Climategate: climate of fear

By James Delingpole
The Telegraph
Dec. 09, 2009

Not all climate fear promoters are nasty bullies. Before my debate with George Monbiot the other day, a sweet, crop-haired blonde girl came up and introduced herself as Tamsin Omond. Climate agitator she may be but she’s also beautifully mannered, good natured and generous spirited – even towards evil AGW deniers like me.

If only the same could be said of this fellow. His name is Bob Ward and here he shows his warm cuddly side on Sky News with Spectator editor Fraser Nelson.

Has Ward been taking charm lessons from The Thick Of It’s Malcolm Tucker? Is he peeved at having come only fifth in the annual Butlins Yul Brynner lookalike contest? What is it that has made this veritable Samson of long flowing hirsuteness so very, very cross? And who is this snarling pit bull anyway?

Ward works for the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, one of the main drivers of the global AGW agenda. Its (enormously well-paid) chairman is the ineffably dismal, droney-voiced, economist-turned-climate-fear-promoter Lord Stern. It has been lavishly funded by Jeremy Grantham, a US hedge fund manager who made a fortune correctly calling the global economic collapse and has now turned his attentions to AGW.

As the Institute’s press spokesman, Ward does a fantastic job for his masters by terrifying the living daylights out of people in the media (see Fraser, above) who are even remotely sceptical about AGW. A favoured tactic is to report them to the Press Complaints Commission for the slightest perceived factual error, presumably because he knows that the supine PCC will almost always cave in to bullying rather than stand up to what often turns out to be the most trivial and vexatious nitpicking. Alastair Campbell used to do something similar when he worked for Tony Blair. It’s deeply unpleasant but it works.

The first time Ward tried this tactic was in 2007 when, as former head of media for the Royal Society, he decided to take responsibility for shooting down Martin Durkin’s notorious Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. This was the first programme on British television seriously to challenge Al Gore’s ‘consensus’ on global warming. The reason I call it notorious is not because it was factually untrue, but because Ward very successfully orchestrated a campaign against it of such shrillness that the programme is now generally remembered as a piece of denialist propaganda.

As Christopher Booker reports in his The Real Global Warming Disaster, Ward managed to corral “37 professors” opposed to the documentary and also launched an avalanche of complaints at the regulatory body Ofcom. In all there were 265 objections, some from the IPCC, some from someone called Mr Dave Rado, the majority from Bob Ward. Guess how many of these objections were sustained by Ofcom? Just seven out of 265, none of them relating to factual errors but to minor technicalities relating to procedure.

Can anyone else see the arrant hypocrisy in all this? Al Gore committed any number of egregious factual errors in An Inconvenient Truth (as was demonstrated in a court case). Every single day, our newspapers are full of blatant, outrageously inaccurate warmist propaganda put out by environmental activists masquerading as objective new reporters. Yet the moment anyone trying a contrary line makes the slightest slip, down comes Bob Ward like a ton of bricks. Well it’s his job and he is being paid to do so. Would that we sceptics were similarly well funded!

Bishop Hill provides examples of even worse ways journalists and scientists have been intimidated by the AGW industry. Here is one:

I am a journalist and have been “warned”, in a manner similar to the one posted, by a social economics professor.

The “offence” was a summary of Lord Monckton’s opinion that AGW is diverting resources, causing food price hikes and adds to human misery.

The threat was that the mere reporting of information would be taken as a direct adoption of Monckton’s views and the writer and the magazine would be seen as oil industry shills. The prof threatened by phone but refused the invite to write his own two page response in the form of an article, not just in the letters page.

Here is another from Roger Pielke Jr, describing a threatening email sent by a climate scientist named Michael Schlesinger to the New York Times’s Andy Revkin when he dared to venture in his reporting beyond the Official Received Version of the Holy Global Warming Truth.

What is it about open debate that these people so hate? If the AGW threat really is so urgent and scientifically watertight, why do climate scientists like the ones implicated in Climategate strive so hard to shut out contradictory evidence and silence dissent?

To judge by the MSM’s almost universally gushing, uncritical reporting on Copenhagen, the AGW lobby’s tactic now will be to pretend Climategate never happened and that nothing has changed.

But it did happen and it has changed everything for the truth is finally out. It will take more than the odd slapheaded bully to silence us now.

UPDATE:

Bob “More charming than an Etonian on National Charm Day” Ward writes to alert me of the definitive proof that, far from being a vicious, terrifying and unscrupulous climate fear promoter, he is in fact most magnificently objective and balanced. As evidence he cites this article for the British Science Association in which he criticises the flaws in An Inconvenient Truth.

And so he does. But only, you realise on reading further down the article, so as to give himself the appearance of being a fair and neutral observer – before launching into yet another hatchet job on The Great Global Warming Swindle and on all those of us idiots who are as yet unconvinced by the “overwhelming” evidence for AGW.

One of the most damaging consequences of the scientific errors in An Inconvenient Truth is that it has allowed others with a personal or political agenda to claim they should also be allowed to misrepresent the evidence to justify their views.

One of the most blatant examples is The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast on Channel 4 in March, which made a convincing, but wholly misleading, bid to persuade the public that the recent rise in global average temperature is due to solar activity rather than greenhouse gas emissions.

The high court ruling about An Inconvenient Truth has led lobbyists to plan to send copies of The Great Global Warming Swindle to every school, presumably on the mistaken grounds that two wrongs make a right.

Broadcasting Code

When I first saw the trailers for The Great Global Warming Swindle, I thought it might be a spoof, so outrageously inaccurate were its claims. But when I realised that many people had believed its content to be accurate, I concluded that it must clearly breach Ofcom's Broadcasting Code, which specifies: "˜Views and facts must not be misrepresented'.

David Whitehouse, a former BBC Science Correspondent, has attempted to claim that The Great Global Warming Swindle (and presumably all other factually inaccurate programmes) is exempt from the Broadcasting Code on the grounds of "˜free speech'. This is a ludicrous defence which ignores the responsibilities that must be attached to the power wielded by the broadcasting media.

Fuzzy thinking is also apparent among some of Whitehouse's former colleagues at the BBC, who have spent the last six months wringing their hands over what impartiality means in the context of climate change. A few of its senior editors seem to think that they should put anybody on the air who sounds like they believe what they are saying, even if their views are not supported by the evidence.

Responsibility

But broadcasters also have a responsibility to convey accurately the fact that there is an overwhelming rational consensus among researchers about the causes of climate change. Of the many hundreds of scientific papers that have been published on climate change in the last ten years, only a few tens (constituting substantially less than five per cent of the total) dispute the interpretation that the rise in global average temperature over the past few decades is primarily due to greenhouse gas emissions.

Nice try, Bob. But we’re not that stupid.