By Paul Homewood

Matt Ridley launches the counter attack on the BBC and the vexatious Bob Ward, with this piece in Reaction:

I was asked to appear on the Today program on Saturday 28 December by the guest editor, Charles Moore, and made the case that the BBC’s coverage of climate change is unbalanced.

Despite a lot of interruption by Nick Robinson, I just about got across the point that the BBC uncritically relays any old rubbish about the environment so long as it is alarmist, even if it comes from an uninformed source like the leader of Extinction Rebellion or falls well outside the range of the scientific consensus that says we are on course for a warming of 1-4 degrees this century.

But the Corporation has strict rules about letting on guests who might say that the climate change threat is being exaggerated, even if their view and their facts fall within that consensus range.

The BBC now has a rule that if by some oversight a lukewarmer or skeptic does get on the air, he or she must be followed by a corrective interview from a scientist, setting the record straight.

Sure enough, I was followed by Sir David King, the former government chief science advisor. (He’s a qualified chemist, while I am a qualified biologist.)

I sat there open-mouthed as he beautifully demonstrated my point with one exaggeration after another.

Full story here.

Ridley goes on to relate some of his encounters with Bob Ward, including this gem:

 Indeed Ward’s aim seems to be never to win the point – that would be a bonus – but to tie us down in a time-consuming process of defending ourselves, in the hope that it deters us from offering similar articles to editors in the future, and deters editors from commissioning them. It works. He has frightened away some journalists and editors from the vital topic of climate change, leaving the catastrophists with a clear field to scare children to their hearts content.

I know from personal experience just how true this is. Booker would often moan to me that it was his own time which was being wasted by Ward’s continual vexatious complaints, whereas as Ward was being paid to do little else other than write them.

Over the last few years, I have helped Booker respond to several such complaints, each of which Ward has lost comprehensively.

I recall Booker telling me that he had only ever lost one complaint from Ward, many years ago, and then only on a technicality.

But “winning” was never the name of the game for Bob Ward.

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January 1, 2020 at 05:01AM