By Christopher Booker 13 Sep 2014Scarcely a day goes by when the BBC doesn’t provide another little example of how happy it is to flout its statutory obligation to report on the world “accurately” and “impartially” by pushing its propagandist “party line” on anything to do with renewable energy or climate change.
Last Monday, for instance, I caught a local documentary item on a public inquiry into “Britain’s largest solar farm”, planned to help make the Wiltshire town of Swindon “self-sufficient in green energy”. These 160,000 solar panels plonked over an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, we were told, would generate “40 megawatts” of electricity.
As usual, what the BBC did not tell us was that this refers only to their full “capacity”, when the sun is shining. But official figures show that the actual output of this environmental eyesore would only average a 10th of that, a piddling four MW, scarcely enough on a dark night to keep many of Swindon’s lights on.
On Tuesday, the BBC’s radio news breathlessly told us that the need for a global climate treaty is now more urgent than ever, because new figures from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) show that CO2 levels last year raced up faster than at any time since 1984. Apart from the fact that this is blatantly untrue – according to the figures from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, no fewer than nine years since 1984 have shown larger increases – there was no mention of the fact that the trend in global temperatures has now shown no rise for 18 years, making a mockery of all those computer model projections relied on by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that dubious body co-sponsored by the WMO itself.
At least a fuller report on the BBC website did admit that surface temperatures haven’t been rising, but it hastily explained that this is only because all of that additional heat has somehow been hiding away in the oceans (a claim recently ridiculed as make-believe by one of the world’s leading oceanographers, Professor Carl Wunsch).
This BBC report did, however, give the game away as to why they should have chosen just this time to come up, yet again, with all this tired old stuff. Next week the UN’s secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, has called yet another “summit” in New York, to “kick-start long-standing negotiations that aim to deliver a new international climate change treaty in Paris” next year. But something else the BBC won’t tell us is that, with China, India and most other nations strongly opposed to it (but not the EU), the chances of such a treaty being agreed are less than zero. As are the chances that those sad little eco-zealots at the BBC will ever be made to obey their legal duty to report honestly on climate change.
We pay for new ‘Berlin Wall’
Who could have predicted a few months ago that the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall would be marked by the construction in Europe of another “wall”, neraly 1,000 miles long, to stop people crossing an international frontier?
Officially code-named “Wall”, this is the plan of the ramshackle regime in Kiev to build ditches, trenches and a “blast-proof fence” along the frontier between Ukraine and Russia, which Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, hopes will be co-funded by the EU. No doubt Brussels will be happy to hand over our money for this crazy scheme, since the whole of this mess was set off in the first place by its recklessly provocative moves to absorb Ukraine into the EU and Nato.
This is also why Nato planes last week airlifted two rocket launchers into Kharkov, to help the Ukrainian army slaughter even more civilians in eastern Ukraine than it has killed already. But why was our Defence Secretary Michael Fallon – meeting with his EU colleagues in Milan last Wednesday – so keen to cheer on this dangerous nonsense?
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