TOG news

Yesterday I had another insight into the confusion on green issues that we all face.

En route to a meeting, I listened to the BBC radio news, with a story about our seabird population.

Not good. Seems they are in a dire state, and this can be traced back to the state of their principal food source, sand eels. And this... is due to global warming.

Oh dear.

Thing is, just 15 minutes later the DJ, Terry Wogan (somewhat of a rebellious spirit to the corporate agenda, like they don't have enough already) read out an email on this story (though without any reference to the news slot just read out) from a listener of unknown professional provenance that the sand eel reductions were nothing to do with climate, but more at the door of Danish fleets 'hoovering them up' (the term used) for animal feed and even, ironically, to be used as an alternative source of fuel.

Now, as a listener, in one quarter of an hour I had two diametrically opposite reasons provided for the fact of sand eel reductions over the airwaves and am currently none the wiser as to which is anything like the accurate one.

Now, I hate to say it, but there has to be a problem that when it comes to read any old press releases by charities that cite 'global warming', the track record of this £3.5B, multi-tens of thousand strong (analysts, researchers, etc) national broadcast entity is a bit suspect, and the net result of all this has been to cast more doubt on anything the BBC comes out with on science issues.

Newsnight