climate science | ukwatch.net

Despite Ruling, "Swindle" Is Still Dangerous

Tim Holmes — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:28:32 +0000

Don’t believe anything you see in a TV documentary made in the UK.

Documentary makers here have no obligation to be accurate, though factual programmes should present a wide range of views.

That is the implication of a series of rulings by Ofcom, the regulatory body for responsible for upholding broadcast standards in the UK, on complaints made about a British TV documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Channel 4, the television company that commissioned and broadcast the documentary, first shown on 8 March last year, subsequently sold the show to 21 countries and released it on DVD. Numerous clips have been viewed on video-sharing site YouTube.

According to the Ofcom ruling, while all programmes dealing with important issues should be impartial, only news programmes have to be presented with “due accuracy”. It doesn’t matter if other programmes are misleading as long as they don’t cause “harm or offence”, and the regulator’s interpretation of harm is so narrow that it effectively gives broadcasters a green light to mislead the public.

The “documentary” in question attacked the idea that global warming is caused by human activity.

To achieve this, writer and director Martin Durkin didn’t look at the many genuine questions and uncertainties relating to climate change. Instead, he assembled a one-sided package of misrepresentations and fabrications based mainly on inaccurate newspaper reports, opinion pieces and old propaganda disseminated by the oil lobby and its stooges.

Blatant errors

For instance, parts of some of the graphs were actually made up, as the programme makers effectively admitted when they corrected the most blatant errors for later broadcasts.

For me and my colleagues, this shameful piece of television was the final straw that persuaded us to do a special setting out the science behind the many climate myths and misconceptions.

We were not the only ones outraged. Durkin’s documentary also prompted many complaints to Ofcom. Dave Rado, a concerned layman, worked with scientists to produce one detailed complaint claiming 137 breaches of the UK’s broadcasting regulations. Those involved stress that they are not trying to stifle free speech, but rather to prevent the media from practicing “systematic deception”.

Now, more than a year after the broadcast, Ofcom has finally gotten around to ruling on these complaints (pdf). It has upheld some of the claimed breaches.

Upheld complaints

The programme misrepresented the views of David King, then the chief scientific advisor to the UK government, and gave him no opportunity to respond, Ofcom has decided. The programme criticised King for comments he did not make.

Ofcom also partly upheld similar complaints by oceanographer Carl Wunsch and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Channel 4 will have to broadcast summaries of Ofcom’s ruling in each of the three cases.

So much for fairness. What about the general issue of factual accuracy? According to Ofcom’s broadcasting code: “Factual programmes or items or portrayals of factual matters must not materially mislead the public”.

The code goes on to say that “due impartiality must be preserved on … major matters relating to current public policy” and “in dealing with matters, an appropriately wide range of significant views must be included and given due weight”.

Ofcom has ruled that the final part of the programme was in breach of the code relating to impartiality and presenting a wide range of views.

The decision is fairly meaningless, however, as it has not imposed any sanction. Channel 4 will not have to broadcast anything relating to this ruling.

Factual failings

What seems extraordinary, though, is that Ofcom has decided Durkin’s programme was not in breach of the code when it comes to factual accuracy. So apparently:

• It’s OK to fabricate graphics.

• It’s OK to state that volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than humans when in fact humans emit far more.

• It’s OK to present scientists as experts in fields they in fact know little about.

• It’s OK to present disputed claims as if they were well-established and accepted scientific facts.

• It’s OK to claim: “There is no evidence at all from Earth’s long climate history that carbon dioxide has ever determined global temperatures”, when there is overwhelming evidence going back many decades that CO2 does play a role.

• It’s OK to deliberately confuse long-term changes in sea ice cover with the seasonal coming and going of ice.

• It’s OK to state that Margaret Thatcher made a speech to scientists at the Royal Society saying: “There’s money on the table for you to prove this stuff” (meaning global warming) when she did not say any such thing. The extraordinary idea being that climate change was an issue cooked up by climate scientists in order to get funding.

• It’s OK to state that, “The common belief that carbon dioxide is driving climate change is at odds with much of the available scientific data: data from weather balloons and satellites, from ice core surveys, and from the historical temperature records” when this is clearly untrue.

• It’s OK to claim that an individual called Piers Corbyn produces more accurate weather forecasts than the UK’s Met Office when there is no evidence of this at all.

The list could go on and on, but you get the picture. I can’t think of any supposedly factual programme on British TV that was less accurate than Durkin’s polemic. For Ofcom to rule that it was not factually misleading is extraordinary and sets a disastrous precedent for programmes relating to controversial scientific issues.

‘Harm and offence’

The reasoning behind this decision, according to the judgement, is that for non-news programmes the rule on factual accuracy applies only to “content which materially misleads the audience so as to cause harm and offence”. It goes on to say that only “actual harm” rather than “potential harm” matters.

In other words, discouraging action to avoid future catastrophes does not count as harm.

On this basis, Ofcom decided that all the falsehoods in the programme relating to the causes of climate change could simply be ignored. The programme will not cause harm by affecting people’s behaviour, the judgement claims, because most viewers know the views expressed are not the scientific consensus.

Well, yes, most viewers might know what the consensus is, but an awful lot of them do not accept it. What’s more, most viewers would not have been aware how many of the statements in the programme were false.

Poor record

By Ofcom’s logic, a programme that presented the long-discredited myths about AIDS not being caused by HIV as being true would not count as causing harm either. Indeed, astonishingly, the ruling makes exactly this comparison.

As for the factual inaccuracies not causing offence, well, I get hopping mad when I see a pack of lies presented as the truth. Does that kind of offence not count? Clearly not.

The other thing I find extraordinary about this case is that Channel 4 is a publicly owned company. Despite its public remit, it has a record of broadcasting similar nonsense.

What’s more, with its advertising revenues falling, it is currently campaigning to get its hands on part of the BBC’s licence fees. What a horrifying prospect.

In my opinion, if Channel 4 carries on producing programmes like The Great Global Warming Swindle, the sooner it goes bust the better off Britain and the world will be

Burning Ambitions

Tim Holmes — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:07:16 +0000

If you’ve been following the news over the weekend, you’ll probably have noticed Blair’s back, and he brings glad tidings to the world of men. The disgraced ex-premier and war criminal flew to Japan on Friday to discuss his plans for a global climate deal, establishing binding targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The Guardian, which happily landed an interview with the guy, told us of Blair’s “ambitious plan for a global climate change deal” which has “been in gestation ever since he left office”. The word “ambitious”, indeed, appears three times in this interview (only once attributed to Blair – evidently the paper was kind enough to echo and amplify his thoughts).

Much of the mainstream press also echoed the adulation of Blair’s “ambitious” new plans. “My God,” writes the Guardian’s Martin Kettle, “now even Tony Blair has got religion on climate change.” John Rentoul in the Independent could barely restrain his lofty estimation of the man’s vision – Blair’s is an “absurd ambition”, he writes – but one which is nonetheless “admirable, however far it falls short”. The same message – combining a lofty appraisal of Blair’s goals with cynicism about the possibility of achieving them – was peddled by the Times. In their headline’s words: “After world peace, Tony Blair’s next mission is to save the planet”. Even Mark Lynas, of all people, gets in on the act – granted, in a more measured and qualified way – writing that Blair may be a “champion” for climate change campaigners; a “man whose time has come”.

So what does his plan actually amount to? According to the BBC, Blair is trying “to guide attempts to secure a deal involving China and the US to slash emissions by 50% by 2050”. Why 50%? In Blair’s words: “There is no point producing something that is not politically doable.”

On the other hand, is there any point producing a target that won’t keep us in the climatic safe zone, avoiding the “tipping points” we need to avoid to prevent runaway climate change? Certainly, a binding agreement would be better than the nothing we have at the moment; and as Blair suggests, this initiative may set the stage for future agreements. Otherwise, amidst the talk of Blair’s “ambitious” plans, the question is barely raised.

It’s time we started raising it rather more forcefully. According to what now constitute the more conservative estimates, “The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures … would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.” In February, research by Damon Matthews, from Concordia University in Canada, and Ken Caldeira, from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, USA, published in Geophysical Research Letters, found that “[g]reenhouse gas emissions will have to be eliminated completely to stabilise the Earth’s climate and prevent temperatures from rising.” As New Scientist reported,

“Roger Pielke, a climate policy expert at the University of Colorado in Boulder, agrees with the findings. “This research makes the case that simply stabilising concentrations is insufficient to stabilise temperatures. Their argument, if widely accepted, raises the bar on what it means to mitigate climate change,” he says.

“Matthews and Caldeira warn that current emissions targets for 2050 are insufficient to avoid substantial future warming. Instead they believe that we need to eliminate emissions, or find a way of actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”

This research echoed the findings of a study published last October by Andrew Weaver and colleagues at the University of Victoria in Canada, that “[o]nly the total elimination of industrial emissions [by 2050] will succeed in limiting climate change to a 2°C rise in temperatures”. As Weaver adds, “There is a disconnect between the European Union arguing for a 2°C threshold and calling for 50% cuts at 2050 – you can’t have it both ways”. And he’s not alone.

“Tim Lenton, a climatologist at the University of East Anglia in the UK, agrees that even the most ambitious climate change policies so far proposed by governments may not go far enough. “It is overly simplistic [to] assume we can take emissions down to 50% at 2050 and just hold them there. We already know that that’s not going to work,” he says.

“Even with emissions halved, Lenton says carbon dioxide will continue building up in the atmosphere and temperatures will continue to rise. For temperature change to stabilise, he says industrial carbon emissions must not exceed what can be absorbed by Earth’s vegetation, soil and oceans.

“At the moment, about half of industrial emissions are absorbed by ocean and land carbon “sinks”. But simply cutting emissions by half will not solve the problem, Lenton says, because these sinks also grow and shrink as CO2 emissions change.

“People are easily misled into thinking that 50% by 2050 is all we have to do when in fact have to continue reducing emissions afterwards, all the way down to zero,” Lenton says.”

Unfortunately, this itself may not be enough. As the US’s leading climate scientist James Hansen put it last May, “what’s now become clear is that maybe 1 degree Celsius is dangerous, because already we’re seeing on West Antarctica a net loss of ice and the ocean is warming and it is beginning to melt the ice shelves.” In June, Hansen, along with five other scientists “from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States”, published a report concluding that the dangerous level of man-made greenhouse gases “is much lower than has commonly been assumed. If we have not already passed the dangerous level, the energy infrastructure in place ensures that we will pass it within several decades”. A “feasible strategy for planetary rescue” therefore “almost surely requires a means of extracting [greenhouse gases] from the air.”

Since this report was published, the data from the melting of arctic sea ice has worsened considerably. As Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the US government’s snow and ice data center in Colorado, put it in December, “The Arctic is screaming”. According to Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, it is “highly possible” that “the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away” this year. As Hansen told one interviewer in February,

“we will have to restore the point of energy balance because as it stands now we will lose the arctic sea ice without any more greenhouse gases, because there is additional warming that’s in the pipeline, because the planet is out of energy balance, just because of the inertia of the system.

“That means we would have to reduce the amount of CO2 at least to the 350ppm level, and we are already at 385. So, we’ve actually got to go backwards …

“We can see that 385ppm is really going to produce a significantly different planet. And also just looking at what’s now happening, not only in the Arctic, and the fact that the ice sheets are not stable with the current CO2 amount, and the fact that the sub-tropical regions have expanded noticeably by a few hundred kilometres, that’s enough to effect the southwest US, the Mediterranean, and Australia I should point out.

“So there’s a lot of things, also coral reefs are another example. If we want to reduce the stress on coral reefs, we have to both reduce CO2 and the warming of the ocean temperatures. So there are a number of things like that which make it clear that we’ve already passed the target level that we should be aiming for.”

Stripping carbon from the atmosphere is possible, Hansen notes, principally through “improved agricultural and forestry practices” (which, he adds, we’re currently undermining). How long we have in terms of time is something we simply don’t know:

“you know we’re pushing the atmospheric composition beyond the level which will give us a stable climate, so we’re overshooting the acceptable level. And we don’t know how long we can stay in a state where we’ve overshot that level. Obviously, if you overshoot for one day, that’s not going to cause a problem. It’s a question of how many years can you leave it at a level which is going to cause long term unacceptable impacts, like instability of the ice sheets. …

“That’s the key question, but it’s a very hard one because the systems in question are non-linear. Inherently it’s very difficult to predict a point of collapse. Whether you’re talking about an ice sheet collapsing or whether you’re talking about an ecosystem collapsing because as some species go extinct, that effects others because they’re all connected. So it’s just inherently a very difficult non-linear problem, and the models are just not up-to snuff as far as giving us the numbers for that. We can’t simulate the responses that are occurring right now in Greenland and West Antarctica.”

As John Houghton, formerly both Co-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Director General of the UK Metrological Office, adds, “[t]he urgency of action on climate change is being recognised at an ever increasing rate, with new evidence constantly coming to light.”

We simply have no time to lose. And what is abundantly clear is that none of this can happen at all unless we phase out coal power. The British government, as should also be abundantly clear by now, is going in the opposite direction – both stepping up the extraction of coal from the ground, and building a new generation of coal-fired power plants. If we want to prevent this from happening, as both Hansen and Al Gore have suggested, direct action has to be a serious part of our efforts (and, as we now know, this year’s climate camp is set to be targeting the site of the proposed new coal-fired station at Kingsnorth in Kent). On its own, one big climate camp a year is unlikely to take us where we need to go. But, if part of a concerted, growing campaign, direct action works; it has worked before; and it can work again. Moreover, the necessary target is achievable. As Hansen says:

“I think an initial target of 350 is doable provided we phase out coal, and although that sounds like a real tough job, in fact it’s doable and if we don’t do it there is no question, if you look at the times in the earth’s history when there was that much CO2 in the atmosphere it was a completely different planet. We have to do it and it is doable … if we compare it to how much effort we put into World War II, it’s a doable job and the incentives are just as great as they were then.”

The original purpose of this post was to draw attention to the looming chasm between what the mainstream media lauds as “ambitious” and what the science is telling us are our minimum necessary targets. What I’m particularly struck by, though, is the extraordinary sense of hope and possibility with which Hansen himself seems to be able to tell us the apparently unthinkable. The mainstream media’s version forms an extraordinary contrast: a totally inadequate target not only rendered “ambitious”, but in some cases so ambitious that it’s barely worth imagining we can possibly achieve it. We are presented with two highly divergent visions of the future. Only one of them can possibly bear thinking about.

Looking Back at 2007

Tim Holmes — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 01:13:38 +0000

In 2007, scientists released a record number of climate change reports. For many the UN talks in Bali were meant to be the year’s highlight, yet despite this negotiating frenzy, and some bleak scientific warnings, the world still lacks firm greenhouse emissions reduction targets.

This year also marked the virtual extinction of the ‘contrarian’ climate change deniers – they were a notable absence in the Bali negotiations. However, instead of agreeing firm targets, the ‘Bali Roadmap’ initiated a two-year process, committing states to the principle of further emissions cuts to replace those in the Kyoto Protocol, and to concluding negotiations on those cuts by 2009. The EU pressed for a commitment of 25-40% emissions cuts by 2020 for industrialised nations, a bid that was implacably opposed by a bloc containing the US, Canada and Japan.

The ‘Bali Roadmap’ aims to build on the Kyoto process by using funds from international carbon trading to pay for mitigation measures such as sea walls, fresh water infrastructure, new crop varieties, mosquito nets and whatever else may be needed as the world warms and rainfall patterns change. But, in terms of agreeing targets, the route now leads to Poznan in Poland in a year’s time, and to Copenhagen late in 2009 – there is certainly plenty to read during this, hopefully final leg of the journey.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 4th assessment report provides evidence that reducing global greenhouse gas emissions can be done at quite moderate costs, far less than the costs of failing to do so, affirming that “Delaying emission reductions significantly constrains the opportunities to achieve lower stabilisation levels and increase the risk of the more severe climate change impacts.” In short, really radical action must be taken now – if we are to avoid crossing a tipping point of 2°C in global mean temperature, beyond which we run the risk of irreversible, catastrophic feedback effects. 2°C inevitably becomes 3°C, releasing more carbon and pushing the temperature irreversibly up to 4°C and so on to climate chaos.

However, many climate scientists were concerned that the 4th IPCC report actually underestimates the seriousness of our situation because it only incorporates research published up to mid 2006. Carbon Equity’s The Big Melt report (see www.carbonequity.info) presented an overview of new trends in the behaviour of Arctic ice revealed this summer, showing the Antarctic ice shelf to be more sensitive to warming temperatures than previously thought. Its floating sea ice is headed towards rapid summer disintegration as early as 2013, a century ahead of the IPCC projections. Hence no further greenhouse gases should be released. We may even have to consider drastic action, at considerable cost to recapture existing atmospheric CO2.

We have now collated enough information to prove beyond reasonable doubt that is time for radical action – the emphasis for 2008 must shift from detailing the problem, to detailing the solution.

The Centre for Alternative Technology’s Zerocarbonbritain report was launched in July. The report aimed to integrate our detailed knowledge and experience into a national framework to address climate change and energy security while providing access to energy to a growing global population. Zerocarbonbritain demonstrated that we could reduce eliminate fossil fuels completely by 2027, reducing our greenhouse emissions from energy to zero if the correct drivers were put in place.

It is meaningless to compare our lifestyles today with those of a zero carbon future – as the most recent science has demonstrated, life as it is now will change – like it or not. More useful is the comparison between a future where we have been proactive and acted ahead of events, with a future where we have let events overtake us.

Rising to the challenge will entail a new approach to many of our current lifestyle choices. Pioneering new lifestyles in reducing emissions means ingenuity replaces apathy, and self-reliance replaces self-gratification, but perhaps most significantly, it might just deliver a rich sense of collective purpose and personal meaning, which we may find we have been craving for a very long time.

Paul Allen is Development Director at the Centre for Alternative Technology.

A Level Climate Science

Tim Holmes — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:25:58 +0000

Melanie Phillips once claimed that she had, in the old Irving Kristol formulation, been “mugged by reality”. I think she sustained a head injury during the attack. She doesn’t, in any case, seem to be able to face her attacker. I wouldn’t normally write about her bizarre, frothing persona: surely most people, even Daily Mail readers, would view her as a slightly crude parody, as Steven Poole insists she is. But now her Spectator incarnation refuses to publish my comments, and I can’t let even a satiric invention get away with that.

It begins with her enthusiasm for David Bellamy. A while ago he jumped, beard first, into the global warming debate, and immediately made an idiot of himself. In 2004 he wrote a Daily Mail article with the standard discredited points – that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a fertilizer, that the real greenhouse gas is water vapour, etc. He even touted the absurd “Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine” petition, “signed by over 18,000 scientists”, including, as George Monbiot pointed out, “Ginger Spice and the cast of MASH”. In an exchange with Monbiot, Bellamy’s complete lack of knowledge of global warming science became evident. For instance, to make his case on glaciers he had apparently relied on non-existent papers in prestigious journals, existent papers in LaRouchite journals, and, ultimately, his inability to operate a computer keyboard. He then wisely wrote to the Sunday Times announcing that he would “draw back” from this subject of which he knew nothing.

Sadly it didn’t last, and this week he was back with another self-pitying, “heretical” article informing Times readers that “the self-proclaimed consensus among scientists has detached itself from the questioning rigours of hard science”. Truth-tellers like Bellamy are victims of “McCarthyism, witch-hunts and all”. He has switched to a slightly different selection of debating points, but they are familiar enough. Ah, but the climate is cyclical anyway. And didn’t the Romans grow grapes in England? Oh, and Greenland used to be green (cue etymologically dubious assertion). On the strength of these claims we can obviously discard those “complex and often unreliable computer models” with their physics and their matching hindcasting. His points have all been dealt with, even in language a soil-fondling botanist should understand, but Bellamy has simply ignored these responses.

Naturally such a performance did not escape Mel P, forever casting around for abject stupidity to endorse. The Bellamy effusion is “glorious”. “Thank goodness” for him. He “rips into the global warming scam with unrivalled brio”. “Over and over again,” she reports, “he brings forward elementary facts which directly contradict or fatally undermine the misleading claims and sometimes totally bent predictions of man-made global warming catastrophe which masquerade as ‘research’.” So there. Even if a scientific consensus existed “it would prove nothing except the unlimited capacity of people to fall into line when their livelihoods are at stake”:

The ‘scientific consensus’ has been proved wrong over and over again; it was not long ago that it was proclaiming with the same certainty that the planet was about to freeze to extinction.

It is perhaps interesting to ponder Melanie Phillips’s understanding of the scientific method. Because the scientific consensus has been wrong in the past, no scientific consensus can “prove” anything except scientists’ self-interest. It is of course true science cannot absolutely prove anything. But if her statement has any informational content beyond this, it apparently suggests that all scientific consensus – indeed science itself – is meaningless. So what if the scientific consensus promotes certain views about gravity? The consensus has been wrong many times. And scientists do get grants for studying gravity: they’re just promoting their own interests. Who can trust these “complex” models of general relativity when all this talk of curved space-time is obvious nonsense to the ordinary decent folk in the street? (This attitude is held, of course, by the arch defender of truth from filthy pinko relativism.)

There is another scientific issue on which Mel P has historically believed herself to be almost uniquely correct, and it’s instructive because at no point did she ever acknowledge that her brave challenge to the consensus was wrong. It is of course the MMR vaccine. Her last article on the subject was titled “MMR: the façade cracks” – and yet since February 2006, and in spite of Andrew Wakefield coming before the GMC on a disciplinary hearing, she has found nothing at all to say. She no longer cares, it seems, about those poor children developing autism. She no longer cares about Wakefield having his reputation “systematically trashed” as part of a “witch-hunt”. No other conclusion is possible unless, of course, she changed her view on the risks of the vaccine. But surely if she’d changed her view this defender of objective truth would at least have admitted she was wrong? She had, after all, helped encourage dangerously low levels of resistance to serious diseases. But no – we heard nothing. Perhaps the final sign that evidence for anthropogenic global warming is irrefutable, even by the willfully ignorant, will be complete silence from Mel P, after a final tantrum where she insists she was right all along.

Anyhow, I originally started this because I wanted to talk about Mel’s attitude towards education (it’s hard to focus on any one part of her continent-straddling lunacy). Some of what she says has some kind of internal logic. One could, for instance, believe her pronouncements on Israel/Palestine if unable to access the empirical facts. But I cannot fathom how she manages to so blithely, and so loudly, hold logically contradictory positions simultaneously. On the one hand, regarding climate change, she believes that “[w]hat matters is not that very grand people with lots of letters after their names all agree to a proposition, but whether that proposition is actually true”. She holds that, without any relevant qualifications, she is in a position to pronounce on global warming by employing “the judgment of ordinary people”. And yet yesterday she moaned that the “gold standard” A Level will be abolished, the “education system [has] imploded”, etc.

Equipped with only an English degree, Melanie Phillips has out-thought thousands of highly qualified scientists and doctors, many with those magnificent A Levels of yore. Some of them, I hear, even have degrees. The Melanie Phillips example surely proves we should at the least scrap science and maths A Levels, even if we have to ramp up numbers of English students to replace them. But as far as I can tell it is also an argument against any qualifications at all. Melanie Phillips should welcome the destruction of A Levels, for it will lead to the replacement of study and training with “the judgment of ordinary people”. And how else will we defeat the worldwide global warming conspiracy?