The impartial BBC

Despite its own report into impartiality specifically criticising the BBC for its record on climate change, there does not appear to have been any fundamental shift on display. The BBC continues to report the most alarmist of stories, cherry-picks which scientific articles or papers to report on and injects a 'global warming' angle into every conceivable subject.

For example, the Lockwood and Froehlich paper from the Royal Society Proceedings was reported prominently with the headline 'No Sun link' to climate change. This was splashed across the main BBC news page, as well as the Science and Technology page (where it remained for some time). The story carried no dissenting views, and several very strong quotes from Lockwood. The paper has subsequently been criticised heavily in several places, (here, here and now, finally, with a response by Svensmark and Friis-Christensen. Can we hope to see the BBC giving even a mention to the rebuttal of Lockwood and Froehlich's paper? Rather than there being 'no sun' link to climate change (which is a patently ridiculous headline anyway), it is clear that the science is far from settled.

To take another example, the BBC has been heavily reporting the recent news of Arctic ice-melting. Again, the tone is both partial and hysterical. However, has there been any report based on the NASA story that the melting might be due to wind patterns (with no mention of CO2)? Nope. Not a bit of it. If the story had been about CO2 causing the melt (which is what the imply in most of the BBC reports), then there's little doubt it would have been front page news.

In the same way, the story earlier in the year that black carbon (soot) may be responsible for a significant portion of the apparent global warming was missed by the BBC completely.

Despite paying lip service to impartiality, the BBC remains one of the most biased voices reporting on climate change. BBC? It really does stand for Broadcasters for Banning Carbon.