BBC Italy Floods Complaint Goes To ECU
By Paul Homewood
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/av/65640935
Another BBC complaint is wending its way the their Executive Complaints Unit!
You will probably remember their claim after the Bologna floods in May of “half annual rainfall in 36 hours”. The claim was made by weatherman Chris Fawkes, as a lead in to the weather forecast.
He mentioned “over 200mm of rain”, but average annual rainfall in the region is about 1000mm, so the claim was clearly fake.
I therefore complained at the time, and asked them to substantiate their claim. They still have failed to do so.
Their first response was the usual waste of time. The second response states:
I have gone back to Chris Fawkes who is adamant that the information provided in his video was correct and was based on official data. His voiceover said: Storm Minerva brought with it half a years’ worth of rainfall in places falling in just 36 hours.”
He says: “The BBC weather supplier Meteogroup stated “Observations show that Ferrara has seen 207mm in the 36 hours to 06z this morning. Bologna has seen 127mm of rain in the same 36 hour period – this is more than double the May average of 58mm.
“What I can see is that Ferrara is a lowland site in Emilia-Romagna. During this rainfall event the prevailing winds were northeasterly – these winds would have pushed the weather system into the Apennines and would very certainly have brought much larger rainfall totals over high ground. In short the Meteogroup observation would corroborate the statement from Civil Protection Minister Nello Musumeci that 20cm of rain fell in 36hrs. I don’t have observations for the 500mm of rain he also reported, national meteorology centres often have some observations that aren’t widely available publicly, but I also have no specific reason to doubt his statement either.”
In other words, he actually backs up my complaint, saying that the 36 hour rainfall was “more than double the May average”, not half a year’s worth, and admitting there is no evidence of 500mm falling anywhere.
Of course, 500mm may have fallen somewhere, but they are unable to find any data to that effect. “Maybes” are not facts. And viewers are entitled to the facts, not least when they come from a weatherman, who is supposed to deal in hard facts and not climate propaganda.
I have therefore escalated the complaint to the ECU, with this reply:
Your second response dated 27th September goes into great detail, but actually confirms my original complaint, ie that there is no evidence that “half of annual rainfall fell in 36 hours”.
As Chris Fawkes notes, the highest rainfall amount recorded appears to be at Ferrara, which had 207mm in 36 hours. Your response states that the average annual rainfall in the region is 1000mm, so 207mm would be the equivalent of about two and a half months.
It may be that higher amounts fell elsewhere, but there is no evidence of this.
Therefore a correction should be published to the effect that the original claims have not been officially confirmed or substantiated. The correction should also include the actual rainfall figures and annual averages mentioned above.
Their first response, by the way, quoted the comment at the time by Italy’s Civil Protection Minister Nello Musumeci that 500mm had fallen in some areas. I replied that I wanted evidence of his claim, and pointed out that it is of course the BBC’s duty to challenge the claims of politicians, instead of merely accepting them as gospel truth.
Their latest response laughingly states that “I am unsure why you feel what the minister said was wrong or untrustworthy”!
Can you imagine the BBC ever accepting to words of a Tory UK minister as gospel?
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The BBC was lost to quality, factual reporting years ago – if it wasn’t forcibly leeching off taxpayers, it would have folded long ago, especially with its over priced, unsustainable salary burden from its dire presenters
We can only hope one day, some Govt has the decency to scrap the licence fee and put us all out of its misery
A collective groan goes up in our household whenever Fawkes and his ridiculous scaremongering appear.
He alone is a good enough reason why the licence fee should not be compulsory.
All the BBC weather presenters are climate change propagandists, but Fawkes is definitely the worst. I reckon their bloated salaries are dependent on how many times they mention “due to climate change”.
I refuse and dont pay a licence tax. I dont watch BBC weather shows as i know they are false. I dont know who the guy Fawkes is as a result.
Problem solved for me – i suggest you all do the same. Stop paying the bbc licence fee tax. Boycott the bbc.
Any relation to Guy Fawkes?
Well done! The fact that they were mis-reporting by a factor of two says it all – but your last line was brilliant. In future you can use the BBC’s reply – that they believed what the Italian politician said – is a precedent of their belief in the honesty of politicians. Ha ha.
+1
++1
Was Melloni in power back in May?
The BBC trusting a government they normally write off as right wing populists, whatever next?
If the politician is spouting the right on view on weather, of course the BBC will believe them.
“I am unsure why you feel what the minister said was wrong or untrustworthy”
There is a message from the BBC, and that message is: ” Believe ! You must believe ! “
If the BBC wants to be gullible that’s up to them. What they shouldn’t do is assume everybody else is. How they can justify their license fee funded existence is beyond me.
So much for BBC Fact Checkers.
Well done, Paul – keep at ’em.
Listen to Tim Davie talking recently about how passionate he is about “impartiality”…..he is either very naive (not), very deluded (possibly) or a massive liar knowing he is charge of a ship with only jagged rocks in front of him. IMHO he is a fully paid up member of the Ultra Far Left Woke mob, and knows exactly what he is doing – his “masters” bidding…
Many of those we might consider members of the “Elite” are, in their own minds impartial, because they believe their political views to be “facts”. We saw this with Brexit, where the BBC was completely uncomprehending that there were arguments to be had about benefits versus costs, democracy etc. As far as they were concerned, membership being a Good Thing was a fact. Anybody saying otherwise was questioning facts and thus not giving them the time of day was being impartial. They take the same view of Climate Change having cunningly (or through their own stupidity) conflated science with the political/economic choices of what to then do. Saying renewables are not the answer is to be, bizarrely, a climate change denier.
The BBC isn’t the only one. There was a report on the outrageous pay of the HS2 “workers” today. At this rate it could hit a Trillion when its finished about 2100.
‘Severe flooding’
Saw headline at Breitbart earlier (now it’s gone), re: New York City:
‘Extreme flooding’
Note that these events go beyond ordinary flooding. One wonders which is worse, ‘severe’ flooding or ‘extreme’ flooding.
Extremely Severe Flooding is the worst in many ways
@glenartney
Extremely Severe (never ending) Flooding? aka The Ocean.
There was a clip on the BBC news regarding the New York flooding. The water was described as “waist high” – well they must be very small people because it looked just like heavy rain.
Well done Paul for your persistence.
Time to remember that back in 2006, the infamous BBC-28 Seminar decided to NEVER give balanced reporting on climate issues. To NEVER criticise the agenda.
This was touted as a meeting of 28 climate scientists. But when asked who they were, the BBC refused all FOI requests. The BBC then spent hundreds of thousands of pounds, trying to keeping the list of attendees secret. But later, Omnologos hacked the names of the attendees, and the vast majority turned out to be climate activists and media personalities.
So the BBC decided to never give balance to climate reporting, based upon the opinions of climate activists. So much for BBC impartiality.
The BBC fought any disclosure of this seminar.
https://www.theregister.com/2012/10/29/boaden_tribunal_information_refusal
https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/09/bbc_beats_blogger_/
But blogger Omnologos found the list
https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/13/climate28_named_wtf/
The BBC-28 list
Ralph
@ Ralph. Thanks for grouping together the evidence of BBC bias re debate on climate change. The internal “believer” culture at the BBC must surely be overwhelming (internally), although the extent of the BBC’s internal “believer” culture is frequently obvious in their external broadcasts, which sometimes resemble sermons.
I have recently heard some dissent on LBC radio, which was previously the realm of hardline believers.
There is mention of Bill Hare on the advisory board at Tyndall, when he was then International Director of Greenpeace. He was also a “visiting scientist” at Potsdam from 2002 to 2008 and fed Schellnhuber most of his lines. He was still being paid by Greenpeace. His wife, whom he met at Kyoto, just happened to be an adviser to Angel Merkel and Schellnhuber and was a Federal employee, so it was fortunate that he managed to get the Potsdam gig wasn’t it? In 2008, the German government then funded his new venture Climate Analytics which tracks how well governments are behaving themselves on following the UN diktats.
There is a deep dive on him here: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/tony-thomas/2019/04/doctor-hares-nasty-green-prescriptions/
The Greenpeace infiltration of Germany took a new turn last year when
the head of Greenpeace International, Jennifer Morgan, became Germany’s new climate envoy. She and Hare are long time colleagues and helped set up Climate Action International, which now has 1800+ groups around the world. She was also a minder for Greta Thunberg at her Davos “How dare you” performance. She was on The Potsdam Science Advisory Board at the same time that Hare was at Potsdam and was a Senior Adviser to Schellnhuber, although she has no science qualifications. In 2008 she was advising Tony Blair.
Her career includes WWF and the UK’s E3G and the US World Resources Institute, when Al Gore was on its board.
https://www.dw.com/en/greenpeace-head-jennifer-morgan-becomes-germanys-first-climate-envoy/a-60704120 February 9, 2022
Greenpeace casts a very long shadow.
Correction! Merkel was no Angel.
Madam Merkle very nearly destroyed Germany, with her uber-Green policy of closing down all their nuclear power stations.
So Germany went full in with Russian gas.
Then Trump arrived and told them to their face, that they were mad to depend upon Russia for gas. And they laughed in his face. (There is a video of this.)
But Trump was right, again.
And they are not laughing now….
R
The delicious irony was that the BBC spent a large sum of licence payers money blocking the release of the attendees – perhaps trying hide that the Head of Comedy was there – when the information was already freely available on the internet.
In fact there was no hacking needed. The full list of names had been available on the Chatham House website all along.
Of the invitees three (as I recall) had some sort of scientific qualifications, the rest were mainly from assorted “charities”, known to be generally pro-the climate change paradigm plus an assortment of BBC apparatchiks, somebody from the US embassy (rumoured to be a CIA spook), and one man who hadn’t a clue why he was there and reckoned they’d got the right name but the wrong man!
Altogether BBC organisation at its finest!
As I’ve said before, the real problem with this BBC meeting is that they afterwards conflated the science of climate change with the political response to the science. Scientists cannot tell us what to do, if anything about climate change. The decisions are political and are best based on a economic analysis of costs of mitigation/prevention versus costs otherwise. Even when you have done that, there are lots of ways to achieve your goals, e.g. do you have government mandate technologies or let the market discover what works best? But all such discussions have been shut down by the BBC. We mut take drastic action, we must do it now and the state must be in control.
What is now truly laughable is that the BBBC give so much time to those such as Extinction Rebellion who are anti the science.
All the publicity funded news media’s are the same. TVNZ is top of the ranks with CC propaganda!
Most are signed up to Covering Climate Now
https://coveringclimatenow.org/about/
“CCNow collaborates with journalists and newsrooms to produce more informed and urgent climate stories, to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom — from politics and weather to business and culture — and to drive a public conversation that creates an engaged public. Mindful of the media’s responsibility to inform the public and hold power to account, we advise newsrooms, share best practices, and provide reporting resources that help journalists ground their coverage in science while producing stories that resonate with audiences.
In addition to three of the world’s biggest news agencies — Reuters, Bloomberg, and Agence France Presse — each of which provides content to thousands of other newsrooms, our partners include CBS News, NBC and MSNBC News, Noticias Telemundo, PBS NewsHour, Univision, Al Jazeera; most of the biggest public radio stations in the US; many flagship newspapers and TV networks in the Americas, Europe, and Asia; and dozens of leading magazines and journals, including Nature, Scientific American, Rolling Stone, HuffPost, Teen Vogue, and Mother Jones.
Damian Carrington is a “Journalist of the Year”
https://coveringclimatenow.org/2023-journalists-of-the-year/
But it’s complete nonsense to use a single data point versus a long term average. There must be years with totals higher than the average and those years might be much higher than the average.
The BBC used “annual rainfall” in a totally misleading way, particularly if annual variability is high.
Typical BBC process Complaint – Reject using standard fob off – Appeal – Reject usually quoting from the article and saying we’re just repeating the sources.
The BBC Weather and Climate reporting is unquestioning parroting of climate doom and beyond contempt.
Why should the BBC be allowed to police themselves – never in this world must this continue; the self same UFL Woke globalist apparatchiks demonstrate their leanings on a daily basis in the same way they pose as reporters. Davie spouts about his zest for “impartiality” the same way the BBC fell they have to tell people “Why you can trust the BBC” in a tiny font almost out of site on the front page of their webpage – these “themes” are both totally unbelievable and only in plain sight because Davie and his army of wokeists are empowered by the Licence Fee Tax to spout this arrant evident rubbish.
FWIW, I personally have exposed how the BBC management allow their editorial staff to write very partial articles, knowingly devoid of impartiality and they manipulate HYS comments allowing abusive defamatory comments aimed at the Tories, AWG/CC and so called vaccine deniers but instantly remove comments that offer a diametrically different view; very biased – I am apolitical BTW….bring on the day when I can exercise my freedom of choice to not support this propaganda machine.
BBC/Met Office claim “over 200mm of rain” in one location, once – so the planet’s in a bad way? They really are desperate.
The BBC’s Editorial guideline for itself.
“Section 1: The BBC’s Editorial Standards
1.6 Complaints:
We are open in acknowledging mistakes when they are made and want to learn from them.”
– but only after at least twice trying to fob-off complainants in the hope they give up jumping through hoops.
https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/guidelines/editorial-standards#16complaints
Sadly GB News allowed a guest to make the claim that wind and solar are cheaper when discussing the Rosebank oil field totally unchallenged. They also let Michael Crick rant that Pacific Islands were disappearing under the rising ocean. It does colour you view of what a person says on other subjects when they are so ignorant on global warming.
Maybe they have to let a little nonsense through or they’d be called racist climate deniers 🙂
Paul,
The list that Mauricio found was probably a list of invitees, not attendees. It was posted on the website of the International Broadcasting Trust, an environmental pressure group which, astonishingly, played a major role in organising the seminar for the BBC. The attendees list was somewhat different.
During the Information Tribunal proceedings that Paul mentions, the BBC listed other significant documents relating to the tribunal that they had failed to mention when I made my original FOIA request. This enabled me to make another, more extensive, request immediately the tribunal’s decision on the first one was handed down.
I eventually obtained the attendees list, together with a lot of other information about the seminar, when the BBC disclosed it in the run-up to another Tribunal hearing, evidently in order to avoid a humiliating and very damaging public defeat.
The appalling role the BBC has played in promoting climate hysteria for nearly two decades can certainly be traced to that seminar in 2006: the reasons for holding it, how it was organised, and who organised and financed it.
A book that I wrote about the whole affair, which was fully referenced and scrupulous cautious about the risk of defamation proceedings, was eagerly accepted for publication by two publishers in quick succession. Both subsequently withdrew, apparently after considering the BBC’s likely reaction.
We live in the age of SLAPP (strategic litigation against public participation) and the book remains unpublished, the full story untold.
Tony Newbery