The Awarmist BBC and “Impartiality”

Christopher Booker’s comprehensive report, The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal (published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and available hence), is essential reading, but I shall quote only from the foreword, by Sir Antony Jay:

It would be astonishing if the BBC did not have its own orthodoxy.  It has been around for 85 years, recruiting bright graduates, mostly with arts degrees, and deeply involved in current affairs issues and news reporting.  And of course for all that time it has been supported by public money.  One result of this has been an implicit belief in government funding and government regulation.  Another is a remarkable lack of interest in industry and a deep hostility to business and commerce.
At this point I have to declare an interest, or at least admit to previous.  I joined BBC television, my first job after university and National Service, in 1955, six months before the start of commercial television, and stayed for nine years as trainee, producer, editor and finally head of a production department.  I absorbed and expressed all the accepted BBC attitudes: hostility to, or at least suspicion of, America, monarchy, government, capitalism, empire, banking and the defence establishment, and in favour of the Health Service, state welfare, the social sciences, the environment and state education.  But perhaps our most powerful antagonism was directed at advertising.  This is not surprising; commercial television was the biggest threat the BBC had ever had to face. The idea that television should be financed by businessmen promoting their products for profit created in us an almost spiritual revulsion. And when our colleagues, who we had thought were good BBC men, left to join commercial broadcasters, they became pariahs. We could hardly bring ourselves to speak to them again.  They had not just gone to join a rival company; they had sinned against the true faith, they were traitors, deserters, heretics.
This deep hostility to people and organisations who made and sold things was not of course exclusive to the BBC.  It permeated a lot of upper middle class English society (and has not vanished yet).  But it was wider and deeper in the BBC than anywhere else, and it is still very much a part of the BBC ethos.  Very few of the BBC producers and executives have any real experience of the business world, and as so often happens, this ignorance, far from giving rise to doubt, increases their certainty.
We were masters of the techniques of promoting our point of view under the cloak of impartiality.  The simplest was to hold a discussion between a fluent and persuasive proponent of the view you favoured, and a humourless bigot representing the other side.  With a big story, like shale gas for example, you would choose the aspect where your case was strongest: the dangers of subsidence and water pollution, say, rather than the transformation of Britain’s energy supplies and the abandonment of wind farms and nuclear power stations.  And you could have a ‘balanced’ summary with the view you favoured coming last: not “the opposition claim that this will just make the rich richer, but the government point out that it will create 10,000 new jobs” but “the government claim it will create 10,000 new jobs, but the opposition point out that it will just make the rich richer.”  It is the last thought that stays in the mind.  It is curiously satisfying to find all these techniques still being regularly used forty seven years after I left the BBC.
The issue of man-made global warming could have been designed for the BBC.  On the one side are the industrialists, the businessmen, the giant corporations and the bankers (or at least those who are not receiving generous grants, subsidies and contracts from their government for climate-related projects such as wind farms or electric cars), on the other the environmentalists, the opponents of commercial expansion and industrial growth.  Guessing which side the BBC will be on is a no-brainer, but no one has documented it in such meticulous detail as Christopher Booker.  His case is unanswerable.  The costs to Britain of trying to combat global warming are horrifying, and the BBC’s role in promoting the alarmist cause is, quite simply, shameful.  [pp. 5-6]

Climategate II: Three Different Responses

The Telegraph’s Christopher Booker, in “Is the global warming scare the greatest delusion in history?”, rightly explains that the modern, awarmist cult of CAGW is suicidally irrational:

While our Government remains trapped in its green dreamworld, similar horror stories pile up on every side, from that UBS report on the astronomically costly fiasco of the EU’s carbon-trading scheme, to our own Government’s “carbon floor price”, in effect a tax on CO₂ emissions rising yearly from 2013. This alone will eventually be enough to double the cost of our electricity, and drive a further swathe of what remains of UK industry abroad, because we are the only country in the world to have devised something so idiotic.

All this madness ultimately rests on a blind faith in the threat of man-made global warming, which no one has done more to promote than the scientists whose private emails were again last week leaked onto the internet.

It is still not generally appreciated that the significance of these Climategate emails is that their authors, such as Michael Mann, are no ordinary scientists: they are a little group of fanatical insiders who have, for years, done more than anyone else to drive the warming scare, through their influence at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  And what is most striking about the picture that emerges from these emails is just how questionable the work of these men appears.

We see how they torture the evidence to support their theory—even to the point where some of them seem to lose faith in the story they are trying to tell.  And we also see how rattled they were as soon as their work was challenged by expert outsiders such as Steve McIntyre, the mathematician who exposed the methods used to create Mann’s “hockey stick” temperature graph, which the IPCC had made Exhibit A for their theory.

Again and again we see them trying to defend the indefensible, giving vent to wild personal abuse of the enemies of what they call their “cause”, and stopping at nothing to keep their critics’ evidence out of IPCC reports and scientific journals, and prevent dissenting views from getting media attention.

This is no longer science worthy of the name.

The Australian, in an editorial, titled “Rational approach on climate” explains that the paper still accepts—without bothering to explain why it accepts—the completely discredited awarmist, alleged consensus—without realising that consensus is not science—whilst “stringently” analysing those bogus claims:

This newspaper always supports a rational approach to climate science, accepting the scientific consensus that carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet, and supporting market mechanisms to reduce emissions—while favouring stringent analysis of alarmist claims.

The Age, in denial that CAGW has been completely discredited, and taking a little time out from trying to scare its few remaining readers that the world must be doomed, and soon to be destroyed by more or fewer droughts and floods, more or fewer storms, and the loss of the last remaining wild herds of lovely unicorns, chooses to rely, in “Climatologist speaks out after new leak”, on the self-interested analysis of Prof. Phil Jones, a corrupt, incompetent scamming pseudo-scientist who (inter alia) fails to understand basic statistical methods:

The British climatologist ensnared in a major new email leak has taken his case to the public, arguing that he and his colleagues' comments have again been taken out of context.

UPDATE I:  see Shub Niggurath’s “Climategate II: Contradictions and Hypocrisy”.

UPDATE II:  in comments at Bishop Hill, Richard Drake provides useful definitions:

a) To take an email in context – to ignore it.

b) To take an email fully in its context – never to have heard of it.

c) To take an email out of context – to read it.

d) To take an email grossly and willfully out of context – to tell someone else about it.

UPDATE III (18 December):  see Cristopher Booker’s “The BBC’s myth makers serve up a double helping of propaganda”.

What a Shame; What a Price

Christopher Booker, of The Sunday Telegraph, explains, in “The BBC’s hidden ‘warmist’ agenda is rapidly unravelling”, that the biassed BBC still sticks with its awarmist agenda even when slightly more honest proselytisers of AGW are conceding that they have insufficient data to support their psuedo-scientific beliefs:

Since 2006, the BBC has relentlessly promoted the global warming orthodoxy as a pressure group in its own right.  In covering the latest twists of this story on his blog, Montford cites another odd BBC programme, Earth Reporters: Sea Change, funded by Unesco, which was like an adulatory commercial for the scientists who push alarm about the impact of global warming on the oceans, via the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The scientific adviser for the programme was the same Dr Smith who organised that 2006 seminar, and whose website lists a string of other BBC programmes he has worked on.

The irony is, however, that just as the BBC adopted its new hard line on climate change, in the real world the story was beginning to shift.  Ever more searching questions have come to be asked about the supposed “consensus” on man-made warming, and the BBC’s coverage has come to look ever more one-sidedly absurd.

Last week, even Richard Black, another BBC proselytiser for man-made warming, was gloomily having to reveal the conclusion of a new IPCC report: that, over the next few decades, “climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variabilty”.  In plain English, that means the great scare story is over.  What a shame.  But at what a price.

UPDATE I (21 November):  see also Bishop Hill’s “Mail on Sunday on the Beeb”; UPDATE II (22 November), but the article (linked therein) by David Rose has been removed.  UPDATE III (22 November):  the article has been restored—but, just in case, here it is:

BBC’s Mr Climate Change accepted £15,000 in grants from university rocked by global warming scandal

A senior BBC journalist accepted £15,000 in grants from the university at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ scandal—and later went on to cover the story without declaring an interest to viewers.

Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s ‘environment analyst’, used the money from the University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research to fund an ‘ad hoc’ partnership he ran with a friend.

Mr Harrabin, an influential figure who both broadcasts and advises other BBC journalists, later reported extensively about Climategate.  The scandal erupted two years ago when emails were leaked from the Tyndall Centre’s sister department, the Climatic Research Unit at the same university.

The leaks left the scientific community in disarray after claims that key data was manipulated in the run-up to a major climate change summit.

An [incompetent, biassed, inadequate] official inquiry later found that although there had been no scientific fraud [based on insufficient evidence and a lack of investigative thoroughness], there was “a consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness, both on the part of CRU scientists and on the part of the UEA.”

In none of Mr Harrabin’s reports on the subject were the grants that he and his friend Dr Joe Smith had received from UEA ever mentioned.  However, BBC insiders claim that the use to which the money was put—annual Real World seminars for top BBC executives on issues including climate change—had a significant impact on the Corporation’s output.

“The seminars organised by Roger and his friend were part of a process which has effectively stifled all debate within the BBC about man-made global warming,” said one senior journalist.  “As far as the high-ups are concerned, the science is settled.”

Last night, Mr Harrabin insisted he does not derive any personal financial benefit from the grants and that far from making him more sympathetic to UEA, the sponsorship—of which the BBC had been aware—“made me doubly determined to investigate Climategate.  If I had been misled by UEA I wanted to be among the first to know.”

In none of Mr Harrabin’s reports on the subject were the grants that he and his friend Dr Joe Smith had received from UEA ever mentioned.

He added:  “The funding from the Tyndall Centre came long before Climategate.  And I was forensic in exposing it.  So any suggestion that I was biassed or soft on Climategate in any way is completely untrue as demonstrated by my reporting.

“I was praised by the world’s leading climate sceptics for my reporting.  Those seminars—for which I received no personal gain—included contributions from sceptics.”

He said his report into the subsequent inquiry into Climategate, led by Lord Oxburgh, was praised for its “forensic impartiality”.

Disclosure of the payments to Mr Harrabin’s private partnership comes in the wake of a damning report last week by the BBC Trust Editorial Standards Committee.

It revealed ‘sponsored’ documentaries on environmental issues, whose production costs had been met by ‘non-commercial’ bodies such as the UN Environmental Programme, have been shown frequently on the BBC World news channel without viewers being made properly aware of their funding.

Trust investigators discovered that of a sample of sixty sponsored programmes broadcast between February and July this year, a total of fifteen breached the BBC’s editorial guidelines.

The investigators said some of the breaches involved direct conflicts of interests—with the funders being the subjects of the programmes they were paying for—and that others failed to observe BBC rules on telling viewers where the programme budget had come from.

Two films in the latter category, part of BBC World’s Earth Reporters series, had Dr Smith as their chief scientific adviser.  He is a climate change specialist at the Open University.

He said yesterday that the Open University sought to ensure that the programmes they co-produced were factually accurate, but beyond the usual formally agreed acknowledgement of the university, programme credits were the “concern of the BBC”.  Dr Smith agreed with the Trust’s conclusions on the matter.

However, it is clear that sponsored programmes about the environment of the type the Trust now deplores have been made on a huge scale for years.

Almost all the £1.4 million annual income of TVE, the production company behind the Earth Reporters series, comes from non-commercial bodies, including the EU, UN agencies and campaign groups such as WWF, which co-founded the company twenty-seven years ago.  Jenny Richards, TVE’s deputy chief executive, said the firm had made “hundreds” of programmes for the BBC, and described the Trust’s criticisms as a “slap on the wrist”.

The Trust has demanded sweeping changes to the BBC’s commissioning process, and the Corporation has agreed that from now on programmes sponsored by non-commercial bodies will be forbidden.  Those from independent production companies will be scrutinised for possible conflicts of interest.

A Trust spokeswoman said:  “Anything that affects the trust of viewers is a serious matter and the steps we are taking to prevent it from happening in future are very clear.”

Mr Harrabin’s partnership with Dr Smith—the Cambridge Media Environment Programme (CMEP)—began in 1996.  That was when Mr Harrabin spent a sabbatical at Cambridge University, where Dr Smith was working at the time.

From then until 2009 they organised their seminars, which Dr Smith described as an ‘ad hoc’ arrangement.  “It was just a light touch thing.  These were occasional seminars held in an academic environment that brought a diverse mix of research, business and policy people together with media people,” he said.

While Dr Smith was paid less than £5,000 for organising each conference, Mr Harrabin did not benefit financially. Dr Smith added that people with dissenting views on climate change were represented, and the purpose of the events was to encourage reflective thinking away from the pressure of deadlines.

His own opinion, which he sets out on his website, is that “everyday human activity—moving, eating, keeping warm or cool —is gently stoking a slow-boil apocalypse”. He calls climate change “one of the challenges of the age” and urges the world to take radical action.  A Freedom of Information Act disclosure obtained by Andrew Montford, who writes the climate-change blog Bishop Hill, reveals that the Tyndall Centre provided £5,000 a year for three years from 2002.

The centre’s newsletter said then it was giving CMEP the money“ because we share its commitment to the effective communication of climate change information to increase knowledge and inspire discussion and debate in society”.

In addition to the Tyndall Centre, the CMEP received funding from energy giant BG, HSBC, Vivendi, the Bowring Trust and the WWF.

Dr Smith has acted as a scientific consultant to dozens of other BBC programmes, including high-profile documentaries about climate change fronted by Sir David Attenborough.

He was also involved in the BBC2 drama series Burn Up, in which a central character argued that the world had only five years to save itself before global warming became irreversible.

A BBC spokeswoman said: “The BBC is aware of the funding arrangements for the Real World seminars.  They have been considered against our editorial guidelines and raised no issues about impartiality for the BBC or its output.”

Throwing Money to the Winds

From the UK’s This Is Money comes “Energy giants want billions for back-up to windfarms”, by Tom Mcghie:

Britain’s richest energy companies want homeowners to subsidise billions of pounds worth of gas-powered stations that will stand idle for most of the time.  Talks have taken place between the Government, Centrica, owner of British Gas, and other energy companies on incentives to build the power stations needed as back-ups for the wind farms now being built around the country.

It is understood 17 gas-fired plants worth about £10 billion will be needed by 2020.

The Energy Department has been warned that without this massive back-up for the new generation of heavily subsidised giant wind farms, the lights could go out when the wind dies down.  Sam Laidlaw, chief executive of Centrica, said renewables, such as large-scale wind energy, were intermittent and required back-up generation, a role gas was uniquely qualified to fill.  But as power stations that operate only intermittently would not be financially viable, Laidlaw said:  “The building of new gas-fired capacity must be incentivised so that gas can fulfil its role as a bridging fuel.”

To that end, energy companies are asking the Government for “capacity payments”. This ensures firms are paid a fee all year round for keeping a plant on standby.  [...]

Industry sources insist the Government has no alternative but to agree to the “capacity payments” for standby generation if it wants wind power, which also receives huge subsidies, to provide one-third of Britain's energy needs.  In winter, when the most intense cold period coincides with a high pressure front, most wind turbines do not work.

One industry executive said:  “Why would we build a power station—costing about £600 million—that is guaranteed to make a loss because it is not used most of the year?”

Also from This Is Money comes an article,  “Why the £250bn wind power industry could be the greatest scam of our age – and here are the three lies that prove it”, by Christopher Booker:

Scarcely a day goes by without more evidence to show why the Government's obsession with wind turbines, now at the centre of our national energy policy, is one of the greatest political blunders of our time.  Under a target agreed with the EU, Britain is committed within ten years—at astronomic expense—to generating nearly a third of its electricity from renewable sources, mainly through building thousands more wind turbines.

But the penny is finally dropping for almost everyone—except our politicians—that to rely on windmills to keep our lights on is a colossal and very dangerous act of self-deception.

Take, for example, the 350ft monstrosity familiar to millions of motorists who drive past as it sluggishly revolves above the M4 outside Reading.

This wind turbine performed so poorly (working at only 15% of its capacity) that the £130,000 government subsidy given to its owners was more than the £100,000 worth of electricity it produced last year.

Meanwhile, official figures have confirmed that during those freezing, windless weeks around Christmas, when electricity demand was at record levels, the contribution made by Britain’s 3,500 turbines was minuscule.  [...]

The point about wind, of course, is that it is constantly varying in speed, so that the output of turbines averages out at barely a quarter of their capacity.

This means that the 1,000 megawatts all those 3,500 turbines sited around the country feed on average into the grid is derisory:  no more than the output of a single, medium-sized conventional power station.  [...]

The second great lie about wind power is the pretence that it is not a preposterously expensive way to produce electricity.  No one would dream of building wind-turbines unless they were guaranteed a huge government subsidy.  This comes in the form of the Renewables Obligation Certificate subsidy scheme, paid for through household bills, whereby owners of wind turbines earn an additional £49 for every “megawatt hour” they produce, and twice that sum for offshore turbines.  [...]

The third great lie of the wind propagandists is that this industry is somehow making a vital contribution to 'saving the planet' by cutting our emissions of CO₂.  Even if you believe that curbing our use of fossil fuels could change the Earth's climate, the CO₂ reduction achieved by wind turbines is so insignificant that one large windfarm saves considerably less in a year than is given off over the same period by a single jumbo jet flying daily between Britain and America.

In Australia, unfortunately, the incompetent Gillard Government and the misanthracist Greens are committed to wasting thousands of millions of dollars on all sorts of airy schemes because their idiotic acceptance of the fraudulent conjecture of CAGW and their myopic, misanthropic neo-Malthusianism.
(Thanks to the Global Warming Policy Foundation.)

UPDATE I (9 July):  see the Institute for Energy Research’s “Britain Evaluates Capacity Payments for Back-Up Generators to Wind Power”.

UPDATE II (12 July):  see David Derbyshire, in The Daily Mail, “The wind turbine backlash: Growing public opposition thwarts green energy drive”:

Plans to cover Britain with wind farms are being thwarted by a growing tide of public opposition.

Nearly half of all onshore wind farms in England and Wales are being refused planning permission, figures reveal.

The percentage of such developments being refused planning permission has risen sharply over the last five years.

UPDATE III (12 September):  see Christopher Booker, in The Daily Telegraph, “Wind farms: the monuments to lunacy that will be left to blot the landscape”:

Three separate news items on the same day last week reflected three different aspects of what is fast becoming a full-scale disaster bearing down on Britain.  The first item was a picture in The Daily Telegraph showing two little children forlornly holding a banner reading “E.On Hands Off Winwick”.
This concerned a battle to prevent a tiny Northamptonshire village from being dwarfed by seven 410-foot wind turbines, each higher than Salisbury Cathedral, to be built nearby by a giant German-owned electricity firm.  The 40 residents, it was reported, have raised £50,0000 from their savings to pay lawyers to argue their case when their village’s fate is decided at an inquiry by a Government inspector.
In the nine years since I began writing here about wind turbines, I have been approached by more than 100 such local campaigns in every part of Britain, trying to fight the rich and powerful companies that have been queuing up to cash in on the vast subsidy bonanza available to developers of wind farms.  Having been the chairman of one such group myself, I know just how time-consuming and costly such battles can be.  The campaigners are up against a system horribly rigged against them, because all too often – although they may win every battle locally (in our case we won unanimous support from our local council) – in the end an inspector may come down from London to rule that the wind farm must go ahead because it is “government policy”.