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That climate change seminar

Much of the interest over the whole Roger Harrabin/CEMP kerfuffle has centred on the ‘high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts' (as the BBC Trust put it) decided that global warming was settled science and that sceptical views could safely be ignored.

We now finally, after months of digging, have the first insider view of the seminar.  Richard D North, a critic of the BBC and apparently the lone sceptical voice on the seminar has emailed TonyN at Harmless Sky to tell us the real composition of the panel.

The BBC crew (senior executives from every branch of the corporation) were matched by an equal number of specialists, almost all (and maybe all) of whom could be said to have come from the “we must support Kyoto” school of climate change activists.

Oops! Read the whole thing here.

Subsidy farming

The Boxing Day walk was up part of Glen Devon which has had the misfortune to have a large industrial site built on it since the last time I was there. Yes, you guessed it, there's a bloody great wind farm been built at the top of the glen. Thanks greenies for that particular bit of landscape desecration.

Fifteen turbines I counted, and guess how many were actually operational, at this, the peak time of year for electricity demand? Well, when we arrived, none of the windmills were actually operating at all. After about half an hour, one of them ground into action, so it's not like there wasn't enough wind, although it was a still day. A little later a second one started to rotate a little hesitantly. It didn't last though. A few minutes later, first one and then the other ground to a halt again and it was all still. None had moved again by the time we left.

It's been said again and again that wind farms don't produce power when it's needed and that they can never produce enough, and here is real world evidence of just that. Wind farms are a means for politicians to divert funds to their client companies in the renewables business (in the shape of subsidies), from where it is diverted back to the politicians by means of political donations.

Corruption, pure and simple. And it spoiled my walk.

Extracting the Michael

More fun and games on the BBC/CEMP front. In the comments thread behind the last post, a visitor identifying himself as a former BBC exec has some interesting insider views on someone else who might have been the guiding hand behind the CEMP seminars. I've taken the liberty of reposting the comment in full so that readers can form their own opinions.

I (an ex-BBC exec) have attended a number of BBC "seminars" over the years. It seems that the climate change one may have been very similar to the most recent I attended, which was about the development of broadcasting in Africa (when I was chief exec of an organisation developing psb in Africa).

The idea was to help forge a strategy between "interested organisations". Those, it turned out, were almost entirely from the NGO or DFID sector, most of whom held views entirely in keeping with then government policy linked (in turn) to Bob Geldof/U2/Bono. My own organisation favoured a much more market led (as opposed to aid) approach - but surprise, surprise, the overhwelming majority there weren't interested.

I should add that I only got to attend the seminar by using old contacts - the first I knew the event was taking place was two days before. So I and my capitalist organisation only got in by gate-crashing.

My main point is that my guess is that the climate change seminar followed exactly the same lines - probably with almost the same cast of people present (ie from Oxfam, WWF, etc). It's the BBC hearing what it wants to hear via people who are government supporters and left-liberal think tanks/NGOs.

This part of th BBC was run by Michael Hastings, their head of "corporate social responsibility", now Baron Hastings of Scarisbrick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings,_Baron_Hastings_of_Scarisbrick). He has since moved on but he set the tone and tenor for this part of the BBC's operations. Michael now sits as a cross bencher in the House of Lords, but all his sympathies lie in the green/NGO arena and he is firmly in the NuLabour inner circle (I know him reasionably well, having once employed him).

There is not much of interest about Lord Hastings on the web - he appears to have left the BBC shortly after the seminar, apparently because his elevation to the peerage was deemed incompatible with his position - it remains unclear precisely why it took the BBC nine months for them to work that out. He has lectured a number of times on climate change. He's now head of corporate social responsibility at KPMG.

Interesting stuff. I shall have to work out how to follow this up.

More on CEMP

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.

You know when you've arrived...

..when one of your blog postings is cited in Wikipedia. Well, not exactly cited, because blog postings are not permitted in Wiki unless it's RealClimate. But there is a citation here of Roger Pielke Jnr discussing Caspar and the Jesus paper, which is good enough for me.

I expect the book contracts to be rolling in shortly...

Getting your argument straight

Some further thoughts have occurred to me after the recent posting on the Cambridge Environment and Media Programme. Joe Smith, you will recall, has argued that CEMP activities are not succeptible to Freedom of INformation requests because his activities on this front are private activities.

Meanwhile it is instructive to compare his position to that of his CEMP colleague, the BBC environment analyst, Roger Harrabin. The fine blogger, TonyN, over at Harmless Sky, has tried to get hold of the visitors of a CEMP get together, but was rebuffed, the BBC arguing firstly that these activities were not covered by the Environmental Information Regulations, and then stating that their exemption under the Freedom of Information Act, allowed them to withhold information relating to journalistic activities.

It seems to me that there is a contradiction here. Joe Smith says that CEMP is private activity, while the BBC says that it is BBC journalism and therefore exempt.

Which is it?

More Harrabin

I've previously blogged about the Cambridge Environment and Media Programme (which might be the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme; nobody seems sure). CEMP, as I'll call it, is run by the BBC's Roger Harrabin and Dr Joe Smith of the Open University, apparently to improve coverage of green issues in the media. As far as I can tell this involves using the BBC to promote environmentalism, but I recognise that my views may be prejudiced, so let me lay down the evidence I have recently uncovered.

CEMP's activities seem mainly to involve putting together BBC journalists and bigwigs and NGOs to discuss green issues. These meetings have lead to among other things the abortive Planet Relief day of BBC greenery.

CEMP is funded from a mixture of public and private sources - the BBC and the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia both say they have contributed. What the private sources are, or indeed what the legal status of CEMP is remain unclear, but it is not a great stretch of the imagination to believe that these are in fact the self-same NGOs who get to meet the BBC bigwigs.

In response to a Freedom of Information request, Dr Smith indicated that in his view, his work with Roger Harrabin is private activity.

Put these factors together and you have a disturbing situation which raises some uncomfortable questions for the corporation. For example:

• Why is the BBC funding the private activities of one of its journalists?
• How can the BBC claim to be editorially independent when it is engaged in a joint venture with unidentified private organisations to shape its own content?
• Who is authorising this expenditure within the BBC?
• What is the BBC getting in return?

Lots of questions, but precious few answers at the moment. I'll keep digging, but any suggestions as to ways of attacking the problem will be gratefully received.

Update on Jan 15, 2012 by Bishop Hill

The full story of Roger Harrabin and the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme is now available as a download here.

Five Labour administrations, five devaluations

James Bartholemew asks a very pertinent question: why is there always a run on the pound when Labour is in power?

The Speaker's committee

The news that the Lib Dems are going to boycott the Speaker's committee because they see it as a stitch-up is welcome. Iain Dale is calling for the Tories to follow suit.

But if there is not to be a Labour majority on the committee, how then should it be staffed? It seems to me that Labour and Conservatives both have too much of a vested interest in the findings - they both desperately need to win vindication for their actions in the past. It seems to me then that it is only the LibDems, of the major three parties, who can justify their presence on the committee.

Two LibDems, one each from the Scots and Welsh Nats, and one of the independents, plus a token Red and a token Blue; that's the answer.

Self-analysis

For followers of the climate change debate and the IPCC process, the fact that IPCC reviews are conducted by the same people who wrote the papers in the first place is not news - Michael Mann was of course famously a lead author on the paleoclimate chapter of the IPCC 3rd assessment report, which, if I recall correctly, managed to include a picture of the Hockey Stick no less than six times.

There is an interesting post up today at Peer-to-Peer, a blog run by the Nature group, and authored by Maxine Clark, the executive editor of that organ.

Nature's 27 November issue (456, 432; 2008) carries a News story about the planned retirement of the editor of a theoretical-physics journal, who was facing growing criticism that he used its pages to publish numerous papers written by himself.

According to Nature, 5 of the 36 papers in the December issue of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals alone were written by its editor-in-chief, Mohamed El Naschie, making nearly 60 papers written or coauthored by him in the journal this year. Most scientists contacted by Nature said that El Naschie's papers tend to be of poor quality, although a few find his ideas original and interesting.

Nature has played a less than stellar part in the global warming debate, refusing to adhere to their own policies on data availability, and suppressing views that do not adhere to the required view. Here is a chance for them to redeem themselves though - I wait, in hope rather than any great expectation - for an article from them demanding resolution to the similar problems that beset the world of climatology.

Taking the Michael

Michael Martin's performance in the Commons yesterday has lead several commentators to note his passing the buck to anyone who stood still for long enough to catch it - the police were to blame, the Serjeant at Arms was to blame, but he, Gorbals Mick was a paragon of virtue and an example to us all. (I made that last bit up).

Martin has been heavily criticised for not shouldering the blame himself, but I think those who would cast the first stone need to be much more culturally sensitive. Martin is from Western Scotland, and in the nether regions of Glasgow, politicians have been brought up to avoid responsibility for everything and anything that goes wrong. It's almost bred into them. It's is where the phrase "political accountability" comes from - it means accountability for things that go well, and things that go well only. Martin is merely expressing his native political culture.

So take your English preconceptions of how politicians should behave back to Blighty and have a care for the way other people run their affairs.

Thank you.

Bashful cops

Sky has the footage of the police searching Damian Green's office, which was taken by some of the Tory staffers. They may be the stupid party, but that was reasonably quick thinking.

What I find bemusing is that they have pixellated the faces of the police officers concerned. Why should they do that? The police are public servants and they have no right to expect privacy when they are at work. It is the right of every one of us to film the police. It's one of the few ways we have to keep them honest.

The benefit of the doubt

After something of a hiatus over the weekend, there has been a rush of new comment on the Damian Green affair, including this rather good piece by Henry Porter over at the Graun. I get the impression that this whole affair may well run and run. Wednesday's statement to Parliament by Michael Martin promises to produce some real fireworks - it might well turn out to be one of those rare occasions when it is worth watching it all live on TV. With a bit of luck a few heads might roll. God, there might even be some bloodshed.

It's fair to say that this isn't a black and white issue. The argument that MPs should not be above the law seems to me to be a fair one. The problem is that the law is not designed with the interests of the public in mind - it's been written solely to protect the interests of the state. By outlawing the leaking of government information, the opposition are left weaponless in the fight to hold the executive to account. If the government mean to enforce the laws on leaking it will mean that yet another plank of the British Constitution has been torn up and tossed aside by a government that cares nothing for the public, but only for its narrow partisan self. What point is an opposition that has no access to the information it requires? We desperately need a sweeping new Freedom of Information Act that will make nearly every state document public (with the obvious few narrow exceptions). Only then can we be sure that the government can be held to account.

The actions of the police may or may not have had a sinister motive behind them. What the commentariat has made clear is that, after 90 days detention and 42 days detention and 28 days detention and ID cards and cash for honours and databases and snooping on all and sundry, people are no longer willing to give Gordon Brown and his motley crew the benefit of the doubt.

It's about time too.

Comment not quite so free as it was?

Still here, still working on some other things. I've just cottoned on to the Damian Green story, which is frankly pretty scary. One thing I did notice was that Comment is Free still hasn't uttered a single solitary word on the story. Are the powers that be at the Graun scared of what people will say about the dear leader?

Update on Nov 28, 2008 by Bishop Hill

There's an open thread at CiF where lots of the punters are wondering the same thing.