Bishop Hill 28gate hits the MSM
David Rose has a big spread in the Mail on Sunday in which he gives the 28gate story a good going over. (If you haven't read it before, get yourself a copy of my pamphlet on how Tony Newbery and I uncovered the story.)
The BBC has spent tens of thousands of pounds over six years trying to keep secret an extraordinary ‘eco’ conference which has shaped its coverage of global warming, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The controversial seminar was run by a body set up by the BBC’s own environment analyst Roger Harrabin and funded via a £67,000 grant from the then Labour government, which hoped to see its ‘line’ on climate change and other Third World issues promoted in BBC reporting.
Bishop Hill
Tony Newbery has more at his blog, together with links to the FOI release.
As what has happened becomes more widely known, perhaps now is the time to consider writing to those in a position to do something about the bias. The Culture Secretary and the chairman of the Commons Culture and Media Select Committee are obvious candidates.
What better way to spend an evening in January?
Reader Comments (112)
The story has just hit the Telegraph front news page a few minutes ago...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/10566952/Row-over-BBC-climate-change-conference-cover-up.html
Pharos: No coverage on the BBC yet. Holding breath.
Easy to be flippant Richard - but Don was making a serious point about the BBC's dishonesty.
Although we here may be sceptical of the official consensus science, it would be defensible if the BBC had only chosen to consult people like yourself.
By bypassing the official sources, in favour of a rag-bag collation of activists and representatives of vested interests - they put themselves firmly in the activist camp.
I'm a bit surprised that no one from the Met Office has pointed this out to them.
I wish the BBC would slow down a bit.
I still haven't drafted the complaint about the Today bias where Sutton and Lynas debated whether the floods are the result of climate change without a sceptic in sight. The trouble was that this followed hot on the heels of what appeared to be a party political broadcast for the EU by Mandelson with the idiot Davies uttering extreme bias with every sentence.
Now, before I have time to lift my pen to complain about the "Inside Mathematics" assertion that the Antarctic ice has only grown by 1% I have now 28gate to deal with.
Perhaps I should write to the BBC and ask them to suspend Harrabin to give me a chance to catch up. I've already decided not to watch Countryfile which is on about now because that always guarantees lots of warmist propaganda.
The trouble with the BBC is that they have too much income to spend on propagandists. I can't keep up.
Perhaps I should write to the Culture Secretary about that.
Jan 12, 2014 at 4:51 PM | stephen Richards
I guess you mean this conversation here? As far as I can see, the only person giving me the "cold shoulder" was the environmental activist because of my objection to the "science is settled" meme. Many of the other participants, including Ben Pile and Barry Woods, were re-tweeting my statements to their own followers - hardly the "cold shoulder".
I never post here under anybody else's instructions, only when I want to do so myself.
Some of the recent comments remind me that only a few years ago the Met Office was regularly making exaggerated alarmist claims as well as participating in advocacy for sweeping policies to deal with CO2.
I'm pleased to acknowledge that this has largely changed for the better but it is not yet squeaky clean by any means as readers of this blog will know.
SC
Richard betts can refute your comment or not by confirming whether the Met office basically agreed with the hockey stick and believed in a settled climateOver the last thousand years until man upset the apple cart.
Tonyb
It's a shame that the rest of the Daily Mail appear to be such tat. 'Vulgar'.
BUT...at least you aren't forced to buy the Daily Mail under threat of imprisonment!
Mailman
Bishop Hill is drawing the wrong conclusion from this. It's not a case of the government subverting the BBC. BBC management was already fully on board with AGW alarmism. They only needed an excuse to push it throughout the Corporation's output. Harrabin started this, not Labour. BBC management two activists as their environmental journalists already, Harrabin and Richard Black. They were already looking for a way to enshrine AGW in their editorial policy, and to get the message infused into BBC drama and comedy as well as their factual programming. Labour simply handed over the money when asked, as Harrabin had apparently by then convinced Benn that he was able to influence BBC editorial policy and programming. Harrabin wouldn't have been able to make that claim to Labour if top BBC management hadn't already enabled it. Why else would they accept being told what and how to broadcast by a group mostly made up of activists rather than a bunch of actual scientists?
You should be more concerned about the BBC's institutional bias on this, which was already in existence before the seminar took place. It served only to function as a shield for their future actions.
The MM @ 7:19
You could be right. The BBC environmental group was as AGW as can be before the meeting.
Either way, Labour and BBC executives are still implicated in adopting a policy of broadcasting propaganda.
You just need to watch a couple of days of BBC output to see it happening even now.
Dr. Betts.
I appreciate your involvement with this blog but I would appreciate it even more if you would give us your views and opinions (of course your own not attributed to the Met Office) on a few of the following points:-
1, If atmospheric CO2 levels are the main cause of global warming (climate change, extreme weather; please delete which does not apply). Why have we seen a cessation of global temperature increase for 17 years whilst the CO2 concentrations continue to rise.
2. Why do climate models differ so much from each other considering they claim to be modelling the same thing? and Why if they give a good representation of climate do they fail to either hind cast of forecast climate as seen by empirical measurement.
3. Would you agree that global sea ice has increased by 15% in total not 1% as widely claimed.
4. Which do you think plays the greater part in climate variation natural cycles of CO2 produced by man ?
I was going to agree wholeheartedly with that but I misread it. The word is tentacles.
These two comments should read:-
2. Why do climate models differ so much from each other considering they claim to be modelling the same thing? and Why if they give a good representation of climate do they fail to either hind cast or forecast climate as seen by empirical measurement.
4. Which do you think plays the greater part in climate variation natural cycles or CO2 produced by man ?
Luckily for Channel Five Evander Hollyfield get evicted from the Big Brother House on Friday.
Homophobia that wasn't supposed to be in the script.
Watching Jim Carrey in the Trueman Show at the moment on E4
BBC has turned Climate Change into some big manufactured Reality TV show
Delingpole is on it.
Thank you to the Bishop & Tony N for the work on this. Pleased that at last your important work is getting in to MSM at last.
Schrodinger's Cat @ 7:28pm
artwest - you seem to imply that the Savile thing was nothing but hysteria. If you read the inquiry reports it is clear that:
- Savile was persistently molesting young people on BBC premises
- This was known about for decades by BBC middle management
- The BBC continued to arrange for him to have unsupervised access to young people
If you think that is 'swallowing hysteria whole', that's up to you. It was a reenactment of the Uncle Mac wrongs.
Martin A,
Many of the same people who tried to cover up Savile/McAlpine tried to cover this up. One can't blame Labour influence for that.
Many a true word spoken in jest :)
You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
Climate Scientist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there's
no occasion to.
To mangle a perfectly good rhyme.
- BBC Natural History has become Natural Reality as the BBC has taken to handling the animals and setting up scenes, cos "we think that could have happened in reality" (documented in R4 Media Show : Dramatised Nature Shows)
- "staging" has become for last 40 years an accepted part of underpoliced UK TV culture.
- So, It is not a surprise for climate aswell they push their idea of what "reality" should be.
- "The camera never lying" is something a vulnerable public have too much faith in.
- Cos, in BBC productionland real facts are not enough, you just have to tweak reality to what it "should" be !
It seems the original poem is appropriate too AC1
Ease up a bit on Richard Betts. He has his opinion, and is not afraid to express it here, even if it is at odds with what most others think, so give him due credence for that. He is trying to enlighten us, so, unless he puts on the mould of ZDB, do not treat him as I am being treated in the Guardian. Had I not the hide of a hippo, I might be getting upset.
Jan 12, 2014 at 3:18 PM | Bitter&Twisted
-----------
I think it is called British humour ;)
North Korea possibly to get BBC programming - no joke apparently.
Re-translations of the dubbing or subtitles should be very entertaining.
A few late-thought thoughts having just been brought up to speed on developments. First, very well done Tony Newbery, Andrew Montford and David Rose. Second, Foxgoose gets it exactly right for me vis-a-vis Richard Betts at 5:44 PM:
Third, what Stephen Richards says about Betts is both rude and stupid:
I like Richard Betts more than Hilary Ostrov does, to take one example chosen entirely from random. But Foxgoose was right to challenge Richard in the way he did. Why hasn't Betts joined with sceptics to say how strange it was there were no Met Office experts there among the 28?
Instead, because of cheap shots from the likes of SR, we go off the substantive point and Mr Betts has an open goal to score into. Let's do better. But, once again, well done to Newbery, Montford and Rose. The cumulative effect of Rose's pieces in the Mail on Sunday is I believe by now changing the shape of the UK debate at all levels. Over to you, Andrew Neil at the BBC. :)
From page 54 of the BBC trust report "From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel"(in 2007, I think)
It's that consensus word again, the alleged 97%. Again. No wonder they didn't want to admit to it.
Also, on page 37
Cue the 'We couldn't find any sceptical scientists.'
The BBC's tentacles spread far and wide...
I was going to agree wholeheartedly with that but I misread it. The word is tentacles.
Jan 12, 2014 at 7:39 PM | graphicconception
I swear (before the gods of fertility) I had exactly the same confusion when I first read the sentence. Surely, the word had to be tentacles.
"What better way to spend an evening in January?"
Bundle up, go down to the pub with a copy of the Mail and pass it around?
"North Korea possibly to get BBC programming - no joke apparently." --tomo
Incoming? Or outgoing?
Jan 12, 2014 at 1:59 PM | sandyS
--------------------
According to commenter "Jimbo" at WUWT,
Jan 12, 2014 at 4:56 PM | Paul Matthews
I would agree that this does appear to be the case on first glance. However, Galloway has an out - or an "excuse" for throwing it in, depending on one's perspective.
Throughout the "proposal" mention is made of the (UN's) Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). When these MDGs were translated into a UN resolution, everything was thrown in - including Kyoto and the
kitchen sinkhuman genome sequence:This morning's Telegraph repeats (in a reasonably prominent position on page two) much of the abbreviated account it published in its online edition yesterday.
I don't see anything particularly wrong with this. Surely the BBC religious affairs department can establish and research a Green Madrassa if they want to.
Street red
That IIGCC link doesn't work. Middle directory structure is missing. I have looked there previously but found no smoking gun, but will look again if you can post the full link. There are quite a number of directories under files and I haven't time to search today.
Thanks
Sandy
A dark irony is it not, at every opportunity the BBC turns up its collective noses at Christianity, in fact hates them actually - Christianity who mostly and religiously have swallowed the green pill but the adherents of the Middle eastern ideology - never pay homage or lip service to the green mania as surely as the BBC does to them.
Streetcred
Sorry iPad corrected your name.
I don't want to divert this thread so will put anything else on unthreaded.
I found the file, I have seen it before, it merely lists members which includes quite a few pension funds. My position remains the same.
With government support of green technology being worldwide why wouldn't a pension fund invest
Having invested why wouldn't a pension fund be keen to protect and increase the value of those investments
There is still nothing more than vague hints and circumstantial evidence no hard numbers
Richard Black would be happy to report anything showing big industrial concerns supporting his view.
If this were a Scottish trial the BBCPF could bank on a Not Proven verdict as their worst case scenario.
Richard Drake
You don't know that he hasn't.I've administered the occasional kick to Richard when I think he's being deliberately obtuse or dissembling but nobody who is known by all and sundry on here to be a senior Met Office employee is going to jeopardise his position by castigating his own employer for the benefit of a blog — even this blog.
Cut the guy a bit of slack. He has already come under fire from one of the usual suspects for daring to suggest that the science isn't settled and I'm pretty certain that the lack of Met Office input to the BBC seminar has rankled more than a little, with him and others as well.
But if you really believe they are likely to come on here and criticise their own organisation... perhaps we could discuss the small matter of a bridge I have for sale.
Well said, Mike. Can anyone fault what Richard said in that Twitter dialogue?
Good to see you posting, Mr Betts.
The Mail on Sunday and The Telegraph fail to mention that one of 'The 28' was Head of Comedy...
Come on, Josh - surely you can make something of that..?
Don Keiller - you should know by now that its a waste of time and effort writing to the Muppet...
'...'Due weight'.....minority (that's us, folks) should not NECESSARILY be given equal weight to the prevailing concensus...' (that's them)...
In other words: 'You lot are NEVER going to get your say because you're not 'on message'....'
Whenever I visit the Daily Mail website it's a constant struggle to not be distracted by photos of frolicking naked celebrities and the enormous Kardashian in the right hand column
Jan 12, 2014 at 10:23 AM | shub
=========================================================================
Ah. The sidebar of shame. And what on EARTH has the Kardashian woman done to her bottom?
The way the BBC conducts itself IS a problem but its a problem that can only be solved if our so called political masters grew a backbone and made the BBC tax voluntary.
@mailman
============================================
It is voluntary. You don;t have to own a TV. We don't.
A bit off subject, but with some well known "alarmist actors". Found this through Steve Goddard
http://web.archive.org/web/20100817023019/http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/why-antarctica-will-soon-be-the-ionlyi-place-to-live--literally-561947.html
I wonder if this is the same chap who now entertains Telegraph readers
"Why Antarctica will soon be the only place to live - literally
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor"
He quotes a well known scientist
"Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the Government's chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, said last week." This was 10 years ago. I guess that neither have improved much in connecting with reality. I wonder if these two esteemed gentlemen still thinks that eight billion inhabitants will be crowding out Antarctica in 86 years time.
Just for the record, Don Keiller's letter was actually based on a letter drafted by myself and then, following requests here, posted at Bishophill. I sent my letter out on 15 November to the BBC trust and eventually got a reply from the BBC Trust which was essentially a brush off. It effectively admitted the meeting took place and that those were the attendees, but ran off sideways. I could have followed up again but I have a day job - its time consuming writing this stuff - and they are clearly just going to ignore it whatever is said. Its probably more effective writing to the Select Committee in practice.
I also sent a copy with a covering letter to my MP Desmond Swayne. He passed it to the Culture and Media Select Committee, but also responded to me with wishy-washy sympathy about sharing my misgivings but also included the following comment
I also copied it to John Redwood for his information.
@ Don Keiller Jan12, 2014 at 12:26pm
I have just read the reply you received from the BBC in response to your concerns about BBC impartiality. At about the same time I wrote to my MP on this too; he passed my letter on to Lord Patten for comment. The body of Lord Patten`s reply matched, word for word, the reply you received, but with an additional paragraph on Bridcut as follows:
"The Bridcut Report itself was commissioned by the BBC Governors and the BBC Executive but was an independent report by Mr Bridcut. He concluded that the Seminar included `some of the best scientific experts`. His report was presented to the BBC Trust, which accepted the report, agreed the principles outlined within it and approved the recommendations for the Trust."
In his concluding paragraph I was invited to raise "specific instances where the BBC has not met expected standards of impartiality" by using the BBC complaints process. I think I will use my MP for that. The evidence of the DFID grant provides just such an instance.
I expect the truth of the matter lies somewhere between Bishop Hill saying
And The Masked Marvel's position of
The BBC trust are an easily overlooked partner to all this. The government at the time and BBC luvvies were all of the same mind - the consensus means a partial view of climate change and the science of climate change can be given and anyone who says otherwise is in the pay of Big Oil.
Would the BBC Trust have known who was at the meeting? The Seesaw to Wagon Wheel report described the meeting as follows: "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." I wonder if the Trust ever asked who those experts were. The presence of several activists and business interest would surely have warranted questions.
This looks to me like the BBC management making use of an outside institution in order to obtain approval from the Trust for pre-determined change of editorial direction.
@ Don Keiller Jan12, 2014 at 12:26pm
I have just read the reply you received from the BBC in response to your concerns about BBC impartiality. At about the same time I wrote to my MP on this too; he passed my letter on to Lord Patten for comment. The body of Lord Patten`s reply matched, word for word, the reply you received, but with an additional paragraph on Bridcut as follows:
"The Bridcut Report itself was commissioned by the BBC Governors and the BBC Executive but was an independent report by Mr Bridcut. He concluded that the Seminar included `some of the best scientific experts`. His report was presented to the BBC Trust, which accepted the report, agreed the principles outlined within it and approved the recommendations for the Trust."
In his concluding paragraph I was invited to raise "specific instances where the BBC has not met expected standards of impartiality" by using the BBC complaints process. I think I will use my MP for that. The evidence of the DFID grant provides just such an instance.