How the BBC pretended to be balanced on 'climate change'. And failed, obviously.
James Delingpole
Sir Crispin: not at all too pleased with himselfI have just been listening to Uncertain Climate, the first in BBC “Environment Analyst” Roger Harrabin’s two-part Radio 4 investigation into the politics of climate change. The announcer introduced it as a programme “on an unusual aspect of global warming that you won’t have heard in the news headlines”. This was touching, but would only have been accurate had it added the phrase “if your only source for those news headlines is the BBC website”.
Anyhoo, I listened to it so that you don’t have to. The programme was rather what you would have expected the BBC and Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin to make on global warming – which is to say apparent sweet reasonableness and noble questing-for-truth disguising a deal of disingenuousness, special pleading, (presumably) unconscious bias, and economy with the actualité. (Hat tip: Nick Mabbs)
Its slipperiest trick, to my mind, was giving so much space – almost unchallenged but for some (heavily edited) interpolations from an underrepresented Nigel Lawson – to former UN ambassador Sir Crispin Tickell.
When the final lofty analysis of the CAGW scare gets to be written up by Sir Christopher Booker’s or Lord Delingpole’s grandson in about 2050 (by which time it will have become superabundantly clear, as polar bears maraud outside the freezing walls of Carlisle, and Mount Kilimanjaro becomes the favoured skiing destination of Boris Johnson’s descendants, that global cooling is and always was the far greater threat), at least one chapter will be dedicated to the deleterious influence of this pompous, insufferable mandarin in skewing the climate debate with his hysterically overblown claims of the eco disasters awaiting us. (In the 1970s he wrote a book worrying we were all going to be done for by Global Cooling. But Sir Crispin doesn’t much talk about this any more.)
