The way the BBC totally distorts the true scientific opinion on
Global Warming (or Climate Change as they now equally falsely call
it) is a sickening distortion of the truth. Despite the world's
scientists (apart from the few clustered round Al Gore) having long
since exposed the flaws, the lack of logic and the deliberately
misleading computer programs used. the debased BBC merely grits its
teeth and shouts more shrilly that white is black. How can we any
longer allow this smug bunch of liars to pump propaganda on this and
other issues into our homes? It's day is done. Scrap it.
xxxxxxxxxxxx cs
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SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 1.2.09
BBC abandons 'impartiality' on warming
Again and again the BBC has been eager to promote every new scare
raised by the advocates of man-made global warming, says Christopher
Booker.
By Christopher Booker

The iconic beast of global warming, as seen in the Thames Photo: PA
Londoners might have been startled last Monday to see a giant mock-up
of a polar bear on an iceberg, floating on the Thames outside the
Palace of Westminster. They might not have been so surprised to
learn, first, that this was a global warming propaganda stunt and,
second, that the television company behind it is part-owned by the BBC.
It was ironic that, last week, while the BBC was refusing to show an
appeal for aid to the victims of Israeli bombing in Gaza, on the
grounds that this might breach its charter obligation to be
impartial, a rather less publicised row was raging over Newsnight's
doctoring of film of President Obama's inaugural speech, which was
used to support yet another of its items promoting the warming scare.
Clips from the speech were spliced together to convey a considerably
stronger impression of what Obama had said on global warming than his
very careful wording justified. While that may have been
unprofessional enough, the rest of the item, by Newsnight's science
editor, Susan Watts, was even more bizarre. It was no more than a
paean of gratitude that we now at last have a president prepared to
listen to the "science" on climate change, after the dark age of
religious obscurantism personified by President Bush. [The trouble
is, the BBC is wrong and as so often Bush was right -cs]
At last, after years when they could not speak openly on this
subject, chirped Ms Watts, "scientists calculate that President Obama
has just four years to save the world". She failed to explain
(although she was later forced to clarify this on her blog) that the
only scientist to say anything so silly was Dr James Hansen of Nasa's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose utterances on climate
change have lately become so wild and extreme that they have made him
a laughing stock. (He was last week publicly disowned by his former
supervisor Dr John Theon, who said that Hansen's unscientific claims
had been an embarrassment to Nasa ever since he joined Al Gore in
whipping up panic over global warming back in 1988.)
In all this, however, Newsnight only reflected the shameless way in
which the BBC makes not the slightest attempt to provide impartial
coverage of this issue. As its editorial guidelines make clear,
"mainstream science" is now so overwhelmingly agreed on global
warming that the BBC sees no reason to give balancing coverage to the
views of a minority of "sceptics"; and examples are now legion of how
it loses no opportunity to propagandise for the cause.
One of the madder instances was the 15 hours of airtime it gave in
2007 to the dreary Live Earth pop concert at Wembley, which was no
more than a commercial for the views of Al Gore. Another was last
year's lavish Climate Wars series, designed by the BBC's science team
as an answer to Channel Four's The Great Global Warming Swindle.
Nothing was more laughable than the sequence showing a huge poster of
the infamous "hockey stick" temperature graph being driven round
London on the back of a lorry, without any mention of the expert
studies which have made the "hockey stick" one of the most
comprehensively discredited artefacts in the history of science.
Again and again the BBC has been eager to promote every new scare
raised by the advocates of man-made global warming. As late as August
28 this year it was still predicting that Arctic ice might soon
disappear, just as this winter' s refreezing was about to take ice-
cover back to a point it was at 30 years ago. Inevitably it fell for
that "iconic" picture of two polar bears standing, seemingly forlorn,
on a melting ice floe, despite the photographer'
had nothing to do with global warming and that she had only wanted to
capture a dramatic snap of wind-sculpted ice.
The BBC couldn't wait to publicise the recent study claiming that
Antarctica, far from getting colder over the past 50 years as all the
evidence suggests, has in fact been warming. It didn't, of course,
explain that the new study is based on a computer model run by the
creator of the "hockey stick", which, in the absence of hard data,
allows for inspired guesswork – what the study's authors call
"sparse data infilling".
It was typical that, when that plastic polar bear was floated up the
Thames last week, the BBC's favourite naturalist, Sir David
Attenborough, should be wheeled on to claim that, although he once
been a "sceptic" on global warming (a fact we had all somehow
missed), he now found the "science" entirely convincing.
In terms of journalistic professionalism, the sad thing about all
this is that the debate about global warming has now entered a
fascinating new stage. Honest coverage of all the new information
coming to light would be vastly more interesting to the BBC's
audience than the vapid propaganda which is all they get.
But inevitably this also exposes the hollowness of all those claims
that the BBC still has a duty to remain "impartial", which on this
issue is belied by own guidelines. As a particularly glaring example
of how the BBC has, on so many issues, abandoned any pretence of
impartiality, this can only provide more ammunition to those who
argue that it no longer deserves that compulsory licence fee.
Sunday, 1 February 2009
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