The Freedom of Information Act and the BBC's willing little helpers

Posted by TonyN on 29/09/2008 at 2:15 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Climate 13 Responses »
Sep 292008

At the beginning of this month I put up a post about a Freedom of Information Act request that I had made to the BBC: Jeremy Paxman, the BBC, Impartiality, and Freedom of Information .The information I requested referred to a seminar on climate change that the BBC had mentioned in a major report on impartiality published last year: From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel. This is how they described it:

The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].

From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, Page 40

As the BBC seem most unwilling to tell me who the ‘best scientific experts’ who attended the seminar where, I’ve spent some time googling in the hope that the internet might yield more information. It did, and what I found is rather astonishing.

My first hit was on the International Broadcasting Trust’s site, where I found this: Continue reading »

Return from holiday round up: Michael Mann, the BBC and holiday-snaps

Posted by TonyN on 25/09/2008 at 8:01 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Landscape, The Wind 2 Responses »
Sep 252008

I’ve been away for about three weeks, and the last few days have been devoted to trying to catch up. Anyone who tries to persuade us that the climate debate is over for all reasonable people should try reading their way back into the subject after even such a short break.At Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre and others are dismembering a new climate reconstruction from Michael Mann of Hockey Stick fame – here. It would seem that, once again, there are many questions to be asked about strange statistical techniques that palaeoclimatologists love, and real statisticians find surprising.

On the three Sundays when I was out of the country, the BBC broadcast a series of programmes on climate change presented by Dr Ian Stewart. I’ve only seen one short clip from this that was posted on YouTube. In this sequence the Hockey Stick is presented as a courageous piece of ground-breaking research that has been successfully defended against unwarranted attacks by ignorant and unscrupulous sceptics. Unfortunately, while Dr Mann is given ample screen time to defend his work, the BBC found it quite unnecessary to allow any sceptic to explain why they have doubts about the Hockey Stick.

Closer to home, there has been the usual backlog of mail to deal with, and this contained at least one interesting item; Continue reading »

Even Andrew Marr worries about groupthink at the BBC

Posted by TonyN on 29/08/2008 at 8:27 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Climate 8 Responses »
Aug 292008

BBC bashing is a favourite sport on the internet, and on blogs in particular. It’s easy, because no news organisation can please everyone all the time, and particularly not one that at least aspires to be impartial in its reporting. Most of us hold partisan opinions on a variety of subjects, so being confronted with arguments that suggest that we may be mistaken is likely to be disconcerting and annoying. This often leads to strenuous venting in the blogosphere along the lines of, ‘Trendy lefties are at it again. What do you expect from the BBC.’Such outbursts can easily be dismissed as knuckleheaded spleen, but you don’t have to look far to find confirmation that there is almost certainly some truth in them. For instance here is something rather startling that appeared in the BBC’s impartiality report last year:

Andrew Marr, former Political Editor, said that the BBC is ‘a publicly-funded urban organisation with an abnormally large proportion of younger people, of people in ethnic minorities and almost certainly of gay people’ compared with the population at large.’ All this, he said, ‘creates an innate liberal bias inside the BBC’.

From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, Page 66

It is not just the thrust of this quotation that is startling, Continue reading »

Climate Change, BBC Impartiality, and ‘Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer'

Posted by TonyN on 16/08/2008 at 1:45 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Climate 2 Responses »
Aug 162008

My last post, Jeremy Paxman, the BBC, Impartiality, and Freedom of Information, seems to have attracted a good deal of attention, but unfortunately it is unlikely that there will be any major developments in the near future. The Information Commissioner’s Office has warned me that, although they have begun to investigate, progress is likely to be slow.
In the meantime, here is something that I came across at about the same time that I made my Freedom of Information Act request about the BBC’s climate change seminar. The following transcript is taken from an edition of Radio4’s Talking Politics programme (broadcast on 4th August 2007) which was devoted to the Corporation’s problems with impartiality.

Presenter: One of Yes minister’s creators, Anthony Jay, has written a pamphlet for the Centre for Policy Studies entitled, Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer. Continue reading »

Jeremy Paxman, the BBC, Impartiality, and Freedom of Information

Posted by TonyN on 06/08/2008 at 11:03 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Climate 108 Responses »
Aug 062008

In February 2007, an article that Jeremy Paxman had originally written for Ariel, the BBC’s house magazine, was published on the Newsnight website. It included this remarkable statement about global warming:

I have neither the learning nor the experience to know whether the doomsayers are right about the human causes of climate change. But I am willing to acknowledge that people who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that it is the consequence of our own behaviour.

I assume that this is why the BBC’s coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago. But it strikes me as very odd indeed that an organisation which affects such a high moral tone cannot be more environmentally responsible. [My emphasis]

Jeremy Paxman, Newsnight Homepage 02/02/2007

This stark admission of partisan reporting by the BBC – coming from someone who has been at the centre of current affairs broadcasting for decades – was a surprise to me, not because I was unaware of bias on this subject, but because someone so highly placed in the organisation was prepared to make such a frank admission. Continue reading »

The BBC's Harrabin and Abbess show; you couldn't make it up!

Posted by TonyN on 17/04/2008 at 11:30 pm BBC and Freedom of Information, The Climate No Responses »
Apr 172008

When news of an extraordinary exchange of emails between the BBC’s Environment Analyst, Roger Harrabin, and a climate change activist called Jo Abbess broke earlier this month, it aroused my innate scepticism. It appeared that a fanatical climate change activist had effortlessly bullied our revered national broadcasting service into changing a story that displeased her. How could this be?

It may surprise warmists, who have come to use ‘sceptic‘ as a term of abuse, that many who question what the public are being told about anthropogenic climate change apply the same standards of scepticism to both sides of the debate.

Was it possible, I asked myself, that the BBC had really allowed itself to be pushed around by an unknown extremist? Was this story an example of disinformation emanating from those shadowy forces that warmists so often blame for the general public’s reluctance to embrace their beliefs? Was someone trying to discredit the BBC? Might the emails have been fabricated? It all looked just a bit too neat and tidy to be true. Was it really possible that a fanatical member of the militant pressure group Campaign Against Climate Change could influence mainstream news coverage of a topic as important as climate change?

Here is a rather sensationalised, but quite accurate, version of what happened:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=216v5AoQcFQ

For those of you who don’t have the software to play this, or would like to see all the evidence in black and white, here is the full story:

On 4th April the BBC put a news item on their website written by Harrabin. The headline was “Global temperatures ‘to decrease'”; quite surprising for an organisation dedicated to spreading alarm about climate change. What followed was based on an announcement by Michel Jarraud, head of the World Meteorological Organizations. Now this is not a body that can in any way be called sceptical about global warming; it is one of the UN agencies that set up the IPCC. Given the BBC’s proclivity for making the most of a global warming scare story, and the impeccable source of its information, there is no reason to suspect that rumours of a downturn in temperatures were being exaggerated.

The BBC’s report started like this:

Global temperatures ‘to decrease’

Global temperatures this year will be lower than in 2007 due to the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said.

The World Meteorological Organization’s secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory.

But experts have also forecast a record high temperature within five years.

[It also said this:]

A minority of scientists question whether this means global warming has peaked and argue the Earth has proved more resilient to greenhouse gases than predicted.

This did not please Jo Abbess, who sent an email to Harrabin headed, ‘Correction Demanded: “Global temperatures ‘to decrease'”.

Dear Roger,

Please can you correct your piece published today entitled “Global
temperatures ‘to decrease'” :-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7329799.stm [this link is to the revised version of course]

1. “A minority of scientists question whether this means global
warming has peaked”
This is incorrect. 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.

2. “Global temperatures this year will be lower than in 2007”
You should not mislead people into thinking that the sum total of the
Earth system is going to be cooler in 2008 than 2007. For example, the
ocean systems of temperature do not change in yearly timescales, and
are massive heat sinks that have shown gradual and continual warming.
It is only near-surface air temperatures that will be affected by La
Nina, plus a bit of the lower atmosphere.

Thank you for applying your attention to all the facts and figures available,

jo.

My emphasis

Referring to Jo Abbess’ first point, it would seem that she is not a scientist either, merely a dedicated activist.

Harrabin’s response to these criticisms of his story by someone who clearly has a limited knowledge of the subject and distinctly partisan views was patient but firm: Continue reading »

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