Christopher Booker on BBC and The Royal Society bias, ClimateGate, The Met cold winter forecast and 2010 hottest year ever:
Horizon’s “Science Under Attack” turned out to be yet another laborious bid by the BBC to defend the global warming orthodoxy…… Hours of film of climate-change “deniers” are cherrypicked for soundbites that can be shown, out of context, to make them look ridiculous…… Although Sir Paul presented himself as the champion of objective science, he frequently showed that, for all his expertise in cell biology, he knows little about climate.
The fact that someone is an expert in one particular field – even if he is President of the Royal Society – gives him little more authority to pronounce on issues with which he is unfamiliar than a man holding forth in a pub……. the BBC has been turned, in Peter Sissons’ words, into a mere “propaganda machine”……. Comparing the actual data…… shows that for four years the original figure has been adjusted downwards. Only for 2010 was the data revised upwards, by the largest adjustment of all, allowing the Met Office to claim that 2010 was the hottest year of the decade……
h/t to Amino Acids in Meteorites
I didn’t watch this latest Horizon propaganda piece, and I have no intention of doing so. Horizon, once one of the best – do-not-miss – science documentaries, has become, for this viewer, avoid-at-all-costs. I would no more watch Horizon for an objective look at science than I would read RealClimate.
However, I did watch one appalling Horizon program a few years back called Global Dimming. Inevitably this turned the dimming by aerosol hypothesis into a tool to leverage co2 sensitivity to absurd levels. A scientist was brought on – Chris Cox (not to be confused with Brian Cox) – as a climate expert who calculated that co2 sensitivity was actually twice as high as the highest IPCC estimate.
This was based on the so-called (il)logic that goes ‘if aerosols were previously masking the warming of co2, then co2 warming must be twice as high as previously thought.’ A nice CGI film was shown of London burning in a desert-like dust storm, while the narator warned in dark tones ‘this WILL happen – unless we take action now.’ If I wasn’t so tight, I would have kicked the tv screen in. Ever since then, I have avoided Horizon. Maybe there has been some good stuff on, but I’ll never know.
Mr Booker claims that “The Climategate emails scandal confirmed that scientists at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had distorted key data.”
Which data were distorted? Independent reviews have cleared the CRU of any such conduct.
Out of the hundreds of hacked emails, the closest they could come to a smoking gun was reference to a “trick” published in Nature to “hide the decline.” If you are wanting to hide some sort of subterfuge, the last thing you do is publish details of it in Nature.
Anyone who took the trouble to read the Nature paper is aware that the “trick” was described fully as part of a discussion of the use of proxy measurements to infer temperatures in the past and in places where no direct temperature records are available. The reference was to a problem which has arisen since the 1960’s where tree ring data, one of the proxy measurements used, ceased to mach direct temperature measurements and other proxy measurements. This has been much dicussed in the brader literature. It was nothing to do with any manipulation of directly measured temperatures. Various possible causes for anomaly have been openly discussed and debated in the literature.
The nature paper had a discussion of how this discrepancy may be explained, and actually showed graphs with and without tree ring data showing that reconstructions of the past were little affected by inclusion or exclusion of tree ring data.
Again, the “trick” was fully discussed in the paper.
And anyone who read the hacked emails in context knows that the remarks were part of a debate between authors as to whether or not they should include tree ring data among other proxies for recent decades when they were aware it was unreliable. Some favoured using the “trick” to attempt to account for the decline in tree ring growth which was not matched by direct temperature measurements showing temperature increases. Other authors favoured leaving the tree ring data out altogether as it was unreliable.
Again, the “trick” was fully described and anyone who read and understood the Nature paper knew what it was about, so how can it be said the authors were trying to hoodwink anyone? There was no hiding declines in measured temperatures because there was no such decline. It was all about the reliability of tree rings as a proxy measurement.
Climate skeptics like Booker are still engaging in wilful ignorance or dliberate dishonesty by claiming that key data was distorted.
Anthony!
Ki Moon has to be from North korea! Its hard to belive that he is saying what hes really is saying.Teapartymovement must quddruple its memebers sthe coming week.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/28/ban-ki-moon-economic-model-environment
Jimbo says !:34 am
You are absolutely correct about consensus in the case of stomach ulcers. My dad had a severe case and all the consensus treatment was to drink milk and eat soda crackers. I showed my dad the information about the helicobacter and he asked his doctor about it and all he got from the doctor was a brush-off about the info. So, my dad suffered many years with this problem which was fairly easily cured. He did get the right treatment later. Scientists today seem to avoid going against the consenus like they always have for fear of ridicule and loss of face and compensation.
A number of contributors have mentioned the BBC’s Climate wars programme. It was presented by Dr Iain Stewart, a geologist who has recently presented another BBC series, about the work of geology’s founding fathers. I was much amused by the episode where he told how a theory, proposed by the then head of UK geology, had become the consensus. When this consensus was challenged by a self taught amateur the establishment pulled out all the stops to rubbish him and his ideas. Fortunately, the scientists sent to debunk him followed the scientific method and the consensus was changed. Ahhh, the good old days!
Chris Wright,
“Nurse’s analogy about the doctors was bad, but if I had been Delingpole I would be kicking myself. I would have said something like: “Yes, I would probably accept the doctor’s concensus because I have no reason to believe they have been cooking the books”. Simple.”
Yes, but the BBC would just have edited that, so the reply would come out as: ‘Yes, I would probably accept the doctor’s consensus.’
The analogy, of course, is a false one. Medicine goes through field trials, and people either get better or they don’t. Each type of cancer has a huge pool of statistical data for morbidity and recovery. For the climate science body of knowledge to be comparable to medicine, you would have to have 100,000 Earth’s each with various combinations of greenhouse gases, and their climates monitored for thousands of years.
A much better medical analogy to climate science, if one were needed, would be as follows. A research group notices that some people who live near mobile phone masts occasionally get a temperature. There is a hypothesis that the low-frequency radio waves have a specific effect on certain centres of the brain. Yet it is difficult to separate the effects of the radio waves from normal random incidents of temperatures. Often people recover, but some people go on to get pneumonia and die. Despite the fact that people have been getting temperatures since the beginning of recorded history, this time there is a consensus that the current outbreak is mostly due to the radio masts. Furthermore, models show that as the number of radio masts increases, there will be a tipping point where nearly everyone will suffer catastrophic fevers and most will not recover. For some reason this is pushed by governments, media, green activists and the UN. Huge funding is made available, and the Royal Society and other august bodies are all agreed that radio masts are a threat to human health and must be removed before it is too late. Although this is the consensus, there are some scientists who say that the correlation between radio waves and fevers are too uncertain, and there is nothing special about the distribution of fevers compared to the past. Who do you believe?
In this case I can’t really sympathize with Delingpole. He knew in advance that he was dealing with tyrants. He should have required a written contract to the effect of “Use my words exactly and properly, with my post-edit approval, or don’t mention me at all.” Instead, he went ahead and let BBC do what it wants, with perfectly predictable results.
This is very interesting, rigging the science to support a political agenda is fraud and a title is not proof of a claim yet that is what is happening with the help of the profession, including the BBC, dedicated to exposing abuse such as fraud and elitism. Interesting but not acceptable.
Christopher Booker is right, Sir Paul Nurse may be geneticist or cell biologist but he clearly does not have any knowledge of physics. I recommend that he study the electromagnetic spectrum particularly the ‘ultra violet catastrophe’ at the end of the 19th century prior to Max Planck’s solution at the beginning of the 20th century. Then atomic absorption spectra and Einstein’s Nobel prize winning work.
Anthony Hanwell
Brilliant, Lord M would be proud.
Do inform us of his reply should he have the balls to.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/20/global-warming-policy-foundation-donors
£503,000 rather pales into insignificance when one compares it against the the billions of pounds of compulsory funding wielded by the BBC across it’s entire output in the furtherance of the AGW chimera.
Add to that the billions confiscated from us through the Renewable Obligations and disemminated by politicians to landowners, energy and associated companies, Green groups and criminals manipulating the EU Carbon Exchanges, and it is a wonder that any dissention is published on any media platform.
Food price rises, exacerbated by the legislation for ethanol percentages in fuel consumption, are playing a major part in the escalating popular uprisings in North Africa.
Here in the West it will be Carbon Taxes in their various manifestations that will precipitate serious demonstations against governments that already may have pushed prices beyond the limit of affordability for an increasing proportion of the poor in our society.
Never mind demonstrations against University fees and the elimination of the deficit, which are containable, further escalations in the name of saving the planet will bring a cross section of society onto the streets to strike fear into the out of touch political classes.
Perhaps cognisant of this, they are having second thoughts about the fuel duty escalator that was pencilled in for April.
Typical “cold is the new warm” bananas that would have been different had there been less snow rather than more snow.
As for the longer term:
CO2 was up 40% during the 20th century, 4% last decade, and I would expect this trend to continue.
We add c. ~7 BMTC/year to a ~750 BMTC atmospheric sink. A bit over half that is absorbed by soil and ocean sinks. The rest accumulates. So, yes, I think humans are responsible for the increase in CO2.
(Yes, it is only 3% of output, but the rest of the output is also input — via the CO2 cycle. It doesn’t accumulate.)
But raw CO2 forcing is only +1C per doubling. And positive feedbacks are simply not in evidence, and they should have been obvious over the last 3 centuries if they were a serious factor.
So I would expect warming this century to be similar to last century: Around a fifth to a third of what the mainstream IPCC scenario projects.
I.e., Warming, yes. But no emergency, whatever.
That’s the “surprise-free” scenario. (No solar Grand Minimum, no hitherto unseen “tipping points”, etc.)
Vince Causey says about “appalling Horizon”:
January 30, 2011 at 6:12 am
If I wasn’t so tight, I would have kicked the tv screen in. Ever since then, I have avoided Horizon.
—————————–
Glad it’s not just me then. I don’t even watch television anymore, for these reasons. I still watch documentaries online, but I avoid these establishment hit pieces, prefering, instead, to learn about them from comments in the blogosphere.
Bloke down the pub says:
January 30, 2011 at 6:34 am
A number of contributors have mentioned the BBC’s Climate wars programme. It was presented by Dr Iain Stewart, a geologist who has recently presented another BBC series, about the work of geology’s founding fathers. I was much amused…..
Similarly a Yorkshire carpenter turned clockmaker, John Harrison was rubbished by the establishment in 18th century denying him the prize, for a long time, of £40 000 defined in the Longitude Act of 1714.
By 1765 he had created what many thought impossible – a ‘chronometer’ so reliable that it lost or gained less than a minute in a six week voyage. This gave the longitude well within the acceptable error. Envious manoeuvrings among the the members of the ‘Board of Longitude’ scandalously denied him his reward for years, but with the intervention of the king, ‘Longitude Harrison’ finally got the money and his place in history.
Another thought on that devious Horizon programme.
The “Lisbon Workshop on Reconciliation” is being held this week. The organisers and attendees seem to have come to recognise that the acrimonious and polarised climate debate is going nowhere.
The pro-catastrophe side have probably come to realise that their combative stance and appeals to authority have failed to win-over general public opinion. The sceptical side can gain from a better meeting of minds as it offers new opportunities to have their concerns more formally examined.
What does the BBC do? I have seen no report on the conference. Searching the BBC website with the text “lisbon conference reconciliation” produces no results (when I tried just now).
Instead, the BBC puts out this brash polemic, with a one-sided narrative, using the word “denier” and what looks like an attempt to discredit at least one individual.
Is the BBC so hopelessly out of touch? Did the BBC fail to notice the Lisbon meeting this week and ended up shaming itself with the Horizon programme? Or was this a deliberate attempt by the BBC to undermine the Lisbon Workshop?
Enquiring minds would like to know.
EFS_Junior says:
January 30, 2011 at 2:34 am
[snip- stop using the D word to label individuals – keep it up and you’ll be banned – Anthony]
Thank you for doing that Anthony. Debate needs a higher grade of civility. I don’t see any problem with wanting that on your blog. So good on ya mate!
p.s. congratulations again to you and your son! 🙂
Rowland Pantling (UK) says:
January 30, 2011 at 4:24 am
BBC4…… This is on Monday 31 Jan at 10pm. “Storyville – Meet the Climate Sceptics”
Too bad I can’t see it here. Here’s a link to the show
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00y5j3v
Philip Shehan says:
January 30, 2011 at 6:12 am
Climategate……the hundreds of hacked emails
Every once in a while I see someone say those emails were hacked. But the truth is no one knows, yet, how they got out into the public. You say they were hacked, so, would you tell me where you found that is how it happened?
Philip Shehan says:
January 30, 2011 at 6:12 am
a smoking gun was reference to a “trick” published in Nature to “hide the decline.” If you are wanting to hide some sort of subterfuge, the last thing you do is publish details of it in Nature.
The details were not published in the work. They did not tell Nature that they had spliced two different graphs together to make one graph. They acted like the graph was from one source.
“Only for 2010 was the data revised upwards, by the largest adjustment of all, allowing the Met Office to claim that 2010 was the hottest year of the decade……”
Yes, yes but the Met Office put it’s foot in it once again Part of their claim was: “With a mean temperature of 14.50 °C, 2010 becomes the second warmest year on record, after 1998.”
That means, if I am not mistaking; – There has been no warming, manmade or otherwise, since 1998. –
Skeptics have known this all along but this is the first time The UK Met Office has officially admitted it and I do very much doubt they realize the meaning of their little admittance.
They also said; – “The record is maintained by the Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit at UEA.” Which means The Uni. of East Anglia and therefore also The IPCC knows
OHD
Philip Shehan,
Three times in your comment you say that that “Mike’s Nature trick” was fully disclosed in the paper. But you did not provide quotes from the paper to prove what you say. Would you comment again about that and provide all germane quotes from the paper this time?
Evan Jones is right, as was noted in the Telegraph article:
Nurse is either ignorant of the facts, or he lied outright. Unless someone can point out a third possibility?
I am beginning to see that contrary to the general impression in America, the British aristocracy and the heads of organizations such as the BBC and the Royal Society are populated by knaves, who use the cover of their position for self-enrichment.
It reminded me of the story of the commoner who invented an accurate ship’s clock. There had been a significant financial reward offered by Parliament for anyone who could devise a clock accurate enough to determine latitude. After working on his clock for thirty years, and having it proved accurate and reliable, the reward was denied. The King had to step in and force the payment, IIRC, which was still less than originally offered. Here’s a link I found.
[BTW, where is Gneiss? I still want an answer to my question: whose views have been censored at WUWT?]
Jordan says: January 30, 2011 at 8:09 am
Is the BBC so hopelessly out of touch? Did the BBC fail to notice the Lisbon meeting this week and ended up shaming itself with the Horizon programme? Or was this a deliberate attempt by the BBC to undermine the Lisbon Workshop?
Seems like the BBC has it’s own part to play in this charm offensive
The Scene
An impressive room in Britain’s Royal Society off The Mall. Roger Harrabin, BBC’s chief environment correspondent in the chair surrounded by representatives of “All the Royals”, as he put it, either on the presentation line up or ‘at hand’ – the Royal
Meteorological Society, The Royal Statistical Society and the Royal Astronomical Society; along with experts (statistics) from Leeds University, Philip Eden of BBC5 weather, Tim Palmer of European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (& RMS), the Met Office (seasonal forecasting division) and a range of other BBC professionals, weather people and public and Michael Fish! – numbering 50 or so in all.
The Purpose: to discuss the BBC’s ‘Weather (Test) Project.
– http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9029000/9029232.stm
The discussion led by Roget Harrabin proceeded as if the
purpose was to compare short-range forecasts of Met office
and competitors and raised many ‘difficulties’.
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews10No34.pdf
Quite the worst aspect of the Horizon programme was that there was scarcely a mention of the geological record of climate change on timescales ranging from decadal to millennial to orbital variability.
Nurse asked Delingpole how he would react if a consultant told him that he had cancer and that the consultant and his colleagues agreed that a particular treatment was best for him. Would he not go along with that consensus. It was a difficult for Delingpole to argue against this as the question was put and of course the viewer was left to make the parallel with “consesus” in climate science.
It’s more than that. The question itself proclaimed the non-consensus answer as crackpot. Who can choose the crackpot?
Change it around though… your wife is dying of a disease and you live in a tribal village someplace remote. All of the village elders have a consensus that performing some crazy ritual is just the thing to cure her cancer. It’s the outlying american doctor that tells them that she needs other treatment.
Just because there’s a consensus doesn’t make it right.