My interview with James Delingpole

James actually received a lot of criticism from sceptics for somehow ‘failing’ to get across the sceptical arguments in this program. When I spoke to him his frustration was obvious as he said he had spent three hours talking to Professor Paul Nurse about the detail of the climategate emails, the failings of the inquiries and the many and varied sceptical arguments with respect to man-made climate change.

James said he had explained in detail why sceptics describe the inquiries as whitewashes, this included the vested interest of the participants, the fact that no one actually asked Jones about whether he had deleted emails, the failure of scientists to provide data to critics and journals (as scientific process would expect) the importance of hiding the decline in proxies, the fact that scientist had become advocates for policy.

Yet in the program all that comes across is a fade to voice over where Professor Paul Nurse states that James believes the inquiries were whitewashes. Why not allow the public to consider some of these reason from James Delingpole

Why did Professor Phil Jones say to delete emails?  Why did he ask colleagues to delete emails relating to the IPCC reports. And most importantly of all. Why did Phil Jones feel the need to ask colleagues to delete these emails?

Those question surely support James Delingpole’s view that the peer-review process and the IPCC processes had been corrupted.

Another question that has been often asked was, why did James trust the BBC?

To put the interview into context the BBC had received a number of complaints regarding both the BBC’s coverage of Copenhagen and the coverage of the climategate emails. The BBC had seemed genuinely surprised by this response from the public and had even launched a review of how science in the media handled subjects like climate science, vaccines and GM.

The invitation that James received from the BBC to be involved in this program appeared to be very much in this context.