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In my post to this blog yesterday, I discussed several articles published in Saturday’s edition of the Times Newspaper. There must have been some mix-up at the recycling plant, I thought – The Times appears to be regurgitating Guardian editorial policy onto its own leader.
Five years ago researchers on the island of Flores in Indonesia found bones of a miniature human species, the Homo floresiensis. The hobbit, as it came to be known, had such a tiny brain for its period that scientists dared to cast doubt on the veracity of the theory of evolution. The paleoanthropological community was aghast. But, after more digging, the theory of evolution survived the hobbit and the paleoanthropological community recovered its equipoise.
The editorial team at The Times are certainly an authority on humanoids with tiny brains. But what has this got to do with climate change?
On the subject of climate change, there appears to be plenty of people who have discovered a hobbit. The poll in The Times today reveals that only 41 per cent of respondents believe that climate change is happening and that human causation is an established fact. A third of the public believes in the fact of climate change but remains unpersuaded that it is the work of human hands. Nearly one in ten people believes that climate change is a purely natural phenomenon and blaming humans is propaganda put about by environmentalists. Fifteen per cent of the country simply do not accept that climate change is happening at all.
The implication here is that to dare to be unconvinced by the cascade of nonsense that emerges from politicians and environmental activists is equivalent to the ‘denial’ of the theory of evolution. The logic is that, since we know that the public haven’t found an equivalent to a ‘hobbit’ to challenge climate change hypothesis, they are wrong. In fact, the implication is that they are stubborn and stupid.
Let’s be clear about what this bullshit is. It is pure propaganda. The Times is doing government PR work here. It is hiring out its reputation as a respected source of comment and analysis for some kind of promise. This much is obvious, because the standards of this leader comment are so very low. And the timing of this article is no accident: the government is on a massive propaganda effort because of the immanent Copenhagen conference. It wants to persuade people of the urgency of their policies, yet they know that they are deeply, deeply unpopular. They have given up on normal reasoning, and have resorted to cruder, and cruder tactics to blackmail the public into submission.
Take this advert from the government, for instance.
It is no surprise that when you feed the public rubbish like this, they respond by sticking two fingers up at it. They aren’t quite as stupid as the government and the Times think they are. The Times doesn’t think there’s a ‘hobbit’ in the climate change hypothesis. Well, that video is just one of many hobbits that escape from Westminster and Brussels.
Even if you believe that ‘climate change is real’, as the government wants you to, it remains undeniably the case that it has been exaggerated. And it is undeniably the case that the exaggeration of climate change has been used to argue for policies. This exaggeration was in fact the subject of a Times article less than a month ago.
Exaggerated and inaccurate claims about the threat from global warming risk undermining efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and contain climate change, senior scientists have told The Times.
Environmental lobbyists, politicians, researchers and journalists who distort climate science to support an agenda erode public understanding and play into the hands of sceptics, according to experts including a former government chief scientist.
Well, well, well. How quickly The Times changed its tune, eh? It even cites former Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir David King,
“When people overstate happenings that aren’t necessarily climate change-related, or set up as almost certainties things that are difficult to establish scientifically, it distracts from the science we do understand. The danger is they can be accused of scaremongering. Also, we can all become described as kind of left-wing greens.”
But how quickly Sir David changes his tune, too. Back in 2004, in an article in the Independent, King is quoted,
Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the Government's chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, said last week.
He said the Earth was entering the "first hot period" for 60 million years, when there was no ice on the planet and "the rest of the globe could not sustain human life". The warning - one of the starkest delivered by a top scientist - comes as ministers decide next week whether to weaken measures to cut the pollution that causes climate change, even though Tony Blair last week described the situation as "very, very critical indeed".
It is only because the great and the good have only now realised that their exaggerated claims have failed to convince the public that some of them are now back-peddling. Back in 2004, it was the norm. The government have not yet realised this, of course.
So when The Times tells you that the public are stupid, remember that the public are in fact in good company, with the likes of the one-time climate-change-alarmist, Sir David King saying much the same thing as them.
The Times goes on to correctly say that “There has clearly been a serious failure of political communication...” Too right. But it’s not because the message being communicated is bad, according to them, but that there’s something wrong with those the message was intended for. They seem to think that all that is necessary is to bark some ‘facts’ at the public, and they will sit! roll-over! and play dead!
the [Fifteen per cent who do not accept that climate change is happening at all] at least should be easy to convince. The decade from 1998 to 2007 is the warmest on record. Of the top ten warmest years in this country, eight have happened since 1997.
That is a half truth.
The most recent decade may well be ‘warmer’ than the previous. But the 1990s warmed much more. There has been virtually no warming since 2000. And as we can see, there has been cooling since 1998. So what the Times thinks is a ‘convincing argument’ that will persuade 15% of us, is in fact a half truth – there has been no global warming since 1998.
Then there is that little claim that “Of the top ten warmest years in this country, eight have happened since 1997”. What has the UK’s temperature record got to do with global warming, I wonder? Here is the graph produced by the Met Office, showing average annual UK temperatures.
It certainly looks conclusive, with the hot years all bunched up at the end. But on the other hand, look at all the cold years bunched around the 1800s – it was ‘unusually’ cold to a greater degree than it is now ‘unusually’ warm, and we know that the ‘little ice age’ accounts for the low temperatures of the 1800s, and that most of the warming since then represents a recovery from this natural cycle.
Also, notice that the recent summers are just 1 degree warmer than the average. That’s not the difference between a gentle spring day and a devastating drought. If climate change is supposed to be catastrophic, it will take more than a single degree to wipe out life on earth. It is hard even to imagine how the mythical 2 degrees will be catastrophic – it is barely even sufficient to make the difference between needing and not needing to wear a jumper outside. Clearly, the UK has survived a two degree warming – most, if not all, of it natural – between 1880 and 2000 without any problem at all... In fact life is arguably much more pleasant now.
The Times leader continues...
If the concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols stabilised at the levels found at the turn of the century, we would still expect global temperatures to reach 1.4C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.
Why would sceptics find the Times editorial teams’ expectations of future climate at all convincing? They continue...
The sea is rising at an accelerated rate.
I live in the country... I know bullshit when I smell it.
Here is a graph from the University of Colorado, showing sea-level since 1992.
It shows that in fact sea level rise has been decelerating since 2002. The solid black line that runs across the diagonal of the graph demonstrates a trend that is roughly constant. It fits the signal behind it. That means sea level is not accelerating. If sea-level rise was accelerating, there would be an upward curve in the signal, but as we can see, there is only a slight bend the other way.
Some might say that that graph isn’t long enough to get a big enough picture.
Here we can see that sea levels have been rising for far longer than can be attributed to climate change.
In this next graph, we can see that, funnily enough, sea-levels have been rising for 20,000 years.
The sea was 140,000mm lower than today, 20,000 years ago. That’s an average of 7mm a year. But most of that happened between 8,000 and 14,000 years ago, at an average rate of about 14mm a year. Even the relatively flat period spanning the last 8,000 years fluctuates, as the planet has experienced warming and cooling episodes, such as the little ice age, and medieval warm period, as has been discussed here before. There is nothing unnatural, unusual, rapid, or dangerous about the current rate of seal level rise.
More hot air from The Times:
In some parts of the world there have been statistically significant increases in precipitation and rainfall and Asia and Africa have seen an increased frequency and intensity of droughts. Mountain glaciers in non-polar regions have retreated significantly.
The Times neglects to tell us who thinks the “increases in precipitation and rainfall” ( which are the same thing) are significant, and how significant they think it is. It means nothing to say that something is ‘statistically significant’, other than that there appears to be a trend. But it would be a surprise to find out that there were no trends anywhere in the world. Climate changes. It always has. There was a medieval warm period. Then there was a ‘little ice age’. These two entirely natural events demonstrate “statistically significant” changes in climate. It is one thing to say that there is a change in climate. It is another thing to say that it is caused by humans. “Some parts of the world” might mean somewhere as small as York. On the other hand, we know that large areas in Africa are very changeable.
Glaciers have become the environmentalists ‘canary in the coal mine’. But climate change can’t explain glacial retreat. Here is a graph from the IPCC.
As we can see, glacial retreat began well before modern climate change came along. The figure on the left, for example, shows glaciers on Mt. Kilimanjaro melting much faster than in recent years, way back in the mid-late 1800s – the era following the end of the Little Ice Age. It is wrong, therefore, to say as The Times have, that the retreat of mountain glaciers ought to ‘prove’ climate change to the 15% of us climate change
More hot air from The Times,
Sophisticated critics, of course, do not deny any of this. They argue that change is constant in the natural world, not that it has miraculously ceased. They deny not climate change but human causation, suggesting instead that global warming is due, variously, to the Sun, volcanoes and el Niño. Fifty-nine per cent of the respondents to this newspaper’s poll do not, for one reason or another, believe that human action is responsible for climate change.
Well, aren’t we the stupid ones!
There are the facts and the figures and lines on graphs above the Times leader’s own words. You can see for yourself that climate change – sea level, glacial retreat, changes in UK average temperature, global temperature, and precipitation – cannot be easily explained as our fault. Every simple story that the Times has tried to tell you is a lot more complex than they say. Some of what they say – the story about sea levels, for instance – is an outright lie. You can see for yourself that it is a lie.
More hot air from The Times,
Again, the failure of political communication is very stark. None of the main parties has yet succeeded in making this issue its own. Yet the case is overwhelming.
Overwhelming? Did they really just say ‘overwhelming’? If the case they have presented so far – some half-baked half-truths, an outright lie, some more half truths – is ‘overwhelming’ then it is only overwhelmingly underwhelming.
The case continues...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was written by 152 scientists from more than 30 countries and reviewed by more than 600 experts.
What? How do scientists ‘write’ a panel? This is the Times newspaper, ladies and gentlemen. This is the leader comment in The Times newspaper. This is the British institution that has, for generations, been regarded throughout the world for its excellence.
Yet it knows not what it is speaking about. It scolds the British public for their stupidity, but in the process reveals that it has to lie, and speak half-truths to make its case, and then it reveals that it doesn’t even know what the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is or does.
The IPCC is no more ‘written’ by scientists than the House of Commons is ‘written’ by Members of Parliament.
And only 152 scientists?
Last Sunday, I wrote about Australia’s PM, Kevin Rudd, who thinks there are 4,000 IPCC scientists. He was wrong.
Last month, I wrote about the cretin, John Prescott, who believed that “the UN has a thousand scientists meeting every year in the IPCC committee and their reporting from when I was at Kyoto it’s got far worse, there’s no doubt about it.” He was wrong.
It seems that nobody knows what the IPCC does. They make up whatever statistic or fact they think will make their case, and attribute it to so many scientists.
The IPCC ddoesn’t make it hard for world leaders and editors of major newspapers to know what they do. They released this flyer just before their last report.
The Times continues.
It concluded that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is due to the observed increase in man-made greenhouse gas concentration. Concentrations of CO2 have increased by more than 35 per cent since industrialisation began, and they are now at their highest for at least 800,000 years. Natural factors alone cannot, on any but the most extraordinary assumptions, get anywhere close to the temperature rises that have been witnessed. Hardly any serious scientists dispute this any longer.
What the IPCC say, in fact, is this
Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations. It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent (except Antarctica).
What the IPCC do not conclude, as The Times claims, is that a 0.6 degree rise in temperature can only be attributed to natural causes by making ‘extraordinary assumptions’. That is just the opinion of The Times. And the IPCC do not say that ‘Hardly any serious scientists dispute this’. That is just the opinion of The Times, too. Like Prescott, and Rudd, The Times seems to believe it can say what it wants about the IPCC. It continues,
It is possible that the collective expertise of brilliant scientists could be wrong.
There is no such thing as “the collective expertise of brilliant scientists”, if by this expression, The Times means the IPCC. As I explained to Prescott, when he laboured under the misapprehension that “the UN has a thousand scientists meeting every year in the IPCC committee”,
The IPCC is divided into three working groups. The first group looks at the physical science of climate change – models, atmospheric physics, climatology, the behaviour of glaciers, that sort of thing. Working Group Two (WGII), looks at how vulnerable society is to climate change, and what the consequences might be. The third group (WGIII) looks at how we might limit or mitigate climate change. These groups work largely independently.
Each working group produce their part of the report by dividing its contributing authors into groups, each working on a chapter, headed by one or more lead author. (...) The authors from chapter one don’t necessarily ever meet or talk to the reviewers from chapter two. And the authors from WGI don’t necessarily ever meet the authors from WGII or WGIII. The reviewers of each chapter may have said nothing at all. An author of chapter 1 of WGI, might disagree completely with what is written in chapter 4 of WGII. And many – if not most - of the contributing authors to the IPCC are not climate scientists at all. They are also economists, social scientists, psychologists, medical researchers, geographers, insurance industry experts, and political activists.
The Times, like Prescott are ignorant of the IPCC’s purpose and functioning. The IPCC does not do research. It does not do science. It consists of government-appointed scientists and experts to review existing research for political ends. Those ends are to inform politicians on the best way to ‘save the planet’, if you believe the hype. And if you don’t believe the hype, those ends are to generate hype for politicians (and newspapers) to suit their agendas. Nonetheless, The Times carries on.
The best minds in the world once held a geocentric theory of the solar system. Before the discovery of sub-atomic particles they believed that everything was made of earth, air, fire and water. Right up to the 19th century, serious scientists wrote recipe books for making animals. But no previous process of scientific trial, error and progress has ever overturned such a well-attested thesis.
There is a difference between scientists making progress independently and autonomously, as is the case with these examples, and on the other hand gathering experts together to generate a consensus.
Imagine, if you will, that before the discovery of sub-atomic particles, the governments of the world gathered selected experts in order to produce a consensus on what matter consisted of. The mere fact of these experts being brought together would not make the idea that everything consists of earth, air, fire, or water any more true. So many scientists being forced to arrive at a consensus about how to make animals from recipes would not make it any more possible or true. That is all that the IPCC is. They have not formulated a hypothesis at all, let alone “a well-attested thesis”.
These mistakes are no mere typos. They are the fruit of stupidity and arrogance. Either on its own is forgivable. But together they are poison. The Times leader finishes,
Lord Rees has reminded us that we now live in a global village and it is, he pointed out, probably inevitable that there will be some global village idiots.
The Times misrepresents the IPCC. It misrepresents the science. And it misrepresents sceptics or ‘deniers’. It lies, distorts, and tells half-truths. It claims that more than half the population are idiots, and that those who disagree are not in possession of the facts.
The Times has proven itself to be a dishonest source of facts. Do not take what you hear in the climate debate at face value. Not from the IPCC, not from the government, not from The Times, and, not from me... You can check for yourself that barely a single claim that The times makes in its leader column is true. Trusted and respected institutions like The Times newspaper (never mind the government) can no longer be relied on. This ridiculous leader comment demonstrates that it is more interested in some agenda or other than in reporting facts. It has hitched itself on to the green bandwagon, most likely in order to score some favour from the government in return for disseminating its environmental propaganda.
Thank god the British public have sufficient sense to see this nonsense for what it is.
