Fresh insights into the techniques used by the BBC to catastrophise climate change are revealed in an exchange of letters with the producer of Justin Rowlatt’s “Wild Weather” Panorama and a former producer of Top Gear. Justifying the Rowlatt suggestion that global weather is getting warmer and more unpredictable and the death toll is rising, the programme’s producer Leo Telling said the latter figure was “cumulative”. In reply, Ken Pollock called the explanation “asinine”, and suggested Telling recognised that: “The death toll in the U.K. is cumulative. It is difficult to imagine it not increasing, if you quote cumulative figures,” he explained.
The “Wild Weather” programme, broadcast in December 2020, was an emotion-charged rant that tried to show that human-caused climate change was behind a series of recent bad weather events. It led to two internal complaints being upheld against Rowlatt. On the death toll claim, the BBC accepted that deaths from natural disasters have actually been falling for many years.
Telling then went on to argue that heatwaves will lead to excess deaths in vulnerable groups with a lower tolerance to extreme temperatures. In addition, he stated that the heatwaves will lead to avoidable deaths through wildfires.
“How can you write with a straight face that heatwaves will kill more and more people,” replied Pollock, “without also accepting that cold kills 10 times as many people every year and extra heat may save far more people?”
How do you reconcile the fact that Singapore and Helsinki have average temperatures differing by 22°C, and yet you accept that a further 1°C could spell disaster, he went on to ask.
Pollock then wondered what the Panorama producer really meant by the suggestion that avoidable wildfire deaths would increase. “You surely know that most of the Australian wildfires and those in the West of the USA were started by arson. Surely you know that the recent wildfires were nowhere near as bad as those in the West of the USA in the 30s and 40s and in Australia in the 80s, when I filmed them for the BBC, and in earlier decades,” he wrote.
In Pollock’s view, much of what Telling produced was drawn from the World Health Organisation and “highly questionable” IPCC predictions. One might expect you to challenge some of them, or at least refer to the source and the speculative nature of the predictions, he contended. Pollock concluded by noting that in his 22 years as a BBC producer, he became alarmed at the inadequate use of statistics by the Corporation in current affairs and elsewhere: “Many BBC people repeated statistics without understanding them”.
On the BBC climate desk, repeating, seemingly without question, the catastrophe claims from third party sources is a normal method of operation. In February 2019, the BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin reported the view of Left wing think tank IPPR that “human impacts had reached a critical stage and threaten to destabilise society and the global economy”. No attempt was made to examine these extravagant opinions. It later transpired that the report, which contained numerous false extreme weather claims, was part written by a young woman whose previous employment had been working as a volunteer for an Edinburgh ‘equality’ charity. Meanwhile, Matt McGrath, the first winner of the BBVA Foundation €100,000 award for climate journalism, wrote an article in July 2019 titled “Climate change: 12 years to save the planet? Make that 18 months”. Accepting his award from BBVA, a Spanish bank with large green investments, McGrath defended the primacy of specialist journalism “that draws on sound scientific sources” in an era of fake news.
Barely a week goes by without the Net Zero-inspired fantasies of climate Armageddon being publicised from the work of academics, think tanks, meteorological operations like the Met Office and the IPCC. This latter body, heavily dependent on climate models and their to-date wildly inaccurate forecasts, is held in particularly high esteem. Writing in July last year, Harrabin looked forward to a new edition by stating, “computing will underpin the new climate science ‘Bible’ from the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) next month”.
It might be suggested that an editorial emergency is awaiting the BBC in the near future. Most of its climate reporting seems to be little more than repeating bad (“extreme”) weather events, and claiming the climate is, somehow, breaking down. In reality, global warming has run out of steam with pauses and dips common in the record over the last two decades. The accurate temperature news from satellites is largely ignored, and there is little appetite for investigating how the major global surface datasets have quietly adjusted their records to add an extra 30% of heating over the last 20 years. Most of the bad weather claims are easily debunked, and are unlikely to be so well tolerated by the wider public if Net Zero leads to substantial reductions in personal freedoms, income and diet.
Writing an excoriating report on the “Wild Weather” programme, Ross Clark noted recently in the Daily Mail that there was a time when the BBC was committed to presenting both sides of the argument. He noted a 2018 instruction sent by the former BBC director of news and current affairs Fran Unsworth, demanding that “interviewees who were sceptical about man-made climate change were no longer to be invited regularly”. He concluded: “Unsworth’s instructions had clearly become the status quo.”
Last September, Insulate Britain activist Zoe Cohen told the BBC that climate change would lead to “the loss of all we cherish, our society, our way of life, law and order”. Ross noted that it was a hysterical claim that had no foundation in science, yet she remained unchallenged. Some at the BBC, he went on to suggest, were losing patience with their climate editor. “The Justin Rowlatt stuff is grim,” an unnamed BBC source is reported to have told another newspaper. “These are not mistakes; he’s a campaigner.”
Matt McGrath is another who might care to look into some of the sources that feed his doomsday copy. Around the time of receiving his BBVA present, he published a story claiming that over 11,000 scientists were predicting “untold suffering” from the forthcoming climate emergency. Among those signatories promoting a “clear and unequivocal emergency” were Professor Mickey Mouse and Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore.
The perfect BBC climate breakdown story. Making it up, in a world of make believe.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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Great to see that the BBC has as many ignoramuses and climate fantasists as the ABC in Australia has. Must be something about public broadcasters and their relationship with facts and opinions
Yes indeed, and our beloved government manages to con people into paying for the state broadcaster – because apparently it is the best in the World. Just like the Notional Health Service.
Trouble is not the lying TV stations. the real problem is the idiots who run the country. Australia used to be called the lucky country now it’s run by gangsters like the ‘mother country’
The full extract from Donald Horne’s book, The Lucky Country still holds true …Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.[2]..
So memorably re-packaged by the legendary Aussie band TISM (This is Serious Mum) as the title to their CD, Australia, The Lucky Cunt. Same horse, different jockey, as they say down under.
They may be idiots or maybe not but they are all subservient to the globalists in the UN, WHO and WEF who think that their wealth entitles them to rule over us. Those behind such organisations should be in jail on a diet of bread and water. Maybe then they will have to contemplate their actions and repent.
broadcasting
bollux about
climate
Deaths are cumulative. Which is why they are increasing. In a tough season, that is going to be hard to beat for stupidest comment of the year, and it’s only May.
Have a few other contenders lined up. But it will be a tight race.
A story better left untold
In what dimension would deaths do anything other than “increase cumulatively”?
Glad to read that this was also the observation of Ken Pollock.
The Bible records one instance of the overall death count reducing by one.
Two actually. Lazarus and some other chap.
And Phoenix! Does a bird count?
No, and there is no phoenix in the Bible.
Many more than two. ‘Many’ on the day of crucifixion. Then of those for which we have some association:
The widow of Zarephath’s son.
The Shunammite woman’s son.
The man raised out of Elisha’s grave.
The widow of Nain’s son.
Jairus’ daughter.
Tabitha (or Dorcas).
Eutychus.
You made my morning!
It did cross my mind to point out that the BBC was discounting the Lazarus effect.
The zombies who actually have faith in Greenism and the original sin of AGW?
I think that the point to consider is that the Climate Change lobby is now so strong that it can happily print lies to justify its collapse of Western Civilisation with no concern that they will raise any eyebrows amongst the technocratic establishment.
Our masters just want stories to justify their continued oppression. No one in power is going to care less about their accuracy. I am sure that nothing will happen to any BBC journalist who provides what the Establishment want to hear….
Perhaps worst of all our kids are being indoctrinated in school with that and other nonsense.
More than that, they’re being frightened by it, which is unacceptable. It’s hoped that they will ‘educate’ their parents into Rightthink.
More repackaged repeats by the BBC, primarily addressed to the media, the only ones left reading, half listening, watching or interested in consuming the equivalent of fast food in an attempt to add value to their increasingly dysfunctional businesses.
Whenever someone talks to me about the problem of climate change, I ask them to point me to one example in the last 20 years, just one example, of a consequence of climate change that they have personally seen or experienced that has led to someone dying or being injured.
I haven’t been given one example. Not one.
I ask people of senior years how bad the sea level rise has been in that seaside resort that they have been going to since they were children. You just get a blank look that signifies a part of their brain going into protective shutdown.
Yes, That’s a good one.
Remember the stunt the Maldives government pulled 10 or 15 years ago holding a cabinet meeting under water in scuba gear to alert people that most of their country would be under water within a decade or two?
If the DS wanted to really make a splash – pardon the pun – they should do a bit of investigative reporting, chase down those ministers and quiz them on how their high profile prediction has fared.
They’ve probably buggered off to another tropical island they bought with the proceeds of their con.
Is this just insulting older people, or do you have a point to make?
Blue Pill is right; I am a person of senior years and I find my peer group has mostly swallowed the narrative. In our lifetimes trust in authority was rarely an issue and they haven’t caught up yet, or maybe they just don’t want to. Me, I’ve always questioned, always worked things out for myself. Mind you, it doesn’t make me any happier for knowing we’re being manipulated.
You are not asking the right people.
Try someone who is a victim of the more frequent violent weather events, or increasingly hot periods, or someone who lives in drought conditions.
There is little point in sitting in the UK, looking at conditions here. The problem is elsewhere.
You might not care or believe, but it doesn’t make you correct.
Can you demonstrate that violent weather events are more frequent, rather than just, in fact, being filmed by smart phone more frequently?
There is no increase in hurricanes or tornadoes for example, in fact hurricanes have been occurring less often in recent years.
Give him time to scurry of to to the professional cartoonist’s (John Cook) web site skepticalscience (which is anything but sceptical) to find some convoluted, non sensical drivel to argue with.
It’s such a hopeless site, Cook himself has given up on it.
The IPCC tells us there are no significant worsening of extreme weather events anywhere in the world.
The IPCC also inform us that any warming will be largely confined to the hemispheres, equatorial regions remaining largely untouched.
NASA satellite and balloon data inform us there has been no meaningful warming for, at the very least, the last seven years whilst CO2 has continued to rise without interruption.
NASA also informs us the planet has enjoyed virgin greening of 14% over 35 years of observations, 70% of that directly attributed to increased atmospheric CO2. Two continents the size of mainland USA worth of extra vegetation according to one of the researchers.
Care to argue with the IPCC, the Hadley Climate Research Unit, the Mauna Loa observatory, and NASA?
There is little point in sitting in the UK, looking at conditions here. The problem is elsewhere.
If so-called problems exist in some places of the world but not in others, the underlying phenomenon is obviously not a global one.
You might find this instructive (if you can actually read a graph).
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-from-natural-disasters
It shows clearly that deaths from natural disasters of all types have dramatically decreased over the past century.
You enjoying working for the 77th?
In response to another hysterical article on the non-existent “climate crisis”, I put in a complaint, noting that the other sided of this hypothesis, including peer-reviewed papers, indeed, a meta-analysis of such, were never referenced.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjp/s13360-021-02243-9
Here’s the BBC’s extraordinary response
“Reference CAS-7173562-L6Y6H5
Dear Mr Poynton
Thanks for getting in touch with us regaridng an article on the BBC News website.
(https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58073295)
BBC News takes its editorial responsibility seriously when reporting on climate change.
We acknowledge the weight of scientific consensus around climate change and this underpins all of our reporting of the subject. The scientific community has reached a significant consensus on man-made global warming. We therefore reflect that with due weight when reporting on the science involved.
This does not mean, however, that we should never interview someone who opposes this consensus, especially if they are influential in the political debate about how to tackle climate change. There are times when it is editorially appropriate to hear from a dissenting voice.
There’s no obligation to include an alternative viewpoint within each and every individual item or programme. Rather, we achieve due impartiality on the political angles – when required – over a reasonable period of time. The merit of doing so is decided by the editor with the specific context in mind on each occasion.
The Director General has explained: “Our impartiality does not mean that we strike some sort of false balance – but that we reflect all contributions to a debate, and give each of them their due weight… We won’t give in to pressure to silence dissenting voices – nor allow those voices to be seen as mainstream.””
In response, I noted that “dissent” is not aa word associated with science, rather with ideology.
“Conor,
Thank you. Please link me to articles where you HAVE cited an alternative (dissenting? Science does not do “dissent” – what a bizarre statement, which rather gives your stance away. Science moves forward with questioning and scepticism, not by blocking (as the BBC has formally adopted as policy in this matter)) scientific position on the main thrust of the article. I say this as I cannot recall ANY
Kind regards
Jeremy”
Response was their none…
Science is 100% dissent.
Dissent and scepticism are not the same. Science is 100% SCEPTICISM.
Semantics matter, else we cannot understand each other, as we may as well be speaking different languages. As those not taught grammar do…
I believe Science expands what we know is wrong (often while expanding the scale of the universe and thus what could be right)
Dissent is saying that something is clearly wrong and why.
Dissent is disagreeing.
Disagreeing doesn’t make someone correct.
If you have a hypothesis based on data, and then it turns out that you ignored most of the data and fabricated the rest, or new data is available that doesn’t fit with your hypothesis, but you choose to ignore it to preserve your hypothesis, I would say thats pretty dishonest. Wouldn’t you..?
Never expect anyone at the BBC to understand or respond coherently to science.
These are ‘Arty’ types. They, like most of the population of the world (90%+?) do not understand the first thing about science.
What they are very good at is telling stories, spinning fantastic yarns that were they restricted to children, would not be known as propaganda.
This is the mistake climate sceptics make; attempting to counter propaganda, which everyone understands, with science, which almost no one understands.
You’ll be aware that almost every left wing atrocity committed in the last 100 years has been preceded by propaganda masquerading as science. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot etc. all used it.
But I’m afraid that sceptics are almost as blindly zealous as their alarmist counterparts. The slaughter of hundreds of millions of people was in the face of scientific integrity, but propaganda prevailed.
Sceptics need to get cuter about their tactics and use their own form of propaganda.
Absolutely, regardless, the Beeboids need reminding that many of us know what they are up to…
That in no way detracts from your determination to hold them to account.
So your arguments boils down to counter lies, with lies.
I prefer to describe it as ‘creative presentation’.
Propaganda is rarely entirely lies. Frequently, it’s ‘creative omission’, exaggeration, or manipulating facts etc.
The left are masters of it.
The problem climate change sceptics have is that they don’t have a good case.
They present cherry-picked data or false data, or project backwards to times, when there was no or little human population.
Some even present the case that CO2 is good for plant growth. Now this is true only in limited cases. It doesn’t help where there is no water. So again cherry picking.
When presenting the sceptical case, it is easily debunked.
What a lot of utter bollox. How much do you get paid for your drivel?
Pray tell, LaudShitty, what you are doing to reduce your carbon footprint?
Got an electric vehicle?
Don’t eat meat?
Don’t fly anywhere?
Don’t wear petroleum-based clothes?
Don’t use fossil-fuel based electricity ANYWHERE?
Don’t use fossil-fuel based products ANYWHERE?
Moron.
Try reading “The Hockey Stick Illusion” by A.W. Montford. You might be surprised by their source of “data”.
It’s not just coming from ‘arty’ types. Plenty of scientists sold their souls to the devil long ago and actually promote the garbage.
If you pay for a TV licence, you know what direct debit you should now cancel …
“the weight of scientific consensus “! More likely the weight of political consensus.
Good article.
I’ll just highlight this part:
“You surely know that most of the Australian wildfires and those in the West of the USA were started by arson. Surely you know that the recent wildfires were nowhere near as bad as those in the West of the USA in the 30s and 40s and in Australia in the 80s, when I filmed them for the BBC, and in earlier decades,”
The narrative about global warming would try to have people believe that a modest rise in temperature would cause bush land, forests, to simply spontaneously combust! it’s ridiculous.
Arson, lightning strikes, carelessness or faulty power infrastructure, as in the case of the California fires a few years ago are to blame especially when you throw in poor forest management.
Cliff Mass wrote a terrific piece about the California fires and concluded that they were not the result of ‘climate change’, and he is not a sceptic; students at his university (Washington), tried to get him cancelled for his trouble.
I remember when I was growing up in Australia (Victoria) during the sixties that there were often public information films on tv warning about the careless discarding of cigarettes, bottles (acting as magnifiers) and so on, and days of ‘total fire ban’, (barbecues etc), to mitigate the risk of bush fires.
These are all still the main risks with deliberate arson, and nothing to do with global warming.
I think we learned during Covidmania there is an every ready contingent in society who want the doom and gloom, the catastrophes and the constant fear.
The key difference these days is those in power play along rather than use common sense. There is some truth to the observation we are now ruled by those with a globalist view who have little in common with those who vote them in.
All we are seeing is that big central governments are run by a relative handful of people and they are relatively easy to hijack. The only way forward is the destruction of centralized governments. Some form of localism perhaps.
100%. Those few people running individual states are clearly compelled to act in accordance with other states and have no autonomy on the big issues which are transforming our daily lives;
Bio security measures (lockdowns, masks, jabs, vax passports)
The phasing out of hydrocarbons, petrol cars
Reckless printing of money
Good luck to any head of government who tries to deviate from this.
There can now be no doubt that the UK government and its agencies are collusive in manipulating events to terrify the public, again.
There can be few better illustrations than with monkeypox.
The NHS website points out the condition is simply not worth worrying about, yet our government has not come out and dispelled fear of it propagated by the media.
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/monkeypox/
However, even that is a subtle deviation to what was originally there to make the condition seem worse than it is.
This is reported by Off Guardian, the following has been completely removed:
The following has been replaced:
With:
(Emphasis is added by OG)
https://off-guardian.org/2022/05/24/the-nhs-just-edited-their-monkeypox-page-to-make-it-scarier/
In re-writing this they have omitted the term ‘bush meat’
As an ex-pat just how many ‘bus meat’ butchers are there in the UK.
Ummm let me guess ?none.
Please not empowering local authorities. They are diabolical. The only localism I want is empowering me and my family. And I promise not to tell other people what to do.
I have a friend who was fireman in California.
He told me that a lot of the fires were due to mis-management of the forest. When trees died (as they do) no-one was allowed to go in and take the dead wood for home use.
Hence the dry tinder effect.
My favourite technique when discussing climate alarmism with a fanatic is to remind them the proposed temperature change of a few degrees predicted by the year 2100 IF WE DO NOTHING is approximately the same difference when you travel from Edinburgh to York on any given day. A few degrees.
Even better, it is roughly the same difference walking from your living room to your kitchen while making dinner. How could we possibly cope with such a dangerous shift in temperature?
As ever, context matters.
or some fekenews beleivers asking why the temperature varies then (if not CO2) and i pointed we were up a mountain and if you look down the snow goes…
Perhaps the barometer has more truth than homeopathic changes in a trace gas?
Anyway, I prefer living in a warmer climate. Bring it on.
The Harm to this country (and the world) done by the BBC’s fakenews is increasing and not cumulatively!
Exponentially.
A great word until the climate Armageddonist’s got hold of it and beat it to a bloody pulp.
and covid nonsense promoters.
exponential is not biologically possible.
‘Unprecedented’ is another left crushed and worthless by the fear mongering philistines.
The there’s the curious language used in weather forecasts. Low temperatures are just ‘colder than average’. High temperatures are always ‘higher than they should be at this time of year’ – as if an average is where something ‘should be’.
Or, perhaps, ‘slightly colder than average’.
Or even ”lower than average”.
I’m going to repeat the comment I made about the online “harms” bill to show how climate reporting and the BBC is already “totalitarian”
The BBC a long time ago, did away with any form of scepticism or scientific critique of its lying propaganda on the climate. The result is that created a vicious cycle of delusion in the BBC which then believed it had a moral duty to lie about the climate and repress sceptics.
The BBC is a taster of what the online “harms” bill will do. In 20 years time, it will be impossible to say anything at all sceptical, anyone who does so will be prosecuted and jailed. All communication will be censored … just like the BBC now does on climate (although obviously they can’t yet jail people who tell the real scientific facts about the climate).
Indeed, if we look back at the witch huntings, we see exactly the same phenomenon. Anyone who dared to be sceptical about the witch hunts … was immediately suspect as a witch. So, almost no one would dare to question it. People started making huge amounts of money from pursuing witches as the goods of witches were confiscated (just as they do on climate progaganda and so many “harms” propaganda). And in Germany it wasn’t just the poor. All levels of society were subject to allegations of witchcraft against which there was no defence (except to be compliant and agree the witchfinders deserved all their ill gotten gains) That is the kind of society the BBC and the online “harms” bill will create. One in witch we are all terrified to speak the truth.
From the article today on the new online safety bill, Harmful Communications Offence: “‘harm’ means psychological harm amounting to at least serious distress.” The BBC should be the first organisation to be prosecuted under the bill.
And still most people, including, sadly, the bulk of ‘Conservative’ MPs, believe the Beeb ahead of the Bible.
So according to the BBC deaths are cumulative. And also fatal. Apparently. No sheeit…
Someone should compile a list (cumulative, of course) of all the people who ever worked for the BBC who are now dead. Deaths are increasing!
Being paid for political agitation, green agenda advertizers and advocates. BBC agitprop, with a good wage at that exes and pension added, what’s not to like?
But maybe the real focus should be on a government red or blue, yellow, pink which is determined, indeed fanatically so to march us all down into the green disaster zone, carbon zero who asked for that? Nobody voted, volunteered to being impoverished and for more expensive but less light and heat. One might beg, a population duped or just stupidly blase?
I don’t recall it in their general election manifesto. Did I miss something? If they’d told us then, I’d have voted for Screaming Lord Sutch (or similar).
Didn’t you publish this article, or one very similar, on May 10th, DS?
The story was *first* broken by Paul Homewood on 28th April.
Dr Ken Pollock then contributed in its comment section
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/04/28/two-complaints-upheld-against-justin-rowlatt/
Dr Pollock’s letter to the BBC was later published in Paul’s follow-up article dated 22nd May.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/05/22/correspondence-with-bbc/
These BBC people are now just completely out of their minds.
That’s being rather generous. Assumes they have minds.
When an outcome of a situation is deemed by the BBC to be beneficial to humankind, the death toll was reported as falling.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16161907
The BBC has atrocious Double Standards, so the Telly-tax must be scrapped.
Reminds me of the quite marvellous Chris Witty moment where he showed us a graph of cumulative deaths and said “as you can see, they’re starting to come down”
Untold suffering might as well be no suffering at all insofar the literal meaning goes. Hence, Over 11,000 scientists (including Mickey Mouse and Albus Dumbledore) predict future weather events will have effects they don’t know anything about yet.
One doesn’t need to be an expert in anything to predict that.
Best action I ever took when I ditched my licence fee 10000 years ago there was an ice age. Humans have roamed the earth for approximately 4000 years. Whi caused that event.. Fred Flintstone
The British Bollocks Corporation is clearly controlled by the globalists who have manipulated and falsified climate data. We need to have them defunded.
We’ve known for a very long time that the BBC only employs people with zero scientific or engineering knowledge. But is also seems that they cannot do simple sums either – not understanding the meaning of cumulative! Why on earth must we still pay an impost to provide diots like this with employment?
I didn’t watch this program, because I’ve given up on expecting any truth from the BBC in respect of climate issues. Why doesn’t the BBC employ proper competent scientists to give the honest information to its viewers. Remember we are more or less forced to pay for this crap and the BBC should be forced to make a programme where the obvious untruths in their output have been clearly shown. All power to Ken Pollock, his counter -argument to this rubbish from the BBC should be much further and wider published. Perhaps if our dying newspaper industry took up his kind of response to the BBC’s lies they might sell more newspapers.
I’ll say it again, ad infinitum and ad nauseam:
FAKE INVISIBLE CATASTROPHES AND THREATS OF DOOM
by Patrick Moore
…“without also accepting that cold kills 10 times as many people every year and extra heat may save far more people?”
Climate change bombshell as more than 500,000 lives ‘saved’ due to Britain’s mild winters
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1551801/climate-change-bombshell-mild-winter-global-warming-50000-lives-saved-Britain