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Climate change is not beyond questioning

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7591/

A BBC News journalist's willingness to report more than climate orthodoxy should be
encouraged not condemned.


A news feature written by a regional BBC reporter has turned out to be a surprising hit on
the
corporation's online news site. In 'What happened to global warming?' (1), Paul Hudson,
weather
presenter and climate correspondent for the BBC's Look North in Yorkshire and
Lincolnshire, asked
why the rise in global temperatures seems to have levelled off since the last
record-breaking year
of 1998. In doing so, he sent the BBC's visitor statistics soaring.

Following its publication on 9 October, Hudson's article was the most popular page on the
BBC's
science pages for the next week. Climate-sceptical columnists and bloggers praised the BBC
for
taking seriously an issue that they have been flagging up for a while. The Telegraph's
Damian
Thompson hailed it as 'a clear departure from the BBC's fanatical espousal of climate
change
orthodoxy' (2). Everyone else, it seems, from the Guardian to Nature, are furious for the
same
reason: because the BBC is taking seriously an issue that sceptics have been flagging up
for a
while. Joseph Romm, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, called it an
'utterly
backwards piece of nonsense' (3). Such was the volume of outrage that Hudson's senior
colleague,
Richard Black, has been motivated to write a rare defence of BBC editorial policy (4).

Some of the criticisms of the article - such as Nature's complaint that he was
over-reliant on
unpublished research findings (5) - might well be justified. But one wonders where was
Nature at
the start of the year when the BBC reported insurance company Munich Re's unpublished -
and highly
contentious - research that claimed to show that climate change was causing an increase in
the
severity of natural disasters. This article of the BBC's was lifted almost verbatim from
Munich
Re's
press release, issued before the research had even been made available for scrutiny (6).

Likewise, where was the scramble to complain about a host of other erroneous and
unjustifiably
alarmist BBC stories about climate change? Here's a small selection of the howlers from
this year
alone: an account of how climate change is driving craneflies and golden plovers to
extinction,
based on a single study (on a single, tiny population at the edge of the species range),
which had
itself recorded no decline in the numbers of either species; a story linking this summer's
fires in
Nepal to climate change based on conversations with concerned conservationists; a report
that
sought the opinions of green NGOs - and not a single scientist - in order to claim that
'scientists
say' government CO2 emissions targets 'do not go far enough' (7).

Hudson might have made some errors, but unlike the authors of these BBC stories, he has
not
constructed his story out of nothing. The question of whether this century is experiencing
a freeze
on global temperatures - and, if it is, what that might mean - is one ripe for debate, and
has no
simple answer. Hudson is certainly not the first journalist to ask it. Last year, Reuters
ran two
stories on the subject, one with an almost identical headline to the BBC's (8), and
another which
quoted no less than Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change
(IPCC), as saying that the apparent temperature plateau deserved further investigation
(9).

Some further investigations have now been conducted. An analysis by the UK Met Office of
its own
HadCRUT3 dataset, published in August in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological
Society, found
that even during the period 1999-2008 (which therefore excludes the 1998 high-point - yes,
proper
Met scientists cherry-pick, too), the world warmed at only 0.07 degrees Celsius per decade
compared
to the 0.18 degrees Celsius per decade recorded between 1979 and 2005 (10).

The size of the effect depends on what dataset you use, however, as well as the precise
years you
choose to start and end with. The effect is less pronounced in NASA's GISTEMP dataset, for
example,
which also differs from HadCRUT3 in that it identifies 2005, not 1998, to be the warmest
year on
record. The authors of the influential Real Climate blog, who are eminent and high-profile
climate
scientists (although not, as many would assume, spokespeople for climate science), have
conducted
an analysis - albeit unpublished - which, they argue, accounts for the different pictures
painted
by HadCRUT3 and GISTEMP, and which they say means the latter should be seen as the more
accurate
dataset (11).



In another study, in the April issue of Geophysical Research Letters, researchers fitted a
linear
trend line to a third dataset and found 'no real trend' for the period 1998-2008. But the
same was
true for the periods 1977-85 and 1981-89, even though, across the longer timescale of
1975-2008,
there was 'substantial overall warming' (12).

All of which suggests that, while there is evidence to support the claim that global
temperature
rise has at least slowed over the last decade or so, 10 years is not long enough for that
to be
particularly significant in the wider scheme of things. The authors of the latter paper,
as well as
the Met Office, Real Climate and others, have gone to great lengths to emphasise that it
is the
underlying long-term trend that is important, not decade-long fluctuations.

That might be so. But if scientists are concerned that there is too much focus on the
short-term
deviations from temperature trends, they might want to ponder why that is. Because, in
their
attempts to engage the press and public about climate change, and generate a sense of
urgency over
the issue, climate scientists and their research institutions are themselves guilty of
turning the
latest twists and turns of the lines on climatological graphs into the subjects of a
rolling news
service.

Their press releases generate countless news stories about what records will be, are
being, or have
been broken this/last/next year/month/week. Every January since 2001, for example, the Met
Office
has issued a forecast of the global surface temperature for the coming year. In 2007, it
press-released its latest 'startling forecast', predicting that '2007 is likely to be the
warmest
year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998'. It soon became clear
that the Met
Office had got it startlingly wrong. But by the time it was writing its end-of-year news
release,
entitled 'A year to remember', the one thing the Met Office failed to remember was that
start-of-year forecast, concentrating instead on the merits of their brand-new 10-year
forecast
(13).

Summer Arctic ice-melt is another storyline that research institutions - in this case, the
US
National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration
(NOAA) - choose to present in real-time, issuing a press release seemingly for each new
data point
they gather. Hence the Observer's news story announcing that 'Ice at the North Pole melted
at an
unprecedented rate last week' (14).

But even a week is a long time in the politics of climate-change awareness-raising. NSIDC
maintains
the tension by issuing daily pictorial updates on the progress of summer ice melt for our
viewing
pleasure.

Given that these institutions reject their own advice to concentrate on the long-term
picture, they
should not be surprised if others with less orthodox standpoints and objectives do the
same.

But then, it's hard to see what might prompt them to heed their own words. Because without
the
sense of urgency generated by the perpetual live feed of news fodder, climate science
stands to
lose more than its viewing public and media allies. It also risks losing its political
utility. The
unfolding, present-tense narrative of lines on charts fuels the commentary about the
conflict
between the ill-intentioned sceptics and 'deniers', and the honest scientists, seeking to
destroy
or save the world respectively.

Meanwhile, time will tell if the BBC is brave enough to run any more articles that risk
angering
the climate change orthodoxy, but that would be one step in a positive direction.
Controversial
stories like Hudson's that take unorthodox lines should be welcomed. Scrutinised, yes, but
not
vilified. Mainstream writers on the subject should be relaxed about them - after all, it's
not as
if they're going to end up proving the theory of man-made global warming wrong or
anything, is it?
As the sceptics' argument that global warming has stopped - whether it's right or wrong -
has
shown, a few more unorthodox opinions might even benefit climate science itself by
stimulating some
productive lines of research.

Stuart Blackman is a freelance science writer and an editor of the Climate-Resistance
blog.

[footnotes at source]

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