Why The BBC’s Lying Climate Editor Must Go

Written by Climate Change Dispatch on April 13, 2022. Posted in Current News

For the last two years, Justin Rowlatt (pictured) has been firstly the BBC’s chief environmental correspondent, and now their climate editor. As with all of the BBC’s output on climate change, his work has always been grossly one-sided.

He has often crossed the line into telling outright falsehoods. He was, for instance, rebuked by BBC News bosses last year for his patently false claim that ‘the offshore wind industry was ‘now virtually subsidy-free.’

He went one better when presenting a Panorama edition last November called Wild Weather – Our World Under Threat. The program blurb summed it up:

Panorama investigates a year of wild weather and hears how freak events are becoming increasingly commonplace, changing life right now for millions. This summer a small town was destroyed by fire after record-breaking high temperatures in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Floods in Germany swept away entire villages.

A plague of mice destroyed livelihoods in Australia’s New South Wales. Dust storms from China swept thousands of miles to South Korea and the people of Madagascar are on the brink of the world’s first climate change-induced famine. By interrogating climate science and with exclusive access to new Met Office data, reporter Justin Rowlatt reveals where in the world the climate is changing the fastest and who will be most affected.

Rowlatt’s opening statement included this: ‘The world is getting warmer and our weather is getting ever more unpredictable and dangerous. The death toll is rising around the world.’

The claim about death tolls rising is a blatant lie. The opposite is in fact the case, as the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has reported:

‘Deaths [due to weather disasters] decreased almost threefold from 1970 to 2019. Death tolls fell from over 50,000 deaths in the 1970s to less than 20.000 in the 2010s. The 1970s and 1980s reported an average of 170 related deaths per day.

In the 1990s, that average fell by one third to 90 related deaths per day, then continued to fall in the 2010s to 40 related deaths per day.’

One viewer complained to the BBC, who tried to fob him off with this ludicrous response: ‘This was a response to the cumulative death toll from weather-related events, not the annualized rate.’

It’s hard to imagine a more inane reply or a more dishonest one! Can you imagine the government getting away with a claim that pensioners are getting better off every month?

The viewer has now escalated his complaint to the BBC’s Executive Complaint Unit (ECU).

But how on earth did such a preposterous claim come to be made in the first place? After all, there is a wealth of readily available data out there to back up the WMO’s report.

It would seem that Rowlatt simply could not be bothered to check the facts, or chose to ignore them, preferring to air his personal preconceptions.

The shoddy reporting did not end there. In the same program, a substantial segment was devoted to the drought in Madagascar last year, which Rowlatt described as ‘the world’s first climate change-induced famine’.

As with the rest of that Panorama edition, there was no attempt to prove the claim with any data.

Shortly after the show, a scientific study was published that conclusively proved that the drought had nothing to do with climate change and that similar droughts have occurred regularly in the past.

My complaint about this is also now with the ECU, after being fobbed off with the excuse that the BBC had got the claim from the UN.

Given that Madagascar was such a significant part of the show, the failure to carry out proper research was extremely shoddy journalism.

In both cases, as well as the offshore wind claim, it is abundantly clear that Justin Rowlatt has little interest in the truth. To him, the message is all-important. His aim is not to report, but to brainwash.

Indeed his obsession with climate change goes back many years. As long ago as 2009 he was blogging about the topic, even questioning whether democracy was an obstacle to tackling global warming.

All very admirable, no doubt. But clearly, he is far too obsessed with climate change on a personal level to be able to report on it fairly and accurately.

He should be removed from the climate brief.

See more here: climatechangedispatch.com

Header image: Getty Images

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