Climate Research News

The BBC has yet another climate change programme presented by Dr Iain Stewart entitled: ‘Earth: The Climate Wars’

Below is an opinion sent to me by a viewer:

Basically its three programmes purporting to be a definitive history of the global warming debate. The presenter is Iain Stewart who did that “Power of the Planet” series which ludicrously claimed that the “snowball earth” period in the planet’s history and subsequent warming was entirely down to CO2 variations and a battle between organisms locking away CO2 and volcanoes releasing it. The whole thing is full of barbed comments against the climate sceptics and an assumption that those sceptics are underpinned by vested interests and are acting unscientifically – total bias.

The first one looked at the rise of the global warming theory and how it took over from the previous fears of a new ice age.

Sunday night (14th) night they looked at three key areas where sceptics had attacked. This was very interesting and shows the danger of allowing your arguments to be defined by your opponent’s position. Everything you say can be turned around and used against you when you are the challenger and your opponent has the ear of the media.

1.Urban heat islands – this was presented as a claim by sceptics that the planet wasn’t warming at all because the ground station temperatures were affected by the UHI effect. They then showed the satellite record which initially claimed that there was no warming and set up a conflict between the two views. With great relish, they showed that the satellite record was wrong because the scientists who produced it – unbelieveably – hadn’t allowed for orbital decay. Thus the wicked sceptics were defeated by the “facts”.

The truth is somewhat different in my recollection. The GWT proponents were using a temperature record exaggerated by false readings from urban stations to establish their theory by showing a 20th century rise to above the then accepted 1000 year maximum. The sceptics pointed out the errors caused by the urban ground stations and the 20th century warming graph was then scaled down. Nobody ever claimed that the urban heat island effect was responsible for all the warming, only that it was exaggerating it and therefore the climate models predicting the future based on the assumption that this warming was all caused by CO2 were mis calibrated and also, therefore, exaggerated. The satellite readings were siezed upon by some too quickly but I was always highly sceptical of them – too good to be true and too contradictory with the netted out ground station readings to be taken on trust.

Note from Admin:

There is no single explanation why the earth didn’t end up as a ‘snowball,’ but cosmic rays were probably a big factor: Towards a Solution to the Early Faint Sun Paradox: A Lower Cosmic Ray Flux from a Stronger Solar Wind – Shaviv 2003:

http://climatesci.colorado.edu/publications/pdf/R-321.pdf

Satellite data – the ‘correction’ was 0.035C, which was well within the 0.05C margin for error quoted by Christy et al.  Slight cooling or slight warming – doesn’t matter – the data contradicts climate models:

Douglass, Christy et al;

A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions. International Journal of Climatology, 2007

http://www.scribd.com/doc/904914/A-comparison-of-tropical-temperature-trends-with-model-predictions?page=6

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3058

Continues:

Of course the temperature record of the last century does not prove anything about man’s influence. An increase could be wholly or partly natural. No increase could be man made warming counteracting a natural decrease.

What happened here was that the warmists set the agenda by saying that the rise in temperatures was fundamental evidence for their position. The sceptics, instead of taking a balanced view and demanding explanations of previous natural climate change, allowed themselves to be drawn into a debate about the accuracy of the readings on the wrong premise.

2 Mann Hockey Stick

The programme then moved to the medieval warm period, explaining what it was and accusing sceptics of moving from saying the planet was not warming (when this was disproved by the “facts”) to claiming the warming was nothing unusual in recent history. It implied that the medieval warm period was not supported by anything other than anecdotes from history, so when it presented the Mann Hockey stick as the scientific answer to the question, it suggested that Mann was the first person ever to have researched climate proxys!

Of course it didnt mention that the IPCC accepted a temperature graph which showed the medieval warm period in all its glory – right until they had to downgrade 20th century warming because of the urban heat island effect and it didnt look so scary anymore.

So the hockey stick was presented as scientific fact, the medieval warm period was written out of history and a chart was put up showing other studies which had been done to back it up – though strangely all the lines on this graph ended well below the actual temperature reading for 2004, where they had stopped it! This graph can be seen on Wikipedia under the hockey stick controversy, where it mentions something the programme forgot – that two of these studies were actually done by Mann or his co-authors. Bizarrely, the Mann graph removes the little ice age from the record as well, an event that the programme accepted was a historical fact!! If it gets that wrong, why should it not be wrong about the medieval warm period too?

The whole hockey stick issue, like the UHI business, was presented as an attack on global warming by increasingly desperate sceptics. The reality is hugely different, with the hockey stick being siezed upon by the warmers to make their case more compelling.

In reality, the magnitude of the temperature changes in the MWP and the LIA dont say anything convincing about man made global warming unless we know why they happened and can demonstrate that the same thing is or isnt happening now. Once again, the sceptics have been drawn in to attacking the warmers’ own propaganda and, though not proved wrong on this occasion, have missed the point. That point is that the proponents of warming have to “get rid” of natural climate variation for a suitably long historical period (especially warming variation!) so that the 20th century looks exceptional and they can blame it on CO2 without proper evidence.

3 Solar factors. The cosmic ray theory of cloud formation and the consequent climate mechanism was then explained very cogently – and dismissed out of hand with reference to TGGWS and the graph of solar activity vs temperature which fitted perfectly up to 1980 – where the graph was stopped. They then extended the graph and showed that the solar activity and temperature graphs diverged after this, with the former falling away and the latter continuing to rise up to 2004. Of course there was no mention of the fact that the graph shown on TGGWS showed temperature as an “11 year running mean” and so in fact reflected data up to 1991!

Naturally, they failed to mention the interview with Prof Wunsch the oceanographer who pointed out the delay factor of ocean temperature change. We know that there is no signal whatsoever in ocean temperature from the 11 year sunspot cycle so you would expect an “overshoot” of ocean temperature when a long period of solar induced warming comes to an end – exactly what we are seeing now!

The presenter then went off on his real agenda – attacking the sceptics as unscientific and underpinned by vested interests. He produced a document created by the now defunct Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a group of US companies which opposed GWT in the 1990s, claiming it showed that a vested interest group was cynically trying everything to mislead the public into rejecting scientific fact. In reality, this was just a PR briefing about how best to mount a campaign in the public arena – it was nothing to do with the science and for sure the IPCC will have similar documents about how to spin its own case. The whole summary documents published by the IPCC are rewritted and summarised by non scientists with a view to how they will be perceived in the media and in Government.

So, once again, the sceptic side is attacked for responding in kind to the modus operendi of the warmers themselves.

Perhaps the most ridiculous moment in the whole programme was when Iain Stewart was attacking the GCC, driving a convertible along a beach road, saying that we all wished that man made climate change wasnt true so it wasnt surprising that vested interests like “big oil” wanted to oppose it. This means that, basically, nobody, anywhere, can challenge the science of global warming because as human beings they have a vested interest in it not being right!

Of course it was this that forced the GCC to disband – the realisation that the PR battle was lost and continuing to fight it would only harm their businesses whilst going with the flow might allow them to make some money out of carbon trading or government contracts! It was not the scientific defeat suggested by the programme.

No, the science is not settled. Not until someone can quantitatively explain the causes of natural climate change in the past – which nobody disputes happened continuously throughout the Earth’s history – and correct the temperature record of the last 150 years accurately for these effects. The sun is still by far the strongest candidate for natural climate change on century based timescales. Its changes fit the historical record better than the relationship with CO2 levels.

Without this analysis, global warming theory and all its calls for action are nothing more than the precautionary principle in operation. To claim they are proper science is an insult to scientists everywhere.

Admin: Once again the BBC are using tired old ‘straw-man’ arguments against climate realists and presenting the ‘Hockey Stick’ climate recostruction as though it is incontrovertible, when clearly it most certainly is not:

See: Climate Audit

UPDATE:

Programme adviser is non other than science historian Naomi Oreskes

September 17th, 2008 | Tags: TV | Category: BBC Bias | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL