Dear Richard Black,
>> MONDAY, JANUARY 03, 2011
Subject: your New Year message I know sharks are very, very important to you and I concur with you that it is not right that we still treat them so cruelly and wastefully. It is strange - to me at least - that you write about this topic without mentioning that the EU's common fisheries policy is the world's most damaging rat's nest of rules affecting fish stocks and sea conservation. But no matter, I know that the BBC rather likes the EU and regularly worships at its altar, so I understand why you brush that under the carpet and point the finger of blame in other directions. May I respectfully raise other queries about your New Year Encyclical on the environment? First I wonder why you dismiss so disdainfully the concerns ofSpanglerboy and JackHughes that in your environment beat, you are still a little obsessed with climate change and "emissions"? I know that like me, you are not a scientist, but there is accumulating evidence that is not hard to find that perhaps the AGW curve is not as uninterrupted as you have regularly made out. The Arctic Sea ice has not gone (in fact, according to the BBC's own report, normally open sea lanes in the Arctic are, as I write,somewhat clogged by ice), ski resorts are not without snow, there is record snow, even in Japan, and, oh yes, despite firm predictions by the Met office back in 2000 that snow would become a rare event, we have had three consecutive winters of arctic temperatures far removed from what the Met Office's £33m supercomputer predicted and we have just experienced the coldest UK December in 120 years. Some are calling for an inquiry, but I know you and your BBC colleagues don't think that such views are important enough to report. I could go on, but I don't want to give you too much to digest. I know you probably view all this as just "weather" and further evidence that AGW is about to kill us all, but I still think that - given the highly influential save-the-world role that you believe you have - you might just think for one moment that the BBC-supported "consensus" on this topic is looking increasingly creaky, and you might at least occasionally break the habits of a lifetime and mention maybe a smidgeon of the rather interesting and persuasive evidence that does not agree with your own views. After all, you do claim to be a journalist. When I was trained by the BBC, in what is now the Langham Hotel in a very different era, we were taught to cast our net more widely than speaking to people who agreed with us. Instead, you come out with strangely confrontational platitudes like this:
I'm still seriously writing about global warming - do you seriously doing (sic, I think he missed out "think") otherwise is an option, given the importance of the issue?I'm writing this because - with the greatest respect - this seems to me to be prima facie evidence that you yourself seem to be elephantinely incapable of absorbing any other perspectives but those of greenie change-the-world activism. Could 2011 be the year that you change? Yours sincerely, Robin Horbury (the man you sought to sue)
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