This, then, was the man chosen to brief senior BBC staff on the ‘truth’ about global warming. Is it any wonder that, ever since, the BBC’s policy has been to marginalise sceptics and fan the flames of climate alarmism in everything from its TV, radio and internet news reporting to parti-pris documentaries like The Truth About Climate Change, Climate Change: Britain Under Threat, Meltdown: A Global Warming Journey, Climate Wars and Horizon: Science Under Attack?
Not even its regular programmes have been immune from this evangelical green fervour. Kiddies’ favourite Blue Peter marked a BBC ‘Climate Chaos’ season by changing its name for the day to Green Peter, giving its audience ‘top tips on how to help the environment’ including advice on how to plant a ‘drought-resistant garden’ and how to ‘boil a kettle with a bike’.
All this might have been more excusable, perhaps, if the BBC had been prepared to find room in its output for countervailing voices offering a less alarmist perspective. But of course it wasn’t back then and it still isn’t now. No sooner would the BBC broadcast a programme expressing scepticism about AGW than it would broadcast one celebrating the state of Israel, or praising Margaret Thatcher or bigging up free-market capitalism or critiquing multiculturalism. It’s just not in its ideological nature.
The Climategate 2.0 e-mails granted a useful insight into the BBC’s instinctive bias on this issue. In one e-mail from 2004, BBC environmental correspondent Alex Kirby boasts to Phil Jones about how he has managed to ‘spike’ some item featuring sceptical views, which he considers to be ‘pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish’. Kirby crows:
We are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them coverage at all and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats.
No worries on that score, Alex. No worries at all.
In Chapter 10, you may recall, I described how by 2007 this bias had become official BBC policy. And also how in 2011, far from overturning this outrageous decision, the BBC instead chose to endorse it in a new report by the snails expert Professor Steve Jones. Neutral observers unfamiliar with the ways of the BBC might reasonably assume that these key decisions were made after careful consideration by many wise heads of a broad range of evidence. As Booker’s report on that influential 2006 seminar presided over by Lord May indicates, though, nothing could be further from the truth.
It was ‘directed’ by Roger Harrabin, one of the BBC’s senior environmental reporters, and Dr Joe Smith, an Open University geographer who describes himself as an ‘action researcher’ on climate change. Back in 1996 they had set up the ‘Cambridge Media and Environment Programme’, to promote environmental coverage in the media. They were funded, inter alia, by Defra, the department responsible for government policy on global warming’; the WWF, a leading environmental pressure group; and the Tyndall Centre, a climate research unit at the University of East Anglia. Also helping to organise the BBC seminar was a body called the International Broadcasting Trust. Despite its name, this was a PR lobbying organisation which acted for several leading global warming activist groups, inluding Friends of the Earth.
One can understand, then, the dismay of the one remotely sceptical witness to this alarmist brainwashing exercise. Journalist and blogger Richard D. North (not to be confused with the Richard North mentioned elsewhere) wrote afterwards:
I found the seminar frankly shocking, 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…
I was frankly appalled by the level of ignorance of the issue which the BBC people showed. I mean that I heard nothing which made me think any of them read any broadsheet newspaper coverage of the topic (except maybe The Guardian and that lazily). Though they purported to be aware that this was an immensely important topic, it seemed to me that none of them had shown even a modicum of professional curiosity on the subject … I spent the day discussing the subject and I don’t recall anyone showing any sign of having read anything serious at all.
If I’ve dwelt at some length on the BBC, it’s because I think no organisation in the world – with the possible exception of the IPCC, which we’ll come to in a moment – has been more culpable in promulgating the Great Global-Warming Myth. Not only is it the overwhelmingly dominant force in the British broadcast media but – thanks to offshoots like the World Service – it remains probably the most trusted and influential broadcaster in the world.
It is also, let us not forget, funded to the tune of £145.50 a year by every British household which uses a colour television set – on pain of a fine, or even imprisonment for those who refuse to stump up for their compulsory licence. This renders its one-sided reporting of global warming even less excusable. Why, after all, should the £145.50 given to the BBC by climate sceptics or climate undecideds be any less valuable than the £145.50 given by tofu-munching, flight-shunning, eco-zealots?
But if you didn’t see any of this reported in the newspaper – let alone on television – I shouldn’t be remotely surprised. By rights, the BBC’s systemic corruption and bias on AGW, in which it breached the terms of its Charter, betrayed the trust of its audience and strayed well beyond the bounds of responsible journalism into outright political activism, ought to have been a major scandal. The BBC, after all, is as significant a national institution as the Royal Family, Parliament or the Armed Forces. For it to have abused its prestige and authority so flagrantly ought to have raised serious questions about the special privileges it enjoys as a publicly funded state broadcaster.
So why did this scandal make so relatively little public impact? Why didn’t angry mobs descend with pitchforks on BBC TV Centre, demanding a £145.50 refund for all the lies they’d been told? For much the same reason, I suspect, that no one marched on the UEA’s Climatic Research Unit after Climategate, demanding back the £13m in public grant funding paid out to Phil Jones’s department. Because believing in a Big Lie is really easy, while questioning it requires considerable effort.
Christopher Booker’s report into the BBC, for example, runs to 30,000 words. Few people these days have the inclination to read even a novella that long, let alone a closely detailed technical report covering the BBC’s Charter obligations, its staffing arrangements and the nuances of the Medieval Warming Period. So much easier – especially in the absence of widespread coverage – to tell yourself: ‘C’mon. This is the BBC we’re talking about here. It’s a respected global institution bound by strict rules. Sure, it might make the odd mistake but no way would it deliberately twist the truth for political ends. It’s the BBC. The BBC just wouldn’t do that.’
Similar rules apply to the IPCC. In October 2011 Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise published The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken For The World’s Top Climate Expert, an exposé of IPCC working practices so thorough and devastating that the organisation’s credibility ought to have been left in shreds. Many of the scientists writing its supposedly authoritative Assessment Reports turned out to be barely qualified, inexperienced youngsters in their twenties, chosen more for their commitment to the global warming ‘cause’ than for their specialist knowledge.
In some chapter reports, Laframboise discovered, more than 40 per cent of the references came not from peer-reviewed papers but from ‘grey literature’ – propaganda, essentially – produced by activist groups like the WWF and Greenpeace. IPCC chapter authors were allowed to highlight their own work at the expense of others’ work; deadlines were stretched so that references supporting the IPCC’s claims could be added, even after the review process had supposedly finished; friendly journals were used to pass ‘on the nod’ specially commissioned papers favourable to the IPCC’s agenda; significant
numbers of those contributing to the IPCC’s reports were closely affiliated with nakedly political environmental campaign groups.
Did all this immediately prompt the public resignation of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, followed by the disbandment of the IPCC? You might have hoped so, yes. But then, you might also have hoped that two years after Climategate and a decade after McIntyre and McKitrick had destroyed his Hockey Stick, Michael Mann would have shown sufficient humility no longer to publish defiant, self-aggrandising letters like the one extracted at the top of this chapter. Neither, unfortunately, has proved to be the case.
Hence my note of frustration in this postscript. It’s a frustration you’re bound to experience yourself once you’ve finished this book. You’ll go out into the world fired up with righteous rage, armed with vast quantities of compelling evidence to support your case that the whole Global Warming industry is a massive scam. But will your friends and colleagues listen? A lot of them won’t. They’ll think you’ve been got at. They’ll think you’ve lost the plot. You’ll plunge in their estimation for you will have revealed yourself to be selfish. And anti-science. And a denier. And a recipient of secret cash payments from sinister fossil fuel interests. And the kind of ruthless bastard who just doesn’t care about the polar bears or the drowning people of Bangladesh or ‘future generations’.
‘No, but wait,’ you’ll want to protest. ‘I’m really none of those things. And I don’t want this to be about name-calling. All I’m asking is that if you have any hard evidence which contradicts what I’m saying, please just show it to me and we can then form a reasonable conclusion about what the facts of the case actually are.’
Yeah, good luck with that. Not that I blame you for your naïve optimism. I’m guilty of it myself every time I wade through the comments below my blog posts. ‘Maybe once, just once, one of the trolls will find it in his tortured, twisted conscience actually to engage with the arguments in my post rather than just telling me how stupid, evil, selfish, hateful, ugly, Fascistic, ignorant and in-the-pay-of-Big-Oil I am,’ I think. Never happens, though. Never once. That’s not how the climate ‘debate’ works because it has been framed in such a way by the Warmists that there never can be a debate. After all, if this were an argument dependent only on facts and evidence, the sceptics would have won it years ago.
In their hearts the Warmists know this. You see it in the Climategate 2.0 e-mails. What emerges very clearly – even more so than in the earlier Climategate e-mails – is that in private these scientists are far less confident about the validity of their models and theories than they claim in public.
‘Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous,’ says one scientist, Peter Thorne, in 2005. In another he expresses concern that ‘the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.’
‘Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle- and low-level clouds,’ admits Phil Jones.
‘What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?’ muses one scientist. ‘They’ll kill us probably.’
Why then, are they so reluctant to express these uncertainties in their IPCC Assessment reports?
One reason, the e-mails suggest, is political pressure.
‘I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story,’ a civil servant writes to Phil Jones in 2009. ‘They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.’
Another is that phenomenon we examined in Chapter 7 – ‘noble cause corruption’ – in which post-normal scientists see it as their holy mission to push governments into doing the ‘right thing’ even if it means playing fast and loose with the known facts. (Michael Mann’s e-mails, especially, are abundant with references to what he calls ‘the cause’.)
Above all, though, what sweats from so many of those e-mails is fear: the fear which comes quite naturally when you have something to hide and you’ll do almost anything not to be found out. That would explain e-mails like this one from Keith Briffa:
But for GODS SAKE please respect the sensitivity here and destroy the file immediately when finished and please do not tell ANYBODY I sent this. Cheers Keith.
Fear also runs through quite the nastiest thread of Climategate 2.0 e-mail correspondence, in which Michael Mann and his ‘Hockey Team’ conspire to destroy the reputation and career of a perfectly decent, reputable New Zealand scientist called Chris de Freitas. The thread begins in 2003 when de Freitas has had the temerity to publish, in a journal called Climate Research, a new paper by Soon & Baliunas on the Medieval Warm Period.
Soon & Baliunas’s conclusion – that ‘across the world, many records reveal that the twentieth century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium’ – is the very last thing Mann and his team want to hear. That’s because, as we saw in Chapter 2, they’re what you might call ‘MWP deniers’. So they gang up to have the journal blacklisted, to get de Freitas sacked from the journal, and even to have him fired from his position at Auckland University.
I shan’t reprint the correspondence here, for it will take up too much space. But if you’ve time, follow the link provided at the end and marvel at just how paranoid, insecure and pathologically vindictive the Climategate scientists can be towards dissenters. Why, though? Can it really be that they find the papers of scientists who disagree with them so offensively wrong that only the total obliteration of their careers will suffice? Or might it rather be that the Team really doesn’t have many effective counterarguments – and that their only way of hiding this is through bullying and bluster?
No one enjoys being exposed as a charlatan, a liar or a fool. No one appreciates being told that the Emperor whose magnificent threads they have been so ostentatiously admiring is actually stark bollock naked. No one will ever thank you for pointing out to them that their gods are false, their religion’s mumbo jumbo and their idols have feet of clay.
This is what makes the task ahead of us so gargantuan. Remember, we’re not taking on just a handful of Gaia-worshipping eco-loons here. We’re dealing with the fastest-growing religion of the modern age – or, if you prefer, an outbreak of mass hysteria on a scale unprecedented in history – with fervent adherents numbered in billions.
Then, of course, there’s the money issue.
‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it,’ said Upton Sinclair. Indeed. Anthropogenic Global Warming has become an industry on which the livelihoods of millions now depend. Do you honestly imagine that these people will be happy now just to shrug their shoulders and go: ‘Ah well, if that’s what the latest scientific evidence says, I guess I’ll just have to wave goodbye to my car and my holidays and my mortgage repayments and my ability to pay for the kids’ education. I mean, sure it’s inconvenient on a personal level. But it would be wrong, quite wrong of me, to be lavishly rewarded at public expense for doing a job which is so utterly useless.’?
No, of course they won’t. They’re going to resist with all their might. Global warming is now so important to so many people that if it didn’t exist they’d have to invent it.
Which, funnily enough, is exactly what they have done: the climate scientists; the carbon traders; the solar panel installers; the renewable energy investors; the insurance and re-insurance companies; the ethical fund managers; the TV and newspaper environment correspondents; the professional eco-warriors who need it to generate sponsorship for their next canoe trip to the North Pole; the local government environment officers; the carbon-offset sellers; the green rebranding consultants and ethical PR specialists; the green politicians; the electrical car manufacturers; the wind farm engineer
s; the copywriters who put the blurb on cereal packets telling you how organic and carbon neutral the ingredients are; the schoolteachers who feel they’re making the world a better place by teaching our kids to feel more guilty and worried; the BBC documentary makers; the lobbyists; the Prius salesmen; the writers of newspaper columns with names like ‘Eco Worrier’; the clergymen who’ve more or less given up God but see Gaia as very much the coming thing; the Maldives tourist authority; the technocrats and administrators and secretaries of the United Nations and the European Union; the mechanics who converted the Prince of Wales’s vintage Aston Martin to run on biofuels; the airline companies used so regularly by Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri as they jet back and forth across the world to remind us how important it is to cut back on our air miles…
Never has so much paranoia been generated, so much money been squandered, so much nonsense been spouted, so many lives been constrained, so much economic damage been inflicted, so many bright futures been stunted on the basis of so little evidence.
Such is the crying scandal of climate change.
But don’t take it from me. Let’s leave the final word to one of the experts – a Columbia dendrologist named Ed Cook – summing up what we really know so far. Though he’s referring specifically to the work done by Michael Mann et al on tree ring samples, what he says applies just as well to the current state of climate science.
Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about 100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).
‘We know fuck-all.’ Hmm. And on this basis, they want us to dismantle the entire edifice of Western Industrial Civilisation?
Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Children's Future Page 27