Met Office Lies: December Was Not the ‘Wettest Month Evah’

This is at best dishonest and at worst a blatant lie. Its only excuse is that cunning little asterisk, which leads you to the weasel get-out clause “*Data from the Met Office’s UK digitised records dating back to 1910.”

So not “since records began” then. But, rather, “since the records that suit our political purpose began.” Because, of course, as Paul Homewood notes the Met Office has records going much further back than 1910 – to 1776, in fact – which totally demolish this claim.

We know, for example, that the wettest December in England and Wales was in 1876. And that the wettest calendar month was in October 1903.

But of course it suits the Met Office’s purposes to pretend otherwise because it enables on-message environment correspondents like the BBC’s Warmist-In-Chief Roger Harrabin to continue the spurious narrative that there is a link between “extreme weather events” and “climate change.”

Storms propelled by the jet stream were mainly to blame, it says, with contributions from the El Nino weather phenomenon and man-made climate change.

That “and man-made climate change” appears to be a flourish of Harrabin’s. I can’t find any mention of this alleged fact in the Met Office’s original press release. If the BBC had any integrity it would have sacked this activist long ago. Harrabin is entitled to his religious beliefs but it is not for the BBC to indulge his flagrant bias at licence-fee payers’ expense.

The Met Office too is in clear breach of public standards codes here.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

I Totally Take Back Everything I’ve Ever Said about Queen’s Brian May…

Just a quick one: was anyone else as surprised and delighted as I was by Brian May’s performance on BBC Question Time last night?

I’ve been quite rude about him in the past. Yes, that distinctively shimmery, echoey, almost Venusian guitar of his did provide part of the soundtrack to my youth – I seem to remember getting to third base for the first time to the accompaniment of Night At The Opera – but what I’ve never quite forgiven are his politics.

As a countryman and nature lover, for example, I feel every bit as passionately about wildlife as he does. Which is one of the reasons I’m so much in very favour of the badger cull, as I argue in more detail here.

Apart from the Ford Mondeo the badger has no natural predator, so since in the early 1980s legislation made it illegal to kill badgers, their population has rocketed to unsustainable levels. The consequences have been disastrous: TB in both badgers and cattle has soared; hedgehog and ground-nesting bird populations have been devastated; farmers’ livelihoods have been destroyed; vast sums of taxpayers’ money — the figure last year was £100 million — have been squandered; and Britain is now at risk of having an EU ban on all its beef and dairy exports, at a cost to the economy of more than £2 billion a year.

May, on the other hand, has positioned himself at the forefront of the shrill and self-righteous anti-badger cull movement, which unfortunately has attracted the very worst elements of the animal rights movement, and appears to be motivated more by sentiment and cherry-picked data than it does by hard evidence.

But while I haven’t changed my views on badgers, I’ve definitely shifted my stance on May.

Last night, as the panel’s licensed jester – the token celebrity who can ride whatever hobby horses he wishes – he could all too easily have spouted the sub-Russell-Brand drivel we’ve come to expect on Question Time. Instead, he was a model of decency and sweet reasonableness.

This was especially noticeable in his behaviour towards fellow panelist Nigel Farage.

It really ought to have been a very tough evening for Farage. And it certainly began that way. Every question he had from the audience was hostile, starting of course with one about him being “snarling, thin-skinned, aggressive”. Even if you’re not a fan – which I still am – I think it would be hard to deny how well Farage acquitted himself – never showing signs of umbrage taken, cheerfully getting his political points in a way that, ever so slowly, began to win the audience round and earn him some actual claps.

None of this would have been possible, though, without the unlikely support he got from his fellow panelists. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt – most definitely not rhyming slang, on last night’s showing – led the way with some generous remarks. But what really clinched it was Brian May, who absolutely refused to pick on an easy target and instead took the opportunity to deplore the nastiness of politics in general and, by implication, the treatment of Farage in particular.

This, in turn, gave the audience the permission they needed to stop poking the chained up bear with their sticks.

If you haven’t watched it, you should. Question Time at its best. Almost restores your faith in human decency.

Almost.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

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How the Blair Government Paid for the Subversion of Our State Broadcaster

BBC: Paid bias

BBC newsroom (Photo: BBC)

So now we know yet another reason why the BBC is so biased in its reporting on climate change: because in 2006 the Labour government effectively paid it to be so. It was a £67,000 grant from the Department for International Development (DFID) which paid for the notorious, secret high-level seminar at which the BBC was persuaded to abandon all pretence at neutrality on the global warming issue. I expect the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin just can’t wait to get his teeth into this major scandal.

Oh no, wait, I forgot: Harrabin was the seminar’s organiser. (Don’t worry, Rog. I promise not to remind anyone. We Oxbridge English Literature graduates must stick together, eh?)

Anyway, I notice one or two feathers have been ruffled by the Mail On Sunday’s suggestion that many of these revelations are new. Some of us were on to this stuff at least as far back as November 2012 (see eg this Spectator article and this Telegraph blogpost), while, of course, the real credit ought to go to the following:

Maurizio Morabito – who (despite heroic attempts by the BBC to keep it secret) managed to unearth the list of attendees at the seminar, many of them environmental activists.

Roger Tallbloke.

Andrew Orlowski. (Sorry for forgetting to include you earlier, mate. My bad. You were a star team member too and there’s really no excuse given that I used this excellent report you wrote at the time in one of my blogs….)

Christopher Booker, whose report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation – The BBC And Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal – put the scandal in its proper context.

Bishop Hill – who has provided the most thorough account of the affair in his pamphlet the Propaganda Bureau.

and, above all, to Tony Newbery, the heroic North Wales pensioner, whose indefatigable pursuit of the story and protracted struggle with the Information Tribunal brought all this stuff into the open.

I call that a brilliant team effort by 28Gate United and I for one am absolutely delighted by the contribution of our latest signing, top Mail On Sunday striker David Rose. This, after all, is a story which has been quite shamefully ignored by much of our mainstream media. Perhaps this will now change and, if we’re lucky, we might even see one or two heads rolling.