BBC’s Fake Climate Claims Now Becoming A Habit

By Paul Homewood

http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/guidelines/accuracy

Accuracy is one the fundamental requirements imposed on the BBC by its Charter.

For years, however, it has been sorely lacking in its handling of climate related matters.

Most of the time, the BBC gets away with it, simply because people don’t realise it, or if they do don’t complain, or if they do are fobbed off all too easily.

However in recent months, it has been forced to retract three totally fallacious claims, which could and should have been avoided with a few simple checks.

1) The first concerned a report on the World at One last march, which discussed rising sea levels around Florida:

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/11/13/bbc-forced-to-withdraw-fake-sea-level-claims/

The BBC correspondent, Nick Bryant made the following comment:

Sea levels at Miami are rising at ten times the global rate

When I complained, the BBC’s first response, as usual, was to prevaricate and ignore the specifics of my complaint completely.

Only after I pursued matters to the Executive Complaints Unit were they finally forced to retract their claim, which was so utterly ridiculous that it should have set alarm bells ringing at the outset.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/comp-reports/ecu/theworldatone270317

2) Then in October 2017, the BBC broadcast an episode of “Russia with Simon Reeve”.

The programme made certain claims about reindeer in northern Russia, as Lord Lawson of GWPF noted in his letter of complaint to the BBC:

Lord Lawson pointed out that on the contrary reindeer populations were stable, and in some cases increasing.

Again the BBC were forced to issue a retraction, as the GWPF reported in January this year:

The alarming claim that reindeer populations across Northern Russia were “in steep decline because of climate change”, was made during the first episode of the recent BBC 2 series: Russia with Simon Reeve.

Writing to the BBC Complaints department, Lord Lawson pointed out that according to a 2016 study, 17 out of 19 sub-populations of Eurasian Reindeer were now either increasing in number, or had a stable population trend.

The BBC have now accepted this evidence, and have published a correction which reads: “This programme suggested that many reindeer populations are in steep decline because of climate change. It would have been more accurate to say that many reindeer populations are threatened by it.”

Indeed it would have been less inaccurate, given that the claim is blatantly false. However, even the claim that they are “threatened” is highly questionable given their growing populations.

The false alarm highlights the BBC’s habitual attempts to exaggerate the consequences of climate change and to ignore scientific evidence that contradicts climate alarmism.

https://www.thegwpf.com/bbc-accepts-lord-lawsons-climate-complaint/

3) Then in December 2017, one of the BBC’s weather forecasters ran an article on BBC Online, provocatively headlined “Is Climate Change Making Hurricanes Worse?”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42251921

After listing some of the major hurricane events of 2017, but with no attempt to put them into historical perspective, the piece ended with this “statement of fact”:

A warmer world is bringing us a greater number of hurricanes and a greater risk of a hurricane becoming the most powerful category 5

There is absolutely no evidence that this is the case, as even the IPCC have been forced to admit.

My first complaint was fobbed off, and only after I resubmitted my complaint, complete with a list of scientific references and graphs did they grudgingly admit that their claim was utterly false.

The offending sentence has now been deleted, and a correction added:

Conclusions

Once may be an accident, twice a coincidence. But three times in just a few months suggests a pattern.

These events pose a number of questions:

1) Who is feeding the reporters with these fake claims?

It is hard to believe that they are making them up themselves. What you think of BBC reporters, they are professionals who have spent their careers learning how to build stories, based either on their own research, or on what they have been told.

So, have these fake claims originated from somewhere like Greenpeace?

2) Why were the claims not spotted and checked out beforehand by programme editors, whose job it is to do so?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, as Booker suggested, there is a blind, unthinking global warming groupthink at work here.

Sea level rise in Florida? Well, we all know Miami is soon going to drown!

Reindeers dying because of global warming? Well, that nice man from WWF told us, and he would not lie, would he!

Hurricanes getting worse? Well, that’s what the models say!

There is a third question – why is this continued bad reporting tolerated by the BBC powers that be?

But I think we all know the answer to that!