Decades of Crying 'Fire!' in the Climate Theatre Have Left the BBC with Net Zero Credibility

It's been a very long time since the BBC even pretended to be impartial on climate change

Let us travel back to April 2012 and revisit an important milestone in BBC climate reporting – what is thought to be the last recorded sighting of genuine journalistic inquiry. Richard Knight noted an extremist claim that up to 150 mostly animal species are lost every day, but then went on to observe that if the claim was really true, should we not expect the International Union for Conservation in Nature to list more than 801 extinct species in the last 512 years. Fast forward 10 years and Esme Stallard was honking without any alternative view that “the extinction of species is now happening between 1,000 and 10,000 times quicker than scientists would expect to see”. Humans could be causing the “sixth mass extinction”, scientists are said to have warned. Over the last two decades, climate science reporting at the BBC has been reduced to cherry-picking the worst ‘scientists say’ clickbait remarks to promote the hard-Left Net Zero fantasy. Debate has been abolished, the scientific inquiry process trashed and the intelligence of the British public insulted on a daily basis. It’s almost as if the BBC decided to convince everyone that a woman can have a penis.

In the wake of the BBC’s decision to mark its own homework by referring climate change reporting to its Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, we would do well to acknowledge the sheer enormity of the crime against investigative journalism that has been perpetrated for over two decades. It is an appalling story of journalists kowtowing to a prevailing narrative. They have been willing and able to take a central role in inducing a mass climate psychosis in the general public that has been designed for purely political purposes.

The BBC climate conspiracy – what other word is appropriate? – can be traced back 25 years to the activities of the then climate chief Roger Harrabin. In 2006 he led a secret editorial meeting, heavily weighted with activists, that attempted to redefine the editorial balance between competing climate change opinions. Natural forces were to be downplayed in favour of the unproven suggestion that any current global warming was mostly caused by humans burning hydrocarbons. At the time, the BBC tried to keep the science wrecking-ball meeting secret, but a few years later details were leaked showing that most of the delegates were highly supportive of the green agenda. Such was the editorial power of Harrabin and his ilk, sceptical and alternative views on climate change started to be removed from BBC content. In 2018, the then director of news and current affairs Fran Unsworth determined that sceptics were no longer to be invited regularly, an effective ban on discussing the scientific process that remains in force to this day.

Few activist endeavours fail the Popperian ‘falsification’ science test more than the attribution of single weather events to human causes. Computer models are used to almost instantly attribute a single bad weather event to the burning of hydrocarbons, a tactic that plays into the promotion of Net Zero. The results are worthless guesses, not least because it is impossible to ‘model’ the chaotic and non-linear atmosphere. The long-time science writer Roger Pielke takes a similar view: “I can think of no other area of research where the relaxing of rigour and standards has been encouraged by researchers in order to generate claims more friendly to headlines, political advocacy and even lawsuits.” Needless to say, attribution studies and their ‘garbage in, garbage out’ results are a mainstay in BBC climate reporting.

Countless BBC reports state that extreme weather is getting worse. Across the network, Attenborough, with over 70 years’ experience in sniffing the direction of the BBC wind, and Packham, along with their many disciples, have been allowed to scream ‘FIRE!’ in the theatre of climate absurdities across all channels. This type of continuous gaslighting even persuaded the Prince of Wales to get in on the act last week at COP30. Point of information for the Pontificating Prince: Arctic sea ice extent has been stable since 2005 – even the Guardian now admits that. Mere data tell a different story on extreme weather, with the IPCC admitting that most types have shown no recent discernible increase. Meanwhile, hydrocarbon-produced wealth has led to a reduction of 99% in the number of fatalities around the world due to bad weather events over the last century. Climate ‘refugees’ are not a problem, not least because nobody can actually define what they are. Meanwhile, global ‘greening’, helped by a little extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is helping to feed the world.

Little if any of this is reflected in BBC coverage. Instead the former editor of Radio 4 flagship Today, Sarah Sands, laments how the British politician Nigel Lawson managed to slip the guard in a BBC studio and observe the lack of increasing extreme weather. Writing in an attribution guide for journalists published by the World Weather Attribution operation, she said she wished she had such a service to effectively challenge his claims. These days, she enthused, attribution studies have given us significant insight into the horsemen of the climate apocalypse. “We have evidence and we have facts. They are a secure foundation for news,” she claimed. The less kind might ask if some people at the BBC know what facts, evidence and news actually are.

These days it is common for companies to hand out ‘Journalist of the Year’ awards featuring their name and trade to specialist writers. It is not something independent journalists should even consider, but the bung of a couple of grand and bragging rights (once the corporate name and trade is omitted) is a minor if silly offence against editorial independence. Younger, naïve journalists might think it looks good on the CV. But raise the award to, say, €100,000 and more serious questions can be raised. Should journalists take such enormous sums of cash from people they might write about, whatever way it is given? The BBC’s Matt McGrath had no problems with this since he accepted a 2019 award from the philanthropic foundation of the Spanish bank BBVA for his “rigorous and assessable coverage of environmental issues”. BBVA is heavily involved in green financing and has since made €100,000 payments to the Guardian (what a surprise) and Marlowe Hood of Agence France-Presse who describes himself as the “Herald of the Anthropocene”.

How the dots join up in the best alarmist circles. In 2022, four Italian scientists led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti published a paper in Nature that said there was not a climate crisis and there was little evidence that extreme weather was getting worse. All hell broke out when the paper went viral on social media and a group led by a Guardian writer, Marlowe Hood, and World Weather Attribution head Dr Frederike Otto banded together to get it retracted. They succeeded, with Otto, a regular commentator on attribution for the BBC, claiming the paper had not been written in “good faith”. Hood was even more forthright, sneering: ”It may be akin to removing a speck of dust from a rubbish heap, but I confess to taking satisfaction in seeing this egregiously bad climate study retracted.” For his part, Pielke observed that the retraction was one of the “most egregious failures of scientific publishing that I have seen”.

For the last 25 years, the reporting of climate science at the BBC has been a joke. This is particularly unfortunate for those who own a television receiver. They might have no wish to consume the BBC’s skewed output on climate and many other issues, but they are often forced to pay a regressive annual tax of £174.50 to the state corporation. The ghastly enforcement of a strict ‘settled’ climate policy has led to the publication and broadcast of countless one-sided articles and programmes. Many of them have been effectively debunked, shown to be the clickbait scary nonsense they are. The Daily Sceptic and its contributors have done their share of the heavy lifting, but the big shout out must go to the indefatigable Paul Homewood who for many years has been a constant thorn in the once armour-plated hide of the BBC. A number of his official complaints to the BBC were noted in a Telegraph article reporting on the BBC inquiry.

The BBC is not alone in its fantasy reporting. Most mainstream media have been happy to print poppycock climate propaganda in the interest of keeping the elite Net Zero narrative going. The eminent MIT Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen says the current climate narrative is “absurd”, but trillions of dollars says it is not “absurd”. But Net Zero is starting to collapse around the world, leaving fading outlier countries like the de-industrialising UK and Germany as the canaries in the emptying mine. Trump’s America is resuming normal industrial progress, so there is less need for a chirping mainstream media chorus of climate catastrophe. The incorrectly-named climate science department at the BBC does not need to be reformed, it just needs to be shut down.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.