BBC Scraps Planet Relief

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In a report yesterday by Richard Black, the Environment reporter for BBC, he reveals that the BBC has consigned Planet Relief to the scrapheap. Planet Relief was going to showcase unity about climate change based on the Live 8 concept.

The BBC changed its mind after long debate by senior executives who concluded that it is not for the BBC “to lead opinion on climate change” and “because audiences prefer factual output on climate change.”

A changeologist, activist and author Mark Lynas, damned the BBC’s decision as “cowardice” and further stated, “The only reason why this became an issue is that there is a small but vociferous group of climate ’sceptics’ lobbying against taking action, so the BBC is behaving like a coward and refusing to take a more consistent stance.”

The BBC’s Peter Horrocks (Head of TV News), blogged the decision an the BBC’s blog. Below are comments by the public in response to Peter’s article on the blog.

“Cynosarges wrote: “In the past 2 months, three major elements of the IPCC model have been found wanting. The Greenland icecap has been found to have remained intact for the last 800,000 years, contradicting the theory of icecap melting. The Asian brown cloud has been shown to be warming, not cooling, showing that the aerosols have been modelled incorrectly (and consequently other factors must have been overweighted. And finally, the Gulf stream has been shown to vary by 800% in the course of a single year, showing that theories that proclaim the collapse of the North Atlantic Conveyor based on 5 measurements in 50 years are laughable.”

Chris Morris wrote:
I have to say that the view that the BBC is an impartial commentator when it comes to global warming is a joke. I can’t remember the last time a news broadcast or discussion panel hasn’t mentioned global warming, carbon footprints or showing images of what a flooded London would look like (BBC homepage last week). You mention that channel 4 was critisized for screening “The Great Global Warming Swindle” but at least they showed it!!! Something i can’t imagine the BBC doing.. The piece may have been critisised for so called loose use of facts, but no one ever mentions the same can be said for “Inconvenient Truth”.

Among many, other comments include:

“I’ve noticed that there is a huge bias towards climate change. Any freak weather events is attributed to climate change. There is constant talk of carbon footprints etc. Even the ‘Have you been affected by climate change’ HYS was left open for MONTHS when some don’t last a day. However, all this doesn’t compare to the bias in reporting which attempts to discredit ‘deniers’.”

“There is never any debate (or I certainly have never seen one) over the background science of climate change”

At last I can breathe a sigh of relief. Not at the decision of the BBC to scrap Planet Relief but at the fact that an organisation like the BBC has now made a decision to back away from proselytising climate change. And also that they at last recognise an opposing view is held to that of the changeologists like Mark Lynas. And to read how piqued he is at the BBC is absolute bliss!

The changeologists have had their way for way too long on this issue and have singularly failed to engage us ‘deniers’ in a suitable forum to openly debate the facts attributed to climate change.

I repeat what I have asked for before - we need a debate. Where and when?

BBC Scraps Planet Relief