Climate Change – Inconvenient Facts

Where is David Rose today? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be issuing its latest report within the next few days, yet the Mail On Sunday’s arch-sceptic climate reporter is today absent from the field. But, with that report looming large, some advance information is emerging, and, as usual, it is being spun according to which paper is doing the reporting.

“Row over IPCC report as nations 'try to hide lack of climate change’” tells the Telegraph, and one should immediately note the quote marks, because there is nothing in the body of that article to support it. “Scientists working on a landmark UN report on climate change to be published this week are at loggerheads over their explanation for why the earth’s surface temperature has stopped rising as rapidly as they previously predicted” it goes on, and there’s nothing to support that one, either.

The spin is as before with the Tel: there will allegedly be “heated discussion centring on how to explain the fact that since 1998 the earth’s temperature has barely risen”, which is a blatant whopper. “It is claimed some governments have even tried to intervene to remove references to the 15 year climate change 'hiatus’ or 'pause’” follows behind, meaning they can’t stand that up – but it gets in anyway.

And then the biscuit is well and truly taken: “The row will fuel claims by global warming sceptics that the issue has become too political and that governments are now spending vast sums of money on policies to combat a phenomenon that may not exist and may not be man-made. The effect of those policies, claim sceptics, is to increase global poverty because the policies are expensive to implement”.

Yes, those turning climate change into a left-versus-right political issue say others are making it too political. Meanwhile, over at the Independent, we get an idea what is really happening, with different countries exercising different concerns, and the inconvenient observation “Fifteen-year-long hiatus periods are common”.

In other words, climate change is not something that happens over a decade and a half, and especially if you pick an especially warm year to start your series. The Observer has underscored this with a rather different take on the IPCC report: “starkest warning yet about the mounting dangers of global warming ... burning of fossil fuels and deforestation have now led to a warming of the entire globe”.

It gets worse: “ice sheets are dwindling at an alarming rate. In addition, sea levels are rising while the oceans are being acidified”. But all that the Telegraph can do is to spin and be dishonest with its readers. Thus the transformation of the climate issue into yet another political football – by those who then whine that it’s all too political. It would be funny if it were not so serious.

Meanwhile, outside the playground, we have a real world problem.