Rupert Murdoch’s Talk rapped for misleading Met Office claims

Kathryn Porter, described as an “independent energy consultant”, was a guest on the unfortunately titled Morning Glory with Mike Graham – the host since sacked by the channel after refusing to assist an inquiry into a racist post which appeared on his social media page – to discuss a BBC report claiming that renewable energy is overtaking coal as the world’s biggest source of electricity.

At the end of the report Graham asked Porter: “And then finally, just one thing that I saw you tweeting about the Met Office pretty much all but admitting that, that they make up some of their weather forecast and they make up some of their temperature data around the country because they’ve closed so many weather stations that they don’t actually have any real way of measuring it.”

This allowed Porter to claim, unchallenged, that “Yes, that’s right” and that “various people have gone round to investigate this and discovered that there are no weather stations nearby, and so they’ve had to remove data because people have basically said ‘you’re making it up’, and they have been.”

Suggested Reading

Talk Plagiarism To Me: BBC pilfers podcast’s name

Rats in a Sack

She went on to claim, in a highly unlikely example, that “there’s one I think in Regents Park or St James’s Park, one of the London parks, where the equipment is surrounded by a concrete wall

and right next to a diesel generator. So, obviously, there’s a huge amount of heat being both created in that little space and contained by this wall and, obviously, that equipment is going to record higher temperatures than it would on the other side of the wall.”

This allowed Graham to conclude: “No, exactly. I mean, that is, that’s pretty much peak net zero though, isn’t it? Just make stuff up and tell you that it’s scientifically collected, tell you that it’s proper data and just hope everybody believes you.”

Alas for Talk, it was one of those rare occasions when somebody was actually watching – and the Met Office complained to Ofcom that not only had it not been sufficiently challenged on the programme, they had not been invited on the show to defend themselves and Porter’s claims were deeply misleading.

Now, seven months on, the ever-rapid watchdog has agreed with their complaint, upholding it.

Its ruling states that “Ofcom’s role in this case is not to determine the accuracy or otherwise of the statements made about the complainant in a programme”, but does make clear that: “We considered that the comments made in the programme were likely to have given viewers an overall negative impression of the complainant’s competence and its data collection practices and had the potential to lead viewers to believe that the Met Office was not a reliable source of information on temperature data. 

Suggested Reading

Another forensic examination by the Daily Express’s Martyn Brown-Nose

Rats in a Sack

“In our view, therefore, the comments made in the programme had the clear potential to materially and adversely affect viewers’ opinions of the complainant in a way that was unfair.”

It appears that Porter’s claims had come from an article which originally appeared on the Daily Sceptic website – run by climate denier and Conservative peer Toby Young – to argue that the Met Office had deleted temperature data following claims that it had been fabricated.

But it is worrying as Porter is said to be an unofficial climate adviser to Claire Coutinho, the shadow energy secretary. Coutinho launched a report by Porter about grid electrification, Electrification – can the grid cope?,  in January this year, writing in an X thread that it proved why Ed Miliband’s energy plan risked leading to blackouts. 

Porter stated last month that the numbers in Coutinho’s policy plan “actually add up”, with Coutinho in turn offering her further praise in a follow-up post. Porter has also written multiple papers for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s main climate science denial group.

Questions for Murdoch’s little-watched web channel, then – but arguably even more for the Conservatives.