BBC spends £500k to ask 33,000 Asians 5,000 miles from UK what they think of climate change: Corporation savaged for 'astonishing' campaign survey on global warming



BBC under fire after spending hundreds of thousands on survey in Asia

Taxpayers' money used to ask 33,000 people their views on climate change

More than £500,000 spent by little-known BBC Media Action for survey



The BBC has been savaged for its 'astonishing' campaign survey on global warming

The BBC has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money asking 33,000 people in Asian countries how climate change is affecting them.



The £519,000 campaigning survey by little-known BBC Media Action is designed to persuade the world to adopt more hard-line policies to combat global warming.



It was immediately condemned yesterday as a flagrant abuse of the Corporation’s rules on impartiality and ‘a spectacular waste of money’ by a top academic expert.

Every year, BBC Media Action gets £22.2 million from the taxpayer via the Foreign Office and Department for International Development.

Its climate survey, published this month, is called From The Ground Up: Changing The Conversation On Climate Change. In it, farmers and villagers in India, China, Vietnam, Nepal, Pakistan and Indonesia were asked how climate change was ‘affecting their lives already’ and about their future concerns.



They described less predictable rainfall, droughts, declining harvests and an increase in respiratory disease caused by dustier soil, and blamed them on global warming.



The survey does not clarify whether these descriptions are supported by data, nor whether climate change is indeed the cause. It also includes graphs showing a steep rise in global temperatures – but they end abruptly in 2000, when temperatures stopped rising at all.



The report ends with advice, apparently written for climate activists: ‘Do not talk about scientific or technical abstractions. Talk about the problems they face in their daily lives… Speak in language that makes sense to people in terms of how they experience climate change.’



BBC Media Action has a £40 million annual budget, and the proportion not funded by the taxpayer is paid by the European Union, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the US government.



Its website states it ‘belongs to the BBC’, and ‘builds on the fundamental values of the BBC to guide its work’. Its chairman is Peter Horrocks, director of the BBC World Service Group. Trustees include newsreader George Alagiah.



John Whittingdale, chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Media and Culture, said last night he was ‘astonished’ to see the BBC involved with a survey of this kind.



John Whittingdale, pictured, chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Media and Culture, said last night he was 'astonished' to see the BBC involved with a survey of this kind

He added: ‘The BBC brand carries with it a huge reputation for impartiality and objectivity. Even though this is not a mainstream, licence-fee-funded activity, for the BBC to attach its label to something which is so politically controversial is unwise.



The BBC has already been attacked for paying too little attention to climate change sceptics, and this bears those criticisms out.’



Richard Tol, professor of economics at Sussex University and a leading authority on climate change impacts, said the BBC ‘would have been better advised to invest this money in proper research’.



He said the survey’s assertions are often contradicted by more reliable sources. He said: ‘Objective data do not corroborate the survey’s reported impacts on health, droughts, predictability of rainfall, and crop yields. Attribution of any of these effects to climate change is by and large beyond the current level of scientific knowledge.’



Prof Tol was one of the ‘co-ordinating lead authors’ of a report on the consequences of warming by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in March.



UN figures show harvests have been rising across Asia for decades. The March IPCC report stated: ‘The worldwide burden of ill-health from climate change is relatively small compared with effects of other stressors and is not well quantified.’



On rainfall, it stated: ‘There is now low confidence in the attribution of changes in drought since the mid-20th Century to human influence.’



Prof Tol said the survey results were academically worthless: ‘Interviewing 30,000 people across six countries is expensive, and cannot tell us much – previous research has shown people’s recollection of past weather and climate is very unreliable, and people’s attribution of observations to causes is worse.’



The BBC has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money asking 33,000 people in Asian countries how climate change is affecting them

The BBC survey’s campaigning intention is suggested by a chapter entitled The Policy Context which tells readers that next year, world leaders will meet at a UN summit in Paris to hammer out a new treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions.



‘2015 is a propitious moment for reorienting the way that we talk about climate change,’ the survey report says. The Paris talks will ‘open a window of opportunity… to articulate a climate change perspective rooted in people’s needs’.



Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which argues that the threat from climate change is overblown, said it seemed Media Action was ‘the campaigning arm of the BBC, [its] propaganda bureau’ and the survey is ‘a blatant abuse of the BBC charter’.



A spokesman for BBC Media Action confirmed the survey’s £519,000 cost but declined to comment on its alleged lack of impartiality.

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.



The BBC has ruled that a radio debate about climate change involving former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson, pictured, should have been censored

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 move by the BBC has huge implications for future coverage, implying that climate change 'sceptics' will be gagged

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.’



