Russell Cook: The BBC Buries a False 2020 Climate Issue Report Title

Chris Morrison’s July 2 blog post at The Daily Sceptic, “BBC Complaints Director Takes Six-Month Sabbatical to Learn How to Promote ‘Climate Crisis’,” was reproduced at Anthony Watts’ WUWT site as a guest post the next day. After reading it at WUWT, I simply wanted to put in a comment reply saying I’d had my own encounter with that BBC Complaints Director, Colin Tregear, back in 2021, after I filed a complaint about BBC’s Radio 4 broadcast titled, “‘Reposition Global Warming as theory, not fact.” My BBC complaint detailed how there was no truth to the claim that this draft memo directive was evidence of the fossil fuel industry operating disinformation campaigns. So for my July 3 WUWT comment, I wanted to link straight to the BBC’s page with that false accusation phrase as its title of the broadcast episode within their series of “How They Made Us Doubt Everything” reports, and then mention how BBC concluded that my complaint was meritless . . . . but that title wasn’t there at the BBC’s otherwise unchanged program page.

It’s possible – just potentially possible – that as the result of my complaint, I managed to live rent-free long enough in someone’s mind at the BBC that they ultimately felt compelled to bury their fatal mistake of failing to check the veracity of the accusations supplied to them (plural!) by their guest in that episode, ex-Greenpeace Research Director Kert Davies.

The backstory here is a bit long, over the span of eight of my GelbspanFiles blog posts:

1) 7/31/2020, “BBC Radio 4 vs Rush Limbaugh: ‘How They Made Us Doubt Everything’ Episode 6 ‘Reposition Global Warming as theory, not fact’” — where I laid out the fatal faults with the accusations (plural) in the BBC podcast report about ‘leaked memos’ supposedly proving the fossil fuel industry deceiving the public by employing skeptic climate scientists ‘shills’ who spread disinformation.
2) 8/5/20, “BBC Radio 4 vs Rush Limbaugh, Pt 2: ‘I don’t remember this stupid ad.’” — the late radio show host reacts to the BBC podcast report and a particular false line in it concerning him.
3) 10/6/20, “BBC ( sort of … ) Corrects Radio 4…” — the BBC’s correction explained nothing while making one error bigger and inadvertently admitting that their Radio4 report guest – Kert Davies – had a bit of a credibility problem.
4) 7/9/2021, “Status Update: my complaint to BBC … ” — in which the senior editorial staff at Radio 4 basically only dug a deeper hole for themselves, via what is described as the Stage 1 part of the BBC Complaints system.
5) 8/18/21, “BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit Responds” — BBC Complaints Director Colin Tregear’s lengthy direct reply to me, “therefore do not believe there are grounds to uphold this aspect of your complaint. There is no further right of appeal against this decision within the BBC’s complaints process but if you do wish to take the matter further, it is open to you to ask the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom…”
6) 8/24/21, “I Appeal for a Reconsideration of BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit ‘Final Decision’” — after I jumped through several hoops just to get the appeal into the BBC system.
7) 9/17/21, “BBC Executive Complaints Unit’s Response to my Appeal for a Reconsideration of their ‘Final Decision’” — BBC Complaints Director Tregear replies twice to tell me to take my complaint one step higher to the British agency overseeing broadcasts, Ofcom
8) 11/8/21, “Ofcom Complaint” — in which I succinctly explain how a rejected, never-used document cannot serve as evidence of actions operating in the directives of the document.

Emphasis on the date of my last blog post in that series. That was the end of the line. No response from anyone at Ofcom, no indication anywhere that I could find that any action was taken to correct the situation or to admit fault. If any action had been taken, nobody told me about it.

Did the industry pay scientist shills to deceive the public? If so, prove it, but the “reposition global warming” memos are inadmissible as evidence, as are the never-implemented “victory will be achieved” memos, the two pillars that BBC report was built on. At GelbspanFiles, I have detailed how both memo sets were never implemented anywhere.

The huge problem now for the BBC is this:

See what happened there? The specific name on the page for this episode was “How They Made Us Doubt Everything Episode 6 ‘Reposition Global Warming as theory, not fact’,” and now it is “The Tobacco Playbook: 6. From Fact to Theory” — tantamount to an admission by BBC to the world that there was something dicey with the original title. That problem was precisely what I detailed repeatedly in my complaint submissions to the BBC.

Why does it look like the BBC seemingly admitted to fault with their report? Using the Internet Archive crawl scans of that page, nothing in the text changed in that page from its start in mid-2020 until a point between 7/14/22 and 6/14/24, where the number count of the episodes updated from “6 of 10” to “6 of 17.” However, between 6/14/24 and when I myself prompted the Internet Archive crawl of the page on July 3, 2025, the number count changed from “6 of 17” to “13 of 17” . . . . along with the massively self-damaging rewording of the title.

Point being, that title change happened minimally 2½ years after my complaint to BBC was deemed by BBC’s Colin Tregear to have ‘no grounds to uphold this aspect of [my] complaint” about the “reposition global warming” memos being literally worthless to serve as evidence proving industry disinformation campaigns happened.

I never received a solitary word from the Ofcom organization. Would they have decided to overturn Tregear’s decision and upheld my complaint 2½ years later? I very much doubt that.

If BBC Complaints Director Colin Tregear needs to take a 6 month sabbatical to learn anything, it is what the reality of the climate issue actually is, on its science and its false accusations against skeptic climate scientists.

The “reposition global warming” memos has been the mainstay since Day 1 — on through Ross Gelbspan’s book and Al Gore’s movie and the U.S. “ExxonKnew” lawsuits and weeks-old U.S. Senate testimony — for the accusation about the fossil fuel industry employing shill experts to undercut the ‘science consensus’ of man-caused global warming.

The BBC made the cracks in that accusation grow bigger. When that whole accusation falls apart, the cracks in the whole climate issue get exponentially bigger. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; we may end up seeing one of the biggest collapses of a political ideology in history if the whole thing falls apart.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/07/24/russell-cook-the-bbc-buries-a-false-2020-climate-issue-report-title/