A Place to Stand

On Friday the 12th I posted Roger Harrabin, the BBC's "Environmental analyst", memo saying how the BBC should spin the news that the court had decided a number of things in Gore's 2006 (based on lectures he has been repeating since 1998) film were convenient lies.

He has replied to CCNet thus:

Roger Harrabin [roger.harrabin@bbc.co.uk]

Very quick, Benny, I have only just written that.

You might also want to carry my comment piece on the Internet too making
my view clear that the Gore film is political, and expressing my
disquiet when I saw it

Roger

And indeed his comment piece does say that while distancing the film from all the "real" global warming aka climate change stuff.

I have spent much of the last two decades of my journalistic life warning about the potential dangers of climate change, but when I first watched Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth I felt a flutter of unease.

Not because the central message - that climate change is happening and almost certainly caused by mankind - is untrue; but because in several points of the film, Mr Gore simply goes too far by asserting or implying facts that are contentious.

I would quibble with the term "contentious" to describe specific untruths but cannot fail to welcome this.

What a great shame that Roger only thought to make his doubts public in this article dated 11th October 2007 a year after the BBC started sanctifying the film & some hours after his memo became public.

I sent
Dear Roger,
May we next year expect the BBC's Environment Analyst to be publishing that he always had doubts about the claim that warming was actually taking place & that 1998 had been the "warmest year in a millennium", with 2007 predicted to be warmer, but that, apart from the lack of warming all the other fears of global warming are not "debatable".

Neil Craig

UPDATE his reply:

If you are referring to the Gore Online piece I refer you to Newsnight March 27th - well before the judge or Mr Dimmock - and the day I sa the Gore movie
RH

While I do not personally remember that episode his previous link says that he "challenged" Gore on ice core data but mentions nothing about any of the points the judge said were untrue (or in BBCspeak "swaying from the consensus") - it says much about the BBC that to ask a question not wholly supportiveon on one part of the warming propaganda can be portrayed as hard hitting.