The unmentionables

The BBC's decision to part company with the Met Office has provoked a great deal of comment over the weekend (and a cartoon or two as well). Returning to my desk this morning I expected that the story would have run out of legs, but it has just been given a new lease of life via the Today programme.

I've attached the audio file below. Justin Webb was discussing possible reasons for the the BBC's decision and he mentioned that some people had suggested that this might have something to do with the Met Office's stance on climate change. Given that the BBC is now arguably rather more alarmist than the Met Office, however, this seems somewhat counterintuitive.

To be fair it was just a throwaway comment, the aural equivalent of clickbait, and at least one bottom feeder has swallowed it whole.

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Leavers on the line - Josh 338

In the news today (The Sunday Times "BBC pulls plug on Met Office") we learn that the BBC is not going to renew the Met Office's contract to provide weather forecasts. Interesting. Maybe we will see a Corbyn giving us the weather in the future.

Cartoons by Josh

The unique way the BBC is funded

Back in 2011, we had fun at BH with the remarkable story that the BBC's commercial arm was accepting readymade programming from green groups and PR agencies, either for free or for negligible cost (see here, here, and here). This story has now reemerged after Ofcom received a complaint about the practice of illicit sponsorship of current affairs programmes.

According to the Ofcom report, over a two-year period between 2009 and 2011, BBC World News accepted no fewer than 186 different programmes at low or no cost without telling the audience.

Each of the programmes was approximately 30 minutes in duration. All were funded by not-for-profit organisations operating largely in the areas of developing world issues and environmental concerns.

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Letts accuse

For such a trifling programme, Quentin Letts' What's the Point of the Met Office is really making waves. Booker reviews it over at the Mail and there's some interesting coverage by Damian Thompson at the Spectator.

Yesterday [Harrabin] went into overdrive. ‘Accusation’, he declared, as he linked to Black’s attack on Letts. The sceptics got ‘their’ programme when the BBC allowed Quentin Letts to raise an eyebrow at the Met Office’s alarmist and utterly false claim that thermometers would shoot up between 2004 and 2014.

Don’t get me wrong: Roger Harrabin is a highly respected science writer. He doesn’t set out to deceive his readers. But, as Letts might put it, What’s the Point of a supposedly impartial ‘environment analyst’ who – apparently – takes offence at his bosses allowing another journalist to offer views different to his own?

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The point of the Met Office

The BBC has a programme on at the moment entitled "What's the point of the Met Office", a light-hearted, but critical look at this august institution. Apparently Peter Lilley and Piers Corbyn are featured at one point.

Update on Aug 5, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Interestingly, the Met Office's Helen Chivers agrees with host Quentin Letts that some of the Met Office's utterances on climate are "biblical" in their alarmism.

Update on Aug 5, 2015 by Bishop Hill

The vested interests are unamused:

Lord Deben: "UK Meteorological Office universally respected used by USA on its most sensitive missions. BBC broadcasts unfounded attacks. Right of reply?"

Tom Burke: "#BBC at it again giving wholly unjustified airtime to climate deniers on Radio4 right now. Egregious attack on the Met Office. Complain now"

Update on Aug 5, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Roger Harrabin has this to say: #Climate sceptics have demanded "their" programme. They just got it. Radio 4. 10.00. @QuentinLetts_ on @metoffice. @ECIU_UK @CarbonBrief

I think he's pulling our legs.

Update on Aug 5, 2015 by Bishop Hill

For overseas readers who want to listen to the show, it can be heard here.

That voice

I get called up quite often by Radio Scotland to talk about energy. It's a hot topic north of the border and they struggle for people who are willing to do anything other than parrot the received wisdom (if you can call it that) on renewables.

So it wasn't altogether a surprise when they called this morning to see if I might be willing to talk about Obama's energy plan and what impact a change in the US situation might mean for further developments here in Scotland. The researcher sounded quite interested in what I had to say - you can guess the content - and went away to talk to her producer.

Unfortunately, when she got back to me half an hour later she said they already had "that voice" in the show, and explained that they wouldn't be needing me. Fair enough.

But now take a listen to what "that voice" had to say. It made me laugh, anyway.

Radio Scotland Renewables

A dampish squib

So President Obama has a new climate plan out and his fans in the BBC are getting very excited about it. The main thing seems to be a requirement for states to formulate climate plans, but not for a while. There is an even longer delay before they have to implement them.

Here are my impressions:

• The main objective is to make climate change an wedge issue in the next round of elections.
• The delays will make them more acceptable to the states.
• The plan will make only a tiny fraction of a degree of a difference to global temperatures at the end of the century.
• The US is halfway to the new target already on the back of the shale gas revolution.
• The new rules are put in place by executive order and can therefore be removed just as easily.

I'm not sure this amounts to a particularly large hill of beans.

Today's top news: greens write a letter

Anti-capitalist green groups and crony capitalists are annoyed about George Osborne's decision to cut renewables subsidies and have written to the Prime Minister to say he's a bad boy. With depressing inevitability, the BBC has launched a full-scale PR campaign to back them up.

So we have a Roger Harrabin article about the letter here, a segment on the Today programme here (from 1:17.35), which is essentially an opportunity for a series of opponents of the new policy to air their views.  Interestingly, there was less quoting of green anti-capitalists this time round. Perhaps my criticisms of Harrabin's last piece made an impact. But not much of an impact - the nearest thing to a supporter of the policy changes was someone from KPMG, who thought the subsidy removal was necessary but taking place too quickly.

I gather the FiveLive phone in features anti-capitalist campaigner from Friends of the Earth as well.

A new green disinformation campaign

Cluff Resources' underground coal gasification project looks at the moment as if it might have escaped Holyrood's moratorium on fracking projects, and greens have therefore launched a concerted campaign to address this regrettable loophole. The latest development is that Frack Off have obtained a letter written in January by Cluff Resources to Scottish ministers. This is breathtakingly dull stuff. The company introduces themselves, explains how much they are planning on investing and the inquire whether they were covered by the moratorium.

In other words it's a complete non-story. Nevertheless it has been hyped up by the greens, who have characterised it as "holding the country to ransom", and this ridiculous claim has inevitably been given maximum publicity by the BBC's David Miller here. He also follows the corporation's normal policy of getting comments from two separate anti-capitalist environmentalist groups (in this case WWF and FoE) to liven things up, although in fairness they do seem to have tried and failed to get a response from Cluff, whose PR team seems to exhibit the same ineptitude as Cuadrilla's.

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More polar bear poop

Another day, another misleading piece on the alleged dangers of global warming. This time it's an article by Matt McGrath, which sexes up claims made in a new paper about polar bear metabolisms:

Polar bears are unable to adapt their behaviour to cope with the food losses associated with warmer summers in the Arctic.

Scientists had believed that the animals would enter a type of 'walking hibernation' when deprived of prey.

But new research says that that bears simply starve in hotter conditions when food is scarce...

Polar bears survive mainly on a diet of seals that they hunt on the sea ice - but increased melting in the summer reduces seal numbers and as a result the bears struggle to find a meal.

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Gray lady

The BBC for once has published a story that could credibly be seen as justifying its taxpayer funding - a fascinating profile of the head of ethics at the Cabinet Office, Sue Gray. The misdeeds of civil servants is something of a theme at BH, but I was particularly interested in this story because as far as I can tell it was Ms Gray who cleared Lord Deben's appointment as head of the Committee on Climate Change despite knowing that he had a conflict of interest.

The story paints a picture of an over-powerful Whitehall official, who seems to operate with an almost total disregard for the law, particularly on FOI. This would not be the first time we have come across public sector officials behaving like this - recall for example the breaches of the law by UEA. Nor is it the first time we have noted the almost complete lack of any consequences suffered by the perpetrators.

Update on Jul 13, 2015 by Bishop Hill

There is a related story here.

No, it's natural variability

In the wake of Karl et al's frantic tweaking of the global temperature data in order to get the pause to disappear, a new paper by Nieves et al, also in Science, comes up with a different theory to explain what's happening, this time putting it down to natural variability:

Recent modeling studies have proposed different scenarios to explain the slowdown in surface temperature in the most recent decade. Some of these studies seem to support the idea of internal variability and/or rearrangement of heat between the surface and the ocean interior. Others suggest that radiative forcing might also play a role. Our examination of observational data over the past two decades shows some significant differences compared to model results from reanalyses, and provides the most definitive explanation of how the heat was redistributed. We find that cooling in the top 100-meter layer of the Pacific Ocean was mainly compensated by warming in the 100- to 300-meter layer of the Indian and Pacific Oceans in the past decade since 2003.

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Science says one thing, scientists another

Anyone would think there was a big climate conference coming up, because the BBC is pumping out the climate propaganda left right and centre. A couple of nights ago we had Kirsty Wark fawning all over Chris Rapley on Newsnight (from 40 mins) and wondering why good people like him weren't making the policy decisions. Today we have Roger Harrabin on ocean acidification (video here).

The samples are chalky white for millions of years from the fossils of tiny shellfish. That's until this dramatic point 55 million years ago [the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum; PETM], when the oceans suddenly got hotter and more acidic and the shellfish disappeared. It took shellfish 160,000 years to recover and scientists say humans are changing the seas ten times faster than at this catastrophic event...

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The compliant media and the scary stories

The BBC and every other environmental pressure group in the country is reporting the release under FOI of a draft Defra report on the impacts of unconventional oil and gas with considerable excitement. The main theme is encapsulated in the headline: "Fracking 'could lower house prices' says draft official report".

Here, for comparison, is an FT report from 2013 about the effects of the Bakken shale revolution in North Dakota.

City-data.com, which analyses house sales, says the average house or condominium in Williston in 2009 cost $101,906. By 2011, the average was $122,000 – still below the norm for North Dakota. “But since then prices have doubled or in some cases tripled,” says estate agent Arlene Hickel, of Bekk’s Realty in Williston.

A study of home prices in Pennsylvania also found an overall positive effect, with only homes with a private groundwater supply negatively affected (in the UK this would be pretty much nobody). And even here it is worth noting the part that fear plays in this effect. There is no real evidence that shale gas actually affects ground water - there are only environmentalists' scare stories compliantly repeated by a compliant media. When The Economist, once considered a serious publication, puts a "flaming faucet" at the top of a story about shale, you realise that something has gone badly awry.

Update on Jul 2, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Here is the unredacted report. The section on house prices bears reading. You will get a rather different impression to the one you get from the BBC.

The madness of Lord Deben

Lord Deben was on the Today programme promoting the Committee on Climate Change's 2015 progress report, which I shall read at my leisure. However Lord D's performance was amazing: he sounds more and more like Paul Ehrlich every day. No doubt the writing in capital letters will follow in due course.

This was completely swivel-eyed stuff, a full-on regurgitation of every bit of environmentalist disinformation that he could conjure up in three minutes with barely a pause for breath. For example, we had a bogeyman tale about Bangladesh facing doom, although Lord D was rather vague about what precisely it was that was going to be causing this crisis:

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