In a rare moment of honesty, in 2009 the BBC published an article that admitted that no increase in global temperatures had been observed for 11 years even though carbon dioxide continued to rise. The BBC soon returned to its global warming propaganda and Climategate emails may indicate the reason why.
On 9 October 2009, BBC published an article titled ‘What happened to global warming?’. This became the subject of BBC’s U-turn on “global warming” because at last BBC’s climate correspondent, Paul Hudson, had written a story about the well-established fact that at the time the earth’s temperature had not risen since 1998.
Paul Hudson is an English weather presenter and climate correspondent for BBC Look North. He has been interested in weather and climate for as long as he can remember and worked as a forecaster with the UK Met Office for more than ten years locally and at the international unit before joining the BBC in October 2007.
The BBC article began: “This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998. But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.” Hudson continued:
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.
Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting … claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures … If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.
What happened to global warming? Paul Hudson, BBC, 9 October 2009
Hudson’s scrupulous approach made things tricky for BBC executives who had swung the might of the corporation behind the climate change orthodoxy, often producing what amounts to propaganda.
The story of BBC’s affinity for the greatest pseudoscience fraud in history – aka “climate change” – began in 2004 when the UK government’s hysterically warmist chief scientific adviser Sir David King successfully persuaded the then Prime Minister Tony Blair to put action on global warming at the heart of UK government policy. Government policy soon became BBC policy too.
Although Hudson had written an article that appeared to show a U-turn in BBC’s reporting, the newly found honesty was short-lived as is demonstrated by a ten-part series titled ‘The Climate Connection’ that the BBC began airing on 30 November 2009. The titles of the episodes speak for themselves, for example:
- Are There Too Many People on The Planet? Can population growth be managed if consumption and emission levels are reduced?
- Does the World Need Meat? Can vegetarianism reduce the effects of global warming?
- Travel – Good for Humanity; Bad for the Planet? The people urging their fellow citizens, and the world, to rethink their travel attitudes.
- Can We Build a Better Future? How architects are aiming to create zero-carbon buildings and whole cities.
- The Selfish Ape. How can economics be used to change personal behaviour around climate change?
So why did the BBC do a second U-turn after Hudson’s article? Climategate emails leaked in November 2009 may provide some answers. Below we let the story unfold for itself by reproducing articles and emails published in the weeks that followed.
BBC’s Amazing U-turn on Climate Change
The following was written by Damian Thompson and originally published on Telegraph Blogs on 11 October 2009. At the time, Thompson was Blogs Editor of the Telegraph Media Group.
I think the BBC wanted to slip this one out quietly, but a Matt Drudge link put paid to that. The climate change correspondent of BBC News has admitted that global warming stopped in 1998 – and he reports that leading scientists believe that the earth’s cooling-off may last for decades.
[Related: The Drudge Report and The Drudge Report Archives]
“Whatever happened to global warming?” is the title of an article by Paul Hudson that represents a clear departure from the BBC’s fanatical espousal of climate change orthodoxy. The climate change campaigners will go nuts, particularly in the run-up to Copenhagen. So, I suspect, will devout believers inside the BBC. Hudson’s story was not placed very prominently by his colleagues – but a link right at the top of Drudge will have delivered at least a million page views, possibly many more.
[The UN’s COP15 was held in Copenhagen between 7 and 18 December 2009.]
Hudson’s piece is a U-turn – not because he has joined the ranks of sceptics who reject the theory of man-made global warming, but because at last he has written a story about the well-established fact that the earth’s temperature has not risen since 1998, and reports seriously the theories of climatologists (themselves not sceptics) who believe that we are in for 30 years of cooling caused by the falling temperatures of the oceans.
According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.
The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).
For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.
But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.
These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.
So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.
Professor Easterbrook says: “The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.”
Hudson’s piece must have been a nightmare to write: talk about an inconvenient truth. All the caveats are in place, distancing him from hardline sceptics and giving plenty of space to the climate change orthodoxy. But, in fact, his scrupulous approach only makes matters worse for BBC executives who have swung the might of the corporation behind that orthodoxy, often producing what amounts to propaganda.
The BBC now has serious questions to answer. It has used millions of pounds of licence-payers’ money to advance a simplistic point of view that is beginning to fall apart under scrutiny. Did it not foresee that this might happen? And, now that statistics are beginning to point in the other direction, is it prepared to give equal prominence to a debate about climate change that is both respectable and urgent?
Climategate: Warmist conspiracy exposed?
Shortly after the Climategate emails had been released, Andrew Bolt wrote…
Continue reading full story: Climategate: BBC’s propaganda falls apart under scrutiny – The Expose