Yesterday I asked of lying liar climate ‘scientist’ Michael Mann: “Does anyone take this guy seriously any more?”

But the question was a purely rhetorical one. I already knew the depressing true answer having just sat, fuming, in my car listening to Mann being given the red carpet treatment on a BBC Radio 4 science programme.

“Oh Professor Doctor Mann, Sir, may it please your eminence to descend from your radiant cloud for a few precious moments and explain to us mere mortals why your amazing and unquestionably brilliant new paper on global warming demonstrates you to be even more right about climate change than you were even in the days when you won your Nobel prize?” fawned and grovelled the BBC’s interviewer from his prostrate position on the studio floor.

Perhaps I exaggerate slightly.

But it would be fair to say that the BBC’s interviewer, Adam Rutherford, sought to leave the listener in no doubt that when it came to climate science the “Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science” Michael Mann was a respected expert of great insight whose opinions one could totally trust.

Mann isn’t though, is he?

Maybe in 2001, when Mann’s Hockey Stick was promoted heavily in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, it would have been legitimate enough for the BBC to quote him as a climate scientist of note.

But that was 16 years ago, since when the Hockey Stock has been discredited to the point where not even the IPCC quotes it in its reports. And where Mann’s reputation has become so tarnished that Mark Steyn was able to compile and edit a 300-page book called A Disgrace To The Profession, consisting largely of distinguished scientists from around the world explaining in lavish detail how utterly flawed, bankrupt and worthless Michael Mann’s climate science was.

“Misleading”; “Just bad science”; “Very erroneous conclusions”; “A crock of shit”; “Excuse me while I puke.”

….just a few of things scientists had to say about Mann and his work.

But as we were reminded yet again on the BBC’s Inside Science programme this week, the BBC continues to treat this tainted and controversial figure with uncritical reverence.

On the programme, his interviewer Adam Rutherford allowed Mann space to give a version of this week’s Congressional hearing on climate science so ludicrously biased towards the alarmist narrative it might have been scripted by Greenpeace.

“We have currently as the chair of the House of Representatives Science Committee an individual – Lamar Smith – whose funding mostly comes from fossil fuel interests who rejects the overwhelming consensus of the world’s scientists that climate change is real and human caused and represents a threat. The hearing was intended to provide cover to Congressional Republicans and the current Trump administration who are trying to cut funding for climate science and who are trying to roll back the policy successes over the last several years in dealing with climate change and dealing with carbon emissions.”

“As the hearing went on every time the topic was about the substance, what the science has to say, my feeling was that the Congressional Republicans realised that they were on the defensive, that they were losing the argument because, after all, they are denying the overwhelming consensus of the world’s scientists. And eventually it got into the gutter where they were trying to discredit me personally and to talk about squabbles between scientists in a sense it was a confirmation that they knew they had lost the actual scientific argument at that hearing.”

“It’s a difficult period right now for anybody who cares about science. We’re about to see an unprecedented event next month here in DC where scientists are going to be marching in the streets….I think it’s a recognition from the typically quite reticent and conservative scientific community that they have to speak out now, that there’s a threat to science and to scientists unlike anything that we have, in my view, faced in the past.”

None of this weapons grade bilge went even slightly challenged by Rutherford, who flagged his own concerns about the Trump administration’s approach to climate science at the beginning of the interview by describing it as “troubling” and “disturbing”. [Says who? Why??]

Let’s not forget, also, that there were three other scientists with at least as much knowledge and experience as Mann who were speaking at the same Congressional hearings, only from a sceptical point of view. Might it not have been useful for the purposes of balance to get at least one of them – John Christy, Judith Curry or Roger Pielke Jr – for the BBC to hear from one of them too?

In theory, this is one of the BBC’s statutory obligations.

According to the terms of its revised Charter 2006:

‘The BBC must do all it can to ensure that controversial subjects are treated with due accuracy and impartiality in all relevant output.’

As Christopher Booker detailed in his thorough report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation The BBC And Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal – the BBC has consistently failed to do this in its woefully one-sided treatment of environmental issues.

Indeed, the BBC hasn’t just failed to remain impartial on the issue; it has actively proselytised on behalf of the climate change scare lobby across a range of programmes from the hysterical reportage of its green-activist-in-chief Roger Harrabin on BBC Radio 4 news, to the doddery laments of its house Malthusian Sir David Attenborough, to the mad-eyed eco-lunacy of Chris Packham, to the rampant global warming alarmism promoted by its entire celebrity science team from Adam Rutherford (see above) to perma-smiley pouty boy physicist Brian Cox and its stupendously-pleased-with-themselves lefty comics Robin Ince and Daragh O’Briaiaiaan.

All this would be absolutely totally fine if the BBC were a private subscription channel whose sole purpose was to reinforce the ill-informed prejudices of the liberal elite.

But it’s not. It’s supposed to be for everyone. Even deplorables like you and me.

In this regard it fails. And always will fail. Scrap the licence fee, I say. That’ll teach it.