This is a trip down memory lane, but late last year, the BBC ran two interesting items about the climate issue -- A post on the Editors blog and a news story about whether climate skeptics were self-reporting censorship.

From the Nov. 14, 2007 blog post:

What follows is actually an excerpt from an article by Richard Black, BBC Online's environment writer, and Roger Harrabin, a BBC environment analyst, for Ariel, the BBC in-house magazine:

The IPCC is the world’s official climate change assessment forum. It relies on published research and peer-reviewed so its prognoses are inherently conservative. Its reports are by acknowledged leaders in their fields surveying thousands of pieces of evidence and employing the scientific method of sceptically testing hypotheses to reduce uncertainty.

The IPCC process is bloody, and some scientists are upset if they believe their work to be under-represented in the policymakers’ summaries that are vetted by the world's major governments. Sometimes politicians do try to sway IPCC conclusions but their endorsement of the final report means that all governments involved, including the US and Australia, agree that greenhouse gases should be cut. The disagreement is over how much emissions should be cut, how soon, and by whom.

In a recent survey of 140 climate scientists, 18 percent found the IPCC too alarming but 82 percent either thought the IPCC represented a reasonable consensus – or said it was not alarming enough. No one agreed with the statement that global warming is a fabrication and that human activity is not having a significant effect. All the world’s major scientific bodies have endorsed the IPCC concerns about the risk of increasing greenhouse gases.

Given the weight of opinion building up around the IPCC it makes sense for us to focus our coverage on the consensus that climate change is happening, is serious, but is manageable if tackled urgently.

We do not need consistently to ‘balance’ the reports of the IPCC. When we broadcast outlying views we should make sure we do not over represent them and we should keep a rough balance of views from either side of the IPCC. If we do not, we will distort the issue and risk misleading or confusing our audience.

We must also be more savvy about the way we treat outlying views – and we should make it clear to our audience when an interviewee holds a minority position.

On one side of the IPCC are some knowledgeable, sceptical climate scientists. They mostly agree that the Earth is heating, and agree that greenhouse gases are probably contributing. But they think future temperatures will be determined much more by solar changes than atmospheric changes – and they do not think IPCC computer models are smart enough to forecast the climate accurately. They mostly think the economic benefit of using fossil fuels outweighs the risk of increasing CO2 levels.

A more extreme position is taken by some libertarian commentators who distrust government and big institutions and who characterise climate change as a swindle. Their views appear to be supported by hardly any climate scientists.

Then there are the ‘sceptics’ (particularly in the US) funded by big business to run ‘think tanks’ spreading uncertainty and thus delaying action. We need to think hard about how and when we invite these various groups to contribute to the debate. Would we, for instance, serve our audiences by inviting lobbyists for tobacco firms to challenge the scientific links between smoking and lung cancer?

Richard Black published another story on Nov. 14, 2007 in which reported back after asking any climate skeptic who felt censored by the climate establishment to tell their story. Some excerpts:

I received e-mails from well over 100 people; some had read my original article, others had seen the idea passed around in blogs and newsgroups.

Four people said they had had problems getting research published, and three sent me the papers in question.

The other said he did not want to disclose details as he was preparing his paper for submission to another journal.

Of the three papers I did receive, one was far from complete, and another was a review article from an author who endorsed the IPCC position and said the bias was against scientists "supporting man-made climate change". ...

The sum total of evidence obtained through this open invitation, then, is one first-hand claim of bias in scientific journals, not backed up by documentary evidence; and three second-hand claims, two well-known and one that the scientist in question does not consider evidence of anti-sceptic feeling.

No-one said they had been refused a place on the IPCC, the central global body in climate change, or denied a job or turned down for promotion or sacked or refused access to a conference platform, or indeed anything else.

If there is an anti-sceptic bias running through the institutions of science, it is evidently keeping itself well hidden.