The BBC and balance

My Times column on the BBC's unbalanced
environmental coverage:

The BBC’s behaviour grows ever more bizarre.
Committed by charter to balanced reporting, it has now decided
formally that it was wrong to allow balance in a debate between
rival guesses about the future. In rebuking itself for having had
the gall to interview Nigel Lawson on the Today programme about
climate change earlier this year, it issued a statement containing
this gem: “Lord Lawson’s views are not supported by the evidence
from computer modelling and scientific research.”

The evidence from computer modelling? The phrase is an oxymoron.
A model cannot, by definition, provide evidence: it can provide a
prediction to test against real evidence. In the debate in
question, Lord Lawson said two things: it was not possible to
attribute last winter’s heavy rain to climate change with any
certainty, and the global surface temperature has not warmed in the
past 15 to 17 years. He was right about both, as his debate
opponent, Sir Brian Hoskins, confirmed.

As for the models, here is what Dr Vicky Pope of the Met Office
said in 2007 about what their models predicted: “By 2014, we’re
predicting that we’ll be 0.3 degrees warmer than 2004. Now just to
put that into context, the warming over the past century and a half
has only been 0.7 degrees, globally . . . So 0.3 degrees, over the
next ten years, is pretty significant . . . These are very strong statements about what will happen over the
next ten years.”

In fact, global surface temperature, far from accelerating
upwards, has cooled slightly in the ten years since 2004 on most
measures. The Met Office model was out by a country mile. But the
BBC thinks that it was wrong even to allow somebody to challenge
the models, even somebody who has written a bestselling book on
climate policy, held one of the highest offices of state and
founded a think-tank devoted to climate change policy. The BBC
regrets even staging a live debate between him and somebody who
disagrees with him, in which he was robustly challenged by the
excellent Justin Webb (of these pages).

And why, pray, does the BBC think this? Because it had a
complaint from a man it coyly describes as a “low-energy
expert”, 
Mr Chit Chong, who accused Lord Lawson of saying on the
programme that climate change was “all a conspiracy”.

Lawson said nothing of the kind, as a transcript shows. Mr
Chong’s own curriculum vitae boasts that 

he “has been active in the Green party for 25 years and was the
first Green councillor to be elected in London”, and that he “has a
draught-proofing and insulation business in Dorset and also works
as an environmental consultant”.

So let’s recap. On the inaccurate word of an activist politician
with a vested financial and party interest, the BBC has decided
that henceforth nobody must be allowed to criticise predictions of
the future on which costly policies are based. No more appearances
for Ed Balls, then, because George Osborne’s models must go
unchallenged.

By the way, don’t bother to write and tell me that Lord Lawson
is not a scientist. The BBC also rebuked itself last week for
allowing an earth scientist with dissenting views on to Radio 4.
Professor Bob Carter was head of the department of earth sciences
at James Cook University in Australia for 17 years. He’s published
more than 100 papers mainly in the field of paleoclimatology. So
bang goes that theory.

The background to this is that the BBC recently spent five years
fighting a pensioner named Tony Newbery, including four days in
court with six lawyers, to prevent Mr Newbery seeing the list of 28
participants at a BBC seminar in 2006 of what it called “the best
scientific experts” on climate change.

This was the seminar that persuaded the BBC it should no longer
be balanced in its coverage of climate change. A blogger named
Maurizio Morabito then found the list on the internet anyway. Far
from consisting of the “best scientific experts” it included just
three scientists, the rest being green activists, with a smattering
of Dave Spart types from the church, the government and the
insurance industry. Following that debacle, the BBC
commissioned a report from a geneticist, Steve Jones, which it
revisited in a further report to the BBC Trust last week. The Jones
report justified a policy of banning sceptics under the term “false
balance”. This takes the entirely sensible proposition that
reporters do not have to, say, interview a member of the Flat Earth
Society every time they mention a round-the-world yacht race, and
stretches it to the climate debate.

Which is barmy for two blindingly obvious reasons: first, the
UN’s own climate projections contain a range of outcomes from
harmless to catastrophic, so there is clearly room for debate; and
second, this is an argument about the future not the present, and
you cannot havecertainty about the future.

The BBC bends over backwards to give air time to minority
campaigners on matters such as fracking, genetically modified
crops, and alternative medicine. Biologists who think GM crops are
dangerous, doctors who think homeopathy works and engineers who
think fracking has contaminated aquifers are far rarer than climate
sceptics. Yet Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth spokesmen are
seldom out of Broadcasting House.

So the real reason for the BBC’s double standard becomes clear:
dissent in the direction of more alarm is always encouraged;
dissent in the direction of less alarm is to be suppressed.

I sense that some presenters are growing irritated by their
bosses’ willingness to take orders from the green movement. Others
no doubt justify this bias to themselves by saying that climate
dissenters get plenty of exposure in newspapers. This conveniently
ignores The Guardian’s and The
Independent’s almost comical bias towards alarm on the topic
of climate change. It also ignores the fact that the BBC, funded by
a compulsory poll tax and unregulated by Ofcom, is by far the
dominant source of news for most people in this country, with a
market share that should have had prompted an investigation by the
competition authorities years ago. And it is required by charter to
be balanced.

Incidentally, I have vested interests in energy, too, but I am
not asking for people who disagree with me to be silenced.