A few months ago a panellist on Radio 4’s “Questions, Questions” program said that temperatures in Europe were higher during the Early Medieval period than they are today. This claim has been thoroughly disproved and should not have been broadcast. This program was a Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 4.

Comedian Steve Punt has railed against the fact that such untruths about climate keep being repeated, despite having been disproved. Substantial numbers of people are being conned into doubting the threat from Global Warming. This means they do not act to counteract the threat. It also acts as a restraint on the action which policy makers are willing to take.

The BBC is possibly the most important news organisation in the world, it is publicly owned, and it has a legal duty to educate and inform its audience. Global Warming is the most important issue our species has ever faced. It is of the utmost importance that the BBC should tell the truth about it, and only the truth.

The biggest source of misinformation about Global Warming is not explicit, but implicit. Business, economic, and political forecasting is given far more airtime than climate science. All such forecasts about the rest of this century seem to assume that Global Warming will not be a serious problem. This is crazy. Last year India’s economic growth was affected by the bad harvest the previous year, and this year Australia’s economic growth has been hit by the terrible weather it has suffered (drought in the south west, storms and flooding in the north east). However, this is nothing to what is expected in the future. On his return from the 2010 UN climate summit in Cancun, Chris Huhne, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said that we were “on track” for a 5˚C rise in global temperature by 2100. According to The Guardian (30 May, page 7) this would render “uninhabitable” the tropics, the sub tropics and even “the lower mid-latitudes”.

In a 2010 Hardtalk program on BBC News 24, Zeinab Badawi interviewed Stephen King HSBC Chief Economist and author of “The World in 2050”. King and Badawi talked seriously about China and India becoming the dominant economic powers in the world. Their discussion ranged as far as 2060, and even at this late date neither of them seemed to think that Global Warming would have any effect on economic growth. If India is going to become “uninhabitable” by 2100, surely that must adversely affect economic growth by 2060!

Right now, the BBC World service (TV & Radio) is broadcasting a major season entitled “Power of Asia”. This too is spouting rubbish about how Asian economies will dominate in the future. Clearly, the powers that be at the BBC do not believe scientific predictions about Global Warming. They prefer the predictions of economists, even though they couldn’t even predict the banking crash of 2008 a few days before it happened!

The BBC should ensure that all predictions about the future which it broadcasts, including those about economics, are scientifically credible. It should state what level of global warming it assumes will take place by 2100, and its justification for that assumption. If anyone makes a prediction which is nonsense, and the BBC feels it needs to broadcast that prediction for some reason, then it should at least point out why it is nonsense. The judgement on what is scientifically credible should ideally be made with the advice of an independent panel of scientists, possibly elected by members of the Royal Academy.