The Guardian’s recent “Climategate” event – picking over the fallout from UEA’s hacked emails – was always going to be a weird one, and I left with decidedly mixed impressions. For some, this event clearly represented the rehabilitation of climate denial in even the more progressive end of the mainstream media. One friend described it as “like being in 1998”, which was not far off the mark. Two of the panellists – Doug Keenan and Steve McIntyre – fall broadly into the “sceptic” camp, while a good third of the room at least seemed to be composed of elements of the denial lobby. Benny Peiser – a serial paid advocate for mining industry front-groups – was in attendance, as was the eccentric weather theorist Piers Corbyn – whose constant heckling at one point saw him threatened with ejection from the room (to loud applause).

Tammy Boyce of the King’s Fund (and co-editor of Climate Change and The Media), who was in the audience, was visibly angry at the prominence accorded the “deniers”. “Policy is not made on the basis of evidence”, she reminded the panel in an impassioned point from the floor, going on to vociferously challenge the “sceptics”’ agenda. Her implication, I took it, was that, in attempting to pick holes in climate science, Keenan and McIntyre were effectively engaged in a battle to influence public perception, with all the potential adverse implications for public policy. Certainly at the very least the event often had a tendency to focus astonishingly narrowly on minutiae at the margins of a gravely and overwhelmingly important issue. Another friend found the level of assumed knowledge and intensive focus on detail absurdly frustrating – and, dare I say it, peculiarly male.

The question of how the prominence of events like this will impact on the public perception of climate change, then, hung over the event like a bad odour. Bob Watson, Chief Scientific Adviser to Defra and former chair of the IPCC (before US pressure forced his ouster) had to repeat the now ages-old critique of the media’s “balanced” portrayal of climate science, and the inherently distorting effect of converting a 95:5 distribution of scientific opinion into an even 50:50 split. Even so, I got the impression that Watson still didn’t quite “get it” as far as the role of the media is concerned. Like many climate scientists, he appeared to perceive the problem as one of relatively innocent failures or mistakes. The reality – implicating the persistent influence of vested interests – surely makes the problem all the more intractable, and more troubling. Nevertheless, Watson’s performance was largely flawless, and by far the most consistently assured, honest, reasonable and convincing of anyone on the panel.

Despite reservations though, I found myself not wholly able to agree with the severest critics of the event. Firstly, there are some legitimate doubts about how far the “sceptical” panellists – or at least Steve McIntyre – fall into the agenda-driven “delayers” camp home to most climate change denial – even if his links to vested interests remain very real. Others perceive McIntyre as more of an obsessive (though inept and deluded) amateur; and he himself asserted during the event – albeit cautiously – that he would expect Governments to take action on the issue. Moreover, it seems clear that, in at least one instance revealed by UEA’s emails, the “sceptical” groups exposed a real problem – namely that flaws in a particular piece of research were glossed over by at least one of its authors. Equally troubling has been scientists’ apparent closing of ranks around this issue – suggesting that in some cases, publicly engaged climate scientists have been not only – and commendably – defending good science, but sometimes simply protecting their own profession and its members. Sadly, the slippery performance of UEA’s Pro-Vice Chancellor and former CRU head Sir Trevor Davies only served to reinforce this impression.

It is worth reminding ourselves, then, that in any field of study, assiduous attention to detail from obsessive outsiders – even including those who are largely incompetent, deluded or ideologically driven – can sometimes produce findings of real importance. This is even true in such stark cases as the historical study of the Holocaust, where deniers’ criticisms have apparently played a real role in producing genuine discoveries. If climate scientists are given license to waive such criticism where it is legitimate, clearly this is a problem for the open and transparent scrutiny of research. For that reason, the outside “auditors” on the panel to my mind deserved a hearing in at least some measure.

Even so, legitimate worries persist. If a pair of Holocaust deniers – to stretch the analogy – had helped produce an important historical discovery, we should still harbour major reservations about according them the privilege of an open platform from which to speak. In some quarters, to make matters worse, the embrace of Keenan and McIntyre was demonstrably utterly naive. Veteran environmental journalist for the Guardian and New Scientist Fred Pearce characterised them as “a new generation of sceptics” more properly seen as “data libertarians”, from whom CRU had closed themselves off. But it quickly became clear that Pearce’s account was utterly delusory. Early on in the event, for instance, McIntyre held up Phil Jones’ “trick to hide the decline” as evidence of scientists’ mendacity (comically, a quotation from Jon Stewart of The Daily Show was the only evidence McIntyre offered to substantiate this judgment). Later on, Keenan stated that of the substantial amount of climate science he had looked at, “none of it stands up to scrutiny”, and proceeded to lay into the incompetence and fraudulence of the entire profession. These two, we are being asked to believe, are merely “data libertarians”?

But there was more ill-thought-out commentary to come from Pearce – in particular in his treatment of the IPCC. According to Pearce’s account, the body institutionally forces scientists to form consensual views and eliminate uncertainties. It is fair to say that across the room the jaws of those familiar with the IPCC were hitting the floor at this point. The IPCC report is perhaps the most caveat-riddled text it is possible to imagine, acknowledging degrees of uncertainty all the way through – even including a formalised glossary of terms used to express uncertainties. It also includes among its “Supplementary Materials” a rigorous and careful document called “Guidance Notes for Lead Authors … on Addressing Uncertainties” – which reads rather like the reverse of everything Pearce described. It was left to Bob Watson to point out that the IPCC does discuss uncertainties – constantly. Personally I couldn’t help feeling Pearce deserved to have the point put to him a good deal more forcefully.

Nevertheless, the event also seemed to mark a distinct shift in the discourse in a more positive sense. We began to hear more about policymaking as a matter of managing uncertainty and risk. Every one of those on the panel advocating action on climate change, indeed (which was most of it) did so with reference to “decision-making under uncertainty” – a near-constant condition across diverse areas of public policy, we were reminded. Troubling questions remain – particularly at an event like this – as to how far the denial lobby may be able to exploit and skew the perception of such uncertainty in the public realm. Yet if the nature of the underlying science and its wider public communication are becoming more closely aligned, this can only be a good thing. Whether the general public will get the message in a serious way any time soon, however, remains an urgent question, and one that still confronts us.

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Yet now that this fake scandal has been exposed, including in an important account by the Guardian’s George Monbiot, North has – perhaps unsurprisingly – been pouring scorn all over that paper’s comment pages. More significantly, after Monbiot noted North’s well-deserved reputation as an “egregious fabulist” “nearly all of” whose “concocted” “stories” (and Booker’s) “fall apart on the briefest examination”, North proceeded to threaten Monbiot and the Guardian with libel action. North referred to “all references to myself” in Monbiot’s blog post “as being libellous and highly damaging”.

Certainly the audacity of North’s double-standards alone here is fairly remarkable. Elsewhere on his blog, he not only berates environmentalists for their censorious tendencies (“These big girls’ blouses can dish it out but when it comes to dealing with disagreement … [a]lways they have to be in control of the message”) but attacks WWF as “an organisation which is turning lying into an art form”. Clearly, if North’s litigious standards were redirected back towards him, he would find himself in serious trouble.

But more importantly, in the tradition of unintentional self-satire in which he has become a master, North appears to have been endeavouring to confirm every one of Monbiot’s accusations even in his comments on the blog post in question. Virtually every one of these – which culminate in his legal threat – produces a flat-out falsehood, painfully embarrassing error or egregious misrepresentation.

Perhaps this sounds like an exaggeration. So in case readers are inclined to be sceptical, let us take a few examples.

Did the IPCC predict that 40% of the Amazon will be decimated?

Falsehood (in North’s 15th comment):

“the IPCC [made] a cataclysmic prediction about 40 percent of the biggest rainforest on the planet.”

Falsehood (in North’s 19th comment):

“And, unless I got it terribly wrong, it was the IPCC saying that the 40% of the Amazon basin was going belly-up.”

Needless to say, North got it terribly wrong. The first sentence of the statement made by the IPCC was the following:

“Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation”.

The statement made is purely hypothetical. Clearly, the IPCC was doing no more here than outlining a major sensitivity and therefore serious risk to up to 40% of the Amazon in response to small changes in precipitation.

Does the IPCC identify climate change as the cause of this hypothetical “slight reduction in rainfall”?

Falsehood (in North’s 13th comment):

“the IPCC statement … misidentif[ies] climate change (as in its “slight reduction in rainfall”) as the proximate cause of the forest decline.”

The relevant IPCC statement actually makes no mention of climate change: it is purely hypothetical, and does not in and of itself identify any proximate cause of any forest decline.

Was the claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 a “deliberate mistake”?

Falsehood (in North’s 12th comment):

“It is vital to the IPCC which has build its Maginot Line on “Glaciergate”, conceding one mistake and only one mistake (not that it was a mistake – it was deliberate).”

To date there has been no evidence that the IPCC “deliberately” made the mistake about the date Himalayan glaciers could disappear – a mistake it has acknowledged and corrected.

Was the claim about the Amazon’s sensitivity backed up by the peer-reviewed scientific literature?

Falsehood (in North’s 11th comment):

“this is not “science” talking, but money talking. And what does “money” say? …. er

““Well chaps, we can’s [sic] actually find any peer-reviewed stuff that says “40 percent of the Amazon forest may be drastically altered by even a slight drop in precitation” … so we’ll fudge it …”

Falsehood (in North’s 11th comment):

“But what about [scientific paper] Nepstad 2004? “New rainfall data showed that half of the forest area of the Amazon Basin had either fallen below, or was very close to, the critical level of soil moisture below which trees begin to die” [a quotation from Nepstad’s own clarificatory statement when the original “Amazongate” story broke]. Are we referring to a “slight drop in precipitation”? … Er … no. Scratch Nepstad 2005 [sic] … irrelevant.”

So can we “actually find any peer-reviewed stuff that says “40 percent of the Amazon forest may be drastically altered by even a slight drop in precitation””? “Are we referring to a “slight drop in precipitation”?” Er, well yes we are, and yes we can. In their 2004 paper in Global Change Biology, Tropical forest expert Dan Nepstad and his team are explicit:

“This study points to the widespread effect of drought on Amazon forests, and the vulnerability of Amazon forests to small declines in rainfall or increases in ET [evapo-transpiration]. Rainfall and ET are nearly equal across the Amazon during most years, with total rainfall falling below ET during years of severe drought. Such droughts may become more common if ENSO [El-Nino] events continue to be frequent and severe, if rainfall is inhibited by deforestation or smoke, and if warming trends continue. Increases in ET of only 15% or similar reductions in rainfall can lead to severe soil moisture deficits over roughly half of the Amazon (Fig. 9).

“The increase in forest flammability associated with severe drought poses one of the greatest threats to the ecological integrity of Amazon forests.”

Not only does the peer-reviewed scientific literature support the IPCC’s claim – that “[u]p to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” – directly, then, but it actually surpasses it. Roughly half the Amazon is of course a great deal more than “up to 40%” (though note that a range of possibilities is implied in both cases). Is Nepstad’s 2004 paper “irrelevant”? Hardly.

Did the IPCC’s statement on the sensitivity of the Amazon exaggerate?

Falsehood (in North’s 13th comment):

“the IPCC statement is … a major overstatement of the case …”

The IPCC’s departure from the peer-reviewed scientific record normally causes all manner of vociferous complaint from North. Yet as we have seen, Nepstad’s peer-reviewed 2004 paper states that “roughly half of the Amazon” could suffer “severe soil moisture deficits” in response to even small rainfall reductions; stresses “the vulnerability of Amazon forests to small declines in rainfall”; and states that “[t]he increase in forest flammability associated with severe drought poses one of the greatest threats to the ecological integrity of Amazon forests.” The IPCC, on the other hand, suggests that “[u]p to 40% of the Amazonian forests” could “react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation”. Exaggeration? Not exactly.

Is the IPCC’s statement in its entirety supported by the peer-reviewed scientific literature?

Falsehood (in North’s 4th comment):

“Certainly, in the context, of the IPCC statement, [sic] its supporters have not yet been able to offer any single paper or combination of papers which supports the statement in its entirely.”

We have already seen that the peer-reviewed literature supports the IPCC’s first claim here, about the Amazon’s sensitivity to small reductions in rainfall. What of the statements that follow, then? The IPCC goes on to state that:

“this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation”.

Could this claim possibly be supported by a “single paper or combination of papers”? Well, er, yes. As Simon Lewis of the University of Leeds notes in a 2006 paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society:

“There are critical thresholds of water availability below which tropical forests cannot persist and are replaced by savanna systems.”

Lewis further lists among his “four plausible routes” for the future of the Amazon “widespread forest collapse via drought, and widespread forest collapse via fire”. As he goes on:

“A warming and drying world leading to the loss of half of the world’s largest tract of tropical forest, and accelerated climate change is, therefore, a plausible scenario requiring urgent attention.”

Could such a collapse happen rapidly in the Amazon? Some of the key evidence on this question is provided in a 2004 paper in Theoretical and Applied Climatology by the Hadley Centre’s Peter Cox and his team. As these authors state, in one global climate model run:

“the extreme warming and drying eventually lead to abrupt reductions in the forest fraction”.

As they continue in commentary on modelled projections:

““When the forest fraction begins to drop (from about 2040 onwards) C4 grasses initially expand to occupy some of the vacant lands. However, the relentless warming and drying make conditions unfavourable even for this plant functional type, and the Amazon box ends as predominantly bare-soil (area fraction >0.5) by 2100 … it seems clear that the HadCM3LC [climate model-derived projections of] climate change in Amazonia would lead to rainforest loss (perhaps via increased fire frequency), and therefore drastic land-cover change.”

The precipitous collapse of the Amazon rainforest produced by one such model run is captured in a graph Cox and colleagues include in their paper – made more conservative in that it “ignore[s] both direct anthropogenic deforestation and also natural fire disturbance”:

This “alarming loss of the Amazonian rainforest”, Cox and his colleagues write, “would have catastrophic impacts on the biodiversity and “ecosystem services” of Amazonia, similar to those anticipated under the most extreme scenarios of direct human deforestation”.

Did the IPCC make an erroneous, unfounded statement?

Falsehood (in North’s 11th comment):

“So what [evidence] have we got? Nothing … rien … nada … SFA.”

Falsehood (in North’s 14th comment):

“the IPCC allegation is still unfounded.”

Falsehood (in North’s 13th comment):

“the IPCC statement … is also wrong”

Falsehood (in North’s 13th comment):

“The only way, therefore, to fix Amazongate is for the IPCC to do the decent thing and admit it is wrong.”

Falsehood (in North’s 12th comment):

““Amazongate”, however, “lives” because the IPCC got it wrong … made an unfounded assertion and has since been trying to cover up …”

Yet, as can easily be demonstrated, judging by the peer-reviewed scientific evidence readily available at the time, the IPCC did not “get it wrong” or make an “unfounded” statement. North, on the other hand, did – repeatedly and unrepentantly.

That a published writer should issue this many blatant falsehoods in a comment thread is pretty extraordinary. To do so and then to threaten legal action on the basis that references to oneself as an “egregious fabulist” whose concocted stories “almost all … fall apart on the briefest examination” are “libellous and highly damaging” is … well, frankly suspicious. We are inevitably tempted to the conclusion that Richard North is an ingenious satirical creation – a kind of Dave Spart for the UKIP fanbase.

The bungling continues

North’s criticisms here are fairly easily rebutted with reference to the peer-reviewed scientific literature. It should be stressed, though, that none of these papers claims to provide a perfect, crystal ball-style vision of the future. Rather, they build on rough projections based on our current knowledge – in all its varying degrees of provisionality, approximation and incompleteness. Sometimes this will involve looking for lessons from similar examples in biological history. In other cases it will involve feeding the observed dynamics of complex systems into powerful computerised models. Such models are not just guesswork – they can generally be projected back into the past as well as the future, allowing us at least a rough test of their accuracy through direct comparison with our observations. The evidence assembled will produce a variety of results and scenarios among scientists and in the scientific literature, from the ultra-conservative to the utterly cataclysmic. What none of them provides – or claims to provide – is absolute certainty.

Yet when Monbiot presented some of the scientific data North had ignored – including Cox’s 2004 paper and another alarming paper on potential future scenarios for the Amazon from Theoretical and Applied Climatology by Richard Betts and his team – in a further post, North’s response proved extraordinary.

North claimed that the papers’ “application of GCM [global climate models] and coupled climate models to the Amazon … has been questioned by Oyama and Nobre (2003) and Merengo [sic] 2006” – another pair of scientific papers, from Geophysical Research Letters and the Revista Brasileira de Meteorologia respectively. It took another commenter to inquire how – in the first case – a 2003 paper could possibly have criticised two papers published in 2004. North replied: “Well, that’s how things often work … the Cox et al work wasn’t particuarly new …” There is a half-truth dangling here, as the 2004 paper followed an earlier, 2000 Nature paper by the same authors. Yet as a brief look at the citations confirms, neither Cox’s 2004 paper, Betts’ 2004 paper, nor any other paper by either of these authors is referenced by Oyama and Nobre.

As for Jose Marengo’s paper, what scathing criticism does this make of global climate models? Here’s what it has to say (in a slightly broken English translation) in its abstract:

“… more complex models and representations on the dynamics of vegetation on regional climate have allowed to more realistic simulations of climate change due to changes in land use and in the concentration of greenhouse gases on the recent years.”

Devastating stuff. But it gets worse. North’s sole reason for citing Marengo is an attempt to rebut Cox and Betts’ papers on the Amazon. Here’s what Marengo has to say specifically about these two papers:

“New developments in physical parameterizations, including more sophisticated and complex schemes for clouds and the dynamics of the vegetation have provided new insights on possible future climates in Amazonia as consequence of global warming (Cox et al. 2000, 2004, Betts et al. 2004).”

Witness the blistering, evidence-based rebuttal of Richard North. A paper that does not reference – and was even published before – those North disputes; and another whose evaluation of these papers is explicitly positive.

Given all this, you might wonder what on earth North is talking about. Why does he cite either paper at all? He gives us a brief clue in a further comment on Marengo’s paper:

“What struck me was the observation that: “Even though we know now more than we knew 20 years ago, still there are some uncertainties in the tendencies of climate and water resources during the 20th Century.” That and his discussion of “significant uncertainties” tends [sic] to act as a counterbalance to the apparent certitude offered by some modellers.”

Which begs the – frankly exasperated – question: what “apparent certitude”? A search of the 2004 Cox paper for the term “certainty” produces 8 results. Of these, all 8 are expressions of uncertainty. Nepstad’s 2004 paper yields 2 results, both expressions of uncertainty. Betts’ paper yields a starker picture: 28 results, 27 relevant (1 using “certain” in a different sense) of which all 27 are references to uncertainties in predictions and areas of understanding. Any “apparent certitude” can only be a result either of failing to read the papers in question, or of a painfully exacting, wilful misreading of their contents.

The implications for journalism

All this may seem rather like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, albeit a very persistent nut. Yet one of the most profoundly disturbing conclusions to be drawn from the “Amazongate” episode is that North’s claims are in no way assured the utter obscurity they so richly deserve. They find their way onto the Telegraph’s blogs and comment pages, frequently via North’s collaborator Christopher Booker. Last week, Booker was at it again, accusing the IPCC of making a “wildly alarmist claim it cannot justify”; stating that “it seems clearer than ever that there is no good evidence” to support the IPCC; that “other papers in support of their claim [were cited] – but none of these provided any support for the specific claim about the impact of climate change made by the IPCC”; and that it “seems to be [un]true” that “the IPCC’s Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence”. In this case, they found their way onto the pages of Times, in a murky episode that may have involved top-down editorial changes to an article producing grossly distorted reportage.

Moreover, this is part of a wider disturbing picture. Editorial pressure to go after climate scientists has been applied in newsrooms since February (a claim that comes via a reliable inside source). Elsewhere in Murdoch outlets, top-down pressure is known to have distorted and distended reporting on climate change. For any journalists managing to survive this institutional firestorm intact and considering using North as a source of material in future, I hope his performance here will give them pause. Try as he may to defend it with legal threats, nothing has been more fatal to North’s “professional reputation” than the man’s own shocking record of falsehood and misrepresentation.

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The respected BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin has published an original but controversial piece criticising the Royal Society, which concludes: “If the great science academies can’t find ways of including the best experts from the blogosphere in their deliberations they may find themselves badly left behind.”

Harrabin draws particular attention to well known “climate sceptic”, Steve McIntyre. He writes, “He has taken on the scientific establishment on some key issues and won. He arguably knows more about CRU science than anyone outside the unit – but none of the CRU inquiries has contacted him for input.”

But I disagree with Roger because the kind of ‘scepticism’ which is the meat and potatoes of bloggers is qualitatively unlike the organized scepticism which questions, refines and replaces theories about how the world works – i.e. it is unlike science.

What most ’sceptics’ do (and I include the benign ones here) is to look for ‘proof’ that confirms their preconceived ideas, looks for inconsistencies in data, bad referencing, sloppy language etc, and in doing so builds up enough of a ‘list of mistakes’ to give themselves and their friends the comforting illusion that they are doing the same as the climate scientists, only better.  But they are not.  They are extremely efficient proof-readers, who mistake book-keeping for an informed understanding of climate science.

Elevating these folk to the same status as professors of oceanography, for example, seems to me completely the wrong reaction to their onslaught.  Proposing to have them undertake reviews and sit in judgment on climate scientists is proposing the death of rational enquiry.  I just don’t think it’s sensible to give people who have no training in a particular scientific discipline, intellectual authority over those who do.  It’s a back-door to censorship by the inter-mob, and to abuse of science by those with a political agenda.

Just ahead of the Copenhagen summit, I wrote in The Times, “Nasa, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences — once we would have allowed these authoritative, trustworthy, dependable voices to shape those parameters. Instead, the scientists we rely upon have become a target for hackers and death threats. In the face of consumerism, these establishment institutions have been cast in the role of radicals.”

Harrabin would no doubt point out that the Royal Society is now being criticised by some of its own Fellows too, and not just bloggers. But the word is that none of these rebel Fellows are climate scientists, and they’re all refusing to explain publicly why they have doubts. As Bob Ward, the policy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at LSE, said, “If these scientists have doubts about the science on climate change, they should come out and speak about it,” and Professor Martin Rees has very openly told the doubters, “It has been suggested that the society holds the view that anyone challenging the consensus on climate change is malicious – this is ridiculous.”

The only named rebel is an electrical engineer and a member of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank which refuses to say who funds it even as it seeks greater transparency from scientists, and whose head, Lord Lawson, has explicit links to the fossil fuel industry. Benny Peiser, not a climate scientist but a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University who is the foundation’s director, said in December last year: “We look out of the window and it’s very cold, it doesn’t seem to be warming.”

As the UK’s chief scientist, John Beddington, has said:  “This is just not science, its commentary.”

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Shellenberger and Nordhaus re-state a plethora of half-truths, misrepresentations and outright fantasies that have lately become almost canonical in the public sphere.

It is an extraordinary account in many ways, re-stating a plethora of half-truths, misrepresentations and outright fantasies that have lately become almost canonical in the public sphere. The pair provide minimal evidence and misrepresent what they do provide, cobbling the whole together with decidedly faulty reasoning. In order to correct some of these major miscues – sadly not confined to this article alone – it is worth examining their claims in more detail.

Demonising campaigners

The pair begin by casting recent attacks on climate science and the IPCC as a backlash against campaigners’ “[e]fforts to use climate science to threaten an apocalyptic future” and “to characterize present-day natural disasters as terrifying previews of an impending day of reckoning”, which have allegedly “undermine[d] the credibility of both climate science and progressive energy policy”. The denial lobby has little to do with the current media meltdown, the pair seem to imply: environmentalists have only themselves to blame.

It’s worth acknowledging what Shellenberger and Nordhaus get right here. Campaigners have often presented areas of climate science with excessive certainty, and been clumsy in handling uncertainty and risk. Some promote apocalyptic scenarios which might not be realistic; or present a simple, cause-and-effect relationship between climate change and present-day weather events – a practice with highly dubious scientific merit. This has in turn allowed the denial lobby to seize on irrelevant cold spells to “prove” that climate change is a myth.

But this indictment is vastly exaggerated. The denial lobby and associates might have had a marginal role in the current crisis, but this is far from self-evident – especially given their clearly discernible influence on the media – and the authors provide no evidence supporting alternative conclusions. In a world bristling with assorted weapons of mass destruction on a 5-or-6 degree trajectory, apocalyptic scenarios are a real threat. The denial lobby would undoubtedly fixate on cold snaps irrespective of the green movement’s messaging – as in turn would the media. And what exactly is wrong – as the pair suggest – in using natural disasters in the present to underscore the potential for devastating impacts in the future?

The denial lobby would undoubtedly fixate on cold snaps irrespective of the green movement’s messaging – as in turn would the media.

The political efficacy of campaigners’ flawed appeals may partly explain why they are made. But this is also simply a matter of the environmental movement’s inevitably imperfect grasp of the science. Campaigners’ understanding of this major field has been fairly rough and sketchy, but has also been steadily improving. The film The Age of Stupid, for instance, deliberately includes a note of caution from former Government climate science adviser Sir David King on connecting particular extreme weather events directly to climate change. Other advocates have increasingly demonstrated a similar degree of care in handling the science. If campaigners used this tactic simply because “it has worked so well for them”, why would such advances happen?

Shellenberger and Nordhaus also take aim at some thoroughly implausible targets. They slate campaigners for “underestimat[ing] the economic and technological challenges associated with rapidly decarbonizing the energy economy”, though the most frequent analogy such advocates employ is with the Second World War – hardly “underestimating” the challenge, however vital addressing it may be. “In 2006,” we are told, “Al Gore used his “Inconvenient Truth” slide show to link Hurricane Katrina” to climate change. In reality, this charge has already been debunked. As climate scientist Gavin Schmidt pointed out:

“Gore talked about 2005 and 2004 being very strong seasons, and if you weren’t paying attention, you could be left with the impression that there was a direct cause and effect, but he was very careful to not say there’s a direct correlation.”

Fellow climate scientist Eric Steig noted the same thing:

“As one might expect, he uses the Katrina disaster to underscore the point that climate change may have serious impacts on society, but he doesn’t highlight the connection any more than is appropriate”.

This has obviously not stopped the denial lobby’s attacks on Gore for this alleged falsehood. But it is something else to see purported environmental advocates repeating the same canard. If Shellenberger and Nordhaus downplay this lobby’s influence, it is perhaps because they themselves are so thoroughly susceptible to it.

Smearing climate science

It is in dealing with the science, however, that the most seriously damaging misrepresentations enter this account.

Campaigners’ “ever-escalating set of demands on climate science”, the pair suggest, have consequently left it tainted.

“Greens pushed climate scientists to become outspoken advocates of action to address global warming. Captivated by the notion that their voices and expertise were singularly necessary to save the world, some climate scientists attempted to oblige. The result is that the use, and misuse, of climate science by advocates began to wash back into the science itself.”

Of course, there is nothing inherently blameworthy in scientists becoming “outspoken advocates of action” in the public sphere. If public advocacy automatically entails “misuse” of the science, we should conclude that Martin Luther King shamelessly distorted the facts underlying the civil rights movement simply by communicating them. Nor are scientists such other-worldly beings that they should be expected to respond to profoundly alarming findings with a shrug of the shoulders, before getting on with other business. This may be how many, even most, scientists do behave; but should it be encouraged? Indeed if the threat is severe, should keeping one’s head down and staying silent even be acceptable?

This contamination of the science, Shellenberger and Nordhaus allege, is demonstrated by CRU’s hacked emails. Really? In at least one obvious case (only a selection of the emails was ever made public) a senior scientist manifestly resented being used to support campaign statements and objectives, and said so, forwarding his objections to colleagues. Anyone familiar with climate scientists will be able to cite countless similar examples. This recalcitrant bunch, we are to understand, are simultaneously engaged in deliberate corruption of the science for their green movement overlords – as though the staff of Greenpeace were able to peer constantly over their shoulders?

Nevertheless, the authors seem determined to demonstrate their fundamental ignorance of the science at every opportunity. Here, for instance, is what they have to say about the so-called “hockey stick” graph:

“The most explosive revelations of Climategate involved disputed methodological techniques to merge multiple data sets (e.g., ice cores, tree rings, 20th century weather station readings) into a single global temperature trend line, the “hockey stick” graph. Whatever one thinks of the quality of the data sets, the methods used to combine them, or the efforts by some to shield the underlying data from critics, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that those involved were trying to fit the data to a trend that they already expected to see – namely that the spike in global carbon emissions in recent decades tracked virtually in lockstep with a concomitant spike in present-day global temperatures.”

It is difficult to know where to begin with a passage like this. The CRU emails do reveal a disagreement – subsequently resolved – over whether current temperatures might have been matched around 1,000 years ago. But this is entirely irrelevant to the question of the current spike in global temperatures, its relationship to carbon emissions, or any putative manipulation of data.

Moreover, the idea that scientists tried to ensure trends in carbon emissions fitted “in lockstep” with present-day global temperatures is simply bizarre. Firstly, it is not carbon emissions but all greenhouse gases that produce a warming effect. Secondly, this is not the direct result of emissions but of the cumulative concentrations collected in the atmosphere. Thirdly, all manner of further complexities permeate this picture: the effect of aerosols and other pollutants that dampen down warming; the uptake and release of carbon by the biosphere; the various “lags” in the climate system; natural background fluctuations that offset warming in the short- and medium-term; and so on. Accusing scientists of manipulating data to show emissions and temperatures changing “in lockstep” is thus profoundly, bewilderingly idiotic. Any scientist attempting such a ludicrous fabrication would inevitably (and rightly) be torn to shreds by her colleagues. Even then, the “hockey stick” graph does not attempt to show anything of the kind.

Accusing scientists of manipulating data to show emissions and temperatures changing “in lockstep” is thus profoundly, bewilderingly idiotic.

So where does this alleged attempt “to fit the data” to a preconceived conclusion come from? The authors don’t make it clear. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that they are thinking of Phil Jones’ “trick to hide the decline” – a contrived scandal debunked almost as soon as it was raised in November 2009. The “trick” refers to the redaction of post-c.1960 tree-ring data – established as divergent from the late-20^th-century temperature record – from a graph of global average temperature trends. This is not “disputed”: the “divergence problem” is acknowledged across the relevant scientific literature. Nor is it “fit[ting] the data” to a preconceived conclusion. Late-20^th-century records derive from direct temperature readings, yielding a very high degree of confidence – a very strong yardstick in assessing the comparative reliability of “proxy” records. Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s case here, it turns out, is founded on thin air.

Slinging mud at the IPCC

“Other faulty or sloppy claims in the IPCC’s voluminous reports”, we are told, “such as the contention that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035 … followed the same pattern” – of “efforts to move the proximity of the global warming threat closer to the present.” Again, no evidence is provided. Perhaps the authors are thinking of lead author Murari Lal’s quote to the British gutter press, that “[w]e thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action”? But this quotation was reported by a journalist known to be strongly sympathetic to the denial lobby, and subsequently exposed as a fabrication. Once again, Shellenberger and Nordhaus are promoting falsehoods that have already been debunked.

Other “researchers felt enormous pressure to demonstrate a link” “connecting global warming to [recent] natural disasters” we are told – without evidence. Consequently,

“in its 2007 report, the IPCC — ignoring evidence to the contrary — misrepresented disaster-loss science when it published a graph linking global temperature increases with rising financial losses from natural disasters.”

This is simply a bundle of egregious misrepresentations. The graph in question was provided to the IPCC by Robert Muir-Wood, a researcher for Risk Management Solutions (RMS) – a group which publishes analyses of disaster-related trends for the insurance industry. The IPCC included this (accurate) graph not in the main body of the text, but among its “Supplementary Material” – which, RMS point out, “were not published” (my emphasis). This would seem an entirely reasonable way of handling submissions of this kind without giving them undue prominence. It is hardly – to put it mildly – alarmist scaremongering.

Moreover, the graph itself does not “link” global temperature increases with rising financial losses from natural disasters – though it does present them alongside one another – and no accompanying statement “linking” them was ever made. Nevertheless, presenting the graph while “ignoring evidence to the contrary” could be construed as potentially misleading – for the infinitesimal number of people scrutinising the report in its entirety, “Supplementary Material” and all.

So what is this evidence the IPCC ignor[ed]”? Shellenberger and Nordhaus flesh it out:

“[R]esearchers are unlikely to be able to unequivocally link storm or flood losses to anthropogenic warming for several decades, if even then. This is not because there is no evidence of increasing extreme weather, but rather because the rising costs of natural disasters have been driven so overwhelmingly by social and economic factors — more people with more wealth living in harm’s way.”

The IPCC, then, allegedly “ignor[es]” these details. Really? Here’s what Chapter I of the IPCC’s Working Group II has to say:

“The dominant signal is of significant increase in the values of exposure [i.e. “more people with more wealth living in harm’s way”] … as has been widely acknowledged, failing to adjust for time-variant economic factors yields loss amounts that are not directly comparable and a pronounced upward trend through time for purely economic reasons. …

“Global losses reveal rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s. One study [the RMS study] has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend.”

The sensitivity of these results requires a caveat, however – which the IPCC includes:

“The significance of the upward trend is influenced by the losses in the USA and the Caribbean in 2004 and 2005 and is arguably biased by the relative wealth of the USA, particularly relative to India.”

Is this an attempt “to unequivocally link storm or flood losses to anthropogenic warming” that “ignores evidence to the contrary”? Or is it, in fact, precisely the reverse: a thoroughly equivocal account that includes such evidence? RMS themselves offer an unambiguous verdict:

“RMS believes the IPCC fairly referenced its paper, with suitable caveats around the results, highlighting the factors influencing the relationship that had been discovered between time and increased catastrophe costs.”

Yet again, this is simply a fake scandal. And yet again, Shellenberger and Nordhaus not only repeat it – misrepresenting the IPCC in the process – but actually use it to demonstrate that body’s hidden agenda.

What, then, of the “evidence to the contrary” these authors themselves simply ignore? Oceanographer Stefan Rhamstorf has recently noted the IPCC’s serious underestimates of sea-level rise – exposing a degree of conservatism that would surely elicit gales of hysteria had the forecasts been similarly overestimated. Rhamstorf writes:

“I mention this because there is a lesson in it. [The] IPCC would never have published an implausibly high 3 meter upper limit like this, but it did not hesitate with the implausibly low 59 cm. That is because within the IPCC culture, being “alarmist” is bad and being “conservative” (i.e. underestimating the potential severity of things) is good.”

Unlike the spurious evidence adduced to support Shellenberger and Nordhaus’ fallacies, this evidence is extremely robust – indeed the IPCC’s sea-level models have already been superseded by observations.

Conclusions

What, then, of the proposal “to free energy policy from climate science” in public communication? The authors may at least have a case here: robust as the science may remain in reality, its perception in the public sphere may now have become irreparably tainted. Yet this claim would be considerably easier to take absent the proposition that “climate science can [now] get back to being primarily a scientific enterprise”. Climate science has been a non- or even anti-scientific enterprise, we are to understand – not superficially or in part, but primarily? Even for these authors, this is a new low.

In any case, their proposed solution is beset by major problems. Shellenberger and Nordhaus acknowledge that “any prudent strategy to minimize future risks associated with catastrophic climate change involves decarbonizing our economy as rapidly as possible.” True enough. But what plausible case for urgent and comprehensive decarbonisation – inevitably meaning real restrictions on carbon rather than “aspirational targets” – can realistically stand without climate change as the fundamental basis for action?

Concerted efforts towards political, cultural, economic and social change remain vital – and are only undermined by baseless slurs against climate scientists and campaigners.

The only conceivable possibility – and Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s own preference – is all-out investment in “low-carbon energy research, development, and deployment”, yielding an entirely speculative new energy source – available in the near-term, cheap enough instantly to displace all fossil fuels, plentiful enough to offset exponentially rising consumption, and flexible enough to heat homes, propel vehicles (including aircraft) and generate electricity, everywhere.

It is as though, struggling to prompt action on the established causes of cancer, campaigners opted instead to cross their fingers and await a once-in-a-generation miracle cure. Coming from critics of environmentalists’ “underestimat[es of] the economic and technological challenges associated with rapidly decarbonizing the energy economy”, this is a little difficult to take seriously. Pursuing such a breakthrough is an entirely laudable goal, but is simply insufficient in isolation. Concerted efforts towards political, cultural, economic and social change remain vital – and are only undermined by baseless slurs against climate scientists and campaigners.

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“Global warming scepticism forces Science Museum to rename ‘climate change’ gallery” headlines the Daily Mail. Only slightly less sensationalist is the Times, with: “Public scepticism prompts Science Museum to rename climate exhibition”.

So does the Science Museum believe that the scientific consensus on climate change has diluted or weakened? Actually, no. But you wouldn’t know that from the headlines.

The Science Museum’s job is to educate the public about science. What’s actually going on here is that they’re doing their job by tackling the serious gap between the remarkable level of scientific agreement on the basics of climate science – (planet warming, human activity to blame) – and the increasingly obvious public confusion about the issue.

What’s actually going on here is that the Science Museum is doing its job by tackling the serious gap between the remarkable level of scientific agreement on basic climate science, and the increasingly obvious public confusion about the issue.

The Museum has obviously concluded that if your audience is ‘the public’, you can’t afford to put anyone off. So the press release says they’re aiming at:

“… satisfying the interests and needs of those who accept that human-induced climate change is real, those who are unsure, and those who do not.”

So far, so sensible. What the Museum no doubt thought they were press-releasing was that they were taking steps to make their work accessible to all, regardless of opinion – a distancing of their work from the highly charged climate debate, a return to the substance of the issue, an informative exhibition for the public aimed at education, not persuasion. They wanted to indicate that they were stepping back from the politically and socially charged implications of climate change, and choosing to concentrate on the question ‘What does the science actually tell you?’.

But the media mangle the story. The Times’ Ben Webster reports:

“The Science Museum is revising the contents of its new climate science gallery to reflect the wave of scepticism that has engulfed the issue in recent months … The museum is abandoning its previous practice of trying to persuade visitors of the dangers of global warming. It is instead adopting a neutral position, acknowledging that there are legitimate doubts about the impact of man-made emissions on the climate.

Even the title of the £4 million gallery has been changed to reflect the museum’s more circumspect approach. The museum had intended to call it the Climate Change Gallery, but has decided to change this to Climate Science Gallery to avoid being accused of presuming that emissions would change the temperature.”

The Daily Mail takes the same line, but with more forceful language:

“[The Science Museum] will refrain from scaring visitors with apocalyptic predictions of rising sea levels at its £4million gallery by adopting a less biased approach, acknowledging legitimate doubts about the impact to [sic] man-made emissions on the climate.”

Yes, that’s right, the reporting took the Science Museum’s acknowledgement of public uncertainty, and using broad brush strokes implied that they were referring to scientific uncertainty – a fundamental difference, and pretty problematic.

The reporting took the Science Museum’s acknowledgement of public uncertainty, and using broad brush strokes implied that they were referring to scientific uncertainty – a fundamental difference.

In fact, the Director of the Science Museum, Prof. Chris Rapley, comments:

“The scientific community has, with some exceptions, concluded that climate change is real, largely driven by humans and requires a response.”

And the Museum couldn’t be much clearer in the response to the reporting they felt they had to issue:

“After laying out our intentions for the new climate science gallery, the term ‘neutral’ has been adopted in some articles in the press, which is not an accurate description of our approach.”

“Our aim is to increase interest and deepen understanding. This will include the fact that majority of the climate science community has concluded that current climate change is real and mainly human-induced.  There are always areas of uncertainty in any scientific topic, and climate science is no exception. We respect people’s right to disagree, and we will address the issues raised, but we always return to the fact that the weight of evidence supports the anthropogenic conclusion.”

You would hope a well-designed exhibition of climate science aimed at the public would acknowledge public doubts about the impact of man-made emissions on climate. But this doesn’t equate to suggesting that there are widespread doubts expressed within the mainstream scientific community.

Chris Rapley obviously understands the difficult communications job the Museum has to do. At a recent Policy Network debate he said:

“There is a tyranny at work here. My impression is that where scientists know there are big uncertainties, they are afraid to emphasise them because people will misunderstand them. The evidence is that when they confess to them, they are exploited.”

It’s a bigger question to what extent the confusion about climate science that the museum is responding to is a product of inaccurate coverage by the media. But this kind of thing clearly doesn’t help.

Lucky we’ve got the Science Museum to educate people, eh?

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Lewis said he was contacted by the Sunday Times before the article was published and told them the IPCC’s statement was “poorly written and bizarrely referenced, but basically correct”. He added that “there is a wealth of scientific evidence suggesting that the Amazon is vulnerable to reductions in rainfall”. He also sent the newspaper several scientific papers that supported the claim, but were not cited by that section of the IPCC report.

…

Lewis also complains that the Sunday Times used several quotes from him in the piece to support the assertion that the IPCC report had made a false claim. “Despite repeatedly stating to the Sunday Times that there is no problem with the sentence in the IPCC report, except the reference.”

Climate Safety originally covered the bogus claims:

As Lewis made clear in correspondence, the problem was not with the accuracy of the IPCC’s statement, which reflected the peer-reviewed scientific literature – but with the reference that had been attributed to it. The issue had in fact already been dealt with in the report of Working Group I (on “The Physical Science Basis” of climate change), which had got the references right. Did Leake’s article accurately reflect Lewis’ views? “Absolutely not.”

Lewis, it turns out, had sent both Leake and Harrabin the same email. But while Harrabin had included Lewis’s comments on the IPCC’s accuracy in his BBC piece, Leake simply ignored them. Instead, he seems to have invented his own, more congenial version of reality. “4000-page report makes insignificant referencing error” is admittedly a rather less powerful headline – even if it does possess the distinct advantage of being true.

More astonishingly, as science blogger Eli Kintisch revealed, Leake had been told exactly the same thing by Dan Nepstad – author of a 1999 Nature paper cited by WWF, and others that back up the IPCC on the Amazon – two days before his story was published.

Interestingly, the Guardian article doesn’t name the journalist in question, Jonathan Leake. Readers who also follow Tim Lambert over at Deltoid will be all too familiar with Mr. Leake. Tim Lambert’s research shows that, among other things, he:

• Was responsible for the bogus story about Google’s carbon footprint
• Made up a story about heart attacks falling after the smoking ban
• Misrepresented Richard Dawkins
• Misrepresented Bruce Hood
• Broke an embargo and got the Sunday Times banned from EurekAlert, an outlet which provides journalists access to embargoed science stories.
• Did the same with JAMA, a medical list, with the same outcome
• Misrepresented the IPCC on tropical cyclone trends
• Quoted a scientist who had refused to speak to him!

All of this led Lambert to post:

Here’s a game you can play at home. All you need is a search engine. Take a Jonathan Leake science story with a dramatic headline. For example, Facebook fans do worse in exams. Then do a search on the headline. You win if you can find complaints by scientists that their research was misrepresented by Leake. Like this.

…

Try the game, it’s fun!

Of the whole AmazonGate/LeakeGate affair, we originally concluded:

While it is wholly unsurprising that the denial lobby should be attempting to push baseless and misleading stories to the press, what is surprising is the press’s willingness to swallow them. In this case, two experts in the relevant field told a Times journalist explicitly that, in spite of a minor referencing error, the IPCC had got its facts right. That journalist simply ignored them. Instead, he deliberately put out the opposite line – one fed to him by a prominent climate change denier – as fact. The implications are deeply disturbing, not only for our prospects of tackling climate change, but for basic standards of honesty and integrity in journalism.

Let’s hope the Press Complaints Commission steps up… then again, don’t hold your breath.

Update: Climate Progress has an excellent post on the same subject.

Update 2: Leake botches another story, this time on UK wind power.

Update 3: Sunday Times admits story was ‘flawed’, offers to print Lewis’s original letter, Lewis rejects.

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The champions of climate science moved onto other fronts, leaving climate scientists to hold down the fort. However, this approach ignored a basic principal of conflict – victories must be defended.

Before focusing on how to reframe the debate on climate science, it’s fair to ask whether it’s worth the effort. In the wake of the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report on climate change three years ago, with climate science seemingly well established, advocates for climate protection focused their attention and rhetoric on the power of clean technology to fuel economic growth and create green jobs. This strategy was driven in part by the sober realization that abstract science is very limited when it comes to reaching and mobilizing mainstream audiences in the U.S. Fancy PowerPoint charts describing a threat arriving 100 years in the future just won’t cut it when your job is on the line right now and rent is due next week.

With the IPCC report well publicized, the champions of climate science moved onto other fronts, leaving climate scientists to hold down the fort. However, this approach ignored a basic principal of conflict – victories must be defended. Not surprisingly, the opponents of climate protection took advantage and mobilized to attack the science. They understood full well that, while the science is insufficient by itself to mobilize public will, it does provide the foundation for building the moral outrage than can and does move Americans. Poll after poll has found that highlighting the threat global warming poses to our children’s future is one of the few compelling arguments that gain traction with mainstream audiences. But that threat is meaningless if the science is not believed.

At the same time, the scale and pace of change required to avoid catastrophic climate change can’t be summoned simply by highlighting the benefits of investing in clean energy. The benefits from changing over to a low carbon society are too diffuse, and the few big winners are yet to be known. Meanwhile the losers know exactly who they are and understand that they stand to lose, and they have the deep pockets to fight long and hard. Choosing between highlighting the benefits of change or focusing on the danger of inaction is a bad strategy. Both benefits and risks must be illuminated.

Choosing between highlighting the benefits of change or focusing on the danger of inaction is a bad strategy. Both benefits and risks must be illuminated.

Science is the question (and it shouldn’t be)

Currently, media coverage of climate science is framed such that it defines the fundamental question as an issue of science, not politics. In this setting, the more the science is debated, the more the science is defined as debatable. There is simply no way to “prove” the science in a sound bite or a new story. Debating the science in the news is a no-win proposition that perpetuates public doubt.

There are four dimensions to the frame of every issue. And there is an opportunity to recast every dimension of climate science debate.

The Messenger

When audiences read news stories and attempt to make out the underlying issues, they take an important cue from the identity of the messengers. And currently, climate scientists are almost the sole messengers defending climate science. While this is problematic on a number of fronts, it is particularly challenging for the framing of the debate. Putting a scientist in the messenger role reinforces the notion that the fundamental issue is a question about the science. If scientists are doing the debating it is only natural to assume the science is debatable.

Beyond the question of identity, many scientists don’t make for a good messenger when the issue is politicized, such as with climate science. They are loath to call out the politics and step into a controversy outside their area of expertise.

Putting a scientist in the messenger role reinforces the notion that the fundamental issue is a question about the science. If scientists are doing the debating it is only natural to assume the science is debatable.

Climate scientists must be joined by other messengers who are willing to stand up and speak out against the attack on science: farmers whose children would inherit dust-bowl farms due to the delay urged by climate deniers, generals who understand the national security threat, and business leaders who understand that every year of delay in investing in clean energy costs the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Message

When debate becomes poisoned and opponents are engaged in distortion and deceit, it becomes critically necessary to call out the politics and highlight the consequences of arguing in bad faith.

Climate advocates should document and highlight the funding and industry ties for the current wave of climate deniers. While the new generation of critics is often driven by partisan politics as much as by direct industry interests, their partisanship is fair game for reprove, particularly when it comes at the expense of our nation.

Advocates for climate protection need to go on the offensive.

They need to go beyond saying what the attacks don’t do (”they don’t undermine the science”) and spell out what the attacks do achieve: costly and dangerous delay.

Calling out the politics is a way to bridge the debate, to move away from debating climate science to highlighting the impacts of climate change as well as the opportunity to invest in a clean energy economy, an opportunity jeopardized by the delaying and stonewalling tactics of climate deniers.

The Audience

The audience forms the third dimension of a news frame. Tell the same story to a different audience and you can end up with a different story. In the context of the climate science debate, addressing the ultra-conservative audiences served up by Fox News is a low priority. The focus should be on independent audiences in key states. At the same time, it is important not to ignore liberal bloggers simply because reaching out to them is seen as preaching to the choir. That choir makes up the much talked about echo chamber, and if you don’t give the choir a songbook, it doesn’t know what to sing.

The Setting

It’s critically important to do more than defend the IPCC. Debating 1,000 page science reports is not a compelling setting, and the rehabilitation of the IPCC brand will not happen overnight, despite the fact that the damage was done by erroneous attacks.

A better setting for talking about climate science is a real time impact of climate change, be it a record heat wave or record heavy rains followed by heavy flooding. There is no denying what your eyes can see. Last fall’s record setting flood in Atlanta was a textbook example of the kind of impact that should be highlighted. Only months earlier, NOAA had released a consensus science report documenting the trend of increased heavy precipitation during the fall months in the southeastern United States. NOAA identified climate change as driving the trend and predicted more of the same for the future.

If you don’t give the choir a songbook, it doesn’t know what to sing.

Some have argued that focusing on current weather can be tricky. However, advocates were forced to do just that when opponents focused on the recent snowstorms as “proof” that global warming was oversold. Advocates were successful in pushing back on climate change deniers in that instance, and the same effort should be applied to upcoming heat waves, droughts and flooding, events that fit the pattern of increasing extreme events that scientists have clearly documented and predicted will only increase as the impacts of climate change intensify,

Another useful setting can be the courtroom, where the plaintiffs are real life people who’ve suffered real losses from climate change. In this setting the question is not whether or not the science is solid, but whether the fossils fuel industry should be held legally liable for the billions of tons of carbon pollution it has dumped into the atmosphere.

Other useful story lines could highlight different governments, companies, and stakeholders such as water managers who are already making decisions and taking action based on what the science is dictating, reinforcing the notion that the science is settled–and urgent–with dramatic consequences for their business and communities.

Fending off the attack on climate science does require a concerted rapid-response defense simply to set the record straight. But winning the debate requires going beyond defending the science. It requires asking different questions, such as who wins and who loses.

This is a guest post by Hunter Cutting, his blog can be found at talkinthewalk.wordpress.com. This piece was first posted on the Huffington Post.

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These are strange statements, given that climatologists have meanwhile willingly acknowledged and corrected genuine errors, and offered suggestions on improving IPCC processes. The journal Nature published a series of suggestions from five prominent climate scientists on ways forward for the IPCC. The Guardian ran a similar story full of scientists suggesting reforms. Climate modeller William Connolley critiqued the thoroughness of IPCC Working Group II, while defending its use of “grey” literature. Other scientists suggested separating the IPCC’s Working Groups. The evidence suggests the scientific profession puts reflection, doubt and criticism at the heart of its practice.

By contrast, the media’s reluctance to address its own failings is stark. Recent weeks have seen a deluge of “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information” in climate change reporting – precisely the kind of material it is the Press Complaints Commission’s (PCC’s) stated role to guard against. But, as its exoneration of Jan Moir’s falsehoods over Stephen Gately’s death has highlighted, this “self-regulatory” industry body remains toothless.

On climate change, various recent journalistic performances have been particularly outrageous. Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times attacked the IPCC over a “bogus” and “unsubstantiated” claim on the Amazon’s sensitivity to reductions in rainfall. Yet Leake was well aware – having been informed by two leading experts, one of whom he went on to selectively quote – that the IPCC had got its facts right.

Leake later accused the IPCC of inaccurately connecting climate change to more frequent extreme weather events – citing its (allegedly) problematic treatment of a single economic study. “UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters”, Leake’s headline screamed. Barack Obama had mentioned the link, we were told. The issue of developing countries’ adaptation funding was predicated on it.

This was transparent nonsense. The group behind the study exonerated the IPCC’s “fair” and “appropriate” treatment, which included “suitable caveats”. The IPCC had obviously not based all future projections of extreme weather events on one economic study – as it quickly pointed out. Adaptation funding – which covers impacts of all kinds – was obviously not founded on one study on extreme weather.

Then there’s the infamous David Rose – a journalist who persistently promoted the fictitious Iraq-Al-Qaeda connection in the run-up to the Iraq war. Rose recently mangled the work of climate scientist Mojib Latif in the Mail, portraying him as dissenting from the scientific consensus – a claim Latif said he “cannot understand”. Rose conflated the man’s climate forecasts with spells of cold weather that “are not related at all”, in Latif’s words. “You can’t compare the two.” Latif’s work suggested that climate change might be offset by short-term variations up to 2015 – not a “mini ice age” lasting up to 30 years. “I don’t know what to do”, as Latif exasperatedly put it. “They just make these things up.”

Rose subsequently smeared the IPCC. On its Himalayan glaciers error, lead author Murari Lal, Rose claimed, “admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders”. Rose quoted Lal directly: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” Both claims, Lal revealed, were simply false.

These are not isolated mistakes: the press have bent over backwards to misrepresent climate scientists in recent weeks. The Times claimed that Bob Watson had identified an “apparent bias” in the IPCC’s errors. Watson stated: “I was interviewed for an hour, and it was obvious that the reporter wanted me to say that the authors were biased – I said I did not believe that.” The mistaken Himalayan glacier melt forecast repeatedly described as a “central claim” of the IPCC was barely reported at all when its report was released – unsurprisingly, since it appears nowhere in the summaries where its “central claims” can be found. Rajendra Pachauri was excoriated for calling criticism of this error “voodoo science”. He was criticising a report that mentions neither the 2035 claim nor the IPCC.

These are egregious journalistic failings, well within the PCC’s remit. Sadly, its handling of similar complaints has been woeful. Nine months after the Telegraph’s Christopher Booker penned an article calling sea-level rise “a colossal scare story”, for instance – prompting a complaint from Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute – the Commission ruled that “It is not of course for the PCC to make findings of fact on where the truth about climate change lies”. The body is of course obliged to make judgments on clear factual inaccuracies, and Ward had exposed a whole selection. Yet Booker was exonerated; his article remains.

In effect the PCC relieves columnists of the obligation to base articles on facts – a tendency which has now reached absurd heights. In theory, the body requires newspapers “to distinguish between comment, conjecture and fact”. Yet it recently ruled that the words “the fact is” – prefacing a review of published research findings – did not indicate a statement of fact. A shocking betrayal of readers this may be – but it is fortunate for papers. Fundamental inaccuracies permeate innumerable comment pieces on climate science – and not just on climate science. Far from deterring “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information”, the PCC acts as a rubber stamp.

The UK desperately needs a press that does not defraud the public on matters of basic science. A responsible media requires accountability: without effective regulation, through the enforcement of legally binding standards by a genuinely independent body, this will inevitably remain a distant prospect. Sure, the IPCC could arguably use some reforms. But the PCC needs to be replaced.

A version of this post was first published on Left Foot Forward.

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As the years passed by, media coverage deteriorated further. Claims by researchers who never published scientific papers to back up their claims were reported in the newspapers as important new scientific breakthroughs, while at the very same time, evidence showing no link between MMR and autism, fully published in peer reviewed academic journals, was simply ignored. This was cynical, and unforgivable.

That last paragraph is particularly important because it shows one of the more common ways in which mainstream media outlets consistently distorts the truth by selectively highlighting particular claims and/or research on the basis of whether it conforms to an established narrative. Take, for example, yesterday’s Sunday Times, which devoted several hundred words to the uncritical promotion of the latest effluvial outpourings of  TV weatherman and all-round climate crock, Anthony Watts.

Left Foot Forward has some of the relevant background to Watts’ report, which he co-authored with another well-known climate change denier, Joseph D’Aleo, but what’s much more interesting and illuminating here a recent peer-reviewed paper by Menne et al (2010) [1], which was published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Menne’s paper, which is usefully summarised at Skeptical Science, takes what was, at the time it was written, Anthony Watts’ assessments of the quality and siting characteristic of 43% of the surface stations included in the US Historical Climate Network (USHCN) and does something with that Watts’ appears not to have even attempted. It analyses the temperature records of these stations and looks specifically for evidence of biases associated with poor siting.

For anyone not familiar with Watts and his Surface Stations website, his personal contribution to climate change denialism has been to use his website to recruit an army of volunteers to go out and photograph the location of surface stations included in the USHCN network in order to evaluate the siting of those stations against published quality standards.

The belief is that this photographic evidence proves that the warming trends evident in the US surface station record are not being generated by climate change but are, in fact, nothing more than the product of microsite influences; the siting of surface stations near car parks, airport tarmac and air conditioners. These, Watts argues, introduce a warming bias into the temperature record.

By examining what has rapidly become the climate change deniers’ holy grail, the raw, uncorrected, temperature data for all the stations that Watts’ had assessed up to the point at which they started work (43% of the total number of sites included in the USHCN), Menne and his co-authors did, indeed, find clear evidence of a bias in the raw data associated with those sites that Watts had assessed as being of poor quality.

Unfortunately, for Watts, this bias turned out to be exact opposite of the one that he predicted.

The poor quality sites included in the USCHN, and identified by Watts, have actually imparted a cooling bias on the raw US surface temperature record since the 1980’s for reasons relating to changes in the instrumentation used to create the records.

(The technical explanation for this is covered by Menne et al’s paper and by Skeptical Science, both of which are linked earlier)

Although Watts’ survey of USCHN surface stations has proved useful here – which Menne openly acknowledges in his paper – what it doesn’t provide is any scientific evidence to support Watts’ proposition that climate change is a complete fraud and one based squarely on the deliberate manipulation of temperature records by climate scientists.

In fact, nothing that Watts does could reasonably categorised as actual science.

This is well evidenced by his response to Menne et al, which consists of yet more surface station photographs and the rehashing of an old critique of the use of homogenised data in a previous NOAA analysis – which is debunked here. None of this has any relevance whatsoever to Menne’s research, which used the unhomogenised raw data for the surface stations included in its analysis and cannot, therefore, be said to have been manipulated by climate scientists.

In short, Watts’ response to a paper which blows a major hole in his pet hypothesis is to post a couple of photos and then quickly change the subject.

To devote several hundred words to a puff piece that promotes Watts’ screed as if it were the work of a genuine scientist is, as Ben Goldacre points out, both cynical and unforgivable – and all the more so in view of the GMC’s recent findings on Andrew Wakefield. These should have given the mainstream media pause for thought but have, instead, been roundly ignored in terms of their implications for the conduct and behaviour of the press in its reporting of scientific issues and evidence.

To make matters even worse than usual, unlike the majority of the news coverage of Wakefield’s fraudulent research, which was written up by non-specialist journalists, the article on Watts’ report carries the byline of Jonathan Leake, the paper’s Science and Environment editor, who really has no excuse for being unaware of Menne et al’s paper…

…is he’s doing his job properly and carrying out the necessary background checks on his work rather than simply churning out wire copy and whatever press releases are being thrust under his nose.

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Suppose you have a child, a son — he’s 10. You want to know whether or not he’s growing normally, so every day you measure his height with a tape measure. You’ve done so since he was 5. You even plot the data on a graph, and notice two things about it. First: the measurements show a fair amount of jitter, sometimes they’re a wee bit higher, sometimes a wee bit lower, there’s noise in the data. Second: there’s also a trend. Your kid is a lot taller at 10 than he was at 5, in fact the trend over the observed time span is upward and reasonably steady. You even do a statistical analysis, estimate the growth rate, and determine that it’s definitely statistically significant — so it’s not a false trend due to noise in the data, it’s real. Your son is growing normally.

Then you’re interviewed by a reporter from the Daily Mail. He asks, “Can you prove — with statistical significance — that your child has been growing since last Tuesday?”

You reply that no, even though the trend over that time span is upward, it’s not statistically significant.

The next day you read the article in the Daily Mail which is titled, “Growthgate U-turn as parent admits: There has been no growth since last Tuesday.”

You protest. “I never said my child wasn’t growing! I just said that the data over such a short time span didn’t show it with statistical significance! That’s only because on such a short time scale, the noise obscures the trend.”

Alas, it’s too late, the damage is done, because 3500 blogs have repeated the article from the Daily Mail and child protective services has been asked to investigate your fitness as a parent.

Sound familiar?

Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate has this to say about the Daily Mail’s horrible misquoting of Phil Jones:

What Jones actually said is that, while the globe has nominally warmed since 1995, it is difficult to establish the statistical significance of that warming given the short nature of the time interval (1995-present) involved. The warming trend consequently doesn’t quite achieve statistical significance. But it is extremely difficult to establish a statistically significant trend over a time interval as short as 15 years–a point we have made countless times at RealClimate. It is also worth noting that the CRU record indicates slightly less warming than other global temperature estimates such as the GISS record.

It is extremely difficult to establish a statistically significant trend over a time interval as short as 15 years.

As ever, the wonderful Skeptical Science covers the whole affair in more depth.

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