Is there nothing the BBC won’t blame on climate change?

Since global warming first entered the public consciousness, it has been hard to avoid the impression that the BBC is more interested in persuading us to take ‘climate action’, than informing us about what might be happening with the planet.

The corporation’s bias has only worsened over the years. In 2010, the BBC’s governing body, the BBC Trust, launched a review of the ‘impartiality and accuracy of BBC science coverage’. A panel of supposed experts concluded that the science on climate change was now so clear that the state broadcaster no longer needed to grant sceptical voices equal airtime.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the BBC interpreted this advice as meaning that dissenters should be heard very rarely indeed. Today, climate naysaying is all but absent from the BBC’s output. The Beeb has abandoned any pretence that climate is still a complex, hotly debated issue. Where public discussion ought to be, we now have a wave of propaganda.

This was led chiefly by the man at the head of the BBC’s climate output, Roger Harrabin, who was its energy and environment analyst from 2004 to 2022. Harrabin’s only qualification for the role was a fervent faith in the inevitability of climate catastrophe and a Cambridge MA in English.

Needless to say, Harrabin’s lack of actual scientific knowledge led to some less-than-accurate reporting. Harrabin spread wildly misleading information about fracking, and in 2018 criticised the government for not forcing people to stop eating meat. ‘The battle over climate change’, he wrote, ‘will have to get personal’.

Harrabin was gradually replaced by Justin Rowlatt, whose PPE degree makes him marginally more qualified than his predecessor. But he is, if anything, even more fervent in his environmentalist faith. The quality of the BBC’s environment output has, as a result, got even worse.

A flavour of the problem can be had by reading ‘Tall Climate Tales from the BBC’, Paul Homewood’s annual review of the BBC’s climate coverage, published last week by Net Zero Watch, of which I am director. This covers more than 30 of the most egregious errors in the BBC’s climate reporting throughout 2023. Some of which are so absurd as to be comical.

Last year, the BBC bizarrely tried to blame climate change for causing a crocodile to bite a woman in Indonesia. A drought, the story goes, forced the woman to walk to the village watering hole instead of the one outside her home. The crocodile then attacked her en route. The major problem with this, as Homewood points out, is that droughts haven’t really got much worse in Indonesia, regardless of climate change. In fact, rainfall has been increasing there since 1950.

Similarly laughable was the claim that it’ll soon be too hot to grow hops in Kent. According to a 2023 article, climate change is threatening to ‘call time’ on the ‘Great British pint’. The BBC neglects to mention that the world’s main producer of hops, Ethiopia, is a tad bit warmer than Kent.

Examples like these abound. The BBC says that ‘aircraft turbulence is worsening with climate change’. But according to the US National Transportation Safety Board, there has been no increase in severe turbulence accidents since 1989. The BBC claims hurricanes are becoming more powerful. But the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there is no evidence that this is the case. The BBC went as far as to argue that a train derailment in Scotland in 2020, which killed three people, was the fault of a landslip caused by climate change. Aberdeen’s High Court subsequently ruled that it was caused by an incorrectly installed and poorly maintained drainage system.

‘Tall Climate Tales from the BBC’ only covers errors related to the climate itself, but the BBC’s coverage of climate policy, Net Zero and the energy transition is just as poor. In particular, the BBC repeatedly fails to question the mantra of ‘cheap renewables’. Remarkably, after years of renewables driving electricity prices ever upwards, the BBC still expects us to believe that deploying some more wind farms will bring them down again.

For two decades, environment correspondents have been able to ignore such awkward questions. But those times are coming to an end. The money to pay for Net Zero has all but run out and those competing demands for what little remains are becoming very insistent indeed. Meanwhile, housing and the welfare system are screaming for funds. Even our roads are in desperate need of repair.

We are hurtling towards an economic precipice. If we do hit rock bottom, people will surely ask how it was that nobody foresaw these problems. Why, they will ask, did nobody say anything? People did, of course. But the BBC, along with most of the mainstream media, has made sure the sceptical voices are never heard. Clearly, activism has almost entirely replaced journalism.

Andrew Montford is director of Net Zero Watch.