Katabasis strips away the BBCs claim to ‘impartial news’ with surgical precision.

The background to this story is the ever bubbling slurry pit of ‘climate warming’, which has been a happy playground for Libertarian bloggers, commencing with the leaked e-mails from East Anglia University where they first laid bare the paucity of evidence for the international money making scam of Global Warming.

Katabasis has continued in this fine tradition with a smartly entered FOI request that has had astounding success.

In January, the BBCs Apologist-in-Chief for Global Warming, Roger Harrabim, announced to a startled public that the chaos of last winter’s snow and ice, which had caused so many deaths and apparently caught Local Authorities and the Government woefully unprepared, was not a freak of nature, nor a matter of negligence by the Met Office, but, by implication, a matter of cold hearted complacency by the heartless Tories, who had been told by the Met Office to expect just such bitter temperatures.

We, of course – and the local authorities responsible for our safety – had been told of an 80% probability of warmer than average temperatures for November, December, and January in Scotland and a 60-80% probability of the same for Northern Ireland, Wales, and most of England.

He said: “The truth is it [The Met Office] did suspect we were in for an exceptionally cold early winter, and told the Cabinet Office so in October. But we weren’t let in on the secret. The reason? The Met Office no longer publishes its seasonal forecasts because of the ridicule it suffered for predicting a barbecue summer in 2009 – the summer that campers floated around in their tents.”

Those pensioners found frozen solid in their front garden, the scenes of half starved refugees huddled against the cold at Heathrow airport, the two kilometre long lines of frozen travellers queuing round the block at St Pancreas Station, the double dip recession caused by the ‘extreme weather’ – all this was known back in October to be at risk of occurring by those heartless Tories?

Katabasis applied for copies of this secret report, and accompanying e-mails, that the Tories had kept from us.

The email correspondence is enlightening between the Met Office and the government:

Someone at the Cabinet Office wrote to the Met Office to tell them what the official position would be: “The Met Office seasonal outlook for the period November to January is showing no clear signals for the winter”. The Met Office writes back – “That is fine.”

So, as if the “secret” prediction wasn’t awful enough, any claim that the Met Office actually warned the government of an impending harsh winter, and by implication that the government therefore did not act responsibly is a 100% complete and utter lie.

Why would the ‘impartial’ BBC deliberately give us the impression that our discomfort was solely the result of the Lib-Dem coalition ignoring warnings to protect us? Is Roger Harrabim the ‘one bad apple’ in the ‘Clive Goodman’ tradition, or does the fish rot from the head, as the BBC are so fond of telling us regarding culpability for phone hacking that ‘must’ go all the way up to Andy Coulson?

The Libertarian blogosphere has been described as the ‘fifth estate’ holding the ‘fourth estate’ to account; on reading Katabasis’ excellent article, and links to other bloggers pursuing the same matter, I am wondering whether the ‘fourth estate’ is not turning irrevocably into the ‘fifth column’?

Your thoughts on the matter please?

Pericles January 31, 2011 at 16:35

In early October there was a report in The Daily Telegraph of the
resignation of Prof. Hal W. Lewis from the American Physical Society, which
has shut down debate on the entire subject.  That is the only coverage I
have seen of Prof. Lewis’s resignation ;  I’ve seen none at all of
the Petition Project
involving more that 30,000 real scientists.

You might like to read Prof. Lewis’s letter of resignation from the A.P.S.

ΠΞ

Tom January 31, 2011 at 00:00

Another “truth” about the BBC (I’m beginning to feel soiled merely putting
BBC and truth in the same sentence) is that most of them actually don’t care
about being wrong or telling lies as long as it suits the moment and the
infotainment propaganda morsel they are cranking out…

I hadn’t heard the term “carousel quote” until a couple of weeks ago and it
fits the bill perfectly, a disposable quote – which by the time the veracity
can be tested it’s history, already gone into people’s ears. A Harrabin /
Black specialty.

One that seems to have a life of it’s own at the moment is “relative to the
cost of living- fuel and energy prices are lower than they’ve ever been” – now
where on earth did that come from? I’ve had it independently parroted at me by
widely separated individuals enough times this week to make me wonder…..

Brian January 30, 2011 at 14:05

I blame the inherently hypocritical and opportunist LibDems for all the bad
things in the Coalition and excuse the Tories for being easily led. David
Cameron, FFS. Libertarians don’t want to admit that smokers create most CO2 or
that travellers are an environmental blight. That’s probably why most are
sceptics. Wrong but right.

Ed P January 30, 2011 at 12:11

BBC’s pension funds have been invested heavily in various eco companies.
They expect good returns from climate change, which lies (pun) behind their
unrelenting pro-AGW propaganda. Harrabin is just following the corporate
line.

SadButMadLad January 30, 2011 at 11:48

Over at Watts Up With That there is some discussion going about
it.

There Steve McIntyre himself says he has met Roger Harrabim and thinks he
has been duped. But that then leads to the question of who duped him. I
suspect Roger’s lack of scientific background led him to be easily led, but
also the culture of support within the BBC guides him down the path of
believing anything that supports Anthroprogenic (man made) Global Warming –
witness the Horizon programme about science under attack.

SadButMadLad
January 31, 2011 at 15:57

And now mentioned at The Register.

Engineer January 30, 2011 at 11:29

I gather that Roger Harrabin holds a degree in English. Now, there’s
nothing at all wrong with English degrees, but is he really the most
appropriately qualified person the BBC can find to report on one of the most
scientifically complex areas of our age? Could they not find someone with a
scientific background? Or didn’t they try very hard to find someone better
qualified….

Daedalus X. Parrot January 31, 2011 at 08:26

Not only do most of the beeboids lack any technical education or
numeracy, they are also recruited from the jobs section of The
Guardian hence they are already politically biased as soon as they
join.

Peter Sissons recently described the endemic BBC bias here:
Left-wing-bias-Its-written-BBCs-DNA and here:
BBC-propaganda-machine-climate-change

As regards to the lunacy of the man-made warming zealots (especially the
BBC kind), whenever we get rain, floods or heat spells, they call it, in a
very serious voice, signs of “Climate Change” and “Global Warming”

It’s funny though, how, when sceptics point out the recent global
occurences of record-breaking freezing spells, they parrot out the trite and
unscientific phrase, “It is weather, not climate”.

These people also readily report the statistic that tens of thousands of
people died in the last serious heat wave in Europe in 2003.

It’s interesting that they also fail to report that in these recent cold
spells, HUNDREDS of thousands of people died in Europe. It is, sadly, likely
that many died because they could not afford the new, “improved”, green
energy prices that jokers like Huhne, Cameron and Miliband were happy to see
levied on us.

Lastly, some of you may enjoy this example of probably the only genuinely
unbiased journalist at the BBC, Andrew Neil from January last year when he
gave the Met Office’s chief a deservedly good grilling.

Andrew
Neil interviews Met Office chief John Hirst, Jan 2010

Watch it quickly before the Beeb take it down, like they have done to
previous copies of licence-payer funded videoes.

Joe Public January 30, 2011 at 11:05

Perhaps the Met Office needs a more-expensive computer?

Engineer January 30, 2011 at 11:19

That would only enable them to get the wrong answer quicker.

I suggest that the taxpayer buys them a piece of seaweed instead. It
can’t be any less accurate than a supercomputer in this instance.

David C January 30, 2011 at 21:36

I reckon the Met Office are incompetent enough to spend at least
£1,000,000 per annum of our money on seaweed, so please don’t send them
down this track.