One of our favorite fountains of culture is the BBC, more affectionately known in hip circles as "the Beeb." Its dramatizations of the works of Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen are without parallel. And many a newspaperman stuck in some remote outpost has been comforted upon hearing the strains of the familiar introductory music and the announcement, "This is London," ringing out over the Beeb's World Service.
So imagine our chagrin when our old friend rather gratuitously attacked our own institution, The Wall Street Journal, in a TV "documentary" Monday evening. Our dismay was only compounded, moreover, by the reliance on the same junk science that has wreaked such havoc on the economy, not to mention rational thought. About a decade after it swept through America, Europe appears to have come rather belatedly to this affliction, with dioxin and Coke scares and the like. But who could ever have imagined that the stolid old Beeb would be taken in?
The issue in this case is global warming, a topic dear to our hearts because it's such an easy target for lampooning. For even if we were to concede the alarmists' claim that the earth's temperature might rise one degree Fahrenheit in the next 100 years, we can see nothing terrible about having more palm trees in Scotland (there are a few now, by the way). Even on the BBC, most weather forecasts have difficulty predicting what the temperature will be three days hence, let alone 100 years.
In "Seven Days that Shook the Planet" the Beeb poured out anguish over the U.S. failure to wake up to global warming, notwithstanding that America is one of the few countries in which a serious public debate on climate change has taken place. What we learned from that debate helps explain why "global warming" has since become fodder for the comedy circuit, with serious scientists calling it one of the greatest scientific hoaxes of all time. For depending on what past period you choose and what comparative data you use, you can prove either global warming or global cooling. More to the point, on the subject of "greenhouse gases" it turns out that man-made emissions are minuscule compared with the vast amounts that nature herself generates.
Nevertheless, the BBC cast anyone challenging global warming theories as a shill for the big corporations that must of course be blamed for this impending disaster. That's where we, classified by the authors as apologists for big business, came in. As a camera panned slowly across The Wall Street Journal banner and then to a June 1996 article by Frederick Seitz, the program suggested that it was all part of an "industry" backlash--an attack on Benjamin D. Santer, the principle author of the 1996 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Like science itself, the truth is far less sexy. Far from being anyone's shill, Mr. Seitz is a former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. And far from presenting a personal attack on Mr. Santer, Mr. Seitz addressed the very relevant question of whether the normal scientific procedure of peer review had been followed in producing the final version of the IPCC report. According to Mr. Seitz, numerous passages expressing skepticism about human impact on climate had been removed from the final report, making its conclusions far more dramatic than what the evidence really warranted.
The BBC's series of programs Monday night did document the numerous natural variations in climate that have occurred throughout pre-human history, but it went on to imply that any future changes would be all man's fault. At one point the TV screen featured what appeared to be steaming nuclear plant cooling towers as illustrations of greenhouse gas emissions. Such towers, by definition, emit nothing but water vapor.
Well, the Beeb has to put something on the air, we guess. But at least the guys who used to give us those great productions of Austen and Trollope and Waugh knew they were dealing in fiction.
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