By Paul Homewood
The pressure builds on Justin Rowlatt, as Ross Clark weighs in:
Anyone who watched the BBC‘s Panorama programme on November 3 last year without previously having taken an interest in climate change probably found themselves terrified.
That edition of the Beeb’s flagship documentary series, called Wild Weather: Our World Under Threat, began with the corporation’s climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, telling viewers: ‘The world is getting warmer and our weather is getting ever more unpredictable and dangerous. The death toll is rising around the world and the forecast is that worse is to come.’
Footage of terrible floods, storms, droughts and fires rolled on — with the clear implication that this had all been caused by man-made climate change.
‘It has been a year of extreme weather,’ Rowlatt went on. ‘We have been able to see the impact of climate change all around us.’
Now jump forward to last week, when it was reported that the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) had upheld complaints about two claims made in the programme.
First, it wasn’t true that the death toll from natural disasters is rising. In fact, the opposite is true.
According to ourworldindata.com, the number of deaths globally from natural disasters has tumbled each decade for the past century, apart from a small blip in the 2000s, from an average of 524,000 a year in the 1920s to just 45,000 in the 2010s — despite a booming global population.
The ECU also ruled that Rowlatt’s claim that southern Madagascar was ‘on the brink of the world’s first climate-induced famine’ was incorrect, as other factors were involved.
Although the ECU didn’t spell out these other factors, the UN has previously blamed last year’s famine partly on Covid restrictions, which prevented seasonal agricultural labourers from working as usual.
But this is not the first time BBC viewers have been misled by the Corporation’s climate editor.
Last December, the ECU had to clarify a claim made by Rowlatt that Britain’s offshore wind is ‘now virtually subsidy-free’.
As was clarified, such a claim may be true of recently installed turbines, but many older models were built under contracts which guarantee them subsidies for many years to come.
Some at the BBC, it seems, are losing patience with their climate editor. ‘The Justin Rowlatt stuff is grim,’ an unnamed BBC source told one newspaper this week. ‘These are not ‘mistakes’; he’s a campaigner.’
Full story here.
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May 16, 2022 at 03:09PM
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