BBC Environment Analyst Received 15000 Pounds From ClimateGate University

For years NewsBusters has informed readers of the tremendous financial ties to spreading the anthropogenic global warming myth.

On Sunday, coincidentally  the second anniversary of 2010's ClimateGate scandal, Britain's Daily Mail exposed the BBC's Roger Harrabin for having taken £15,000 from the very university at the heart the damning email messages demonstrating a nefarious collusion between the world's top climate alarmists:

A senior BBC journalist accepted £15,000 in grants from the university at the heart of the ‘Climategate’ scandal – and later went on to cover the story without declaring an interest to viewers.

Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s ‘environment analyst’, used the money from the University of East Anglia’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research to fund an ‘ad hoc’ partnership he ran with a friend.

Mr Harrabin, an influential figure who both broadcasts and advises other BBC journalists, later reported extensively about Climategate.

Readers might recognize Harrabin as the BBC reporter who materially altered an article back in April 2008 to incite climate hysteria. It was later discovered that he had done so under pressure from a global warming activist.

Now, as the Daily Mail reports, we find out that he's taken money from ClimateGate U:

In none of Mr Harrabin’s reports on the [ClimateGate] were the grants that he and his friend Dr Joe Smith had received from UEA ever mentioned. However, BBC insiders claim that the use to which the money was put – annual Real World seminars for top BBC executives on issues including climate change – had a significant impact on the Corporation’s output.

‘The seminars organised by Roger and his friend were part of a process which has effectively stifled all debate within the BBC about man-made global warming,’ said one senior journalist. ‘As far as the high-ups are concerned, the science is settled.’

But there's more:

Disclosure of the payments to Mr Harrabin’s private partnership comes in the wake of a damning report last week by the BBC Trust Editorial Standards Committee.

It revealed ‘sponsored’ documentaries on environmental issues, whose production costs had been met by ‘non-commercial’ bodies such as the UN Environmental Programme, have been shown frequently on the BBC World news channel without viewers being made properly aware of their funding.

Trust investigators discovered that of a sample of 60 sponsored programmes broadcast between February and July this year, a total of 15 breached the BBC’s editorial guidelines.

The investigators said some of the breaches involved direct conflicts of interests – with the funders being the subjects of the programmes they were paying for – and that others failed to observe BBC rules on telling viewers where the programme budget had come from.

That's some pretty ugly stuff when you think about it. And it gets worse as Christopher Booker of Britain's Telegraph reported Saturday:

The story of the BBC’s bias on global warming gets ever murkier. Last week there was quite a stir over a new report for the BBC Trust which criticised several programmes for having been improperly funded or sponsored by outside bodies. One, for instance, lauded the work of Envirotrade, a Mauritius-based firm cashing in on the global warming scare by selling “carbon offsets”, which it turned out had given the BBC money to make the programme.

Just as this scandal broke, I was also completing a report, to be published next month by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, on the BBC’s coverage of climate change. It ranges from the puffing of scare stories dreamed up by “climate activists”, to BBC reporting on wind farms, often no more than shameless propaganda for the wind industry. Part of the story told in my report is the unhealthily close relationship that developed between the BBC and organisations professionally involved in the “warmist” cause.

Some years back, the BBC adopted a new editorial policy –that the scientific and political “consensus” on climate change was now so overwhelming that it should be actively promoted, while climate sceptics, or “deniers” as the BBC calls them, should be kept off the airwaves.

A key moment in developing the new party line was a “high-level seminar” in 2006, attended by a bevy of top BBC executives. It was organised by Roger Harrabin, one of its senior environmental correspondents, and Dr Joe Smith, a geographer and climate activist from the Open University. They had set up the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme to promote the consensus line on global warming, funded by, among others, the Department for the Environment (then in charge of government policy on climate change) and WWF, one of the leading warmist pressure groups.

Now according to the Daily, we find out that Harrabin and Smith received money from UEA:

Mr Harrabin’s partnership with Dr Smith – the Cambridge Media Environment Programme (CMEP) – began in 1996. That was when Mr Harrabin spent a sabbatical at Cambridge University, where Dr Smith was working at the time. [...]

[Smith's] own opinion, which he sets out on his website, is that ‘everyday human activity – moving, eating, keeping warm or cool – is gently stoking a slow-boil apocalypse’. He calls climate change ‘one of the challenges of the age’ and urges the world to take radical action. A Freedom of Information Act disclosure obtained by Andrew Montford, who writes the climate-change blog Bishop Hill, reveals that the Tyndall Centre provided £5,000 a year for three years from 2002.

So individuals with tremendous sway over the BBC's reporting on global warming had been receiving money from the university at the heart of the ClimateGate scandal since 2002.

Isn't that special?

(H/T Steve Milloy via Marc Morano)