UPDATES ARE CONTINUOUSLY BEING ADDED at the end of this story. Check below.
WUWT readers may recall this post last week:
The Secret 28 Who Made BBC ‘Green’ Will Not Be Named
The BBC pits six lawyers against one questioning blogger, Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky, who was making an FOI request for the 28 names. In the process, the judge demonstrates he has partisan views on climate change.
Now, thanks to the Wayback machine and Maurizio Morabito (omnologos) we can now read the list that the BBC fought to keep secret. [Damn those mischevious bloggers 😉 ]
This list has been obtained legally. (link to Wayback document.) My heartiest congratulations to Maurizo for his excellent sleuthing!
Maurizo writes: This is for Tony, Andrew, Benny, Barry and for all of us Harmless Davids.
The list from: January 26th 2006, BBC Television Centre, London
Specialists:
Robert May, Oxford University and Imperial College London
Mike Hulme, Director, Tyndall Centre, UEA
Blake Lee-Harwood, Head of Campaigns, Greenpeace
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen
Michael Bravo, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Andrew Dlugolecki, Insurance industry consultant
Trevor Evans, US Embassy
Colin Challen MP, Chair, All Party Group on Climate Change
Anuradha Vittachi, Director, Oneworld.net
Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation
Claire Foster, Church of England
Saleemul Huq, IIED
Poshendra Satyal Pravat, Open University
Li Moxuan, Climate campaigner, Greenpeace China
Tadesse Dadi, Tearfund Ethiopia
Iain Wright, CO2 Project Manager, BP International
Ashok Sinha, Stop Climate Chaos
Andy Atkins, Advocacy Director, Tearfund
Matthew Farrow, CBI
Rafael Hidalgo, TV/multimedia producer
Cheryl Campbell, Executive Director, Television for the Environment
Kevin McCullough, Director, Npower Renewables
Richard D North, Institute of Economic Affairs
Steve Widdicombe, Plymouth Marine Labs
Joe Smith, The Open University
Mark Galloway, Director, IBT
Anita Neville, E3G
Eleni Andreadis, Harvard University
Jos Wheatley, Global Environment Assets Team, DFID
Tessa Tennant, Chair, AsRia
BBC attendees:
Jana Bennett, Director of Television
Sacha Baveystock, Executive Producer, Science
Helen Boaden, Director of News
Andrew Lane, Manager, Weather, TV News
Anne Gilchrist, Executive Editor Indies & Events, CBBC
Dominic Vallely, Executive Editor, Entertainment
Eleanor Moran, Development Executive, Drama Commissioning
Elizabeth McKay, Project Executive, Education
Emma Swain, Commissioning Editor, Specialist Factual
Fergal Keane, (Chair), Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Fran Unsworth, Head of Newsgathering
George Entwistle, Head of TV Current Affairs
Glenwyn Benson, Controller, Factual TV
John Lynch, Creative Director, Specialist Factual
Jon Plowman, Head of Comedy
Jon Williams, TV Editor Newsgathering
Karen O’Connor, Editor, This World, Current Affairs
Catriona McKenzie, Tightrope Pictures catriona@tightropepictures.com
BBC Television Centre, London (cont)
Liz Molyneux, Editorial Executive, Factual Commissioning
Matt Morris, Head of News, Radio Five Live
Neil Nightingale, Head of Natural History Unit
Paul Brannan, Deputy Head of News Interactive
Peter Horrocks, Head of Television News
Peter Rippon, Duty Editor, World at One/PM/The World this Weekend
Phil Harding, Director, English Networks & Nations
Steve Mitchell, Head Of Radio News
Sue Inglish, Head Of Political Programmes
Frances Weil, Editor of News Special Events
For those who don’t know what this is about, read the back story here.
Here is the backup link to the original document just in case the original disappears:
Real World Brainstorm Sep 2007 background (PDF)
============================================================
UPDATE: Now this Climategate 2.0 email makes more sense, as they’ve just been carrying water for CRU and the eco-NGO’s all along. The meeting with the 28 was just a pep rally. From: this WUWT post:
BBC’s Kirby admission to Phil Jones on “impartiality”
Alex Kirby in email #4894 writing about the BBC’s “neutrality”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
date: Wed Dec 8 08:25:30 2004
from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.xx.xx>
subject: RE: something on new online.
to: “Alex Kirby” <alex.kirby@bbc.xxx.xx>
At 17:27 07/12/2004, you wrote:
Yes, glad you stopped this — I was sent it too, and decided to
spike it without more ado as pure stream-of-consciousness rubbish. I can well understand your unhappiness at our running the other piece. But we are constantly being savaged by the loonies for not giving them any coverage at all, especially as you say with the COP in the offing, and being the objective impartial (ho ho) BBC that we are, there is an expectation in some quarters that we will every now and then let them
say something. I hope though that the weight of our coverage makes it clear that we think they are talking through their hats.
—–Original Message—–
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit
BBC and “impartiality”…”ho, ho” indeed.
UPDATE: ‘TwentyEightGate’ was coined by RoyFOMR in comments. I liked it enough to put in the title.
UPDATE3 – Barry Woods writes in an email to me:
Don’t forget Mike Hulme Climategate email. why he funded CMEP, to keep sceptics OFF BBC airwaves… (below)
Mike Hulme:
“Did anyone hear Stott vs. Houghton on Today, radio 4 this morning? Woeful stuff really.
This is one reason why Tyndall is sponsoring the Cambridge Media/Environment Programme to starve this type of reporting at source.” (email 2496)
let us also not forget, that Roger Harrabin BBC & CMEP – (and Greenpeace Bill Hare) were also on the Tyndall board from 2002 to at least Nov 2005.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/27/climategate-2-impartiality-at-the-bbc/
When did Roger Harrabin step down from Tyndall advisory board?
(and he no made no mention, when reporting Climategate, of connections)
Tyndall were funding CMEP seminars for years to persuade the BBC, so not just that seminar, but years worth of lobbying
UPDATE4: Bishop Hill makes this excerpt from correspondence the “quote of the day”:
We now know that the BBC decided to abandon balance in its coverage of climate on the advice of a small coterie of green activists, including the campaign director of Greenpeace. This shows that the “shoddy journalism” of Newsnight’s recent smear was no “lapse” of standards at all. BBC news programs have for years been poorly checked recitations of the work of activists.
UPDATE5: Maurizo has added some analysis.
Summary for those without much time to read it all: Why the List of Participants to the BBC CMEP Jan 2006 Seminar is important
http://omnologos.com/why-the-list-of-participants-to-the-bbc-cmep-jan-2006-seminar-is-important/
UPDATE 6: Maurizo asked to add this –
I have not “given” the 28Gate list any importance. In fact, not one of the bloggers and journalists and commenters has “given” the 28Gate list any importance. It has been the BBC that GAVE IMPORTANCE TO 28GATE by spending so much money on lawyers. Therefore, 28Gate is important.
Congratulations to all who produced this list. The presence of the US Embassy at the meeting is staggering. The whole sham and shameful cause of climate catastrophism and media manipulation has been dealt a heavy blow.
Really makes me wonder why the Beeb was fighting disclosure so hard and expensively. I don’t see any names or organizations on that list that surprise me in the slightest. Purely the usual suspects. In fact one big class of usual suspects is nearly absent from the list: corporations, investors and reinsurance firms with a monetary vested interest in pushing Green nonsense. (Only BP was there.)
Mods – sorry can help out a harassed Aussie in his lunch break and correct my rushed spelling – “congratulations” and “sham”. ?
[We jest thought you were rightin’ sum new-finagled Australeze dialect fer the rest of us English-readers…. Mod]
Jackpot.
http://web.missouri.edu/~segerti/capstone/mediaclimatechange.pdf
The BBC only claimed 28 “scientific experts” attended, and I count 30. Who’s for having a laugh and guessing which 2 aren’t “scientific experts”?
Really looking forward to a spreadsheet breakdown of the qualifications, political leanings, activist activities and current employment status of these charlatans. A crowd sourced summary will be very damaging to the “cause”
Until now (besides what happened to Galileo) science has been nearly all about data. No opportunity for any opinions or preferences, if it was repeatable and predictable it became a theory. This meant politics was always kept as a way of running a country based on the voter’s preferences, while science was used to discover what was there already and possibly exploit its uses.
Now scientists employed by larger groups (as opposed to working for themselves) have become political activists and encouraged others to and pushed world government policies. It has divided the world generally between the ideological left and pragmatic right, and has now merged entirely into something simply used to promote collectivist policies and treated not as an unfolding discovery which constantly changes, but a core political policy, breach of which is heresy. We have been taken back into the dark ages, and I have just completed a list of quotes going back to the 1970s of how the environmental extremists, not the nutjobs and bloggers they accuse us of being, but top world leaders of all fields- politics, science, investment etc, detailing long before the hockey stick even became erect how man made global warming will be the key to unlocking the new world order.
So currently science no longer exists as it should do, its major aim is a political force to rebuild the world on an environmental platform, removing the traces of development and industry to bring it back to how it was before we ‘colonised’ it (yes, just like the trees colonise it or the fish colonise the sea). Of course they won’t be in the toilet with us useless eaters, they want to clear the planet of us just so they and their friends and family can have the space to live, ‘liebensraum’ in German (where have I heard that already?), while we become either their slaves or wiped out to provide the optimum population the planet can sustainably (their key word) handle.
So yes, although climate data is no different to a nurse shoving a thermometer up your anus and reading it, it is being taken up by political activists as if measuring temperatures is a social science and must be read in psychological and societal context. As if.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings and commented:
Add your thoughts here… (optional)
Should we go with 28Gate?
I mean, wouldn’t want anyone to get the impression that there’s only been 27 before this…
The only good thing out of this fraud is the fact they (BBC) base and invested their pension investments for all BBC staff into green funds all based on this CAGW crap. Last I heard they were down 2.5 billion pounds.
Ha Ha Ha!
Perfect juxtaposition for trash-advocacy veneered as junk-science.
#16 Iain Wright, CO2 Project Manager, BP International.
#17 Ashol Sinha, Stop Climate Chaos.
And Big Oil backing Green yet again !
Blogged, now I need sleep
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/joe-smith-dangerous-news-twenty-eight-gate-begins/
Note to all: you Really need to read the pdf that tallbloke inked to above…
reposted here: http://web.missouri.edu/~segerti/capstone/mediaclimatechange.pdf
Umm, who are their ‘handlers’?
Who is at the top; the “Mr Big”?
Are there more names we need to see?
.
So not a list of 28 impartial scientists but a sorry bunch of activists, vested interests and a couple of rent seeking pro AGW pseudo-scientists. I believe a quote from the infamous former Australian MP Mark Latham says it best – “A conga line of suckholes.”
When it comes to the physics of radiative gasses, “out of their depth on a wet pavement” doesn’t adequately describe this biased bunch of social parasites. “So far out of their depth the fish have lights on their noses” would be closer to the mark. There is only one plausible reason the BBC called this load of slime in was for a strategy meeting on propaganda. They certainly could not have been learning anything about the science.
I’m hoping Donna Lafamboise will weigh in with what she knows of the eco-green power structure behind the IPCC and how it relates to the BBC.
The affiliation-acronyms in the list should have been spelled out where unfamiliar to Americans.
Hello Konrad. Did we have a discussion about IR Spectroscopy previously? The ‘group’ of 28 may or may not have a grasp of the subject at hand, but it is best to address them for those issues for which you have ‘actionable’, provable points or issues rather than simply riding one’s familiar hobby horse …
.
Jon Plowman, Head of Comedy
What could be more apropos for TwentyEightGate, the Beeb, and Mr. Plowman than the tagline from a show he worked on:
I seem to remember a report here on WUWT in the aftermath of that get-together from someone who either sat in on the meeting or was given an account of it from an attendee. I hope someone who’s familiar with the best ways of searching the archives here will take a look for it.
Well done Maurizio. I thought the evidence might be hiding somewhere on the internet but I’m such a patzer I wouldn’t have known how to go about finding it.
No wonder the BBC didn’t want people finding out about their illustrious “28” – they had just rounded up another bunch of “the usual suspects”.
If I was still living in the UK (I jumped ship some years ago) I would not pay the BBC licence fee anymore. My brother was smart – he threw his TV out about 10 years ago..
Lord May of Oxford argues that although it is beyond dispute that the burning of fossil fuels is thickening Earth’s greenhouse gas blanket (to levels not seen for tens of millions of years), there remain some uncertainties about the severity of particular adverse consequences and the timescales for manifestation. (My bold)
Such certainty/uncertainty from someone so well credentialed. How can he be so certain?
Robert McCredie May, Baron May of Oxford, is an Australian scientist who has been Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, President of the Royal Society and a Professor at Sydney and Princeton. He now holds joint professorships at Oxford and Imperial College London and is a member of the Lowy Institute’s International Advisory Council.
(source)
The “seminar had the following aims:
· To invoke imagination to allow the media to deal with the scope of the issue” **
The “scope of the issue” should include the drastic, destructive measures perpetrated on the nation in order to counter climate change/promote sustainability, as C. Booker points out.
Worthless wind turbines will cost hundreds of billions, while the back up gas plants would only cost 13 billion, according to Prof. Gordon Hughes.
The worthless wind turbines and smart meters are economically destructive, unnecessary. And don’t think for a second that it is going to work!
**research by TonyN of Harmless Sky
I remember reading that it was Roger Harrabin who organised the list of attendees, along with someone else whose name I can’t remember. I suppose as ‘Environment Analyst’ the BBC regarded it as his area of expertise, and that he would be ‘fair and unbiased’! At the time they would not know about his eco-activist hobbies.
Richard North of EuReferendum was an attendee and I recall reading his recollection of the event but I can not find it on his website [after a brief search]. My recollection is that he thought it was a hatchet job and he was a lone voice.
One can see why the BBC was so loathe to release this list as it was not an elite gathering, and in effect they broke their charter at the behest of activists.
“UPDATE: ‘TwentyEightGate’ was coined by RoyFOMR in comments. I liked it enough to put in the title.”
Will someone EVER come up with something original??
REPLY: The ball is in your court – Anthony