The BBC tried to prevent climate sceptics from taking part in a Radio 4 programme about the Met Office. Senior BBC editors discussed the programme before it was made and agreed that it “would not feature challenge to the majority scientific view on climate change”, according to a BBC Trust ruling. Quentin Letts, presenter of What’s the Point of…the Met Office, broadcast in August, was not informed of the editors’ decision. The trust ruled that the programme seriously breached the BBC’s editorial guidelines on accuracy and impartiality and ordered that it should be deleted from iPlayer, meaning the public can no longer hear it. Mr Letts said: “It’s a bit Orwellian. There’s an amateurishness to their sinister attempts to control thought.” –Ben Webster, The Times, 5 December 2015
In July I made a short Radio 4 programme with them called What’s the Point of the Met Office?, which accidentally sent orthodox warmists into a boiling tizzy. Amid jolly stuff about the history of weather predictions and the drippiness of today’s forecasters, we touched on parliamentary lobbying done by the state-funded Met Office. All hell broke out. Cataracts and hurricanoes! I was accused of not giving a proper airing to ‘prevailing scientific opinion’. Apostasy had occurred. I was duly flogged on the Feedback programme. That was the last I thought of it until last week, when I was sent an enormous draft report from the BBC Trust’s editorial standards committee. This said I was likely to be found guilty of a ‘serious breach’ of ‘impartiality and accuracy’. The tone was akin to something from the International Criminal Court at the Hague or the Vatican in Galileo’s day. Meanwhile, my ethics and religion mates have been sentenced to hard labour on the BBC Academy’s impartiality online training module, with ‘a substantial scenario on reporting climate-change science’. At school they call this detention. –Quentin Letts, The Spectator, 6 December 2015
The BBC Trust has decreed that a light-hearted Radio 4 programme by Quentin Letts, “What’s the point of the Met Office”, which included a brief section suggesting that global warming might be a bit exaggerated, broke its guidelines on impartiality. The programme has been removed from the BBC iPlayer. In order to respect the BBC ruling, let’s have no more laughing at the Met Office. So please, no more references to Michael Fish saying we are not going to have a hurricane, and no more mention of the Met Office prediction of a barbecue summer. Henceforth, it is not appropriate to mention the video of Vicky Pope confidently predicting that 2014 would be 0.3C warmer than 2004, a prediction that turned out to be completely wrong. And whatever you do, please do not read, publicise or distribute the following transcript of the Quentin Letts programme, produced by Alex Cull, who is now undertaking a re-education course conducted by Cardinal Harrabin. –Paul Matthews, Climate Scepticism, 6 December 2015
The BBC was once supposedly a fine, respected news organisation, a public body that attempted to maintain the highest standards of impartiality, balance and accuracy. All that, even the pretense of all that, has gone out of the window in these days of relativity when one man’s terrorist is the BBC’s freedom fighter and the insidious corrupting effect of political correctness, which is anything but, being more about lies and cover up than truth in order not to hurt the feelings of the guilty. If ever there was a time when a review of the BBC was needed it is now as the BBC sinks ever faster into self-reverence and hubris to protect the privileges of the gilded eilite who milk the BBC and its licence funds filling their own pockets whilst also exploiting the BBC’s reputation and facilities to peddle their own propaganda about politics, war and climate. A prime example would be the BBC’s climate change reporting, now as corrupt and untrustworthy as anything produced by the state-run news organisations of the Soviet Union. —Biased BBC, 6 December 2015
Lee Jussim’s talk began with one of the most egregious examples of bias in recent years. He drew the audience’s attention to the paper: “NASA faked the moon landing ‚Äì therefore (climate) science is a hoax.” The study was lead by Stephan Lewandowsky, and published in Psychological Science in 2013. The paper argued that those who believed that the moon landing was a hoax also believed that climate science was a fraud. After describing the study and reading the abstract, Jussim paused. Something big was coming. “But out of 1145 participants, only ten agreed that the moon landing was a hoax!” he said. “Of the study’s participants, 97.8% who thought that climate science was a hoax, did not think that the moon landing also a hoax.” Jussim explained that within the field, those on the left outnumbered those on the right by a ratio of about 10:1. So it meant that even if left-leaning and right-leaning scientists were equal in their bias, there would be at least ten times more research biased towards validating left-wing narratives than conservative narratives. –Claire Lehman, Quillette, 4 December 2015
A full blown argument between the developed and developing countries over the application of principle of common but differentiated responsibilities to the Paris agreement rocked the summit as it drew closer to the end of the first week of negotiations. With developed countries blocking any proposal to operationalize the principle in the Paris agreement through the entire week, developing countries came out with scathing comments in public. Speaking for the Like Minded Developing Countries, which includes India and China, Gurdial Singh NIjar of Malaysia said, “You (the developed countries) grew to this level of prosperity because you burnt fossil fuel at an unabated rate. You created that situation which has created this problem for us. You created the problem and now you say that we want you to share—on an equal basis—the responsibility.” –Nitin Sethi, Business Standard, 5 December 2015
