In Part 1, we showed that the University of East Anglia climate emails scandal was nothing but a colossal waste of time that proved only the hysterical idiocy of fossil-fuel financed climate "scepticism'. Continuing to be amply funded by their fossil-fuel benefactors, the leading climate "sceptic' front groups weren't ready to give up. Not surprising given the degree to which their views are given such media prominence.
One reprehensible example of ridiculous media coverage of climate non-issues was in early 2010, and squarely targeted the IPCC's famous "hockey-stick' graph. The graph depicts global average temperatures over the last millennium, and shows that the temperature rise of the twentieth century is "likely" to be "unprecedented". This time, the mainstream media outlet was the Wall Street Journal.
The WSJ claimed that the IPCC's "hockey-stick' graph and others like it were based on the questionable "tree-ring techniques" used by scientist Keith Briffa, as well as on data gathered from these techniques an issue which emerged in relation to the climate email fiasco we reviewed in Part 1. Yet as one of the climate scientists who contributed to the "hockey-stick' graph study, Michael Mann, points out: "Neither the multiple proxy-based "Hockey Stick' reconstruction of Mann et al nor the multiple-proxy based Jones et al reconstruction used "Mr. Briffa's tree-ring techniques' let alone their data."
In fact, the IPCC "hockey-stick' graph has been corroborated and reinforced by numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies. In 2008, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences extended the multi-proxy reconstruction of global average temperatures back nearly 2,000 years. The study was explicitly non-reliant on tree-ring data, and found that: "Our results extend previous conclusions that recent Northern Hemisphere surface temperature increases are likely anomalous in a long-term context. Recent warmth appears anomalous for at least the past 1,300 years whether or not tree-ring data are used." With tree-ring data, this conclusion can be extended back 1,700 years.
Michael Mann, a lead author of the paper, told the National Geographic: "You can go back nearly 2,000 years and the conclusion still holds the current warmth is anomalous. The burst of warming over the past one to two decades takes us out of the envelope of natural variability."
With Mann himself completely exonerated from "sceptic'-fuelled allegations of misconduct and fraud by an official university inquiry, and with the scientific validity of the 'hockey-stick' graph vindicated years ago by a detailed peer-reviewed synthesis report by the US National Academy of Scientists, the 'sceptics' have nothing left to stand on.
Self-styled "sceptics' have tried to counter the compelling evidence encapsulated in the "hockey-stick' graph by claiming it ignores events like the Medieval Warm Period (9501250). But this again illustrates the dire lack of understanding of very simple elements of climate science. The higher temperatures associated with the Medieval Warm Period were only regional, and did not represent the global average temperatures illustrated in the graph. While warmer temperatures were concentrated in certain regions, other regions were even colder than during the lower regional temperatures during the ensuing Little Ice Age (13001850). Again, the MWP issue is dealt with in the peer-reviewed literature.
"Sceptics' were also overjoyed when it emerged that the IPCC had promulgated the following major error within its 3,000 pages: that the Himalayan glaciers could "completely disappear" by 2035 and "perhaps sooner" at current rates of warming. The IPCC later conceded that this was an unjustifiable statement which relied not on the peer-reviewed scientific literature, but on a single media interview with a scientist in 1999.
Although widely claimed as a victory of climate "scepticism', the error was not discovered by any "sceptic', but by glacier expert Georg Kaser, himself a lead author of Volume 1, Chapter 4 of the IPCC report.
The way 'sceptics' jumped on this mistake, one would think it disproves the whole of climate science. Unfortunately for the planet, it doesn't - painstaking scientific research repeatedly confirms that the rate of glacier melt is accelerating due to global warming. There is no doubt that Himalayan glaciers fall into this trend of an increasing rate of melt over the last decades. And earlier this year, new peer-reviewed research in Nature Geoscience showed that 75 per cent of ice loss in the Greenland glaciers is due to ocean warmth due to climate change.
Nevertheless, for certain "sceptic' commentators such as the Telegraph's Christopher Booker this was only one out of several alarmist declarations in the IPCC's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report which were "based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists":
"Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves."
Booker's alarmism about the problem of "global warming alarmism', it should be noted, has involved such journalistic wonders as claiming that the threat to human health from white asbestos is "non-existent", and that passive smoking does not cause cancer. No wonder then that all he had really done was repeat parrot-fashion the equally shoddy journalism of Jonathan Leake, science and environment editor at the Sunday Times, in an article whose research was done by Richard North. It is no coincidence, of course, that Richard North is Christopher Booker's co-author of a well-known anti-science screed, Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming a book resoundingly lambasted by both left and right. The Guardian describes it as replete with "egregious errors that would shame a junior reporter" (including "reporting a non-existent interview"), while Richard D. North writing for the Social Affairs Unit slams it for being "strikingly wrong in important respects". Together, the work of Leake and North, backed up by intellectually-challenged pundits like Booker and Delingpole, fed into a cycle of news-regurgitation fueled by climate "sceptic' groups, propelling the "meme' of the IPCC's discrediting worldwide.
The fact of the matter is that all the IPCC's statements about African crop yields, the intensification of natural disasters and erratic weather, and the potential deforestation of the Amazon are entirely accurate and corroborated by the peer-reviewed literature.
The IPCC's statement that "yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50%" by 2020 refer to a paper by climate expert Professor Ali Agoumi. "Sceptics' shouted that the claim is discredited because the paper is not peer-reviewed. Although technically correct, the paper was a report published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development and the Climate Change Knowledge Network. It constituted "a summary of technical studies and research", much of which is peer-reviewed, "conducted to inform Initial National Communications from three countries (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change," and was therefore "a perfectly legitimate IPCC reference." In fact, the IPCC's specific projection on the potentially devastating impact of climate change on African crop yields is supported by a whole series of peer-reviewed scientific studies from 1994 to 2007.
What about the IPCC's statements about the link between climate change and natural disasters? Also accurate. The source cited and highlighted by "sceptics' as problematic was a Risk Management Solutions paper by Dr Robert Muir-Wood, a former Earth Sciences Research Fellow at Cambridge University. The full paper is entirely credible, and "was peer reviewed and accepted for publication in November 2006", a few weeks after "the cut-off date for the IPCC 4th Assessment Report in October" explaining why an earlier draft version of the report was referenced by the IPCC. The latter was "aware of the full report and that it had been accepted for publication." Dr. Muir-Wood himself has publicly confirmed that the IPCC did not misrepresent his conclusions. It's worth remembering that the link between climate change and the increased risk of natural disasters, including dangerous weather, is widely acknowledged and explored in the peer-reviewed literature.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
