5 April 2008
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/scarewatch/bbc_scarewatch_temps_down_temps_up.html
The scare:
The BBC published an article by its "environment analyst", commenting on
an announcement by the World Meteorological Organization that 2008 was
likely to be the tenth successive year in which global temperatures had
not risen. The BBC's story stressed that the stasis in global
temperatures was only tem****ary and that anthropogenic "global warming"
would inexorably resume.
The truth:
The BBC opens its story with the words "Global temperatures will drop
slightly this year ." However, the BBC somehow fails to mention that,
according to the UK's Hadley Centre for Forecasting and the Climate
Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, global temperatures have
already been falling for more than six years, and that the downtrend,
far from being slight, is equivalent to 0.4 degrees Kelvin (almost 1
degree F) per decade:
The downtrend that the BBC somehow failed to mention: Since late 2001,
the trend of global surface temperatures has been firmly downward.
"Global warming" stopped in 1998; and, though it may resume in future
years, the rate of warming is self-evidently less than official
forecasts had shown, and is very likely to be harmless.
Next, the BBC uses a favorite tactic, citing unnamed "experts" as a way
of falsely giving apparent legitimacy to what are in fact its own biased
opinions. It says, "Experts say we are clearly in a long-term warming
trend." So we are. Since the end of the Maunder Minimum in 1700, global
temperatures have recovered from the Little Ice Age at a near-linear
rate of 0.5 degrees K (almost 1 F) per century (Akasofu, 2008).
In the 20th century, an additional 0.2 degrees K of warming occurred,
over and above the long-term recovery from the Little Ice Age. However,
part of this very small addition to the long-established warming rate
probably arises from the 70-year Solar Grand Maximum that peaked in the
early 1960s and now appears to have ended. Also the direct output of
heat by human activities and machines has contributed. It is by no means
certain that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide either has had or
could possibly have had more than a very small influence on global
temperatures.
The BBC, as usual, fails to point out that temperatures in the Arctic
were warmer in the 1940s than they are today; that the Greenland ice
sheet actually thickened by 5 cm (2 inches) per year in the decade
1993-2003 (Johannesen et al., 2005); that most of the Antarctic
continent has been cooling for half a century (Doran et al., 2002); that
there has been no increase in ocean temperatures in recent years (Lyman
et al., 2006); that global temperatures were warmer than today in the
Mediaeval Warm Period (McIntyre & McKitrick, 2005), in the Roman Warm
Period; and, for at least 2000 years, in the Bronze Age Holocene Climate
Optimum.
The BBC's story also fails to mention that global surface temperatures,
as inferred from oxygen isotope ratios in ice-core samples from
Antarctica, were at least 5 degrees Celsius (9 F) warmer than today's in
each of the four previous interglacial periods (Petit et al., 1999,
etc.).
The BBC goes on to say that the unidentified "experts" predict a new
record high temperature within the next five years. However, it somehow
fails to point out that not one of the computer models relied upon by
the IPCC predicted ten years ago that global temperatures would be lower
in 2008 than they were in 1998.
Next, the BBC deploys another favorite tactic: it quotes the World
Meteorological Organization as saying that "the decade from 1998 to 2007
was the warmest on record." The WMO did not in fact say anything of the
kind. The phrase "warmest on record", not uttered by the WMO, is
deliberately chosen by the BBC because it sounds far more drastic than
the truth, which the BBC somehow fails to mention, that the "record"
extends back only as far as 1880. Also, the BBC somehow omits to note
that the January-to-January fall in global mean surface temperatures
between 2007 and 2008 was the largest since records were first kept in
1880 - or, in the BBC's loaded language, the largest "on record".
The BBC also somehow fails to point out that, given that global mean
surface temperatures have been rising at a near-linear centennial rate
for the past three centuries, the fact that the most recent decade is
the warmest "on record" is not in the least surprising: and it certainly
provides no basis for the implicit assumption that the warming which
stopped in 1998 is principally (or at all) attributable to anthropogenic
"global warming".
Next, the BBC says that unnamed "researchers" say that the long-term
temperature trend will be upward. However, it is possible that the rapid
slowing of the solar sub-surface magnetic convection currents presages a
long-term solar cooling. If so, on the evidence of the Maunder Minimum,
when there were no sunspots for 60 years, the small warming effect of
additional anthropogenic carbon dioxide will at least be mitigated and
potentially altogether eliminated by the cooling Sun and the cooling
oceans.
Then the BBC says, "Temperatures have not risen globally since 1998 when
El Nino warmed the world." The BBC somehow fails to say that there have
been two El Ninos since 1998, leaving its audience with the impression
that the only reason for the fall in global temperatures in recent years
was the magnitude of the 1998 El Nino event.
The BBC moves on to another questionable tactic: the unverified
headcount. It says: "A minority of scientists question whether this
means global warming has peaked and argue the Earth has proved more
resilient to greenhouse gases than predicted." The BBC offers no
evidence that it is "a minority of scientists" who question whether
'global warming' has peaked.
It was this very tactic that the BBC's "Head of Newsgathering", Fran
Unsworth, deployed when making her public announcement - at a conference
of news organizations in Amsterdam in November, 2006 - that the BBC
would not in future provide balanced coverage of the climate scare. Here
is what she said:
"Once we'd got one person setting the case for man-made global warming,
and somebody opposing it, the viewer is probably left with the
impression that there's equal weight to these arguments. And I think
that we have now moved on in our coverage of it. There is now a
dwindling band of scientists who don't accept that there is man-made
global warming."
And what expertise does Fran Unsworth have in evaluating how many
"scientists" accept or do not accept that there is man-made "global
warming"? How many scientific papers has she read? Has she ever read a
scientific paper on climate from a peer-reviewed, learned journal? Would
she have understood it if she had? We are entitled to ask all these
questions, because Fran has adopted the BBC's traditional tactic of not
providing any evidence whatsoever for her proposition, which she merely
recites, mantra-like, as though it were an article of blind, religious
faith.
Besides, the question is not so much whether there is what Fran
describes as "man-made global warming", as how much of the warming that
began in 1700 and ended in 1998 was attributable to human activities,
including greenhouse-gas enrichment of the atmosphere. On that question
there is not and has never been a scientific consensus: indeed, the IPCC's
calculations of climate sensitivity in each successive quinquennial
*****sment re****t are mutually incompatible and contradictory in several
fundamental respects.
Next, the BBC quotes a Mr. Jarraud of the WMO as saying, "When you look
at climate change you should not look at any particular year. You should
look at trends over a pretty long period and the trend of temperature
globally is still very much indicative of warming. La Nina is part of
what we call 'variability'. There has always been and there will always
be cooler and warmer years, but what is im****tant for climate change is
that the trend is up; the climate on average is warming even if there is
a tem****ary cooling because of La Nina."
The graph from the Hadley Centre does not demonstrate that "the trend is
up or that "the climate on average is warming", or that there is nothing
more than "a tem****ary cooling because of la Nina." A diligent
journalist would have looked at this graph before interviewing Mr.
Jarraud, and would have asked him to explain it further in the light of
the very clear evidence to the contrary. The BBC, of course, asked no
such questions: Mr. Jarraud was saying what they wanted to hear.
Mr. Jarraud, on being shown the Hadley Centre's graph, might have
replied that the period covered by the graph is too short. And that is
why we have gone back 300 years, noticing that the uptrend began in 1700
for well-understood and entirely natural reasons, and continued until
1998. Of course, it is possible that the up-trend will resume in the
coming years: increased carbon dioxide concentrations do cause some
warming. However, the fact that the warming began 300 years ago, long
before the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide had begun to
rise, and the fact that the warming ceased as solar activity declined
from the Grand Maximum, and the fact that global mean surface
temperatures today are still well below the median value for the past
half-billion years (some 7 degrees K, or 12.5 F, warmer than the
present), do suggest that there are credible natural explanations for
the warming that has been observed, and that the warming effect of
carbon dioxide - whose magnitude is highly speculative, and which the
IPCC's computer models are tuned to assume as a given - may be far less
than the assumptions pre-programmed into the models.
Such doubts and cautions as these do not appear in most of the BBC's
re****ts. Fran Unsworth has publicly made it explicit that the BBC
intends henceforth only to present biased coverage of the "climate"
scare, just as it whipped up needless and scientifically-unjustified
alarm about a host of previous and equally baseless scares, such as
"salmonella in eggs", "Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease in British beef," and
"the bird-flu pandemic".
The BBC was wrong, relentlessly wrong, about each and all of these
previous scares, and about many others like them. It is wrong,
relentlessly wrong, about the "global warming" scare too.
End of scare.
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