07/03/2014
It is no coincidence that, the day after Owen Paterson received the 20-year strategic plan for the Somerset levels, we get
a major blast from the BBC on the
Today programme, seeking to blame "careless farming" for making the floods worse "in Somerset and elsewhere".
In between blaming climate change and just about anything they can think of, except their own actions, the greens have been spraying disinformation into the ether to distract from the real causes, and to protect their funding streams. And, as always, the BBC and sock-puppet Roger Harrabin are willing recruits to the cause.
And it comes as no surprise that Monbiot's dire propaganda is re-cycled, together with some wholly irrelevant work from
Exeter University on water retention in catchment areas, which just happened to be published yesterday, ready for Mr Harrabin's piece.
Unsurprisingly though - as so often proves to be the case -
the work on which Roger Harrabin relies is not exactly unequivocal. Essentially, it was focused on monitoring plant species in bogs on Exmoor, after a limited programme of gully blocking to increase wetness of the area.
Conclusions were confined to suggesting that the programme could "provide ecosystem stability", which was "potentially attributed" to "increased water retention of peat, increasing the hydrological stability of the blanket bog ecosystem, reducing the severity of flood and drought events and increasing favourable conditions for hydrophtic bog species".
Upon this slender basis is Professor Blazier, running the project of behalf of the university, allowed to make completely unsupported claims about the Somerset levels.
The entry of Exeter University into the fray is actually quite significant. The institution is a temple of Europhilia and has siphoned off over â¬44 million in EU funding, between 2007-12, filling its boots with a staggering â¬18.5 million in 2012 alone - much of it on climate change and related activities.
Now the Green/EU agenda is under threat, with people being given the choice by Owen Paterson between dry homes and wet lands, the collective is moving onto the offensive. Every available medium is being harnessed to
pour out the propaganda, all to confuse the issues and ensure that the whole truth does not emerge.
As with the Ukraine, therefore, the one thing you will not get from the state broadcaster is any indication of the role of the European Union. In particular, we are not allowed to know how it contributed to the flooding the Somerset Levels, or how it financed its proxies, the
RSPB and the
WWF, each of them living high on the hog, taking respectively â¬14 and â¬54 million from the EU trough.
Gradually, though, we are assembling the story in
a report of our own, drawn from blogposts here, plus additional material. The story of the uplands mythology, much favoured by Monbiot and now Harrabin, is dealt-with in Appendix 3, with a reference to
the paper, neither want you to see in full, as it does not support their thesis.
This dishonesty in the way "science" is harnessed for propaganda purposes is par for the course, not least hiding research carried out at public expense behind a paywall. And, with the BBC on-side, the greens have a head start. In the final analysis, though, people really do prefer dry homes to wet lands. All we have to do is tell them they have a choice.
