TonyN at Harmless Sky has had an interesting comment on one of his blog postings about the BBC seminar that Roger Harrabin's CEMP set up to decide the global warming issue for the purposes of BBC output (no prizes for guessing what their conclusions were!).
We know that the seminar took place at the BBC on 26 January 2006, but the corporation has resisted attempts to discover who actually attended. The attendees were, we are lead to believe, a panel of leading climate experts, but the only names identified as attending were:
Jana Bennett, Director of Vision (then Television), BBC and Helen Boaden, Director of News BBC. It was chaired by Fergal Keane, Special Correspondent with BBC News. The key speaker at the seminar was Robert McCredie, Lord May of Oxford.
So as far as the scientists were concerned, only Lord May counts (he is a biologist, IIRC).
The new name revealed was discovered in an article in the Times. In a gossipy column, journalist Rachel Johnson describes a conversation she had with Andrew Simms, a wonk at the New Economics Foundation, in which they discussed how the greens won the battle for public opinion:
Well, I thought that the piece Susie Watt did for Newsnight last week, questioning whether economic growth is good, was a real marker,” he said, “But I think the real conversion took place about 18 months ago . . .” He trailed off to snaffle a tranche of Cornish yarg before resuming, “when I was asked to attend a BBC seminar on climate change, and Fergal Keane was there.”
This conversation took place in January 2008, and this, together with the presence of Fergal Keane, suggest that they referred to the same climate change seminar in 2006 - even the BBC can't have that many.
Andrew Simms is head of policy at NEF and directs their climate change programme. What is rather more interesting about him is that he is a board member of Greenpeace UK and a founder member of the Green New Deal Group.
So those of us who were wondering whether the BBC's group of leading climate scientists were in fact a group of tofu-munching environmentalists are increasingly convinced that we were right.
The BBC - the public relations arm of Greenpeace.