Delingpole: ‘Climategate Was Fake News,’ Lies the BBC…
By Paul Homewood
From Breitbart:
Today I’m at the funeral of my dear friend Christopher Booker.
Were he alive — and I still can’t quite believe he is not — I know exactly what we’d have been talking about this morning: the risible section of last night’s Newsnight which the BBC had cobbled together in a sad, desperate, and unconvincing attempt to debunk the Climategate scandal.
Climategate is fast approaching its tenth anniversary (which falls in November). Naturally the BBC — as one of the key promoters of the man-made global warming scare — is keen to get its excuses in early.
How did it achieve this?
Why, by the genius move of speaking to some of the activist-scientists implicated in the Climategate scandal and getting them to explain how it was always a lot of fuss about nothing.
I particularly enjoyed the contribution from NASA GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt.
“I had about 400 emails in the hacked email package…15 years of emails and people were picking and choosing out of them. People were kind of like putting them together in weird orders that made it seem like one email was talking about this event when it was really talking about something else. There was a lot of confusion.”
Schmidt is being disingenuous here.
It really doesn’t matter in what order you rearrange the Climategate emails. You get the same result every time: a bunch of second-raters bullying dissenters, troughing lavish grants, racking up air miles on conference freebies, cooking the books, manipulating the evidence, torturing the data till it screams in order to make man-made global warming look like a much more significant and well-understood problem than it actually is.
The implicated scientists have come up with all manner of excuses since: it’s a war on science conducted by the evil Big-Oil-funded right; it has all been taken out of context; the incriminating emails don’t mean what the deniers claim they mean; the Climategate scientists have been exonerated by three inquiries; etc.
Meanwhile in the real world, no convincing evidence whatsoever has emerged to support the threadbare theory that anthropogenic CO2 is causing the planet to warm in ways which are dangerous or unprecedented. Still, the theory rests entirely on computer models which, increasingly, appear to diverge from the actual observed data.
Booker knew all this. He’d done his homework, written the definitive book on the subject, and was too honest and rigorous and fearless to soft-pedal his position by claiming that “Of course, I recognise that man made global warming may be a problem…” because he knew that it wasn’t.
He never doubted that one day the great global warming scare would come to an end for the simple reason that nature is on the side of the sceptics, not the alarmists.
But nor did he kid himself that the scam was going to end any time soon — not least because of the way it has been so assiduously, unquestioningly promoted by influential institutions like the BBC.
As he wrote in his paper for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal:
In the very years when the global warming issue was becoming more controversial than at any time since the scare was first launched on its way in the 1980s, the BBC continued to promote the received orthodoxy on climate change and the political response to it without ever exposing either to serious questioning.
The BBC’s journalists went out of their way to publicise almost every alarmist claim the promoters of the scare could come up with, even after these had been shown to be without scientific foundation. Almost the only occasions on which they have paid attention to the views of dissenters from the orthodoxy has been when they have produced programmes designed to trivialise and caricature those views, portraying them as being held by only a tiny and disreputable minority of ‘deniers’. They have lent enthusiastic support to every political measure proposed to ‘fight climate change’, while consistently failing to explain the immense financial cost of those proposals and their enormous economic implications.
In their relentless promotion of the benefits of ‘renewable energy’, such as wind power, they have consistently endorsed the often absurdly exaggerated claims of the commercial interests involved in ‘renewables’, while failing to explain their practical shortcomings. In doing this, as this report will try to show, the BBC has not only failed in its professional duty to report fully and accurately on one of the biggest scientific and political stories of our time: it has betrayed its own principles, in three respects.
First, it has betrayed its statutory obligation to be impartial, using the excuse that any dissent from the official orthodoxy was so insignificant that it should just be ignored or made to look ridiculous.
Second, it has betrayed the principles of responsible journalism, by allowing its coverage to become so one-sided that it has too often amounted to no more than propaganda.
Third, it has betrayed the fundamental principles of science, which relies on unrelenting scepticism towards any theory until it can be shown to provide a comprehensive explanation for the observed evidence.
Booker never minced his words. How I would have loved to hear his demolition of the BBC’s pathetic effort at undermining the significance of the Climategate emails.
He wouldn’t have been angry about it, though. Just drily amused and quietly pleased at the way it yet again confirmed all his theories about the follies to which man is prey when he becomes a victim of groupthink.
I’m sure he would also have been cheered by the legal challenge being launched by the campaign group Stop BBC Bias.
A former BBC employee, David Keighley, is crowdfunding a judicial review of the way the BBC measures impartiality. The BBC insists that it is impartial. Most of us who watch it and listen to it know it isn’t, especially on topics like climate change which it no longer even pretends to cover even-handedly having decided that the debate is over…
Booker wasn’t happy that he got ill — he felt that he still had much work to do. But he did feel a measure of relief that he’d no longer have to put up with a world where everyone gets their lessons on global warming from a 16-year-old kid in pigtails who can see ‘carbon’ in the air and a doddery old Malthusian whose TV crews drive walruses off cliffs and then blame it on climate change, all courtesy of a propaganda institution so shamelessly left-biased it makes Central Television of the USSR look like Fox News.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/07/11/bbc-tries-airbrush-climategate-out-history/
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“People were kind of like putting them together in weird orders that made it seem like one email was talking about this event when it was really talking about something else.”
Schmidt’s a bullshitter.
The emails all had date & time stamps, so readers could trace exactly the chronological order of threads.
http://di2.nu/foia/
Click to access climategate-emails.pdf
BTW – Steve McIntyre – recently (4th July) debunked more claims relating to ClimateGate emails.
“Hack, Now Ex-Bellingcat, Gets Climategate Timezones Backwards”
Full article here:
Of course they love to claim that it was a hack because that makes the ignorant feel for them. The police never got far on that line as there was no evidence. The file was stored on a Russian server for safety as they could be trusted not to try to block anything. The consensus view is that it was a leaked release by a CRU employee of information gathered when they were trying to stop FOI requests getting at the truth.
Reblogged this on Climate- Science.
“A doddery old Malthusian”
Don’t you mean “The most trusted man in Britain” – as former TV presenter Anne Diamond, described him in today’s Sunday Express. It doesn’t seem to be available online. Perhaps she should stick to appearing on “Loose Women”, and the QVC shopping channel…
BBC UNFAKE NEWS —
A reminder from 2006, lest we forget what those BBC executive were (are still) doing…
From: https://principia-scientific.org/28-gate-bbc-crisis-deepens-in-exposure-of-rigged-and-unlawful-climate-policy/
If you have contact in the BBC please remind them of this and the continuing lies they spouted about it not happening.
Climategate happened, BBC 28gate happened. The BBC = FAKE NEWS
The funniest thing about 28Gate was that having wasted £100,000s of licence payers’ cash trying to hush up the attendees, the list had been on the internet all along, posted by somebody so pleased to be there.
Richard North was there.
There are two Richard Norths. Don’t confuse the Richard North, Booker’s former colleague, with the Richard D North (cited above) of the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Thank you for pointing that out.
I can’t imagine Richard A.E. North being invited to that gathering – too sharp and focussed.
Richard D North seems less so (based on a very brief skim through his blog). Although he is a self-professed conservative, they probably thought he was “mostly harmless” and could serve as the ‘token opposition’.
Thanks Dave.
Sent from my iPad
>
“He never doubted that one day the great global warming scare would come to an end for the simple reason that nature is on the side of the sceptics, not the alarmists.”
A key sentence, it seems to me. I wonder what will happen when there is so much ice on the wind turbines that they won’t go round.
In my neck of the woods the wind turbines aren’t going round because there is hardly any wind.
“Reports made out that we blew the safe before we tied up the staff, which would just have been incompetent.”
“In the very years when the global warming issue was becoming more controversial than at any time since the scare was first launched on its way in the 1980s, the BBC continued to promote the received orthodoxy on climate change and the political response to it without ever exposing either to serious questioning.”
In other words, they refused to do any actual news journalism. The BBC is little if in any salient ways different from the American news media in that it is, and has been for a long time, really little more than an extension and surrogate of the cultural and political Left and here, of one particular political party.
The world would be a great deal better off without them (and how CNN, with its astonishingly small viewership, survives financially, is anyone’s guess).
I was very sorry to hear about the death of Christopher Booker, I used to read his column in The Sunday Telegraph avidly. I can thoroughly recommend his book, ‘Scared to Death’ which he co-wrote with Richard North, with many diverse scares debunked. May he rest in peace!
Andrew;
I re-read the chapter on Global Warming recently and was struck by how it still destroys the claims that the BBC love.
I’ve written to the Telegraph suggesting they take-on Paul Homewood as a replacement.
LOL!!!!!
If have read the recent post by Dr North you will understand where the Telegraph is at the moment. Lacking the courage to sack Booker, they cut his subject list down but stopped short of global warming and Brexit. I never knew he was banned from exposing the Stasi Family Court and its role in the state snatching of children that ruins their lives forever. I guess somebody high up was making money out of the huge fostering fees charged to councils.
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
You people in the UK have to get up to speed by using actual data collected locally if it is available and get it in the press. I did this in Canada and can prove climate change is BS but not many people want to believe me because the whole issue has become a religion not a science anymore. The green people have a powerful lobby and a lot of money behind them. Selling wind turbines and solar power.A economists from the University of Guelph did a paper on green energy. He calculated that 90% of the income produced by green power came from subsidies and only 10% from power produced. How does that make any sense. And there is all the real environment problems with green energy. Taking agriculture land out of production and killing bats and insects. Google his web site. Ross McKitrick University of Guelph Ontario Canada . He is accused of being a denier so the the alarmists are attacking his web site .You have to dig a bit to get to his blog
The BBC has been preparing its pitch in advance of the law suit. They are the only authentic, truthful voice, they say, scrupulous about what they air. Hurrumph! Well that’s news to me.
A far kinder, truer and more fitting tribute to Christopher Booker here than the telegraph were able to come up with.
Approaching middle age, I’ve begun to take more interest in history, especially the cultural shifts that took place before I was born. What strikes me is an oscillation (like the climate) of roughly 30 year periods, in the prevailing attitude of influential, young and / or powerful groups between realism and magical thinking. For whatever reason we now seem to be at the peak of the latter, and sadly, as throughout the course of human history, it is being utilised as a cover for endemic corruption.