Unlike economic recession and wars, which pass, climate change does not, and there are deadlines if we want to avoid a point of no return. In fact, scientists calculate that Obama has four years in which to save the world.

That was BBC Newsnight’s Science Editor Susan Watts reporting in January 2009. It was the scientists’ starkest possible warning yet. Impressively, climatologists had managed to reduce Barack Obama to a number, feed him into their models and work out the precise length of time he would need to avert the end of the world.

Well, almost a decade later it’s easy to laugh, although maybe we shouldn’t. Quite a few things have shifted, in the arena of geopolitics anyway, but what has remained much the same is the quality of journalism at the BBC. On Monday 8th October 2018 Newsnight was again sounding the alarm about climate change, following the release of the IPCC’s latest report, and a time traveller from 2008 to this turbulent and strange era would have found it reassuringly familiar. Some things, it seems, are resistant to change.

Chris Cook, Policy Editor at Newsnight:

Some of the official predictions made about climate change sound biblical in scale. More drought, more famine, more flooding, more of the most powerful tropical cyclones – and of course, the seas rising. A familiar litany, and one, they say, we need to do more to fight. Something that will need rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society. Our current no-action path is like this – rising carbon emissions. And that would take us to a more than 4-degree rise by 2100. Now that half-a-degree change may not sound like much. But scientists think it could radically reduce the harm done to our world by climate change. The thing is, though, to get there we have to reduce our net carbon emissions to zero by the year 2050. And that means huge changes to the way that we live. To how we get around, to how we generate electricity, to how we arrange our cities, to what we wear – even to what we eat.

After that the show has two parts, the first in which presenter Evan Davis brings on arch climate baddie Myron Ebell, ostensibly to enquire whether the IPCC report will have any effect on the current US administration, but actually just to mock. It’s a bit of theatre more than anything else, a prologue to the studio discussion that follows, and I don’t think Davis is really interested in what Ebell and the US administration think about the report, because he just knows they are wrong about everything.

But the dialogue is still revealing. At several points, Myron Ebell, who has been asked about policy, starts to talk about the climate models running too hot and is promptly – and rudely – shut down by Davis.

… I don’t want to hear your argument that the science is wrong, because you don’t know anything about it…

This is predictable territory and we’ve been here before with Nigel Lawson on the radio – it’s a case of you’re not a scientist and yet “you’re trying to show you know more about the science than the scientists!”

It’s an obvious tactic. The BBC won’t bring in a statistician like Ross McKitrick or a climatologist such as Judith Curry who might say something off-message about the climate models, preferring to hear instead from others, like the Tyndall Centre’s Corrine Le Quere, who think the models are just fine. The only critics occasionally allowed on are non-scientists – and the beauty of it is that their points can be automatically dismissed because they are not scientists. Effectively, the debate is over before it’s properly begun, each time.

Yet even that might not be enough, these days. This edition of Newsnight has triggered another round of soul-searching at the BBC, with James Stephenson (News Editor, BBC News and Current Affairs) being grilled by Radio 4’s Roger Bolton on Feedback for giving the likes of Myron Ebell any airtime at all. Bolton has the following to say on recent developments:

BBC staff are also being encouraged to enrol on a course detailing the do’s and don’ts of covering climate change. All of which is rather timely since on Monday the UN’s IPCC – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – published a stark warning that urgent action was needed to avoid a global catastrophe. Cue a steady stream of politicians and scientists filling the BBC airwaves with their take on the significance of the report and what actions need to be taken – with no deniers anywhere, on radio at least. Some listeners and green campaigners see that as a distinct change in tone from the BBC, compared with previous times when the issue has been in the news, and they welcome it.

So catch these fleeting moments while you can. (NB. I recommend the blog isthebbcbiased for its excellent and thoughtful – and often gently humorous – commentary on BBC bias.)

Ebell, though, makes a valid point about the IPCC – as a political organisation:

It’s meant to be a promotional body, it’s not meant to be an objective scientific advisor – if you go back and look from Day 1, it has been a promoter, not a neutral scientific body.

This is lost on Davis who says, a few moments later:

Do you ever think there may be a small chance that the scientists have simply done the work, straightforwardly looked at their results, published their results in an open-minded and unbiased way, and presented their conclusions? ‘Cause really you’re just saying either you know more or that they are somehow lying to us about what they really have found and what they believe.

If he had done some fact-checking, as journalists used to do in olden times, Evan Davis could have realised that his model of how the IPCC works and how its reports are delivered to the world might be more than a little naive (and that’s being charitable). For a start, what the BBC and other media outlets have been using as their source is the Summary for Policymakers, a document that is edited, rewritten and approved by non-scientists such as lawyers and diplomats (see this article – and others – by Donna Laframboise for some of the detail). So in other words, it’s not the scientists setting an agenda and telling us how we should arrange our cities and what we should eat – this is the realm of policy, where policymakers past and present such as Myron Ebell and Nigel Lawson clearly do have the right to opine, according to the BBC, even though it may not hold their opinions in high regard.

A wider failure, however, is the wholesale lack of curiosity as to what exactly has changed since the last report of its kind. What new knowledge has brought on this shift from a 2-degree red line down to 1.5 degrees? Where are the workings-out? Where is it precisely that “they say, we need to do more” and what is that based upon? It would be unreasonable to expect paid BBC journos to go into the subject matter as deeply as Donna Laframboise, Jaime Jessop, Geoff Chambers, Ben Pile or Paul Matthews, but there is ample scope for more than a few searching questions. Why not bring a scientist such as Myles Allen (prominent IPCC contributor) onto the programme and make him sweat a little?

But none of this wrong sort of analysis gets airtime. The science is not to be questioned or even teased out in any great detail – it would be like someone bothering Moses about why there were no more or no fewer than Ten Commandments or whether “no other gods before me” implied that there were indeed other gods and if so, what might Baal, Moloch and the rest have to say about Yahweh and his attitude, and so forth. It would just not be the done thing to talk back.

Instead, all the discussion is about how we should implement this edict from on high whilst trying to avoid the uncomfortable truth that reducing “our net carbon emissions to zero by the year 2050” is (short of something like a modern equivalent of the Black Death) clearly unfeasible.

No, the way to do it, according to Bryony Worthington, is – as ever – collective action and to keep the message “coming across loud and clear” – “we’ve got the lead story and that’s where it should stay until we really make progress”. But the BBC and other activists have been very “loud and clear” about it for at least a decade and rather than spurring collective action (that messy realm of policy again) their tin-eared stridency has, if anything, contributed to a growing public indifference about climate change.

And outside the self-sealing BBC bubble, in the mass media outlets that need to pay closer attention to what their customers are interested in, climate is not the lead story for very long, nowadays. Less than a week later, co-leader of the Green Party Siân Berry was on the Andrew Marr Show, expressing her disappointment that this new “starkest possible warning” was nowhere to be found in the Sunday papers – except for a single story in the Observer. On page 6.

I’ll give the penultimate word to Nigel Tufnel of the fictitious band Spinal Tap:

You’re on 10 on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where? … Nowhere, exactly. What we do is if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? … 11. Exactly.

The trouble is, for the BBC and fellow band members, the volume is set to 11 already (and no bum notes allowed!) but the world isn’t following them over the cliff quickly enough. Where can they go from there? 12, maybe?

Well, I suppose they now have 12 years to try and figure that out. It will be interesting.