- Bishop Hill blog

The BBC is currently engaging in some intense navel-gazing, as part of which it has been considering the range of opinions to which it currently gives airtime. This process is documented in a paper on the BBC Trust website, which includes this interesting little snippet:

...the need for BBC journalists regularly and systematically to challenge the assumptions behind their own approach to a story, is...difficult to achieve. Even when good intentions lead to specific measures aimed at doing so, there can be inadvertent aberrations. Take, for example, the BBC College of Journalism online service, which includes a whole section on impartiality. First among the clips illustrating the need for impartiality in covering the subject of climate change is an illustrated lecture given by the BBC’s former Environment Correspondent Richard Black. The section of the lecture on the site is entirely devoted to sustaining the case that climate change is effectively “settled science” and that those who argue otherwise are simply wrong. What might have been helpful is for Richard’s talk about the scientific position, and David Shukman’s on the same site, to have included a line or two in which he reminded his audience of John Bridcut’s point, a point made also in the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines, that dissenters (or even sceptics) should still occasionally be heard because it is not the BBC’s role to close down this debate.

It is clear from the document that the author's objection is not to Richard Black trying to argue that the science is settled. The objection is a presentational one, namely that Black should have preempted criticism by stating in effect that "despite sceptics being wrong, they will still be heard from time to time".

How remarkable it is then to consider the BBC position in light of the evidence given by Michael Oppenheimer to the US House of Representatives yesterday:

Some things are more or less settled, some things are not. The question of whether carbon dioxide is 30 to 40 percent above pre-industrial times, that’s settled. The question of exactly how warm the Earth will become as a result, that’s not.’ Oppenheimer refused to defend the 97% claims. ‘Whether the 97% is defensible, I really don’t know.’

Oppenheimer, a former chief scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund, is about as green as you can get. If even he is saying that the science is not settled, the BBC's position is indefensible. Think about it: the BBC's position on climate change is even more fringe than the deepest of deep greens.