Sunday, January 24, 2010

The BBC

I was in the UK over Christmas and it turns out that the BBC is still running their program "Climate Wars" from time to time. Anyway I watched the initial episode on the web and its portrayal of my father was based on the same erroneous facts as the Oreskes story in the Times On Line. Gee I'm so surprised that Oreskes didn't call up the BBC to correct this when she was forced to admit to the Times that they needed to print a correction to their story.

The BBC picks right up on the false claim the Reagan had appointed my father to produce a politically motivated report on CO2. They have a caricature of his career focused on his work on the Manhattan project. The whole segment falls apart if they would correctly state that the report was actually from the National Academy of Sciences, and that he had been appointed by the Academy prior to Reagan being elected. Maybe if the "scientist" who narrates the program had taken five minutes to actually read "Changing Climate" he would have been unwilling to read that kind of slander.

Anyway I have filed a complaint with the BBC. This took the usual couple of tries. My first attempt got the response asking me for when the show had aired. I replied by sending them a link from their own web site.

The latest reply said that they are looking into it, but that it may take some time due to the high volume of complaints recently. My goal is for the BBC to either not show that episode any longer, or for them to edit and correct the portion having to do with my father.