The BBC Complaints Director Colin Tregear has enrolled on the green grooming course run as a six-month sabbatical by the Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN). The course is funded by the Green Blob and aims to make the ‘climate crisis’ a central element in the journalism of the attendees. Tregear is said to have responsibility for climate complaints at the BBC. Quite why the British TV taxpayer should fund this activist boondoggle for a man who is supposed to independently consider matters that often involve disputed areas of science is not immediately clear. In the past, attendees have been asked to consider that fruit such as mangoes aren’t as tasty as a year ago due to climate change. A previous speaker is on record as speculating on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for those expressing scepticism about “well supported” science.
Tregear is joined on the jolly by Maeve Campbell who is a TV climate reporter on Channel 4 in the UK. Her inclusion is less surprising since she is an identikit activist fully up to speed on the need for fear mongering to support the Net Zero fantasy. She should fit in well at the OCJN. Recently, she wrote that all over the world “fertile land is gradually becoming dry, barren and unable to support plants animals or people, as climate change causes temperatures to rise”. At the risk of imprisonment, it might be kind for someone to point out to her that the recent small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide has led to a massive ‘greening’ of the planet, significant de-desertification and record yields of staple crops around the world.
The OCJN is run by the Reuters Institute, which is funded by the Thompson Reuters Foundation. The overall steering committee is chaired by Alan Rusbridger, who in his time as the editor of the Guardian helped turn the newspaper into an hysterical proclaimer of a coming climate apocalypse. Direct funding for the course, which seeks to influence journalists around the globe, has been provided by the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and the Laudes Foundation. The ECF is heavily supported by the Extinction Rebellion funder Sir Christopher Hohn, while Laudes chipped in £1 million in 2024 to support the network’s course activities until 2027.
The Green Blob paymasters are well represented on the OCJN Advisory Board, which is said to be dedicated to “improving the quality and impact of climate change journalism worldwide”. Katy Hartley is the Director of Strategy, Innovation and Narrative and is a member of the Laudes management team. In a previous job, she was part of a “cross-entities team exploring how all the philanthropic entities could respond to climate breakdown”. Other interesting advisers are Leo Hickman, the Editor of Carbon Brief, an activist blog funded by the ECF, and Dr Friederike Otto who runs a Green Blob-funded pseudoscientific weather attribution outfit from Imperial College London. Regular readers will of course recall that Otto was one of the leading instigators in the infamous Alimonti affair, when a group of activists and journalists forced Nature to withdraw a paper that had stated a climate emergency was not supported by the facts – the facts being those provided largely by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Otto claimed the authors “of course” were not writing in good faith. The distinguished science writer Dr Roger Pielke Jr later noted that “shenanigans continue in climate science, with influential scientists teaming with journalists to corrupt peer-review”.
Perish the thought that anything like this will be plotted at the OCJN. But its deliberations and relentless agitprop will hopefully be helpful to Colin Tregear as he faces all those impertinent complaints from the public about the BBC’s biased coverage of climate change. He has good form in shutting down debate. In February 2014, Nigel Lawson, a prominent Conservative minister in the Governments of Margaret Thatcher, told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 that global temperatures had paused over the last decade. Responding to the complainer, Tregear replied: “I hope you will accept my apologies on behalf of the BBC, for the breach of editorial standards you identified”. In fact the pause, although highly inconvenient, was well known at the time and the Met Office even wrote a paper about it titled, The Recent Pause in Global Warming. Within a short period, the BBC moved to close down all sceptical comment on a science that was declared “settled”, a ban that is strictly enforced to this day.
Meanwhile for his ‘mango’ contribution, your correspondent helpfully suggests the following. Use AI to tell you why its taste has declined because of climate change and you will have mainstream media-ready copy within seconds. Try asking it, as I did, for an alternative view that mangoes are now tastier than before and again, before you can say bananas, a plausible article appears. The point of course is that if mainstream media is simply being groomed to write copy within strict pre-set narrative guidelines, what is the point of employing the journalists in the first place? The entire over-staffed climate desk at the BBC could be closed down, and Mr Grok tasked with supplying a never-ending stream of ‘scientists say’ propaganda designed to induce mass climate fear and nudge the general public to accept the controlling Net Zero elitist fantasy.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
Postscript: The BBC Press Office has been in touch to complain this story is inaccurate.
Firstly, the employee that you mention isn’t on a sabbatical. It is a part-time course compromised [sic] of one hour lectures every two or three weeks and is being completed alongside their current role.
The purpose of the course is to help the ECU understand challenges journalists face when reporting on all aspects of climate and enhance its ability to maintain impartial reporting by the BBC in this area.
Secondly, they are a Complaints Advisor (not Director) within the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU).
It should be noted, however, that the OCJN describes its six-month course as “intensive”, which is hard to square with a once a week lecture. In addition, on the course website Tregear is said to be “a complaints director at the BBC specialising in climate change”, so the question of job title is one the BBC Press Office should probably take up with OCJN rather than us.
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