions will with a high probability cause millions of future deaths

Does that make me crazy? I don’t think so. I am certainly far less crazy than those people today who are in favor of the death penalty for everyday cases of murder, in my opinion. And like them I have freedom of speech, which is a very valuable thing.

Climate sceptics need ‘treatment:

You must understand climate scepticism isn’t a result of intelligent thought or informed debate, it’s because climate sceptic’s brains are wired wrong:

Psychology provides insight into why people doubt climate change

The authors drew on dozens of studies into people’s reactions to news about climate change, some of which suggest that certain types of people are more likely to find the evidence for human-induced climate change less convincing than others.

More in a similar vein:
David Roberts is a blogger over at the green website Gristmill.   On September 19, 2006, evidently fed up with climate change deniers, Roberts made an interesting suggestion for how to resolve scientific issues. To wit: “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards—some sort of climate Nuremberg.” Roberts is far from alone. As Brendan O’Neill over at spiked points out, “climate change deniers” are now being likened by some activists to Holocaust deniers or even Nazis themselves. Apparently, it is no longer acceptable to question in polite company the hypothesis that humanity is causing catastrophic climate change.

Global warming: the chilling effect on free speech
The demonisation of ‘climate change denial’ is an affront to open and rational debate.
‘David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial’, she wrote. ‘Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence. It is a crime against humanity, after all.’
The message is clear: climate change deniers are scum. Their words are so wicked and dangerous that they must be silenced, or criminalised, or forced beyond the pale alongside those other crackpots who claim there was no Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. Perhaps climate change deniers should even be killed off, hanged like those evil men who were tried Nuremberg-style the first time around.

Of course the BBC is at the forefront of the attacks on climate sceptics, orchestrated by Roger Harrabin who runs the Green’s ‘Black Ops’ misinformation campaign…CMEP.

When the CRU emails were released into the world, after a months silence from the BBC, we finally got a response from Harrabin and Co…a response that was obviously an organised one being exactly the same from several BBC journalists and some of their allies:

Harrabin…The UEA’s CRU is one of the most respected centres in the world and its data set is like others around the world.  Hackers stole private emails that climate sceptics say manipulated the data…if it were true it would be extremely serious but scientists behind it absolutely reject the allegation…I have spoken to a lot of scientists and they are very confident that the science behind the CRU data will be upheld.
Obviously this was a bid to sabotage Copenhagen…millions of dollars are spent by American business trying to discredit AGW and this is the background as to why researchers have behaved in a defensive way.

Some of the e-mails reveal the frustration and annoyance among mainstream climate researchers about the probings they face from critics who relentlessly question their methodology.

But speaking to my source at the CRU, it is also clear that the unit has been dragged down by what it considers to be nit-picking and unreasonable demands for data – and that there is personal animus against their intellectual rivals.

Now this sort of hostility is nothing new in academia – but the revelations come at a sensitive time as the world’s nations gather for the climate meeting in Copenhagen.

In the absence of any formal inquiry, trial by internet will continue. For better or for worse.
Tom Feilden….this shows how difficult it can be to remain objective when scientists are subjected to concerted attacks by those who will do or say anything to win a wider political argument.
The CRU emails are taken out of context….are they the result of  exasperation by someone who has been subjected to constant harassment by an orchestrated group of campaigners?

 
Seems that BBC correspondents and climate alarmists are ‘orchestrating’ a campaign…..the themes are all consistently the same….out of context, stolen, scientists under attack and being forced to be defensive, climate sceptics orchestrate.
Curiously climate misinformation campaigner, Bob Wade from the Grantham Institute at the LSE, uses the same excuses…political motivated theft  and harassed scientists.

In 2008 Harrabin was involved in a controversy after he altered a BBC Online report on climate forecasting report following complaints by an environmentalist and the World Meteorological Organisation. Conservative critics accused Harrabin of caving into pressure.

Blog bully crows over BBC climate victory

Harrabin denies it:

However:

Abbess: “Several networks exist that question whether global warming has peaked, but they contain very few actual scientists, and the scientists that they do contain are not climate scientists so have no expertise in this area.”
Harrabin: “No correction is needed. If the secy-gen of the WMO tells me that global temperatures will decrease, that’s what we will report”
Abbess: “Personally, I think it is highly irresponsible to play into the hands of the sceptics/skeptics who continually promote the idea that ‘global warming finished in 1998′, when that is so patently not true.
“Please do not do a disservice to your readership by leaving the door open to doubt about that.”
Harrabin: “We can’t ignore the fact that sceptics have jumped on the lack of increase since 1998. It is appearing reguarly now in general media. Best to tackle this – and explain it, which is what we have done.”
(still no mention of the WMO…)
Abbess: “When you are on the Tube in London, I expect that occasionally you glance a headline as sometime turns the page, and you thinkg [sic] ‘Really?’ or ‘Wow !’ You don’t read the whole article, you just get the headline.
“It would be better if you did not quote the sceptics. Their voice is heard everywhere, on every channel. [Even the BBC? – astonished ed] They are deliberately obstructing the emergence of the truth. I would ask : please reserve the main BBC Online channel for emerging truth.”
“A lot of people will read the first few paragraphs of what you say, and not read the rest, and (a) Dismiss your writing as it seems you have been manipulated by the sceptics or (b) Jump on it with glee and email their mates and say “See! Global Warming has stopped !”
“I am about to send your comments to others for their contribution, unless you request I do not. They are likely to want to post your comments on forums/fora, so please indicate if you do not want this to happen. You may appear in an unfavourable light because it could be said that you have had your head turned by the sceptics.”
Harrabin: “Have a look in 10 minutes and tell me you are happier. We have changed headline and more.”

Harrabin has a little job on the side, using his BBC job as a platform to launch his lucrative public speaking career:

The  Gordon Poole Agency:   He gets 5k to 10k for talks on environment etc

Many of today’s environment/equity themes became issues of public
            concern following Roger’s reports on Radio 4’s “Today” programme.
            They include climate change, biodiversity, carbon footprints,
            population, over-fishing, green taxation, road pricing, global
            inter-connectedness, 3rd World debt, and many more. He was years
            ahead of the pack in showing how the environment links to energy,
            transport, farming, government aid, foreign policy, planning

Look at this headline from January 2013:

US 2012 heat record ‘partly due to climate change’

And this from 2012:

The last year in the continental US has been the country’s hottest since modern record-keeping began in 1895, say government scientists.

One of the agency’s weather experts suggested climate change was playing a role in the hot temperatures.

However the BBC had to qualify the claim with this spoiler:

However, it was still only the 14th hottest June on record – the hottest being June 1933, during the Dust Bowl period.

So…em…what caused that record heat then in 1933?

But now look at this report:

N America weather: Polar vortex brings record temperatures

Not a single mention of climate change as the whole of North America is engulfed in icy ‘weather’….that’s ‘weather’…not ‘climate change’:

Harrabin gets the hump with Bishop Hill on Twitter as he questions Harrabin’s curious lack of interest in the EXTREME cold weather in the US:

Scientists confirm 2013 as #Australia's hottest year. Follows 2012 as USA's hottest. Oz govt rolls back climate laws. http://t.co/AGwToquVNx

— roger harrabin (@RHarrabin) January 3, 2014

Have you noticed the weather in N America? @RHarrabin

— Bishop Hill (@aDissentient) January 3, 2014

@aDissentient Very chilly in International Falls. When I was in US the previous year people wore shorts in Michigan in Jan. Extremes abound.

— roger harrabin (@RHarrabin) January 3, 2014

They do. One has to be careful about reporting those at one end and not the other. @RHarrabin

— Bishop Hill (@aDissentient) January 3, 2014

Yep…it seems that the massive record cold temperatures are just weather and can be ignored as irrelevant to the ‘debate’ on climate change….surely, logically, if a burning hot 2012 meant the planet is about to fry us all then a similarly extreme cold period must mean we’re in for an ice age…no?

Harrabin of course still trying to push the new ‘extreme weather’ narrative.  Shame even the ‘experts’ don’t agree with him that the present weather is caused by climate change:

…detection of this projected anthropogenic influence on hurricanes should not be expected for a number of decades.

So extreme weather isn’t caused by climate change…not indeed for quite a time into the future..and then only to a minor degree….by the end of the century….

This from believers in the science and the cause of global warming as man’s activities:

Anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause hurricanes globally to be more intense on average (by 2 to 11% according to model projections for an IPCC A1B scenario).

It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane activity.

In short, the historical Atlantic hurricane record does not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming induced long-term increase.

Our regional model projects that Atlantic hurricane and tropical storms are substantially reduced in number, for the average 21st century climate change projected by current models, but have higher rainfall rates, particularly near the storm center.

there is little evidence from current dynamical models that 21st century climate warming will lead to large (~300%) increases in tropical storm numbers, hurricane numbers, or PDI in the Atlantic.

Roger Harrabin….as a BBC, impartial, balanced journalist, he’s a bit of a fraud isn’t he?

I have spent much of the last two decades of my journalistic life warning about the potential dangers of climate change.

and this is interesting from 2007:

• Observations since 1961 show the ocean has been absorbing more than 80% of the heat added to the climate system. Such warming causes seawater to expand, contributing to sea level rise.

So…the oceans have been absorbing heat since 1961….how then can Harrabin use the excuse of the oceans absorbing heat as the explanation for the pause, or ‘slowdown’ as the BBC prefer, in global warming since 1998?

Why no ‘slowdown’ since 1961 then?

Oil company Chevron was fined $19 billion by a court in Ecuador last year….based on ‘evidence’ brought by environmentalists.

The BBC did report this in 2012:

Chevron has in the past said the original ruling against the company was a product of “bribery and fraud”.

However things have moved on…..

One of the financiers of an environmental lawsuit that led to a $19 billion verdict against Chevron Corp. in Ecuador told a judge that he came to regret funding the case once after learning that it may be a fraud.

Burford Capital LLC Chief Executive Officer Christopher Bogart told a Manhattan federal judge yesterday that his firm, which he described as the world’s largest dedicated litigation financing provider, supplied $4 million to the Ecuadorean plaintiffs and later sold the share when it became “deeply concerned about the mounting evidence of fraud and misconduct.”

You would have thought that this would have been a big story for the BBC environmental reporters….what is alleged to be a massive con gouging an oil company for $19 billion using methods that are indeed reminiscent of the Mafia.

Apparently not….a week since the story resurfaced…but no signs of it on the BBC…..they know about it because they link to the above report from ‘Bloomberg’ but seem uninterested themselves in disclosing the fraud and criminal actions of their environmental ‘friends’ as AGW alarmist John Ashton might call them.

Of course the BBC’s Harrabin sent out a memo to his fellow reporters ‘guiding’ them on the preferred way to report the court’s findings that Al Gore’s little propaganda film was bunk, downplaying the fact that it was found to be peddling lies….

‘In any future reporting of Gore we should be careful not to suggest that the High Court says Gore was wrong on climate……We might say something like: “Al Gore whose film was judged by the High Court to have used some debatable science” or “Al Gore whose film was judged in the High Court to be controversial in parts”.  The key is to avoid suggesting that the judge disagreed with the main climate change thesis. ‘

And Harrabin confirms he’s not exactly neutral when it comes to climate change…not ‘reporting’ but ‘warning’ of climate change:

I have spent much of the last two decades of my journalistic life warning about the potential dangers of climate change, but when I first watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth I felt a flutter of unease.

Harrabin’s not shy, once again, when it comes to tryng to blacken the name of anyone opposed to his campaign to warn us of the dangers of climate change:

The man who brought the complaint, Stuart Dimmock, expressed his delight that this “shockumentary” had been exposed.

Mr Dimmock is a member of the “New Party”, apparently funded by a businessman with a strong dislike of environmentalists and drink-drive laws.

When asked on the BBC’s World Tonight programme who had under-written his court costs, he paused long and loud before saying that “someone on the internet” had offered him support.

Here Harrabin admits the film was political but such an approach was ‘forced’ upon Gore as:

The sceptics knew that they did not need to win the battle of climate facts, they just needed to keep doubt alive.

An Inconvenient Truth is a response to that often cynical campaign, attempting to put climate change beyond doubt and remove ambiguity from presentation of the scientific facts.

The film was made as a polemic, not an educational tool for children. The government would have been on safer ground if it had chosen Sir David Attenborough’s climate change programme which passed the BBC’s own anguished impartiality test.

In the event, ministers seized on the slick, powerful and informative Gore movie as a tool to persuade children, and presumably by extension their parents, to worry about the climate.

And this points to the essentially political nature of the film, and the decision to show it in schools.

So there you have Harrabin making excuses for the lies of Al Gore…..and blaming it all on those awful, ignorant, unscientific Sceptics.

Perhaps that’s why they’re slow out of the traps reporting this:

From the New York Post via Bishop Hill:

Chevron’s landmark lawsuit exposes ‘greenmail’

In a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday, one of the highest-profile environmental campaigns of recent decades is about to be exposed as nothing more than a fraud and extortion racket — “greenmail.”

Chevron is suing lawyer Steven Donziger and a number of activist environmental groups in a civil-racketeering suit, claiming that his landmark $19 billion award against the oil company in an Ecuadorean court was the product of a criminal conspiracy.

Ironically, much of the company’s evidence comes from footage shot for “Crude,” an award-winning pro-Donziger documentary that premiered with much publicity at the Sundance Film Festival.

In an eight-year suit in Ecuador, Donziger and his environmentalist allies argued that the oil company had wantonly polluted the pristine Ecuadorean rainforest, creating vast areas of poisoned land and causing huge spikes in cancer and other diseases.

Chevron got a court order for more than 500 hours of footage from “Crude” that never made it into the documentary.

They show Donziger full of contempt for the country he says he cares about, openly boasting about how corrupt Ecuador’s judicial system is and planning to intimidate the judge because “the only language . . . this judge is going to understand is one of pressure, intimidation and humiliation.”

The filmmaker even recorded the lawyers lamenting that no pollution had spread from the original drilling sites and “right now all the reports are saying . . . nothing has spread anywhere at all” and how this lack of pollution was a serious problem.

But the footage also shows Don­ziger figuring he can brazen it out: “If we take our existing evidence on groundwater contamination, extrapolate based on nothing other than our . . . theory . . . then we can do it. And we can get money for it.”

Chevron will produce evidence that Don­ziger forged the signature of American experts on reports claiming widespread pollution — when these same experts had actually filed reports finding no such thing.

And that Donziger and his associates paid the Ecuadorean court’s “independent” expert more than a quarter of a million dollars so they could ghost-write his findings — the report that recommended the massive damages.

Chevron even promises to show that Donziger offered a judge on the case a $500,000 bribe to swing the judgment.

Chevron is arguing that Don­ziger and his environmental allies are no better than the mafia extorting money out of the company based on threats and fraud.

Germany’s Energy Poverty: How Electricity Became a Luxury Good
Germany’s aggressive and reckless expansion of wind and solar power has come with a hefty pricetag for consumers, and the costs often fall disproportionately on the poor. Government advisors are calling for a completely new start.

Bob Ward’s paymaster, Jeremy Grantham (investor in Big Oil) doesn’t like climate sceptics:
The [Sceptic’s] misinformation machine is brilliant. As a propagandist myself , I have nothing but admiration for their propaganda. [Laughs.] But the difference is that we have the facts behind our propaganda.

We can try to bypass them on one level and we try to contest the political power of the sceptics.

They are using money as well as propaganda to influence the politicians, particularly in America.

We also fund old-fashioned style investigative journalism which is dying out in newspapers because the newspaper industry has become incredibly tough.
All we were interested in was the net result of whether it could produce a more effective presentation of the facts.

So that sets the scene…now you know not only who pays Bob Ward but what his mission is…to destroy the Sceptics and deny them an outlet in the Media.

And he goes about it with considerable vigour.
On the 4th of October  the hyperactive climate activist and propagandist Bob Ward  released this into the wild:

Lord Lawson’s campaign group for climate change sceptics, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, has been executing a carefully co-ordinated campaign with its media and political allies to discredit and misrepresent the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

On the 11th of October the BBC’s Roger Harrabin, caught and tamed the feral press release and re-shaped it so that it could introduced into civilised society….but instead of crediting the alarmist spinner Bob Ward with being the author he re-attributes it to the more statesmanlike Lord stern, thus giving it gravitas and authority…he hopes…..
Lord Stern says energy and media firms ‘mislead’

Climate-sceptic newspapers are conspiring with energy firms in a campaign of misinformation on bills, says the former head of the government economic service, Lord Stern.
He says they want to shift blame for rising bills on to green taxes.
It is clear, he says, that the real culprit for bill increases has been the soaring price of gas.

More than likely it is merely a coincidence that ever since the IPCC published it’s AR5 Summary for Policy Makers Ward, of The Grantham Institute, has been attacking the BBC for daring to invite a couple of climate Sceptics to comment….and all of a sudden Harrabin publishes one of his articles, essentially a press release….claiming it is a ‘news report’…attacking the Sceptics.

Ward of course is not the only one criticising the BBC, the passed over scientist, Steve Jones, rescued from obscurity by the BBC, put in his two penneth worth, as did John Ashton, formerly the top climate-change official at the Foreign Office:

“The BBC should now explain how its decision to give a platform to Carter [Sceptic]   serves the public interest. Otherwise, it will be undermining its friends when it needs them most and throwing the scavengers a piece of its own flesh.”

This surely demonstrates not their certainty about the science but that their case is so weak that they need to silence even the few critics that get the slightest bit of airtime.

And what exactly does Ashton mean by…‘it [the BBC] will be undermining its friends when it needs them most ‘?

Is the BBC not so independent as we thought?  Climate scientists and activists are the BBC’s ‘friends’?

On the day the SPM was released I know of only two sceptics who were brought in to 5Live during a whole day devoted to climate change and the IPCC report…one was Andrew Montford, aka Bishop Hill, who was given a couple of minutes on Sheila Fogarty’s show and then Professor Bob Carter on 5Live Drive ….but the tone of the presenter contrasted starklywith the obsequious, deferential treatment pro-AGW scientists or advocates received.

Carter was told that he possessed a ‘dangerous state of mind’ ….and asked ‘Don’t you worry about the future?’.
From that you can see that the presenter was not there to listen and weigh up information, he had already made up his own mind…the world is in danger….and sceptics are ‘deniers’.

Despite the bare minimum of time and the dismissive, accusatory attitude of the BBC towards the critics it seems that that was still too much exposure for Ward to accept….despite himself being a bit of a climate sceptic…….

“We don’t really know yet what the explanation is for the slowdown,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of economics.

Harrabin himself isn’t well disposed towards climate sceptics who upset the applecart:

The BBC’s Roger Harrabin — one of the Beeb’s army of die-hard Warmists — has noticed too. ‘What’s a know-nothing like Delingpole doing on a science panel?’ he has asked the organisers, as if this simple fact alone is enough to render the entire conference invalid. (Moments later, when I introduce myself, he says he’s quite tempted to punch me because of all the lies and disinformation I put out — though he later apologises and puts it down to jet lag.)

Let’s have a closer look at Ward’s attitude towards Sceptics, here dismissing a well known scientist as irrelevant to the debate:

Bob Ward Bob Ward ?@ret_ward .@mehdirhasan But why have you made Lindzen the focus of the debate? He no longer contributes to the science and is irrelevant to policy.

However:

Richard Lindzen – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Richard Siegmund Lindzen (born February 8, 1940) is an American atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen is known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books.[1] He was a lead author of Chapter 7, ‘Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,’ of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change.

Here is Ward attacking Bob Carter after his appearance on the BBC:

Bob Ward, of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, based at the London School of Economics, said: “The BBC’s coverage of the new climate-change report was variable, with some excellent reporting by its science and environment correspondents, but some very poor contributions from presenter-led programmes.
“In particular, the World At One on Friday provided a stunning display of false balance when it devoted less airtime to IPCC scientists than it did to Bob Carter, a sceptic who is funded by a free-market lobby group in the US, the Heartland Institute. Carter was allowed to make a number of inaccurate and misleading statements unchallenged.”

And in the Guardian fellow alarmist John Ashton keeps up the attack:

The BBC has been criticised for its coverage of the most comprehensive scientific study on global warming yet published. Prominent climate experts have accused the corporation of bias towards “climate sceptics” at the expense of mainstream scientists.
According to John Ashton, formerly the top climate-change official at the Foreign Office, the BBC’s coverage of last week’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was “a betrayal of the editorial professionalism on which the BBC’s reputation has been built over generations”.
Writing in the Guardian on Wednesday, he says the BBC had given “the appearance of scientific authority to those with no supporting credentials”.

Ward and Co try to paint Carter as a non-scientist…in fact he was a practising geologist……unlike Bob Ward whose scientific credentials are that he has a …geology degree….but he has not actually worked as a scientist…and is definitely not a ‘climate scientist’, he has worked in PR for most of his career…….

Bob joined the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) from Risk Management Solutions, where he was Director of Public Policy.
He also worked at the Royal Society, the UK national academy of science, for eight years, until October 2006. His responsibilities there included leading the media relations team.
He has also worked as a freelance science writer and journalist.
Bob has a first degree in geology and an unfinished PhD thesis on palaeopiezometry.
He is a Fellow of the Geological Society.

Ward’s other line of attack is to try and discredit the Sceptics by claiming they are funded by ‘Big Oil’ or some such vested interest….needless to say he doesn‘t apply the same critical criteria to people such as himself pushing the climate hoax.….

Here he is in the Guardian again attacking Carter…

The BBC jumped at the chance and Carter and Singer were soon touring the studios at Broadcasting House giving back-to-back interviews. Radio 4’s The World At One even gave Carter more airtime than the IPCC.
BBC editors appeared to be unaware that Carter and Singer are paid by the Heartland Institute

The BBC are ‘unaware carter was paid by the Heartland Institute’….really?

Let’s see if Bobby is right, this is by the BBC‘s Harrabin:
For anyone who doesn’t spend every week up to their waists in the ordure of climate politics, the Heartland Institute is a US-based organisation with an overtly libertarian bent to its work.
To itself, it’s a think-tank; to critics, it’s a lobby group, paid to oppose regulation on a number of fronts – including climate change.
The institute says it retains the services of several “high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message”.
These include the US-based Craig Idso ($11,600 per month) and Fred Singer ($5,000 per month plus expenses), and Australian Bob Carter ($1,667 per month).
Heartland is not unique. We still have no idea, two years after its formation, of who funds the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) in the UK, nor what the funders’ motives are.
Who’s raising a flag now for openness in the lobbies of climate change debate?

And this:
More from Heartland
May 18, 2010 BBC Climate: other
Another Roger Harrabin report from the Heartland Conference, this time looking at the question of whether sceptics are all right-wingers.

If who finances who is so important you might be justified in asking who funds Bob Ward?  Bob Ward doesn’t want you to ask that though…because the answer ain’t pretty…it’s Big Oil…….

Ward works for the Grantham Research Institute, a “research department” at the London School of Economics (LSE)funded by an American hedge-funder called Jeremy Grantham and headed by the economist and former treasury official Lord Stern.

This is what Jeremy Grantham, Bob‘s ultimate boss and paymaster said about how he makes money:
Jeremy Grantham on how to feed the world and why he invests in oil
On whether there’s any conflict in him (via GMO and/or his foundation) investing in oil and gas companies?

The first point is that each fund we have at GMO – maybe 80 or so – is run by its own team. I don’t think that money management can easily have too many rules coming down from the top. Our first responsibility is to make money for our clients….and nothing is more important than oil.

His first responsibility?…not to the Planet…but to make money.

How big is Grantham’s company GMO?

GMO is a global investment management firm committed to providing sophisticated clients with superior asset management solutions and services. Investment management is our only business. As of June 30, 2013, we managed $108 billion in client assets, $50 billion of which was in asset allocation strategies.

How much cash does it provide for climate activism?

As a Sunday Times article revealed recently:
So concerned is Grantham, 70, over this issue that he has set up the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, endowed with £165m of his own money, to fund environmental research and campaigns. From it he is funding the LSE and Imperial donations, and other grants to American groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund.

Impartial?

Taking its lead from Lord Stern’s (tragically flawed) report, it is  committed to the ideological position that man-made “Climate Change” represents a major, immediate threat which must be dealt with urgently through costly intervention. There is not much tolerance for “climate scepticism”, let alone “denial” at the Grantham Institute.

But Ward not only works for the Grantham Institute he also, and so does Lord Stern, work at the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy…which is essentially yet another climate change propaganda outfit:

Nicholas Stern – Chair of CCCEP and Management Board
Bob Ward – Policy and Communications Director

Our mission is to advance public and private action on climate change through rigorous, innovative research into economics and policy

The Centre is hosted jointly by the University of Leeds and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and is chaired by Professor Lord Stern of Brentford.

It is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

The ESRC tells us:
We are a non-departmental public body (NDPB) established by Royal Charter in 1965 and receive most of our funding through the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

Funded by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills…government then…the same government that is trying to flog us wind farms and carbon taxes?

And of course government is providing funds elsewhere to drive the ‘consensus’:

Bishop Hill, which in turn came from Not A Lot Of People Know That:
I can…reveal that, during the financial year 2009/10 (the most recent for which the data is available), Research Council spending on “climate change research and training” amounted to £234 million. This analysis was provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on behalf of Research Councils UK (RCUK).

The government could of course think such messages could be easier if we, the Public, were more amenable, more in tune with the message….perhaps the ESRC could help…via Bob Ward & Co:
Influencing behaviour and informing interventions
We need better understanding of the behaviour of people, social groups and organisations, and how to influence them. ESRC-funded research throws light on the underlying reasons for different behaviours and therefore how people and groups might respond to different interventions. This could help rethink the delivery of public services, influence consumer and corporate behaviour, and enhance wellbeing.

How to understand behaviour and risks at multiple levels and a variety of contexts?

The ESRC shapes and defines society’s sense of itself, guides the creation of new social knowledge and collaborates with those who make policy and executive decisions in government, business and the third sector.

But of course there is that other big institution that can be relied upon to push the right message:
The BBC foists on us a skewed version of reality
The news media are engaged in a political argument about whether the purpose of journalism is to report the world as it is or to purvey an idealised view
So this is where the bigger question comes in: what is the dissemination of news for? For the BBC – by which I mean, for those who decide these things at the corporation – there is little doubt that the function of news broadcasting is to enlighten the public. I use that word advisedly, in its specialised sense, meaning not simply to inform but to “free from prejudice and superstition”.
BBC news output is specifically designed to counter what it sees as ignorance and popular prejudices. Its coverage of issues in which it believes such prejudices to be rife – immigration, for example – is intended to be instructional and, specifically corrective of what its managers think of, and describe openly in conversation, as the influence of the “Right-wing press”.
The unabashed dissemination of this highly political official viewpoint is justified on the grounds that it is needed to balance the influence of scurrilous newspapers.

A perfect example of that is this recent BBC ‘report’ that pumps up the alarmism by saying El Nino will be intensified by global warming (If there is any)

WUWT begs to differ:

Will Global Warming Increase the Intensity of El Niño?

As well as funding by the ESCR the CCCEP is also funded by a large insurance company, who might obviously have a vested interest in creating some alarm about climate change:

‘Generous support for the Centre’s work is also provided by Munich Re’

The Munich Re programme
Evaluating the economics of climate risks and opportunities in the insurance sector
This research programme is funded by Munich Re and benefits from research collaborations across the industry and public sectors. It is a comprehensive research programme that focuses on the assessment of the risks from climate change, and on the appropriate responses, to inform decision making in the private and public sectors.

Now surely just a coincidence but Bob Ward used to work in the insurance industry:

Director of Global Science Networks at global risk insurance firm RMS.
While Ward’s employment is ostensibly with the Grantham, he also doubles up as PR man for the CCCEP. The CCCEP is funded jointly by the UK’s research councils and risk insurance giants Munich Re.
The close association between climate alarmists and the insurance industry is no less natural than that between ‘sceptics’ and Exxon. Just as Exxon might be expected to play down the threat of climate change when it suits them, Munich Re can be relied upon to overstate the dangers. Fear of risk is to the insurance industry what oil is to Exxon.

The difference is that Bob Ward doesn’t write letters of complaint to Munich Re insurers or articles for the Guardian when Munich Re disseminates ‘misleading and inaccurate information about climate change’ – which they surely do.

And Ward writes papers about climate and insurance risk:

Herweijer, C., Ranger, N., and Ward, R.E.T. July 2009. Adaptation to climate change: threats and opportunities for the insurance industry. The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance: issues and practice, v.34 pp.360-380.

Ward, R.E.T., Herweijer, C., Patmore, N., and Muir-Wood, R. January 2008. The role of insurers in promoting adaptation to the impacts of climate change. The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance: Issues and Practice, v.33, pp.133-139.

Ward, R.E.T., Muir-Wood, R., and Grossi, P. 2007. Flood risk in New Orleans: implications for future management. Geophysical Research Abstracts, v.9, 04542.

Oh and look….more ‘vested interests’ at the Grantham Institute:
Glancing down the profiles of Grantham’s management team, we spot another corporate Green to have found a new home among academic foliage. The last time we looked, Sam Fankhauser was Managing Director of IDEAcarbon:
IDEAcarbon is an independent and professional provider of ratings, research and strategic advice on carbon finance. Our services are designed to provide leading financial institutions, corporations, governments, traders and developers with unbiased intelligence and analysis of the factors that affect the pricing of carbon market assets.
IDEAcarbon’s parent company is IDEAglobal, where Stern is Vice President.

Ward, the geology graduate turned PR spinner, continues his attack on the BBC…apparently its presenters, not being scientists, can’t possibly understand what the issues are….unlike himself of course…..

Here he launches into Andrew Neil:
He [Andrew Neil] falsely claimed that Professor Hans von Storch, when discussing the recent slowdown in the rise of global surface temperature in an interview with a German newspaper, indicated that “if there is a 20 year plateau, then we’ll need to have a fundamental re-examination of climate change policy, not to abandon it, but to wonder whether we should be doing it so quickly and in the way we’re doing it”. In fact, Professor von Storch did not make any such statement.

Unfortunately Storch did make such a claim….this illustrates perfectly the arrogance of people like Ward….who claims non-scientists can’t possibly understand the science….but then of course how do politicians make decisions based upon that science if they don’t understand the concepts?
Bishop Hill suggests that it isn’t necessarily the politicians who are at fault…but those scientists who give the advice:
On advice to government
Reasonable people might wonder why the Government Chief Scientific Adviser is basing his briefing of the Cabinet on data that is known to be erroneous.

Is Ward saying we are implementing billions of pounds worth of climate programmes on a politician’s hunch…or is the truth that scientists are misleading the politicians…some politicians happy of course to be led by the nose as they have vested interests in green technology?

Here von Storch is interviewed by Der Spiegel:

Climate experts have long predicted that temperatures would rise in parallel with greenhouse gas emissions. But, for 15 years, they haven’t. In a SPIEGEL interview, meteorologist Hans von Storch discusses how this “puzzle” might force scientists to alter what could be “fundamentally wrong” models.

Storch: I’m not aware of any studies showing that floods happen more often today than in the past. I also just attended a hydrologists’ conference in Koblenz, and none of the scientists there described such a finding…..since there has been only moderate global warming so far, climate change shouldn’t be playing a major role in any case yet. [Compare with Met Office’s Peter Stott’s claim that the risk of flooding has doubled due to climate change (despite there being no apparent trend in rainfall statistics)]

Storch: Unfortunately, some scientists behave like preachers, delivering sermons to people. What this approach ignores is the fact that there are many threats in our world that must be weighed against one another. If I’m driving my car and find myself speeding toward an obstacle, I can’t simple yank the wheel to the side without first checking to see if I’ll instead be driving straight into a crowd of people. Climate researchers cannot and should not take this process of weighing different factors out of the hands of politics and society.

Storch: If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.

SPIEGEL: That sounds quite embarrassing for your profession, if you have to go back and adjust your models to fit with reality…

Storch: Why? That’s how the process of scientific discovery works. There is no last word in research, and that includes climate research. It’s never the truth that we offer, but only our best possible approximation of reality. But that often gets forgotten in the way the public perceives and describes our work.

SPIEGEL: Does this throw the entire theory of global warming into doubt?
Storch: I don’t believe so. We still have compelling evidence of a man-made greenhouse effect. There is very little doubt about it. But if global warming continues to stagnate, doubts will obviously grow stronger.

If the models are wrong, then the science is wrong and the politics based upon that science is wrong….and Ward is wrong.

So that’s Bob Ward….not a scientist but a peddler of a very one sided view of the world, funded ironically by ‘Big Oil’ and his boss’s huge financial empire built on exploiting the planet’s resources.

He attacks the Sceptics for being funded by business and yet he is himself funded by big business, not to mention by government.  He criticises them for being non-scientists…when in fact often they are scientists…whilst Ward himself is not.  He criticises them for not having the facts…but then the facts seem to elude him also.

In fact all these criticisms are the very same ones that Harrabin frequently raises about the Sceptics….the very Sceptics he has also tried to silence and smear.

Any coincidence that Ward seemed to be a favourite source of quotes for Richard Black….has Harrabin ‘inherited’ him?

Perhaps Ward was doing Harrabin and the BBC a ‘favour’ by claiming the BBC were giving too much airtime to the Sceptics….maybe the whole charade was designed merely to suggest that the BBC was ‘impartial’, listening to all sides to blunt the attacks on the BBC for having decided that the ‘science was settled‘ and was no more than a climate propagandist.

Whatever, Harrabin and Ward seemed to have kissed and made up…which is why Ward’s (or  Lord Stern’s if you prefer) message trying to damn Sceptics was so readily given such prominence by Harrabin….a ‘more effective presentation of the ‘facts”?

Andrew Neil, that well known climate scientist, has stirred up a hornet’s nest by daring to question government policy on climate…based as it is on ever increasing temperatures….but there are obvious doubts about that now due to the long hiatus in rising temperatures:

The Sunday Politics interview with Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey on July 14 provoked widespread reaction in the twittersphere and elsewhere, which was only to be expected given the interview was about the latest developments in global warming and the implications for government policy.

The main purpose of the interview was to establish if the government thought the recent and continuing pause in global temperatures meant it should re-think its policies in response to global warming.

This is a vital policy issue since the strategy of this government and the previous Labour government to decarbonise the economy involves multi-billion pound spending decisions, paid for by consumers and taxpayers, which might not have been taken (at least to the same degree or with the same haste) if global warming was not quite the imminent threat it has been depicted.

Our focus was on a global temperature plateau which could be a challenge to the forecasts of climate models which have determined government policy. The plateau could continue for the foreseeable future or melt away as temperatures resume their upward trajectory.

What was possibly even more interesting was this:

It might also be argued that challenging interviews on matters in which there is an overwhelming consensus in Westminster – but not necessarily among voters who pay for both the licence fee and the government’s energy policies – is a particularly legitimate purpose of public-service broadcasting.

So it is the job of public-service broadcasters to challenge the overwhelming consensus?

You could have fooled me and many others who thought the BBC had decided that the science was ‘settled’ and that no more questions needed to be asked…full ahead with green taxes and hair shirts.

I guess when you take money from organisations that promote man made global warming your journalism might be compromised.

And the fact that BBC journalists have few scientific qualifications between them and yet feel compelled to denounce ‘mere bloggers’ as unqualified to comment on climate change…many of whom are actually far  more scientifically qualified that the BBC journalists.