What follows are descriptions from three prominent TV personalities of how their dissent was crushed.
- David Bellamy,
- Johnny Ball
- Peter Sissons
David Bellamy is a botanist, author of 35 books, and has presented roughly 400 television programs on botany, ecology, and environmental issues
In the 1980's and 90's he was regularly on TV talking about the environment. Then he expressed skepticism about wind farms, was publicly humiliated and, by 2005, removed from the public gaze.
In November 2008 the Express ran an interview with Bellamy under the headline "BBC shunned me for denying climate change ." in which he said:-
"The sad fact is," he explained, "that since I said I didn't believe human beings caused global warming I've not been allowed to make a TV programme." ..."Back then, at the BBC you had to toe the line and I wasn't doing that."He also said in The Australian November2008:- "The price of dissent on global warming" by David Bellamy"
my opinion is that there is absolutely no proof that CO2 has anything to do with any impending catastrophe. The science has, quite simply, gone awry. In fact, it's not even science any more; it's anti-science."and he said in the Times of October 2007
"the self-proclaimed consensus among scientists has detached itself from the questioning rigours of hard science and become a political cause. Those of us who dare to question the dogma of the global-warming doomsters who claim that C not only stands for carbon but also for climate catastrophe are vilified as heretics or worse as deniers. "
[End of quotes from David Bellamy]
JOHNNY BALL - Example 2
Johnny Ball presented "Play School" and later the maths entertainment series "Think Of A Number"
The following extracts are from newspapers from around early 2011:-
" here "and here and here
Mr Ball, a 72-year-old grandfather, believes his career has been destroyed and says his bookings have fallen by 90 per cent since the smear campaign began after he spoke out against ‘alarmist’ climate change scientists at the Manchester Science Festival in 2007. Police are investigating his claims.[End of quotes from Johnny Ball]
But he says zealots are trying to sabotage his career because he has described climate change as ‘alarmist nonsense’. He said the campaign against him amounted to a ‘witch-hunt.’ Anyone who seeks to make a common sense, measured comment about climate change is branded a 'heretic'.
"In the past decade or so I've been mocked, vilified, besmirched - I've even been booed off a theatre stage - simply for expressing the view that the case for global warming and climate change, and in particular the emphasis on the damage caused by carbon dioxide, the so-called greenhouse gas that is going to do for us all, has been massively over-stated."
For daring to take this contrarian view, I've lost bookings, had talks cancelled and been the subject of a sinister internet campaign against me that only came to an end following the intervention of the police."
"For taking an intellectual stand, my name and reputation have been comprehensively trashed. And something very similar has happened to Dr David Bellamy, who has never been shy about expressing his belief that climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon. His media career, particularly in television, has suffered as a result.
Britain seems to have become a remarkably intolerant place, a place where healthy debate seems to be stifled rather than encouraged"
"...those who have been worshipping so ardently at the altar of reduced carbon emissions - and how quickly they adopted the messianic zeal and intolerance of a religion - may find that they have been deifying not just a false god but a ruinously expensive one, too."
" The cult of reducing carbon emissions shapes everything we do,"
"Blinded, maybe even brainwashed by the climate-change zealots, we are spending so much money on reducing carbon emissions that there is a danger of us bankrupting ourselves — and future generations — to solve a problem that in the opinions of a growing number of scientists and opinion-formers has been wildly exaggerated.
Peter Sissons - Example 3
The BBC became a propaganda machine for climate change zealots, says Peter Sissons... and I was treated as a lunatic for daring to dissent
Peter Sissons 25th January 2011
Mr Sissons was a Television Journalist for 40 years - twenty of them with the BBC
"For me, though, the most worrying aspect of political correctness was over the story that recurred with increasing frequency during my last ten years at the BBC — global warming (or ‘climate change’, as it became known when temperatures appeared to level off or fall slightly after 1998).[End of quotes from Peter Simpson]
From the beginning I was unhappy at how one-sided the BBC’s coverage of the issue was, and how much more complicated the climate system was than the over-simplified two-minute reports that were the stock-in-trade of the BBC’s environment correspondents.
These, without exception, accepted the UN’s assurance that ‘the science is settled’ and that human emissions of carbon dioxide threatened the world with catastrophic climate change. Environmental pressure groups could be guaranteed that their press releases, usually beginning with the words ‘scientists say’ would get on air unchallenged
On one occasion, after the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in 2009, the science correspondent of [the BBCs] Newsnight actually informed viewers ‘scientists calculate that he has just four years to save the world’. What she didn’t tell viewers was that only one alarmist scientist, NASA’s James Hansen, had said that. [ Note:- They used the plural "scientists", when in fact only one scientist had said it ]
My interest in climate change grew out of my concern for the failings of BBC journalism in reporting it. In my early and formative days at ITN, I learned that we have an obligation to report both sides of a story. It is not journalism if you don’t. It is close to propaganda.
The BBC’s editorial policy on climate change, however, was spelled out in a report by the BBC Trust — whose job is to oversee the workings of the BBC in the interests of the public — in 2007. This disclosed that the BBC had held ‘a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus’.
The error here, of course, was that the BBC never at any stage gave equal space to the opponents of the consensus.
But the Trust continued its pretence that climate change dissenters had been, and still would be, heard on its airwaves. ‘Impartiality,’ it said, ‘always requires a breadth of view, for as long as minority opinions are coherently and honestly expressed, the BBC must give them appropriate space.’
In reality, the ‘appropriate space’ given to minority views on climate change was practically zero.
Moreover, we were allowed to know practically nothing about that top-level seminar mentioned by the BBC Trust at which such momentous conclusions were reached. Despite a Freedom of Information request, they wouldn’t even make the guest list public.
There is one brief account of the proceedings, written by a conservative commentator who was there. He wrote subsequently that he was far from impressed with the 30 key BBC staff who attended. None of them, he said, showed ‘even a modicum of professional journalistic curiosity on the subject’.
None appeared to read anything on the subject other than the Guardian.
This attitude was underlined a year later in another statement: ‘BBC News currently takes the view that their reporting needs to be calibrated to take into account the scientific consensus that global warming is man-made.’ Those scientists outside the ‘consensus’ waited in vain for the phone to ring.
It’s the lack of simple curiosity about one of the great issues of our time that I find so puzzling about the BBC. When the topic first came to prominence, the first thing I did was trawl the internet to find out as much as possible about it.
Anyone who does this with a mind not closed by religious fervour will find a mass of material by respectable scientists who question the orthodoxy. Admittedly, they are in the minority, but scepticism should be the natural instinct of scientists — and the default setting of journalists.
Yet the cream of the BBC’s inquisitors during my time there never laid a glove on those who repeated the mantra that ‘the science is settled’. On one occasion, an MP used BBC airtime to link climate change doubters with perverts and holocaust deniers, and his famous interviewer didn’t bat an eyelid.
Meanwhile, Al Gore, the former U.S. Vice-President and climate change campaigner, entertained the BBC’s editorial elite in his suite at the Dorchester and was given a free run to make his case to an admiring internal audience at Television Centre.
His [Al Gore's] views were never subjected to journalistic scrutiny, even when a British High Court judge ruled that his film, An Inconvenient Truth, contained at least nine scientific errors, and that ministers must send new guidance to teachers before it was screened in schools. From the BBC’s standpoint, the judgment was the real inconvenience, and its environment correspondents downplayed its significance.
At the end of November 2007 I was on duty on News 24 when the UN panel on climate change produced a report which later turned out to contain significant inaccuracies, many stemming from its reliance on non-peer reviewed sources and best-guesses by environmental activists.
But the way the BBC’s reporter treated the story was as if it was beyond a vestige of doubt, the last word on the catastrophe awaiting mankind. The most challenging questions addressed to a succession of UN employees and climate activists were ‘How urgent is it?’ and ‘How much danger are we in?’
Back in the studio I suggested that we line up one or two sceptics to react to the report, but received a totally negative response, as if I was some kind of lunatic. I went home and wrote a note to myself: ‘What happened to the journalism? The BBC has completely lost it.’
A damaging episode illustrating the BBC’s supine attitude came in 2008, when the BBC’s ‘environment analyst’, Roger Harrabin, wrote a piece on the BBC website reporting some work by the World Meteorological Organization that questioned whether global warming was going to continue at the rate projected by the UN panel.
A green activist, Jo Abbess, emailed him to complain. Harrabin at first resisted. Then she berated him: ‘It would be better if you did not quote the sceptics’ — something Harrabin had not actually done — ‘Please reserve the main BBC online channel for emerging truth. Otherwise I would have to conclude that you are insufficiently educated to be able to know when you have been psychologically manipulated.’
Did Harrabin tell her to get lost? He tweaked the story — albeit not as radically as she demanded — and emailed back: ‘Have a look and tell me you are happier.’
This exchange went round the world in no time, spread by a jubilant Abbess. Later, Harrabin defended himself, saying they were only minor changes — but the sense of the changes, as specifically sought by Ms Abbess, was plainly to harden the piece against the sceptics.
Many people wouldn’t call that minor, but Harrabin’s BBC bosses accepted his explanation.
The sense of entitlement with which green groups regard the BBC was brought home to me when what was billed as a major climate change rally was held in London on a miserable, wintry, wet day.
I was on duty on News 24 and it had been arranged for me to interview the leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas. She clearly expected, as do most environmental activists, what I call a ‘free hit’ — to be allowed to say her piece without challenge.
I began, good naturedly, by observing that the climate didn’t seem to be playing ball at the moment, and that we were having a particularly cold winter while carbon emissions were powering ahead.
Miss Lucas reacted as if I’d physically molested her. She was outraged. It was no job of the BBC — the BBC! — to ask questions like that. Didn’t I realise that there could be no argument over the science?
I persisted with a few simple observations of fact, such as there appeared to have been no warming for ten years, in contradiction of all the alarmist computer models.
A listener from one of the sceptical climate-change websites noted that ‘Lucas was virtually apoplectic and demanding to know how the BBC could be making such comments. Sissons came back that his role as a journalist was always to review all sides. Lucas finished with a veiled warning, to which Sissons replied with an “Ooh!”’
A week after this interview, I went into work and picked up my mail from my pigeon hole. Among the envelopes was a small Jiffy Bag, which I opened. It contained a substantial amount of faeces wrapped in several sheets of toilet paper.
At the time no other interviewers on the BBC — or indeed on ITV News or Channel Four News — had asked questions about climate change which didn’t start from the assumption that the science was settled
I’m glad to say that more recently a number of colleagues have started to tiptoe on to the territory that was for so long off-limits. After the abortive Copenhagen climate summit and the Climategate scandal at the University of East Anglia, a questioning note was injected into some BBC reports. But even then, leading ‘sceptics’ were still generally regarded with disdain and kept at arm’s length.
I eventually gave up trying to persuade the head of the newsroom that there was something wrong with the BBC’s climate change coverage"
What is being described here is Orwellian
"Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness"said George Orwell
Imagine the power it takes to destroy TV celebrities. This is a power way beyond mere scientists and even environmental activists such as Greenpeace. It seems to me that there must be very considerable political power being applied here.
Lets add to this what happens to Scientists who dissent :- The Daily Telegraph on 11 Mar 2007 :-
"Scientists who questioned mankind's impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community.[End of extract of article from Telegraph]
"They say the debate on global warming has been "hijacked" by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions.
"Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.
"One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.
Another commentary on the political nature of Man Made Global Warming "Science" is given in the following documentary.
The speaker is Dr. Richard Lindzen - the Alfred P Sloan Professor of Meteorology And Atmospheric Sciences at MIT. He was also a lead author of chapter 7 of the IPCC 3rd assessment report.
He puts the case (with supporting direct quotations) that the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) "scientists" are motivated by politics rather than truthfulness. Their alarmist distortions are politically motivated.
He points out what I had already noticed - that the AGW alarmists used the standard techniques of propaganda :-
- Constant repetition and
- Endorsements by authority.
What follows is worthy but dull - the most relevant part is in the first 15 minutes.
Finally let us also add to this the horrific propaganda movie that publically proposed murdering children just for being skeptical.
Repeatedly censored from Youtube but now available again
From my earlier blog-article you will know that this extremly fascist move was made by a public relations firm at the request of a GOVERNMENT department.
If right-wing "extremists" such as the British National Party or the English Defence League made this movie there would be national outcry and mass arrests. It is only because the government made this movie that nothing has been done about it.
If environmental groups made a video like this - something would have been done .
For example:-
Suppose Greenpeace made a video in which they murdered the children of whale-hunters. There would be public outcry and someone would go to jail.
Similarly, If "People For the Ethical Treatment Of Animals" (PETA) made a video in which they murdered the children of women who wore fur coats. There would again be public outcry and someone would go to jail.
Yet, whoever made this eco-fascist movie had enough power to make sure that there was little public outcry and nobody even got arrested. So - I repeat that I don't think it was just an environmental group.
And in fact it wasn't - it was the British GOVERNMENT that made it. They have enough power to make sure that nobody even got arrested.
My general point is that this isn't a just a dispute between scientists that also involves some environmental activists. Governments are deeply involved in this - and the British government has unlimited dis-honesty and un-limited violence at it's disposal.
So - people like me, who are skeptical of Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming are up-against:
- lying scientists
- biased newspapers and TV
- violent (child-killing) Eco-Fascists and
- governments with un-limited dishonesty and un-limited violence.
" We are subject to a heavily biased and carefully organized propaganda" "The current debate is a public policy debate with enormous implications. It is no longer about climate. It is about[End of quotes from President Václav Klaus]
who want to get more decision making and power for themselves.
- the government,
- the politicians,
- their scribes and
- the lobbyists
It seems to me that the widespread acceptance of the global warming dogma has become one of the main, most costly and most undemocratic public policy mistakes in generations" ..."the real threat for human society is not global warming itself. The real threat comes when politicians start manipulating the climate and all of us."
No wonder you believe in Catastrophic, Man-Made, Global Warming - look how powerful the people who want you to believe it are.
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