BBC's climate change scam

BRITAIN'S broadcaster has betrayed its charter and its audience by turning a blind eye to scepticism.

Climate conference

BY any measure, concern over global warming has been one of the major stories of our time, raising questions of profound relevance to all our futures.

How much of such global warming as has taken place can be ascribed to human activity? Have predictions that this faces the world with an unprecedented threat been based on truly reliable evidence? Considering their immense economic and social implications, how far have the measures put forward by politicians to avert that threat been in practice justified?

The BBC, as the largest and arguably most influential media organisation on earth, has had no prouder boast through the years than that it has won unique respect for the impartiality and independence of its reporting. Its duty to remain at all times impartial is enshrined by law in regulations under its royal charter.

Nevertheless, there are many who would question the extent to which it has always lived up to this obligation. Ever longer in recent years has been the list of issues on which the BBC has a clearly identifiable "party line", which is allowed to dictate the nature and slant of its coverage.

On few issues, however, if any, has the BBC shown itself to be more conspicuously committed to a particular point of view than the belief in man-made global warming. And it is important to recognise the extent to which this has been the result of deliberate policy. About the middle of the past decade, the BBC's senior executives, including those in charge of news and current affairs, along with its team of environmental journalists, took a decision that its coverage on issues related to climate change should be more overtly partisan.

They justified this on the basis that belief in the threat of man-made global warming was now accepted by such an overwhelming consensus of scientists that it was the BBC's duty not merely to accept that view but actively to promote it, and to ignore the views of those who disagreed.

Significantly, however, it was precisely about this time that the global warming story was entering a new phase. It was beginning to throw up more serious questioning, scientific and political, than ever. Ever more scientists, many of them leaders in their fields, were beginning to challenge the assumption on which the global warming theory rested: that the chief cause of rising world temperatures was man-made emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

Foremost in giving authority to this view since 1990 had been the series of major reports issued by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Other experts were beginning to expose serious flaws in the scientific methods by which the cause had been promoted. This was most notably in the IPCC's exceptionally prominent use of the famous "hockey stick" graph, which was its chief evidence for claiming that global temperatures had suddenly shot up in the late 20th century to by far their highest level in 1000 years.

After years of negotiation, in December 2009 there came the dramatic failure, for political reasons, of the Copenhagen climate conference, the largest the world had seen. Here it had been hoped that the world's leaders would sign a treaty agreeing to cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases so drastic and so costly that these would have presented mankind with easily the largest bill in its history.

The BBC's journalists made no secret of their dismay at the breakdown of negotiations in Copenhagen. But also, about that same time in the northern winter of 2009-10, came the revelations of the "Climategate" emails, and those other scandals surrounding the IPCC, which dealt such a blow to that body's authority that it would not be easy to recover.

This sequence of events amounted to a wholly new phase in the climate change story, one that should have called even more strongly for informed and dispassionate reporting.

Yet through it all, the BBC's coverage remained so defensively one-sided that it was at best peculiarly selective, while to much of what was happening it remained studiously oblivious.

In the years when the global warming issue was becoming more controversial than at any time since the scare was launched on its way in the 1980s, the BBC continued to promote the received orthodoxy on climate change and the political response to it without exposing either to serious questioning.

The BBC's journalists went out of their way to publicise almost every alarmist claim the promoters of the scare could come up with, even after these had been shown to be without scientific foundation.

Almost the only occasions on which they have paid attention to the views of dissenters from the orthodoxy has been when they have produced programs designed to trivialise and caricature those views, portraying them as being held by only a tiny and disreputable minority of deniers.

They have lent enthusiastic support to every political measure proposed to "fight climate change", while consistently failing to explain the immense financial cost of those proposals and their enormous economic implications.

In their relentless promotion of the benefits of "renewable energy", such as wind power, they have consistently endorsed the often absurdly exaggerated claims of the commercial interests involved in renewables, while failing to explain their practical shortcomings.

In doing this, the BBC has not only failed in its professional duty to report fully and accurately on one of the biggest scientific and political stories of our time: it has betrayed its own principles, in three respects.

First, it has betrayed its statutory obligation to be impartial, using the excuse that any dissent from official orthodoxy was so insignificant that it should be just ignored or made to look ridiculous.

Second, it has betrayed the principles of responsible journalism, by allowing its coverage to become so one-sided that it has too often amounted to no more than propaganda.

Third, it has betrayed the fundamental principles of science, which relies on unrelenting scepticism towards any theory until it can be shown to provide a comprehensive explanation for the observed evidence.

In all these respects, the BBC has been guilty above all of abusing the trust of its audience, and of all those compelled to pay for it. On one of the most important and far-reaching issues of our time, its coverage has been so tendentious that it has given its viewers a picture not just misleading but at times even fraudulent.

Christopher Booker is a journalist with London's Sunday Telegraph and author of The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to Be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History?