The reverberations of the BBC's recent announcements on how to deal with the climate change issue continue unabated. Radio 4's Feedback programme recently considered two separate instances related to the corporation's coverage of climate change (audio below). The first of these a "tidal wave" of complaints they had received in relation to Bob Carter's appearance at the time of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. Interestingly these complaints seem to have been rejected, except in that Carter's funding arrangements were not made sufficiently clear.
Then there was the Lawson/Hoskins event and, as for the previous case, we had some vox pops to illustrate the complaint. Firstly we had someone called Liz Mandeville from Lewes, who turns out to be part of the Transition Towns movement and a director of a community renewables company. Then there was Neil Spencer from Ashreigney in Devon, who turns out to be a former director of a company called Renewable Futures Ltd. Amusingly, the show featured an interview with Alison Hasting, the chairman of the BBC Trust editorial standards committee, who reckoned that:
..the audience have a right to expect that they know where the contributors are coming from; they know their background and they know their status.
There was a particularly interesting section on "false balance" (from 5:30). Hastings said that there was a agreement among a large number of climate scientists that the climate is changing and that there is a manmade element to this. Caveats about the statistical significance of any such changes apart, this is not an unreasonable thing to say, and for a while I wondered if the corporation was simply arguing about what to do with people who dispute the greenhouse effect.
However, the presenter then suggested that Steve Jones wanted people who disagreed that mankind was the main cause of climate change kept off the air; in other words, lukewarmers should not be allowed on air either. Hastings pointed out that there was a wide spectrum of views on the timing of any global warming and disputed that Jones wanted such views kept off the airwaves. Given that Nigel Lawson undoubtedly acknowledges a human influence on climate and given that Jones has complained about his being any airtime at all I think we can say unequivocally that Hastings is dangerously mistaken. Given Jones' documented lack of integrity, I would not be surprised if he had misled her.
Hastings' understanding of the climate debate seems rather sound, based on this brief outing. But how then to explain the extraordinary ruling by her colleague Fraser Steel that Lawson's views are "not supported by the evidence from computer modelling and scientific research"? Steel's hilariously unscientific views about what constitutes evidence apart, the fact that lukewarm views are explicitly supported by the IPCC and by his boss, Alison Hastings, suggest that Steel is somewhat out of line. But then again, when you consider the recent Trust report on impartiality, with its recommendation about avoiding "false balance between fact and opinion", we are left none the wiser.
I think the BBC needs to be clear on who is allowed on air and in what circumstances; what is fact on global warming and what is opinion. At the moment it's anyone's guess.