AGW Sceptics to Get Less or No BBC Coverage

Bosses rule climate change 'sceptic' Lawson should have been censored by R4

The BBC has ruled that a radio debate about climate change involving former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson should have been censored – as he did not agree with flawed global warming computer predictions.

Fraser Steel, head of the BBC complaints unit, said a Radio 4 Today programme about the causes of last winter’s storms should never have been broadcast.

The move has huge implications for future coverage, implying that ‘sceptics’ will be gagged.

And it has been widely condemned by MPs, with Peter Lilley, a Tory member of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, saying it shows the BBC is ‘afraid of letting a single critic point out that the climate change emperor has no clothes’.

His Labour colleague Graham Stringer said: ‘This is a form of censorship.’

Citing the bogus claim that the MMR jab causes autism, which was exploded by investigative journalists, he added: ‘After all, it is often non-specialists who prove the specialists wrong.’

Lord Lawson, the chairman of sceptic think-tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation, was invited to discuss last winter’s floods on the Today programme in February.

The former Chancellor often appears on Radio 4 to talk about economics, but this was the first time he had been allowed to discuss climate change.

He argued that there was no evidence to prove that the violent storms were caused by global warming – a conclusion later endorsed by the Met Office.

However, Bob Ward, a climate change spokesman from the Grantham Institute, complained that the debate created a ‘false balance’ between scientists and sceptics.

And in his ruling, Mr Steel said: ‘A false balance should not be created between well-established fact and opinion. Lord Lawson’s views are not supported by evidence from computer modelling.’

Mr Ward responded to the ruling by calling for ‘necessary precautions’ to ensure that experts are on hand to ‘correct any errors’ if climate change sceptics are allowed on air.

But Lord Lawson said Mr Steel’s ruling was ‘completely absurd’, adding: ‘The BBC’s position is quite extraordinary. They are now saying that only alarmism is acceptable.’

And Dr Richard Betts, head of the Met Office Climate Impacts section, said: ‘Unlike the person who complained to the BBC, I don’t have a problem with Lawson or anyone else being given air time to voice their opinions.’

'I've been banned by the BBC!': Ex-Chancellor Lord Lawson, a passionate climate change sceptic, accuses BBC bosses of silencing debate on global warming

By Nigel Lawson

Over the years, both in and out of government, I have frequently been invited to appear on BBC radio’s flagship Today programme, usually to discuss economic issues.

But despite the fact that I had written a thoroughly well-documented book about global warming (An Appeal To Reason), which happily became something of a best-seller, and the following year founded a think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (which is advised by a number of eminent scientists), I was never invited on Today to discuss any aspect of climate change.

That was until earlier this year, when I was asked on to discuss the recent bad weather, which had caused widespread flooding in parts of England, the extent to which this may have been connected with man-made climate change, and what should be done about it.

My opposite number was the scientist Sir Brian Hoskins. It was an appropriate pairing, since Sir Brian is no remote and unworldly academic: he is chairman of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, a lavishly-funded alarmist pressure group, and a member of the Government-appointed Climate Change Committee, which exists chiefly to promote the abandonment of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) by the UK.

It was a thoroughly civilised discussion, ably refereed by presenter Justin Webb. Following the programme, on February 13, all hell broke loose.

The BBC was overwhelmed by a well-organised deluge of complaints — many of them, inevitably, from those with a commercial interest in renewable energy, as well as from the Green Party — arguing that, since I was not myself a scientist, I should never have been allowed to appear.

The BBC responded reasonably robustly.

Ceri Thomas, head of programmes for BBC News, pointed out that, after six weeks of flooding, ‘this was the first interview on Today with a climate change “sceptic” ’, and that as a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, I was well qualified to discuss the most cost-effective policy response to the flooding.

But the orchestrated complaints continued and it now seems, from widespread leaked reports which the BBC has nowhere denied, that poor Mr Thomas has been over-ruled.

The head of the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit, a Mr Fraser Steel, whose qualifications for the job are unclear and whose knowledge of the complex climate change issue is virtually non-existent, has written to a little-known but active Green Party politician called Chit Chong to apologise for the fact I was allowed to appear on the programme and to make clear this will not happen again.

Among the reasons given in Mr Steel’s letter for upholding Mr Chong’s complaint and over-ruling the BBC’s head of news programmes is the mind-boggling statement that: ‘As you have pointed out, Lord Lawson’s views are not supported by the evidence from computer modelling.’

Evidence? However useful computer models may be, the one thing they cannot be is evidence. Computer climate models are simply conjectures, expressed in the form of mathematical equations (the language of computers), which lead to forecasts of future global temperatures, which can then be compared with the evidence on the ground.

So far, it has to be said, they have not been doing very well; but we shall see in due course if they improve. In fact, there was nothing I said in the entire Today programme discussion that was incorrect, nor, indeed, did Sir Brian Hoskins suggest otherwise.

This can be confirmed by reading the full transcript, still available on my foundation’s website and possibly also on the BBC’s website, if they have not removed it out of embarrassment.

The only untruth came from the unreliable Mr Chong of the Green Party who accused me of claiming on the programme that climate change ‘was all a conspiracy’. Needless to say, I said nothing of the sort, as the transcript makes clear.

During the discussion, I made two principal points.

First, that rather than spending untold millions on subsidies for wind farms and solar panels, which provide unreliable energy at exorbitant cost, we would do better to spend (much less) money on protecting the country from whatever nature throws at us, such as improved by flood defences.

Second, that forecasts of global temperatures over the next 100 years are highly uncertain.

The first is a matter of judgment. The second is a matter of fact, which Sir Brian did not contest. The greatest (but by no means the only) uncertainty, and one about which climate scientists disagree, is the crucial question of precisely how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to carbon dioxide emissions.

This is known in the trade as ‘climate sensitivity’. The fact — and it is a fact, borne out by the measurements made by the Met Office and similar bodies in America — is that there has been no recorded increase in global temperature over the past 17 years, during which carbon emissions have grown dramatically.

This has led a growing number of scientists to conclude that the existing models exaggerate the climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide.

Sir Brian, for the present, is reluctant to accept this, arguing that the ‘missing heat’ was being secreted in the ocean depths — which I described as ‘speculation’. This was the only serious disagreement we had.

And the eminent scientist, James Lovelock, famous among other things for the Gaia hypothesis (which states that the Earth operates as a single, living organism) wrote to me after reading the transcript.

'It is hard to imagine a more blatant breach of its charter, which commits it to political balance, or a more blatant betrayal of the people’s trust, on which the continuation of its licence fee depends'

He said: ‘The weakness of Brian’s case is that no one yet knows the climate of the oceans and, until they do, projections of future climate are little better than guesses.’

(Incidentally, it is a scandal that, at the age of 95, James Lovelock has still received no honour from his sovereign.)

It is also unclear, of course, how much it matters if the icy-cold ocean depths become very slightly less cold.

Needless to say, while apparently in active correspondence with the Green Party politician and non-scientist Mr Chong about the iniquity of allowing me to appear on the Today programme, at least not without emphasising that, as a non-scientist, no one should take any notice of what I may have to say, at no time has either the head of the Editorial Complaints Unit or anyone else from the BBC sought to get in touch with me about all this.

Had they done so, I might not only have sought gently to educate them on a subject about which they clearly know very little.

I might have suggested, too, that if there is to be a ban on non-scientists discussing climate change issues (which I do not, of course, support), this should in the best BBC tradition be an even-handed one.

That is to say, they should also ban non-scientists such as Energy Secretary Ed Davey, Ed Miliband, Lord Deben (chairman of the Government’s Climate Advisory Committee), Lord Stern (former adviser to the Government on the Economics of Climate Change and Development) and all the others who are regularly invited to appear.

The truth is that the BBC’s outrageous behaviour is nothing whatever to do with whether I am a climate scientist or not. Indeed, it is not about me at all.

Matt Ridley, for example, is arguably this country’s — indeed, the English-speaking world’s — leading science writer who has researched the climate change issue and reached a conclusion which is very close to my own.

(He is also among the unpaid members of the Academic Advisory Council of my think-tank.)

Not once has he been invited to discuss any aspect of the issue on Radio 4’s Today programme.

The fact is that, on this issue, the BBC has its own party line (indistinguishable from that of the Green Party) which it imposes with quasi-Stalinist thoroughness.

The one occasion, last February, on which it permitted a balanced and civilised discussion is now seen by the Corporation as a colossal error for which it must grovel and undertake never to repeat.
This amounts to a policy of outright political censorship.

It is hard to imagine a more blatant breach of its charter, which commits it to political balance, or a more blatant betrayal of the people’s trust, on which the continuation of its licence fee depends.

The BBC justifies its unique compulsory funding model — a television tax — by claiming that it provides a fair and balanced public service. Its treatment of climate change shows this is simply not the case.

It is little wonder that a recent poll found most people would like to see the licence fee scrapped.

BBC’s climate change stance in brazen defiance of the law
When it comes to climate change, the BBC’s coverage is quite deliberately one-sided, argues Christopher Booker

Next January will see the 10th anniversary of one of the most curious episodes in the history of the BBC. At a “secret seminar”, many of its most senior executives met with a roomful of invited outsiders to agree on a new policy that was in flagrant breach of its Charter. They agreed that, when it came to climate change, the BBC’s coverage should now be quite deliberately one-sided, in direct contravention of its statutory obligation that “controversial subjects” must be “treated with due accuracy and impartiality”. Anything that contradicted the party line, from climate science to wind farms, could be ignored.

The BBC Trust later reported that the seminar had taken this momentous decision on the advice of “the best scientific experts” present. Only years later, after the BBC had spent tens of thousands of pounds trying to suppress the identities of its “scientific experts”, did it emerge that they had been nothing of the kind. The room had been full of rabid climate activists, from pressure groups such as Greenpeace and Stop Climate Chaos.

In 2011, I wrote a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation charting in detail how this had led to hundreds of programmes that were blatantly biased.

Last week, as the wave of propaganda mounts in advance of that bid to get a new global climate treaty agreed next December, the BBC was at it again, in a 75-minute documentary called Climate Change By Numbers. Using a well-tried formula, the programme purported to be taking a fresh, objective look at the issue, this time employing three mathematicians to subject the basic science on global warming to rigorous mathematical analysis.

As usual, supported by an array of gimmicky graphics, irrelevant anecdotes and film clips from all over the world, what these presenters omitted to say was even more important than what they did. We began with a young lady mathematician explaining how we know that, since 1880, the world has unmistakably warmed. Although she cleverly skated round the increasingly controversial methods by which computers have been used to “adjust”, “infill” or “homogenise” temperature data, few people would disagree with her conclusion that the world has indeed warmed, by around 0.85 degrees. What she left out was that there has been nothing unprecedented about our recent warming. As the world has generally warmed since emerging from the Little Ice Age 200 years ago, two earlier warming phases from natural causes, between 1860 and 1880 and from 1910 to 1940, were just as great as that of the last 30 years – before CO2 levels rose as they have done recently.

But the computer models relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been programmed to predict that, as CO2 rises, so global temperatures must follow. So the second segment showed us a professor using his passion for Spurs football team to assure us that those computer models are reliable. What he omitted to explain was that, in the past 17 years, the IPCC’s computer model predictions have turned out to be comprehensively wrong.

In the final segment, another professor used a long sequence about Formula One motor-racing to tell us that pouring increasing amounts of man-made CO2 into the atmosphere has already led us to ever more “extreme weather events”, floods, storms, droughts, hurricanes etc. In years to come, unless we totally change our lifestyle, these will only get even worse and more dangerous. What he failed to tell us was that, as even the IPCC concedes, such events have not become more frequent or intense at all. There have been no more floods, droughts and hurricanes than there were before the global warming scare was invented.

It was telling last week that, in answer to criticism of another even more ludicrously biased programme on another of its favourite subjects, the EU, a BBC spokesman should have insisted “impartiality is paramount for the BBC”. The fact is that they know they have a legal obligation to be impartial. They know that they are breaking the law. But they also know they can get away with it, because no one in authority will ever call them to account for doing so.