How the BBC is crushing the climate debate: BBC News is equating criticism of the green agenda with conspiracy theories and science denial

BBC News carried two articles last week denigrating and demonising the critics of climate-change alarmism.

The first was by Marianna Spring, the BBC’s ‘specialist disinformation reporter’. She asserted that criticism of environmentalism was being fuelled by right-wing conspiracy theorists who had switched ‘from Covid denial to climate denial’. And the second came from reporters Rachel Schraer and Kayleen Devlin, who are both part of the BBC’s ‘Reality Check’ team of fact-checkers. They claimed to have exposed ‘the truth behind the new climate-change denial’. Both articles are travesties of journalism.

Take Schraer and Devlin’s piece, which claims to debunk four claims supposedly made by climate deniers: that a ‘Grand Solar Minimum’ will halt global warming; global warming is good; climate-change action will make people poorer; and renewable energy is dangerously unreliable.

Despite the article’s dismissive approach, it completely fails to debunk what are plausible claims. For instance, the ‘Grand Solar Minimum’ – when the Sun gives off less energy as part of its natural cycle – is, as the article admits, a real phenomenon. Whether it will reduce the Earth’s global temperatures by a significant enough amount to offset climate change is up for debate, but it is a debate worth having. To write off theories of solar influence on climate in two perfunctory paragraphs, when there is still so much to research and understand, seems highly premature.

Or take the claim that global warming is ‘good’. There is certainly plenty of evidence to suggest that a warming climate is not the terrible catastrophe many hype it up to be. Indeed, thanks to social and economic progress, fewer people today die or suffer from events and phenomena attributable to the climate than at any point in the past. And there is plenty of reason to think that such progress will continue in the future.

And what of the claim that climate-change action will make people poorer? Again, that seems like a fair comment. After all, it is precisely because of the impoverishing consequences of decarbonisation targets that so many developing nations are resistant to them – as the failure of COP26 to eliminate coal power showed. And as for renewable energy, it is unreliable precisely because much of it depends on the weather. If the conditions aren’t right, then wind turbines or solar panels do not produce energy. This is not a crack-pot theory. It is a simple fact.