BBC accused of institutional alarmism as new report reveals long list of climate misinformation
By Paul Homewood
London, 9 June – The BBC has been accused of institutional alarmism as a new report reveals the BBC’s persistent exaggeration and false information when it comes to climate and weather-related news.
The report, compiled by climate researcher Paul Homewood, reveals that the BBC has been forced to correct a dozen false claims and other items of fake news in climate-related coverage after receiving public complaints in recent years.
The report, which has been submitted to the Government’s upcoming Mid-Term Review of the BBC, shows that it has become common practice for BBC reporters to publicise exaggerated and often misleading weather-and climate-related stories in order to hype up the potential risks from global warming.
Net Zero director Benny Peiser said:
Persistent misrepresentation by BBC journalists in climate news coverage is fuelling the corporation’s institutional alarmism.
Institutional alarmism is a form of hyped and exaggerated news reporting that is deeply embedded in the BBC. It manifests itself as unbalanced, one-sided coverage of climate risks that are habitually exaggerated and that go uncorrected by the BBC’s in-house fact checkers.”
In 2020, the BBC’s director general warned that the problem posed by disinformation online was increasingly serious and that the BBC would need to work harder than ever to expose fake news and separate fact from fiction.
Since then the corporation has set up a team of fact checkers, a BBC-wide ‘Anti-Disinformation Unit’ and a ‘Climate Misinformation’ team. Yet none of these teams of fact checkers noticed or addressed the long list of false news stories that were only corrected by the BBC after lengthy and protracted complaint procedures.
Paul Homewood said:
There can be little doubt that the cases documented in this report are just the tip of the iceberg. Many other such inaccurate news or false information are broadcast by the BBC without being noticed or complained about.
It is also true that the BBC regularly try to fob off complainants with spurious replies, leading many to give in. This is even the case when their inaccurate claims are obvious, easily proven and manifest.”
Paul Homewood: Institutional Alarmism: The BBC’s disastrous climate complaints (pdf)
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The irony is that the BBC purports to be making a stand against fake news and misinformation when in fact it is one of the worst offenders, specialising in climate misinformation in particular.
One wonders why, if the evidence of anthropogenic climate change is so overwhelming, they need to lie, distort and invent in its desperate attempts to fool the world. They are an embarrassment to the UK and should be required to drop the first ‘B’ and become the ‘BC’
To us, “fake news” is that which is based on lies and misrepresentations. To the BBC, etc. “fake news” is anything w/ which they disagree.
Every program Justin Rowllatt appears on, should be pre- & suffixed with a disclaimer that his wife & sister are Ecoloons.
I made a complaint to the BBC about Rowlatt, with no great expectation of success, earlier in the week. He was reporting from Germany about some climate event or other and made several outrageous unscientific about extreme weather events getting worse “we know are going to happen”.
I just thought you think you can get anyway with this unsubstantiated propaganda on the main news whenever you like, so I’ll waste my time getting the usual “BBC is always right, so push off pleb and leave this to your betters” reply. I might even feel inclined to appeal.
They speak nonsense. There is no such thing as a ‘climate event.’ Only weather has events.
Any link?
Justin’s climate programme are on every day this week at 1.45 on radio 4
I missed the intro of the first one and genuinely thought I had stumbled on some piece of sci fi drama
Paul,
the actual broadcast has disappeared from the BBC website but there’s a reference to Mr Rowlatt’s attendance on this page.
https://archive.org/details/BBCNEWS_20220607_010000_BBC_News
I’ll look further
Ben Vorlich : ” He was reporting from Germany about some climate event or other and made several outrageous unscientific [sic ] about extreme weather events getting worse …….I just thought you think you can get anyway [sic ] with this unsubstantiated propaganda ….whenever you like ” ….
So you cannot recall what he said and have no accurate reference ? What did Rowlatt allegedly say ” earlier in the week ” from Germany and when Ben ?
Is this yet another nail in the coffin of this monstrous spreader of falsehoods.
If the rumour that i “heard ” (internet chatter) is true there will be no coffin for the BBC . The govt is planning to replace the licence fee with a universal tax , possibly added to the council tax , so will be unavoidable even if you never watch BBC or even have a TV or similar device.
Free from the need to keep viewers and therefore the licence money they will have a guaranteed income from now to the end of time , and no restrictions at all on what they do with it .
Similar to the French system which includes it in the taxe d’habitation. Since they’re phasing out that tax, I’m not sure what is happening to the TV charge.
Until now it has part-funded the France national channels, part of the deal being they don’t show advertising during the evening.
I see no objection in principle to a licence fee. It all depends on what you do with it and what the BBC has been doing in recent years is using its position to proselytise a particular socio-political point of view, no matter how loudly it tries to deny this.
Well done, Paul Homewood, for bringing this egregious BBC behaviour to the attention of the Government’s mid-term review of the BBC. I hope the panel are also aware of that Corporation’s multiple biases in practically every aspect of their presentation of information to the British people!
The BBC is clearly acting as a source of Disinformation:
“Misinformation” vs. “Disinformation”: Get Informed On The Difference. Dictionary dot Com
Well done for your hard work and research on this.
Bravo Mr H and thank you.
Well done Paul. There are so many other areas beyond climate change in which the BBC is institutionally biased and provides fake and misleading information.
Meanwhile the establishment doubles down, re-rewarding Rabid Attenbollox, inserting climate propaganda into the jubilee……
I wondered at what point DA had become a member of the Royal Family.
It is with some pride that I managed to post a comment in yesterday’s Express-on-line article about the recent Sir Attenborough/Prince Charles love-in. “Find the truth about DA from Susan Crockford’s Walrus book”.
In Napoleonic times spreading false information and panic was punishable with death. At the least the BBC are guilty of fraud. Ian fully in favour of defunding the BBC. Why are the BBC not forced to present an alternative view on climate curated by GWPF? Take BBC to court to force presentation of work by a number of eminent scientists whose voices are suppressed. Climate change hysteria has little to do with climate and more about geopolitical goals and filling the pockets of bankers and industiralists. Time to take the fight for truth to the next level?
The BBC is at it again right now. Gleefully supporting the claims that filling up an “average family car” is over £100. According to the cars I have owned, and generously, a typical tank is about 7 Imp gallons, and that’s £50 at the prices announced today. Only 100% exaggeration!
Hi Vernon, I actually don’t think they are wrong on this one. My wife’s Hyundai i20 has a 50L fuel tank, (my Peugeot 4 series diesel estate has a 60L tank). Checking around, a Ford Focus has up to 55L with a minimum of 47L depending on model. A typical modern family car really does have around a 50+ litre tank.
Of every 100£ of fuel 44£ goes to the govt.
About time ev drivers stopped freeloading and paid 55£ a year car tax
That started out as 500£ car tax
All our cars, pretty typical, take over 50 litres
OT
Enjoyed this article from substacks El Gato
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/price-of-gasoline-too-high-buy-an
Don’t forget the Major Complaint of April 2016 which ran to 160 pages and was absolutely devastating. Inter alia a whole chapter was devoted to Attenborough’s terminological in exactitudes about science. The Complaints chapter described BBC’s attitude as ‘ignorance, misplaced sophistry and disdain’. You can get it up on Paul’s archive. There are attached appendices. It’s really worth a read and it’s sad it didn’t sink the lying Beeb.
Is this the link you mean, Coeur de Lion?
If so, did the BBC just ignore it?
Was there a judicial review?
Regards,
John.
The BBC also gets forced to edit articles that contain misleading information, which it then does surreptitiously.
Its notoriously misleading graphic that was designed to ‘explain’ the fracking process to the gullible (and maybe influenced the liars at Friends of the Earth) has only recently been stealth-edited.
It’s not only climate misinformation that the BBC peddles.
It also misleads or misleads-by-omission on a number of aspects related to energy. Strangly, soon-to-be-departed R Harrabin is credited as both Enviro Analyst and Energy Analyst.
Good call Joe.
Lying by omission is their preferred tactic, precisely to avoid the issues this article addresses. Namely falsifiable assertions can be, well, falsified.
Merely omitting them however is much harder to legally pin on them. Editorial licence and all that.
They know what they’re doing.
The Islamic doctrine of deception by omission or concealment is termed ‘ kitman ‘ …….
The BBC ‘s Climate Kitman ….I like the alliteration
Leftists lie, misinform and censor to get power.
All subjects.
Not just climate.
This has been true for 100 years.
BBC radio’s relentless climate nightly world service output is even more rampantly biased than most of the stuff you see.
the world service is relentless in its climate and social agendas
I wonder if any viewer has ever actually learned something correct or usefull from the BBC’s environmental “analysts”?
the problem is Boris suffers from Stockholm syndrome as perfectly illustrated by his sickening sycophantic introduction at Blackpool of the owl like replacement for the sour faced Scottish bint that preceded him.
He is in lockstep with his torturers the BBC because they are his mouthpiece for net zero and off shore wind which he reiterated was the mainstay of his energy policy.
Toadlike he continues to career at breakneck speed towards a fast approaching General Election where the Conservative party will shatter into a myriad of pieces as the full impact of Net Zero becomes apparent.
Toads would be well advised not to simmer their frogs intemperately.
Does Net Zero differentiate Conservatives? I thought all UK parties support Net Zero.
Indeed. And all are in the thrall of the BBC no matter which turd floats to the surface.
Well done Paul.
We’re not seeing the vast quantity of complaints and so what is needed is for some enterprising individual to set up a BBC-complaints-watch site where complainants can register their complaint, progress and (almost) inevitable fob-off.
Shine a bit more light on it.
It isn’t just climate alarmism at the BBC. The BBC is deeply environmentalist and any other viewpoints on any topic are ignored or deliberately suppressed.
Well done again Paul, the clarity of your complaints makes it hard for the BBC to avoid honest replies.
But this report goes to the ‘Government’s Mid-Term Review of the BBC’, does this mean it will be ignored?
Paul, I would like to quote from your excellent report on the MENSA site. There are some large mouths with little brains there who swallow everything the BBC et al say. Would you be happy with that?
Yes. that would be great
I admire your dedication and perseverance Paul, very well done indeed. Rowlatt and his ilk are political activists on a tax payer funded payroll. They should be sacked for misconduct in public office.
I also missed the first of the Rowlat programmes,but am taping the rest. I think that today is about the West Antarc.ice shelf.Have not seen it yet,but I,m having a bet with myself that he does not mention the under sea volcanic activity in that area.
Unfortunately the pond life that currently constitute our parliament are sufficiently dim as a collective group that having the reality of the situation pointed out to them is meaningless. Climate change is a religion not facts or rational argument. The response will be a series of dull witted platitudes and carry on as before.
Why don’t the rebroadcast “An Inconvenient Truth”?
I have made so many climate related propaganda complaints to the BBC that they have banned me from submitting complaints for 5 years! They are a real tyranny.
Maybe I have missed it but I have not seen mention of the fact that BBC actually formalised regulation that opposition to the green agenda was not permitted – neither by their staff nor guests.
lobal warming? Let’ step back. When a fossil fuel is burnt there are three products that can cause atmospheric warming – carbon di-oxide, water vapour and, yes, heat.
Heat? This requires a little further explanation. Ideally all the heat energy in a fossil fuel is used in generating another form of energy such as propulsion or electricity. However, in practice most goes, directly or indirectly, to the atmosphere.
The scientific name for this ‘waste’ heat that is lost during its transformation into other forms of energy is ‘entropy’.
So global warming (and yes it exists, for whatever reason) is probably not much due to ‘carbon’, which gas has increased by just one part in ten thousand in the atmosphere since we started exploiting fossil fuels in quantity. Nor does it seem to be greatly affected by water vapour, even though there is of the order of twenty times as much of this in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
The real cause is much simpler. We are warming the atmosphere directly with our waste heat. There is a lot of it, because our mechanisms for transforming heat into energy, such as power stations and automobiles, are very inefficient. Only about 35% of the heat in a power station’s fuel emerges as electricity, and as little as 25% as propulsion from a gas-powered auto (diesel-fuelled vehicles are rather higher). In addition, when we use fossil fuels for warming or cooling almost all of the heat involved ends up in the atmosphere. Perhaps overall about 70% of the energy in our fossil fuels ends up just heating the air around us.
The calculation of the order-of temperature rise from our energy use is almost laughably simple. Here it is.
There is a useful website, https://ourworldindata.org/, which has assembled annual estimates of fossil fuel consumption since the early 1800s. The total about a year ago came to 5,455,496 Terawatt hours, a ridiculously precise figure, which is equal to roughly 2.0 x 1016 Megajoules (MJ). The mass of the atmosphere is about 5.2 quadrillion tons (5.2 x 1015 tons) and its specific heat is about 0.001 MJ/kg/degree Centigrade. Multiplying the mass of the atmosphere by its specific heat and dividing this figure into all those megajoules gives a (very) theoretical temperature rise if all the heat from the fossil fuels we have burnt went just to warm our planet’s atmosphere.
This crude calculation gives a global temperature rise of 3.8 degrees Centigrade (6.8 degrees Fahrenheit). But, as we have seen, about 30% of the megajoules in the fossil fuels burnt created motion or electricity, not heat. This would give a temperature rise of 2.7 degrees Centigrade (4.8 degrees Fahrenheit). However, a warmer atmosphere would radiate more heat into space, regardless of the greenhouse effect, so a one degree Centigrade (1,8 degrees Fahrenheit) rise since the beginning of the industrial revolution from our waste heat seems quite reasonable.
There is visual evidence of this effect in the form of those dramatic NASA images of our light-spangled planet at night. . According to the US Department of Energy only about 15% of our electric power is used for illumination, so what we see is the tip of the iceberg in terms of power generation, and this in turn is well under half the entropic heat that goes into the atmosphere.
The good news is that solar, wind and hydro power generate zero entropy, So we have been doing the right thing but for the wrong reason. Entropy, not ‘carbon’ is generating global warming.
Greenhouse gases impede Earth’s ability
to cool itself. They do not add heat, they prevent
some heat from escaping. They form a partial
barrier between Earth’s surface and the
infinite heat sink of outer space.
That is called the greenhouse effect.
You need to learn more climate science
and stop inventing alternate theories.
The energy from wast heat might account
for 1% of the global warming since the 1970s.
CO2 increases most likely account for more,
but the percentage is unknown because
there are too many climate change variables
to know exactly what each one does.
Here’s my own list.
I consider waste heat
to be part of 9) “unknown causes”
since there are no reliable measurements:
The following variables are known
to influence Earth’s climate:
1) Earth’s orbital and orientation variations
2) Changes in ocean circulation,
ENSO and others
3) Solar Irradiance and activity
4) Natural volcanic and man made pollution aerosol emissions
5) Greenhouse gas emissions
6) Land use changes
(cities growing, crop irrigation, etc.)
7) Changes in clouds and water vapor
8) Random variations of a complex system
9) Unknown causes of climate change
The variables above are not all independent.
In the 1990s I had a British boss in a
USA engineering job. If he heard something
from an engineer he thought was BS, he’d say:
“Is that true, or did you hear it on the BBC?”
Which I suppose made more sense to British engineers.
I advised him to say: “Is that true, or did you
read it in the New York Times?” but he
couldn’t stop saying “BBC”. I much later
used the NY Times motto myself
for one of my blogs.