Wrong Fox – but no harm done, eh?
A strange story in Bishop Hill about Fiona Fox. You may remember she’s the director of the Science Media Centre who claimed earlier this year that the way BBC could improve its science coverage was to give less space to sceptics.
She said: “To have a sceptic or contrarian in every interview is really misleading the public.”
Then, amusingly, she dropped two of the BBC’s more shameless eco-activists in the dudu by commenting:
“With Climate Science there’s been a real change with people like Richard Black and Roger Harrabin fighting internally to say ‘We don’t have to have a sceptic every time we have a climate scientist.’”
How Rich and Rog must have thanked her for this revelation!
And now she’s in trouble of a different kind. It seems she took part in a practical joke which went horribly wrong, summarised here by the Bishop:
She is also apparently a close friend of Jim Devine, a former Labour MP who is now facing fraud charges over his expense claims. She appears to have got herself involved in a bizarre and rather nasty practical joke involving Devine and his office manager, and which has now led to a substantial damages award against the politician.
Unless it involves Al Gore, masseuses and the phrase “love poodle” I’m not generally that interested in reporting sordid, sorry tales about people’s rackety personal lives – not least because it can’t be long before word leaks out about me last weekend with the hamsters, the dwarves with cocaine bowls balanced on their heads, Jimmy Page and the cast of High School Musical III. (And it’s interesting to note that when Steve McIntyre chose to write it up at ClimateAudit, some of his commenters got frightfully sniffy. “And what, pray does this have to do with statistics or climate science?” some of his more matronly readers wanted to know as they reached for the smelling salts).
Me, I’m much more interested in the Science Media Centre connection and the puzzling question of how Fiona Fox became to become so influential figure in the Climate Change Pseudoscience Alarmism Spin Machine. OK so she’s a former revolutionary Marxist – but so too are her sister Claire, as well as the Spiked Online gang Brendan O’Neill, Mick Hume, Frank Furedi and the rest. And all the latter are ferocious defenders of Enlightenment values, as well as being so sceptical about Global Warming b***ocks generally they make me sound like Geoffrey Lean. Well, almost.
One theory, mooted by one of the Bishop’s sharp-eyed readers, is that she was got at by an organisation called LobbyWatch and bullied in changing tack. But did she really have to go so far the other way as to appoint to her Science Advisory Panel such nakedly partisan figures as (former Government Alarmist-in-Chief) Sir David King, and to her board, such outrageously parti-pris types as Philip Campbell (editor in chief of Nature) and, Lord preserve us, Bob Ward?
“Only connect.” As well as being the epigraph of Howard’s End, this is also the theme of an infinitely superior book coming out soon on the great climate change conspiracy called Watermelons.
Fox, Campbell, King, Ward, Hansen, Gore, Monbiot, Porritt, Connolley….Not without reason do these names crop up again and again in this blog. They may not be sitting round the same table plotting. But they’re all part of the cabal, a surprisingly small cabal, given the vastness of its influence and the almost unimaginable immensity of the bill they are trying to impose on mankind in the name of their religion, Climatism.
You will recall that Bird Flu has didn’t kill the numbers predicted in 2003.
What does that say about their relative judgements.