Mail Changes Climate Change Again

[Update at end of post]

The Mail On Sunday’s rejectionist of climate change orthodoxy David Rose has not rested on his laurels over the past week, after he falsely suggested that this year’s Summermelting of Arctic Sea ice was indicative of “cooling”. Today he has returned to the supposed leaked report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with the added ingredient of blubbering victimhood.

“Global warming is just HALF what we said: World's top climate scientists admit computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong” announces the headline triumphantly, going on to say “Leaked report reveals the world is warming at half the rate claimed by IPCC in 2007”. Yet, for some reason, there are no extracts presented, no original graphics, and I doubt that there will be.

But let’s cut to the temperature graphic that Rose uses to underscore his assertion that all those computer models got it so wrong: “They recognise the global warming ‘pause’ first reported by The Mail on Sunday last year is real – and concede that their computer models did not predict it. But they cannot explain why world average temperatures have not shown any statistically significant increase since 1997”.

Well, Rose’s graphic certainly shows one thing very clearly, and that is that there was no pause in that gradually rising temperature in 1997. According to the Mail’s own graph, it just carried on going until 2004. And something is missing at the end of that thick black line: it appears to stop between 2010 and 2011, but data is available for all the latter year, and for all of 2012.

Moreover, 2012 was the year when Arctic Sea ice (remember that from last week, Mail people?) shrank to its smallest Summer extent on record. There were also record high temperatures in parts of the world. Come to think of it, there have been more record high temperatures this year too, notably in Australia, and so there must be temperature data, but Rose appears reluctant to add it to his graph.

And then there is the victimhood play. This is all down to the deeply subversive Guardian, or rather, two comments which were left in response to an article published there before the moderators rocked up and dealt with them. You know, Mail people, rather like all the weird and wacky feedback that happens at, on I dunno, your own site, for instance.

Such is Rose’s reliance on this truly lame device that he gets the author of Mail On Sunday Comment to talk of “appalling personal abuse”, which is totally different to the premeditated character assassination that the Mail indulges in every day of the week. No thanks David Rose, you can put that document online and publish a link to it, instead of lining up a few climate change sceptics to prop up your assertions.

And you can show us that graph revised to include the previous 30 years, thanks.

[UPDATE 18 September 1325 hours: the Guardian has an article noting that a recent study shows a majority of the coverage of climate change now contains a focus on uncertainty. The papers contributing to the analysis in the UK were, apart from the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Mail. There's your majority in one.

The study's lead author noted "There is plenty of evidence showing that in many countries the general public finds scientific uncertainty difficult to understand and confuses it with ignorance". Thus the currency for sceptics and denialists to readily trade in]