In
his evidence to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology on 17 July, David Jordan, director of editorial policy and standards at the BBC and a graduate of economics and politics from the University of Bristol, told MPs: "[Professor Jones] also made one recommendation which we didn’t take on board which is that we should regard climate science as settled in effect, and therefore that we shouldn’t hear from dissenting voices on the science of climate change and we didn’t agree with that because we think the BBC’s role is to reflect all views and opinions in society and we’ve continued to do that."
This is the result of erroneously believing that climate change is just a political issue, and based on a matter of opinion. But the laws of atmospheric physics are not a "point of view", and this wrong-headed approach by the BBC means it is sacrificing accuracy by being impartial between facts and fictions.
There are two consequences of this decision by the BBC to ignore the advice of Professor Jones. The first is that over-representation of the opinions of climate change 'sceptics', the overwhelming majority of whom are not scientists, misleads a large part of the public into believing that there is no scientific consensus about the causes and consequences of climate change. In fact,
more than 99 per cent of scientific papers on climate change and all of the world’s major scientific organisations, agree that the Earth is warming and that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are primarily responsible. Yet,
a recent opinion poll found that only 56 per cent of the UK public accept that "most scientists agree that humans are causing climate change".
The second impact is that the BBC is disseminating inaccurate and misleading information about climate change because it allows 'sceptics' to make erroneous statements unchallenged, and some of its own staff even promote falsehoods themselves.
A clear example of this occurred on
The Sunday Politics show on 14 July. The programme is hosted by Andrew Neil (a graduate in politics and economics from the University of Glasgow) and
frequently includes misrepresentations of the science of climate change.
On this particular occasion, Neil spent a whole interview quizzing the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Davey,
about recent trends in annual global average temperature. Among the many tactics adopted by Neil was to misrepresent the views of climate scientists. He falsely claimed that Professor Hans von Storch, when discussing the recent slowdown in the rise of global surface temperature in an interview with a German newspaper, indicated that "if there is a 20 year plateau, then we’ll need to have a fundamental re-examination of climate change policy, not to abandon it, but to wonder whether we should be doing it so quickly and in the way we’re doing it". In fact, Professor von Storch
did not make any such statement.
Neil also made a number of false assertions, such as "the Arctic ice melt did not happen other than normally this year", when in fact the area of sea ice last summer was the lowest on record and 49 per cent
below the average for the period between 1979 and 2000.
In addition, Neil misrepresented the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, referring to "a quick and large rise in temperatures that the IPCC is predicting, their central forecast was 3% for this century". In fact, the
most recent IPCC report, published in 2007, presented six scenarios, none of which indicated that temperature would rise by 3% by 2100.
