Global Warming Policy Foundation
11 July 2014
The BBC Is Scared Of Nigel Lawson – And It’s Right To Be
The BBC is getting itself in a huge hole over its coverage of climate change – and it does not seem to see the need to stop digging. The danger comes from self-censorship. Which editor now is going to invite Lord Lawson or even Prof Bob Carter on to their programmes in the certain knowledge that they are likely to be criticised and perhaps have time-consuming complaints upheld against them? As Lord Lawson argues, surely correctly, he has, in effect, been banned by the BBC. It is an easy thing to judge. Let’s see when he next appears in the climate change context. –Raymond Snoddy, MediaTel, 9 July 2014
The fact is that, on the climate change issue, the BBC has its own party line (indistinguishable from that of the Green Party) which it imposes with quasi-Stalinist thoroughness. It is hard to imagine a more blatant breach of its charter, which commits it to political balance, or a more blatant betrayal of the people’s trust, on which the continuation of its licence fee depends. –Nigel Lawson, Daily Mail, 9 July 2014
1) Raymond Snoddy: BBC In Deep Water Over Climate Change Censorship Row – MediaTel, 9 July 2014
2) The BBC Is Scared Of Nigel Lawson – And It’s Right To Be – The Spectator, 12 July 2014
3) Nigel Lawson: BBC Imposes Its Party Line With Quasi-Stalinist Thoroughness – Daily Mail, 9 July 2014
4) The House Magazine: Interview With Nigel Lawson – The House Magazine, 11 July 2014
5) David Whitehouse: The Real Climate Dogmatics – The Spectator, 9 July 2014
It is only a matter of time before Nigel Lawson — if he is allowed on the BBC at all — has to have his words spoken by an actor in the manner of Gerry Adams at the height of the IRA’s bombing campaign during the 1980s. In the case of Mr Adams, whose voice was banned from the airwaves by the government, the BBC stood up for free speech. But it is quite a different story with Lord Lawson. The BBC has effectively banned the former chancellor (and former editor of this magazine) from appearing on its programmes to debate climate change, unless he is introduced with a statement discrediting his views. When people try to close down debate rather than engage with it, there is a pretty clear conclusion to be drawn: they lack confidence in their own case. –Editorial, The Spectator, 12 July 2014
More active than many peers half his age, Lord Lawson is busier than ever. And from shale gas to wind farms, from tax cuts to EU reform, the former Chancellor’s views are taken seriously in both the Treasury and No 10. Energy policy is one of his chief passions, not least since the creation of his own Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2009. But his keen interest in the issue stretches back to the early 1980s, when he was Margaret Thatcher’s energy secretary. With the coal strike looming, Lawson sought to redefine the way the UK bought and sold energy. “A sensible energy policy should be part and parcel of our economic policy,” Lawson says. “And just as our economic policy was to give the state a reduced role and to give market forces a greater role, so that should apply to energy as well.” Crucially, he prepared the ground for the gas and electricity privatisations to come. —The House Magazine, 11 July 2014
The problem with the climate debate lies not with sceptics asking the wrong questions but with the inflexible and dogmatic way that some commentators and indeed some scientists regard climate science. –David Whitehouse, The Spectator, 9 July 2014
1) BBC In Deep Water Over Climate Change Censorship Row
MediaTel, 9 July 2014
Raymond Snoddy
As Nigel Lawson, the former chancellor, accuses the BBC of banning him from debating climate change at the Corporation, Raymond Snoddy warns that the reputation of BBC News would be seriously compromised if journalists were found to be censoring.
The BBC is getting itself in a huge hole over its coverage of climate change – and it does not seem to see the need to stop digging.
The controversy is best highlighted by the BBC’s decision to uphold a complaint against the Today programme for the appearance of climate change sceptic Lord Lawson to discuss the impact of climate on the recent floods.
A complaint against the World at One has also been partially upheld after an interview with a sceptical scientist Professor Bob Carter, head of the department of earth science at James Cook University.
Even though the former Chancellor was more than balanced by his co-guest the scientist Sir Brian Hoskins, chairman of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, the BBC apologised to complainant Chit Chung, a Green Party activist who has a draught proofing and insulation business in Dorset.
In part it was a technical judgement – that listeners had not properly been informed that Lord Lawson held a minority view, though perhaps such a finding is unnecessarily insulting to the intelligence of the average Today programme listener.
In his letter, head of the BBC Complaints Unit, Fraser Steel, made two important statements which give an insight into the BBC approach to one of the most important long-term stories the Corporation has to cover.
Steel said that “minority opinions and sceptical views should not be treated on an equal footing with the scientific consensus.”
So far so good – probably.
He added, much more contentiously, that Lord Lawson’s views on climate change: “are not supported by the evidence from computer modelling and scientific research and I don’t believe this was made sufficiently clear to the audience.”
Up to a point. As the science writer and Conservative peer Matt Ridley made clear this week in The Times, linking the words “evidence” and “computer-modelling” in the same sentence is an oxymoron. Computer models try to predict the future and can only be tested as potential evidence when they are proved to be correct.
As many newspapers – but probably not the BBC – have pointed out, such computer models have not exactly been covering themselves with glory in recent years.
By 2014 computer models were predicting there would have been a significant rise in temperature of 0.3 degrees compared with 2004. Despite the fact that the world has been pumping ever-increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere during the period there has, in fact, been a slight cooling of global surface temperatures over the past decade.
The computer models also predicted a serious shrinking of Antarctic ice when in fact it has expanded to near record levels.
In a complex subject difficult for non-scientific laymen to penetrate, there could well be perfectly decent explanations within the man-made global warming consensus for such phenomena. The sea may be capable of absorbing more heat, for example.
At the very least there are questions to be answered about computer models and no justification for those who raise them to be effectively censored by the BBC. […]
The danger comes instead from self-censorship. Which editor now is going to invite Lord Lawson or even Prof Bob Carter from New Zealand on to their programmes in the certain knowledge that they are likely to be criticised and perhaps have time-consuming complaints upheld against them?
As Lord Lawson argues, surely correctly, he has, in effect, been banned by the BBC. It is an easy thing to judge. Let’s see when he next appears in the climate change context.
There will, of course, be no edict. He will just never ever be invited to take part in any BBC programme on an issue that he has put considerable effort into learning about, and one where he has published a best-selling book.
On the BBC internal contacts list producers add advisory notes against names and you can be sure the former Chancellor will get one.
One of the key components of the case for a new licence fee is the integrity of BBC News. The case for man-made global warming may indeed be the right one, but the reputation of BBC News would be seriously compromised if journalists were found to be censoring, if not inconvenient truths then troubling anomalies.
2) The BBC Is Scared Of Nigel Lawson – And it’s Right To Be
The Spectator, 12 July 2014
It is only a matter of time before Nigel Lawson — if he is allowed on the BBC at all — has to have his words spoken by an actor in the manner of Gerry Adams at the height of the IRA’s bombing campaign during the 1980s. In the case of Mr Adams, whose voice was banned from the airwaves by the government, the BBC stood up for free speech. But it is quite a different story with Lord Lawson.
The BBC has effectively banned the former chancellor (and former editor of this magazine) from appearing on its programmes to debate climate change, unless he is introduced with a statement discrediting his views.
The BBC’s Editorial Complaints Department this week ruled that the Today programme broke BBC guidelines in February by inviting Lord Lawson to a debate with Sir Brian Hoskins, chairman of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change. It bizarrely claimed that his views are ‘not supported by the evidence’ — though he had pointed out, correctly, that the planet has not been warming for the past 17 years. Nevertheless, the BBC politburo warned, listeners should have been warned that Lord Lawson is in a minority and, therefore, his words ‘should not be regarded as carrying equal weight to those of experts such as Sir Brian Hoskins’.
Lord Lawson is, of course, not a scientist. But a great many people speak on the BBC on subjects in which they do not have any formal qualifications: Al Gore, for example. Or Rajendra Pachauri, a railway engineer by training, who now runs the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC). Neither does the BBC seem to be worried about non-scientists addressing scientific issues when it comes to such things as fracking or GM crops, on which any green activists are welcome to speak, however bizarre their scaremongering theories.
What Lord Lawson is, however, is chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a think-tank that has no quarrel with the idea of global warming. Its aim is to appeal to reason, and to engage in mature argument rather than hysteria. Lord Lawson is advised by scientists who until recently included Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading. Professor Bengtsson was hounded off the GWPF board by his fellow scientists.
When people try to close down debate rather than engage with it, there is a pretty clear conclusion to be drawn: they lack confidence in their own case. The suppression of debate was shown again this week when Vladimir Semonov, a climate scientist at the Geomar Institute in Kiel, Germany, revealed that a paper he wrote in 2009 questioning the accuracy of climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was effectively censored by the scientist to whom it was sent for review. Their reasons for demanding passages be removed seems rather less than scientifically rigorous: one wrote that the offending material would ‘lead to unnecessary confusion in the climate science community’ and another said that ‘this entire discussion has to disappear’.
The process of peer review used in the scientific press is often held up as a mark of quality, which enables poorly conducted scientific research to be weeded out before it reaches the eyes of readers less qualified to judge the rigour of the work. This may to some extent be true, even if peer review failed to spot weaknesses in the now discredited Fleischmann-Pons cold fusion experiments of 1989 or stop the MMR scare.
But the peer review process is also open to abuse. Just as the social sciences became infected by political correctness 20 years ago, climate science has become governed by climatic correctness. To question the consensus that the world is facing fire and tempest as a result of anthropogenic global warming is, in the eyes of some working in the field, simply not allowable. That is something which was revealed in the Climategate scandal of 2009 when leaked emails from the University of East Anglia caught out scientists who had been withholding data, trying to keep rivals’ papers out of journals and in one case threatening violence against a sceptical scientist.
The BBC at first declined to go into the content of the emails, preferring to treat the story as a case of data theft. The fact that the emails contained material of extreme public interest seemed to count for nothing. The unknown individuals who leaked the emails can only dream of the hero worship afforded to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange; attitudes on the left towards release of information seem to swing dramatically depending on what information is being released.
The same is true of the BBC’s attitude towards balanced debate — something which is supposed to be guaranteed by its charter. The BBC has decided that it is allowable to debate such issues as whether benefit cuts are causing distress or whether sports-women are being discriminated against by male-dominated bastions — something the Today programme does virtually every morning. But dare to question whether it is wise for the country to embark on the economic experiment of abandoning fossil fuel on the back of some far-from-robust scientific models, and you will have to find another media outlet.
3) Nigel Lawson: BBC Imposes Its Party Line With Quasi-Stalinist Thoroughness
Daily Mail, 9 July 2014
Over the years, both in and out of government, I have frequently been invited to appear on BBC radio’s flagship Today programme, usually to discuss economic issues.
But despite the fact that I had written a thoroughly well-documented book about global warming (An Appeal To Reason), which happily became something of a best-seller, and the following year founded a think-tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (which is advised by a number of eminent scientists), I was never invited on Today to discuss any aspect of climate change.
That was until earlier this year, when I was asked on to discuss the recent bad weather, which had caused widespread flooding in parts of England, the extent to which this may have been connected with man-made climate change, and what should be done about it.
My opposite number was the scientist Sir Brian Hoskins. It was an appropriate pairing, since Sir Brian is no remote and unworldly academic: he is chairman of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, a lavishly-funded alarmist pressure group, and a member of the Government-appointed Climate Change Committee, which exists chiefly to promote the abandonment of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) by the UK.
It was a thoroughly civilised discussion, ably refereed by presenter Justin Webb. Following the programme, on February 13, all hell broke loose.
The BBC was overwhelmed by a well-organised deluge of complaints — many of them, inevitably, from those with a commercial interest in renewable energy, as well as from the Green Party — arguing that, since I was not myself a scientist, I should never have been allowed to appear.
The BBC responded reasonably robustly.
Ceri Thomas, head of programmes for BBC News, pointed out that, after six weeks of flooding, ‘this was the first interview on Today with a climate change “sceptic” ’, and that as a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, I was well qualified to discuss the most cost-effective policy response to the flooding.
But the orchestrated complaints continued and it now seems, from widespread leaked reports which the BBC has nowhere denied, that poor Mr Thomas has been over-ruled.
The head of the BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit, a Mr Fraser Steel, whose qualifications for the job are unclear and whose knowledge of the complex climate change issue is virtually non-existent, has written to a little-known but active Green Party politician called Chit Chong to apologise for the fact I was allowed to appear on the programme and to make clear this will not happen again.
Among the reasons given in Mr Steel’s letter for upholding Mr Chong’s complaint and over-ruling the BBC’s head of news programmes is the mind-boggling statement that: ‘As you have pointed out, Lord Lawson’s views are not supported by the evidence from computer modelling.’
Evidence? However useful computer models may be, the one thing they cannot be is evidence. Computer climate models are simply conjectures, expressed in the form of mathematical equations (the language of computers), which lead to forecasts of future global temperatures, which can then be compared with the evidence on the ground.
So far, it has to be said, they have not been doing very well; but we shall see in due course if they improve. In fact, there was nothing I said in the entire Today programme discussion that was incorrect, nor, indeed, did Sir Brian Hoskins suggest otherwise.
This can be confirmed by reading the full transcript, still available on my foundation’s website, and possibly also on the BBC’s website, if they have not removed it out of embarrassment.
The only untruth came from the unreliable Mr Chong of the Green Party who accused me of claiming on the programme that climate change ‘was all a conspiracy’. Needless to say, I said nothing of the sort, as the transcript makes clear.
During the discussion, I made two principal points.
First, that rather than spending untold millions on subsidies for wind farms and solar panels, which provide unreliable energy at exorbitant cost, we would do better to spend (much less) money on protecting the country from whatever nature throws at us, such as improved by flood defences.
Second, that forecasts of global temperatures over the next 100 years are highly uncertain.
The first is a matter of judgment. The second is a matter of fact, which Sir Brian did not contest. The greatest (but by no means the only) uncertainty, and one about which climate scientists disagree, is the crucial question of precisely how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to carbon dioxide emissions.
This is known in the trade as ‘climate sensitivity’. The fact — and it is a fact, borne out by the measurements made by the Met Office and similar bodies in America — is that there has been no recorded increase in global temperature over the past 17 years, during which carbon emissions have grown dramatically.
This has led a growing number of scientists to conclude that the existing models exaggerate the climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide.
Sir Brian, for the present, is reluctant to accept this, arguing that the ‘missing heat’ was being secreted in the ocean depths — which I described as ‘speculation’. This was the only serious disagreement we had.
And the eminent scientist, James Lovelock, famous among other things for the Gaia hypothesis (which states that the Earth operates as a single, living organism) wrote to me after reading the transcript.
He said: ‘The weakness of Brian’s case is that no one yet knows the climate of the oceans and, until they do, projections of future climate are little better than guesses.’
(Incidentally, it is a scandal that, at the age of 95, James Lovelock has still received no honour from his sovereign.) […]
The fact is that, on this issue, the BBC has its own party line (indistinguishable from that of the Green Party) which it imposes with quasi-Stalinist thoroughness.
The one occasion, last February, on which it permitted a balanced and civilised discussion is now seen by the Corporation as a colossal error for which it must grovel and undertake never to repeat.
This amounts to a policy of outright political censorship.
It is hard to imagine a more blatant breach of its charter, which commits it to political balance, or a more blatant betrayal of the people’s trust, on which the continuation of its licence fee depends.
The BBC justifies its unique compulsory funding model — a television tax — by claiming that it provides a fair and balanced public service. Its treatment of climate change shows this is simply not the case.
It is little wonder that a recent poll found most people would like to see the licence fee scrapped.
4) The House Magazine: Interview With Nigel Lawson
The House Magazine, 11 July 2014
More active than many peers half his age, Lord Lawson is busier than ever. And from shale gas to wind farms, from tax cuts to EU reform, the former Chancellor’s views are taken seriously in both the Treasury and No 10.
“I think it’s appropriate that George Osborne is dieting,” Nigel Lawson says, with a knowing smile.“Controlling public expenditure is about saying ‘No’ and sticking to it. And dieting is exactly the same.”
As a former chancellor of the exchequer and the author of his own best-selling diet book, Lord Lawson of Blaby knows whereof he speaks on the issue of belt-tightening. And with a sprightliness and energy that belie his 82 years, one of the Tory party’s biggest of big beasts is relishing his role as a troublesome éminence grise.
The recipient of The House magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award earlier this year, he’s helped redraft the UK’s banking regulation, runs a thinktank on climate change and is a constant critic of HS2 and the EU. A regular attendee in the House of Lords, Lord Lawson appears to be more politically active than at any time since his departure from Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet 25 years ago. Far from resting on his laurels, he’s as focused on the future as any new intake MP.
Energy policy is one of his chief passions, not least since the creation of his own Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2009. But his keen interest in the issue stretches back to the early 1980s, when he was Margaret Thatcher’s energy secretary. With the coal strike looming, Lawson sought to redefine the way the UK bought and sold energy. Given the way the subject has soared up the political agenda of late, does he think he was ahead of the game?
“I do, if I may say so,” he says. “If you want an impartial witness, the leading energy economist in this country is Professor Dieter Helm, who has written the definitive account of British energy policy since the war. He says that the 1982 speech which I made to a meeting of the International Association of Energy Economists in Cambridge was the most important speech ever made by an energy secretary and it defined the whole of our energy policy for a long time to come.”
The main thrust of that speech was to say there is no reason to treat energy any differently from any other area of policy, despite the habit of British governments to interfere in the largely state-owned industry. “A sensible energy policy should be part and parcel of our economic policy,” Lawson says. “And just as our economic policy was to give the state a reduced role and to give market forces a greater role, so that should apply to energy as well.” Crucially, he prepared the ground for the gas and electricity privatisations to come.
The former chancellor has long defied the conventional wisdom on climate change too. When the world was congratulating itself on the Kyoto Treaty in 2004, Lawson was among those who wrote a letter to the Times warning of uncertainties in the science. Last year, he won a bet with Oliver Letwin that Kyoto would expire without any successor in place.
“I was not the first, but I think that certainly I realised very early on that this had been accepted as gospel by people who had not done any proper analysis,” he says. “It’s a new religion. That is why it is so difficult to change people’s minds, because they are not interested in the facts – it’s a belief system.” The Treasury still strong in his bones, he says the real issue is not so much the science as the policy response and a proper cost-benefit analysis. “What is the extent of the damage? And how does it compare with the benefits from warming? Because there undoubtedly are benefits, even the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] accepts that; it’s where does the balance lie?
“Then there is also the political issue that because it’s an extremely costly policy, it means we go from relatively cheap and reliable energy to relatively expensive and unreliable energy. And you’re not getting any benefit on the climate front because there isn’t a global agreement.”
5) David Whitehouse: The Real Climate Dogmatics
The Spectator, 9 July 2014
The problem with the climate debate lies not with sceptics asking the wrong questions but with the inflexible and dogmatic way that some commentators and indeed some scientists regard climate science.
Some people find climate change ‘deniers’ the most irritating people on God’s green earth. On her Telegraph blog Martha Gill equates them with flat-earthers, which says a lot for the depth of her analysis. She points to a piece on the Huffington Post by Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (funded by billionaire Greenpeace contributor Jeremy Grantham, who also sponsors an $80,000 prize for environmental reporting – which this article will stand no chance of winning) and says it demolishes the deniers’ arguments. The problem is that it doesn’t.
Those who think ‘deniers’ are a problem and seek to put them down are in doing so misrepresenting the science they want to uphold. Once they said ‘deniers’ did not believe that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas or that mankind was pumping it into the atmosphere, or even that the globe had warmed in recent decades. And so-called deniers never took issue with any of this. Their questions were at a deeper level, but it took years for the media to notice.
You can make a strong case that all this ‘denial’ has been good for climate science. Some of these ‘deniers’ actually found that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s supreme icon – the ‘hockey stick’ graph showing a recent alarming rise in global temperature – was wrong. Then they pointed out that the global annual average surface temperature was not rising as predicted. To some it was an obviously fictitious, mischievous ploy to cast doubt on climate change, a misinterpretation of a minor recent blip in what is obviously an upward trend in global surface temperature that has been going on for well over a century.
But the ‘deniers’ were right. The non-publicity seeking real climate scientists who published their thoughts in peer-reviewed literature knew something was going on with global surface temperatures, and debated its significance and possible causes in unreported papers that only the ‘deniers’ seemed to read. Eventually the pause was recognised for what it is. The journal Nature called it the biggest problem in climate science, and so it is. Something that was said to be a denier’s ploy has now more than a dozen serious scientific possible explanations. The so-called deniers were closer to the science and far ahead of media commentators.
But there is still trouble with climate change ‘denial’ according to Bob Ward. He criticises Lord Lawson for saying that he denies any link between climate change and the weather events of earlier this year. Bob Ward said the Met Office has laid it out. Yes they have, and this is what their report said:-
‘As yet, there is no definitive answer on the possible contribution of climate change to the recent storminess, rainfall amounts and the consequent flooding. This is in part due to the highly variable nature of UK weather and climate.’
Bob Ward also cherry-picks his answer to counter Lord Lawson’s statement that the effect of carbon dioxide on the earth’s atmosphere is probably less than was previously thought. That is actually a fair and scientifically reasonable standpoint to take and were it made amongst scientists at a conference there would be sober discussion. It is significant that the latest IPCC report on climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide does not cite a best estimate, whereas the previous one did. The latest report notes a substantial discrepancy between observation-based estimates of the effect of carbon dioxide and estimates from climate models. This is not settled, there is room for debate.
