Rabbos.... dont get in the way of a reasonably nonsensical argument

BBC series stitches up sceptics in counter-attack over climate change

As informed questioning of the global warming orthodoxy rises on all sides, the BBC's three-part series Climate Wars, ending tonight, bears all the marks of a carefully planned counter-attack.

BBC science producers were apoplectic at the attention given last year to Martin Durkin's Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, featuring a galaxy of the world's more sceptical climate scientists. This is their riposte.

Last week, against a range of far-flung locations from Greenland to California, the presenter, Dr Iain Stewart, tackled three of the main arguments of Durkin's film.

In each case the technique was the same. After caricaturing the sceptics' point, with soundbite clips that did not allow them to develop their scientific argument, he then asserted that they had somehow been discredited.

For example, doubts had been raised over the reliability of satellite temperature records which do not show the same degree of warming as surface readings. Dr Roy Spencer, who designed Nasa's satellite system for measuring temperatures, was allowed to admit that a flaw had been found in the system.

But his interview ended before he could explain that, when the flaw was discovered in 1998, it was immediately corrected (although it made little difference to the results).

Likewise, there is a growing case for a correlation between global temperatures and solar activity. Dr Stewart accused Durkin's programme of cutting off a graph which illustrated this at a point when the data failed to support the thesis. Then he did exactly the same himself, not extending his own graph to 2008 in a way that would reinforce the thesis.

Most hilarious of all, however, was a long sequence in which Stewart defended the notorious "hockey stick" graph, which purports to show that temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level on record.

The BBC had a huge blow-up of this "iconic" graph carted triumphantly round London, from Big Ben to Buckingham Palace, as if it were proof that the warming alarmists are right.

There was no hint that the "hockey stick" is among the most completely discredited artefacts in the history of science, not least thanks to the devastating critique by Steve McIntyre, which showed that the graph's creators had an algorithm in their programme which could produce a hockey-stick shape whatever data were fed into it.

There was scarcely a frame of this clever exercise which did not distort or obscure some vital fact. Yet the "impartial" BBC is sending out this farrago of convenient untruths to schools, ensuring that the "march of the lie" continues.