12 October 2007

 The BBC is making a real hash of the Al Gore story. Today on Radio Four’s flagship lunch-time news programme, it invited Martin Livermore from the Scientific Alliance, to give an interview on Gore winning the Nobel Prize.

As we have blogged on the site, the Scientific Alliance was set up by Scottish quarryman Robert Durward in 2001 to fight environmental regulations and take the sceptical line on climate change.

It was one of the first “corporate front groups” to be set up in the UK. It has consistently tried to undermine climate science and networked with Exxon-funded groups in the US and UK.

However rather than saying the Alliance undermines the debate on climate science, the BBC’s presenter Shaun Ley described the Alliance as “campaigning to improve the quality of debate about science”.

Asked about the Nobel award to Gore, Martin Livermore the Alliance's ex-Dupont front man said that it was “not healthy” to give awards to “fashionable causes”. He also warned Gore’s award would “close down the scientific debate”.

When asked about the recent legal case against Gore’s film in the UK, which had been objected to by “a parent”, Livermore said the Judge who had criticised Gore had made a “sensible decision” on a “political film” that represented “just one point of view”. What the BBC failed to do again is actually tell the listener what was going on here.

To an uninformed listener it seems that the Scientific Alliance and legal action “by the parent” are completely separate. The problem is they are not. They are funded by the same person: Robert Durward, a Scottish Quarryman and chair of the New Party – which his political opponents have described as fascist.

The so-called parent is Stewart Dimmock, who is a member of the New Party, a failed New Party councillor, and who has admitted being backed by the New Party in taking the legal action.