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 Prince, the traveller, and the universe

Posted by TonyN on 31/07/2008 at 1:53 pm The Landscape No Responses »
Jul 312008

One of the advantages of having a large but not very well organised filing system – and there are very few advantages – is that searching for an illusive reference can occasionally yield a pleasant surprise. This morning I stumbled on this and I think that everyone should read it at least once in their lives. The punchline comes, with some brutality, in the last paragraph. Continue reading »

Ofcom's inconvenient truths and Al Gores swindle

Posted by TonyN on 23/07/2008 at 9:27 pm The Climate, Uncategorized 40 Responses »
Jul 232008
[Note: Ofcom is the UK broadcasting regulator]

The other night, BBC News was able to get it’s teeth into a story that combined two of the Corporation’s favourite hate figures. With the publication of Ofcom’s report based on a sixteen-month inquiry into ITV’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, they had the chance to attack both climate change sceptics and their most despised rival for audiences.

On the 10pm. News Roger Harrabin assured viewers that the inquiry had been brought about by a ‘deluge’ of complaints although, according to Ofcom, there were only 265 of these from the general public. The audience was estimated at 2.7 million. True, there was also a 176-page complaint from a group coordinated by someone called Dave Rado **, but this involved many of the usual suspects in the climate science community including Sir John Houghton, Robert Watson, Bob Ward, the late Bert Bolin and William Connolly*. Ofcom wisely seems to have kept this separate from the other complaints, as it was clearly more in the way of a lobby group campaign than a reflection of wider public disquiet. They argued that the film had mislead the public. Continue reading »

Glyndebourne's wind turbine and Attenborough's shame

Posted by TonyN on 18/07/2008 at 9:59 am The Wind 11 Responses »
Jul 182008

From the eastern end of the South Downs it is possible, on a clear day, to look out over one of the most quintessentially English of all landscapes. A vast area of Kent and Sussex countryside lies at your feet, green, undulating, heavily wooded, and tranquil. This is The Weald, known for centuries as the Garden of England. Small villages cluster round ancient churches and farmhouses slumber among well-tended fields, timeless reminders of our rural heritage. Confronted with such beauty it is possible to forget, briefly, that this is also one of the most densely populated parts of the country and one of the most prosperous, and just revel in such a feast for the eyes and balm for the stresses of our modern, industrialised existence

Who could deny that this exquisite prospect is worth protecting? In an age when four fifths of the population live in urban areas, and the government plans to build up to three million more houses, many of them in the countryside, surely there must be some inviolable rules that will ensure that a few vestiges of pristine rural landscape are preserved for the enjoyment of all. Without them we risk losing the ability to see our existence in any context other than that of an industrialised landscape that isolates us from the natural world. Our daily lives will be impoverished by the loss but, even more seriously, we will risk loosing sight of our relationship with the forces of nature, and forget that we are subject to them and not their master.

Well one person who does not see things quite this way is that illustrious television presenter, naturalist, and all round national treasure, Sir David Attenborough. Continue reading »

The Guardian: a tale of two polls

Posted by TonyN on 10/07/2008 at 11:25 pm The Climate 10 Responses »
Jul 102008

The other day I glanced at an article in The Guardian that made this rather startling claim.

Climate more urgent than economy, say voters

The Guardian 02/07/2008

This surprised me, as other polling evidence that I have seen suggests that the vast majority of the UK public are by no means convinced that human caused global warming is taking place. I’ve posted about Ipsos Mori opinion polls that show this here, here, and here.

Any suggestion that The Guardain’s startling headline had merely been the work of an overenthusiastic sub-editor in a hurry was dispelled by the first paragraph of the article.

Voters think that taking action against climate change matters more than tackling the global economic downturn, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today. The results, which will delight green campaigners, suggest that support for environmental action is not collapsing as feared in the face of possible recession.

At the end of the article there was a series of pie charts that seemed to bear out these claims, but again I did no more than glance at them. Knowing the enthusiasm with which The Guardian has embraced the cause of climate catastrophe, the unworthy thought crossed my mind that they might have rigged the question in order to get a predetermined answer, but only for a moment. ICM is a respectable company and The Guardian is not a down market tabloid. Instead of digging deeper I just made a mental note that there was now an opinion poll that seemed to be bucking the trend and moved on to other things.

About a week later I was involved in a discussion on the Climate Audit message board and happened to post a link to The Guarian’s article. A sharp-eyed commenter using the name ChrisWright drew my attention to a couple of things that I should have spotted.

Firstly, the captions of the all-important pie charts indicate that the questions used by ICM referred specifically to ‘the environment’ and not to climate change.

Secondly, when I returned to The Guardian article for a more careful look, I noticed that ‘Guardian/ICM poll‘ was a hot link. Clicking on it revealed what the poll questions actually were.

Q.1 Bearing in mind growing global economic problems on the one hand growing environmental problems including global warming on the other, where do you think the governments main priorities should now lie?Q.2 Generally speaking would you support or oppose the introduction of green taxes, designed to discourage things that are harmful to the environment?

Q.3 Do you think green taxes should be introduced irrespective of present economic problems or should the government delay the introduction of any green taxes, or not introduce them at all?

Q.4 Often consumers are faced with a choice between a more expensive but environmentally friendly choice, and a cheaper alternative that is not so environmentally friendly. Thinking about people you know, given the recent rise in the cost of living do you think they are now more likely to choose..? [list of options]

Climate change only gets one passing reference in the first question; the emphasis of the poll is entirely on the ‘the environment’. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that people see these two terms as being synonymous, and why would they do so? It is quite possible to be concerned about pollution or wasteful use of natural resources and still not be convinced that humans are now changing the climate.

If ICM’s questions had actually asked about climate change, do you think that the pollsters would have got the same response, or that there would have been any ‘delight’ among green campaigners at the results? I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this article – in a leading national broadsheet newspaper – is blatantly and cynically misleading, and why the editors might think that such deception is acceptable.

A shop-soiled messiah goes east: Tony Blair, the G8, oil prices, and an inconvenient opinion poll

Posted by TonyN on 07/07/2008 at 8:00 pm The Climate 11 Responses »
Jul 072008

Some time ago, I posted about the return of a shop-soiled messiah by the name of Tony Blair. Since being forced out of office, he has found various niches on the world scene from which to keep his name alive in the media. Acting as a roving ambassador for an organisation called The Climate Group is one of these, and it is in this capacity that he recently visited Japan. His mission was an attempt to salvage the road map for a drastic reduction in carbon emissions which was outlined at the Bali (son of Kyoto) Climate Conference last December.On the BBC Radio4 Today programme the following proposition was put to the ex-prime minister – in the form of a question – by James Naughty:

There was a poll here the other day which suggested, to the horror of some people in the environmental movement, that people don’t yet buy the seriousness, as you believe it to be, of the climate crisis. So politicians have not managed to persuade them.

The response was vintage Blair: Continue reading »

Who said that?

Posted by TonyN on 06/07/2008 at 10:33 am Uncategorized 10 Responses »
Jul 062008

I have not all my facts yet, but I do not think there are any insuperable difficulties. Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You find yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories.

This quotation turned up rather unexpectedly in something I was reading this week, and it sounds like good advice for all climate scientists. Unfortunately I can’t offer a prize for identifying who these wise words are attributed to, but can anyone supply the answer WITHOUT using Google?

Kyoto, climate change, and the price of oil

Posted by TonyN on 29/06/2008 at 8:54 am The Climate 2 Responses »
Jun 292008

Last weekend, UK prime minister Gordon Brown visited Jiddah to plead with oil producers to increase supplies. This would seem to be a very strange thing for a politician with the declared intention of leading a worldwide crusade against climate change to do.

For years now we have been told that our addiction to fossil fuels is causing global warming, and that the only way to avert catastrophe is to reduce fossil fuel consumption to below 1990 levels. What better incentive to do this than a steep rise in oil prices? Surely the prime minister should be celebrating not whingeing.

Governments all over the world have at least paid lip service to the Kyoto Protocol. They have stated and re-stated their intention to reduce demand for oil, by whatever ruthless means may be necessary. So how is it that we now have a shortfall in production that has caused oil prices to double in just six months? Falling demand should be driving prices down by now, or at least keeping them stable. Continue reading »

FT: Global warming - don't despair

Posted by Robin Guenier on 22/06/2008 at 3:58 pm The Climate 10 Responses »
Jun 222008

On 19th June, the Financial Times published an article by Phillip Stephens entitled “Saving the planet will be difficult, but do not despair”. See: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/65b790f0-3e12-11dd-b16d-0000779fd2ac.html

Essentially, he’s worried that “denial” of man-made global warming is still a problem despite the “overwhelming weight of scientific knowledge” that, unless mankind’s emissions of CO2 are curtailed, we face dire consequences. He claims that opinion polls show that, although respondents in most countries think global warming is “a very serious problem”, that’s not true of the “two worst polluters” – the USA and China. He comments that emission control is no longer “cool” – the world now faces other short-term priorities. He notes how China and India have increasingly voracious appetites for fossil fuels. Hence the “despair” of the title. This, he says, is exacerbated by the problem of getting all nations to move to low-carbon economies – perhaps it’s just too difficult?

Stephens rejects despair. Instead, he supports the economist Nicholas Stern’s proposal that “market mechanisms, technological advances and behavioural changes” be used to share “the burden of adjustment” between rich and emerging nations. That would mean ceilings on emissions by the developed economies that “bite immediately” and a “new international trading system” imposing “binding” targets on developing countries after 2020.

I agree that despair is unnecessary. But there is so much that is unpleasant, misleading and wrong in Stephens’s analysis that that truth could be overlooked. Some examples: Continue reading »

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