Peter Horrocks, head of BBC TV News, should be given due credit for having opposed these plans on the grounds it is not the job of a public broadcaster to promulgate a moral campaign to save the planet. Unwisely, however, Horrocks went on to add that "BBC News certainly does not have a line on climate change, however the weight of our coverage reflects the fact that there is an increasingly strong (although not overwhelming) weight of scientific opinion in favour of the proposition that climate change is happening and is being largely caused by man".

The utter lack of self-awareness in this statement, when it is compared with the actuality of the BBC's broadcasts, epitomises exactly the problem with media coverage of the global warming issue across the world, including Australia.

The BBC's "line" is self-evident to any independent and trained scientist who watches its coverage. It is to reproduce, without a trace of critical analysis, the alarmist utterances of a bevy of self-interested, self-perpetuating scientists and science agencies, environmental pressure groups and "significant" politicians (Tony Blair, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bob Brown), while at the same time ignoring or paying the most passing of lip service to any independent scientists or "insignificant" politicians (President Vaclav Klaus, Czech Republic; Senator James Inhofe, US Senate; Dennis Jensen, Australian Parliament) who try to inject some critical analysis into the debate.

Horrocks' statement also embraces the typical semantic confusion that marks journalists and editors when he asserts "climate change is happening", which is not and never has been the issue. Of course climate is changing; it always has and always will. In terms of the current public debate, the hypothesis to be tested is not "is climate changing" but rather "do human emissions of carbon dioxide cause dangerous global warming". Despite the 20-year-long efforts of thousands of scientists and the expenditure of about $80 billion of public money on research since 1990, no unambiguous (or even concerning circumstantial) evidence exists for this proposition. Indeed, with the collapse of the "hockey stick", and the recent failure of global temperature to follow its supposed script, the sole argument an increasingly desperate Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coterie is left with is the deployment of the results of unvalidated, speculative computer GCMs.