Arguments
The Mail's censure shows which media outlets are biased on climate change
Posted on 25 September 2017 by dana1981
Back in February, the conservative UK tabloid Mail on Sunday ran an error-riddled piece by David Rose attacking Noaa climate scientists, who had published data and a paper showing that there was never a global warming pause. The attack was based on an interview with former Noaa scientist John Bates, who subsequently admitted about his comments:
I knew people would misuse this. But you can’t control other people.
The UK press regulator, the Independent Press Standards Organization (Ipso) has now upheld a complaint submitted by Bob Ward of the London School of Economics. Ipso ruled that the Mail piece “failed to take care over the accuracy of the article” and “had then failed to correct these significantly misleading statements,” and the Mail on Sunday was required to publish the Ipso adjudication.
The Mail’s manufactured controversy
Essentially, Bates had expressed displeasure in the way the data from a Noaa paper had been archived at the organization. Rose and the Mail blew this minor complaint into the sensationalist claim that “world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data.” It would be hard to find a better example of fake news than this one. The piece included a grossly misleading chart that Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies director Gavin Schmidt described as a "hilarious screw up." In fact, the Noaa data and paper in question had already been independently verified by other researchers, and are in close agreement with global temperature data from other scientific groups.
And of course the paper itself had undergone rigorous peer-review prior to its publication in one of the world’s most highly-regarded scientific journals, Science. All signs pointed to the Noaa data and paper being based on sound science that had been reproduced and verified. But that didn’t fit the preferred denialist narrative of Rose and the Mail on Sunday, so they weaved a conspiracy theory that then reverberated through the right-wing media echo chamber.
Misinformation spread through right-wing media outlets
Rose’s story seemed to have all the climate denial components that biased conservative media outlets crave. A lone wolf scientist whistleblowing his former colleagues with accusations of data manipulation for political purposes? Despite the glaring errors in the story that were immediately called out by climate scientists and reputable science journalists, this narrative proved irresistible to the conservative media: Breitbart, Fox News, Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, The Daily Caller, The Washington Times, and more ran with Rose’s story. Meanwhile, legitimate news outlets like The Guardian, The Washington Post, Carbon Brief, E&E News, Ars Technica, Science Insider, RealClimate, and numerous other science blogs quickly debunked Rose’s falsehoods.
The errors really aren’t surprising. Rose and the Mail have a long history of climate denial, including error-riddled stories on Arctic sea ice, Antarctic sea ice, human-caused global warming, even the very existence of global warming. And the Mail has such a long history of inaccuracies in general that Wikipedia editors consider it an unreliable source and banned its use. But Breitbart, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and other right-wing media outlets have no qualms with publishing inaccuracies from unreliable sources, as long as the story advances their climate denial agenda.
House (anti-)science committee echoed the Mail falsehoods
Lamar Smith (R-TX), the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, has been attacking the Noaa scientists since they published their ‘pausebuster’ paper in 2015. Rose’s piece was almost perfectly timed for one of Smith’s frequent anti-climate science congressional hearings just two days later, but alas, by then reputable journalists had already soundly debunked the story. Smith could only plead with attendees to believe that the story “may be more serious than you think.”
As Ipso has verified, it wasn’t.
Norris M @48
No Norris I made a whole range of points you ignored. But forget it.
You are however confusing me. You started off discussing historical temperatures and complaining we dont have 100% certainty. We have good certainty plus or minus a small difference. We have five main global temperature data sets produced by different agencies (nasa, noa, hadcrut, etc) who all take the raw data and correct for things like urban heat islands, so they dont bias things upwards etc. They do this slightly differently. All these finalised sets of data are actually pretty similar. There's a composite graph here below and its very clear.
https://thinkprogress.org/comparing-all-the-temperature-records-4a273a0f8f31/
If you are now talking model projections until 2015 (latest available) temperatures have tracked models quite well except they are slightly under projections through the last few years, but as you can see not much and the high temperatures of 2015 - 2016 have bought things back into line. So theres nothing fundamentally wrong with the models despite the complete blather on some websites. Some of these model runs are quite old so nothing has been "adjusted".
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/climate-model-projections-compared-to-observations/
Thank's for your quoted commentary but I dont intend to respond to much of it because its all out of context and hard to follow. The graphs I have indicated are from well known websites that dont make things up, and speak for themselves. A picture paints a thousand words anyway.
I will comment on this regarding models and predictions right through to year 2100:
"Sorry Benjamin but estimated ECS is still 1.5C – 4.5C @ 95% confidence. By definition that’s a constant forcing. That range hasn’t been improved in 60 years of climate “science”. The low end of that range is yawn-worthy and the high side is alarming. Observed ECS is near or below the low number."
"If we are still at this range, we are not talking 100% certainty, are we? We are no where near the certainty we require before we undertake massive changes in our society."
You are possibly missinterpreting these numbers. They are not variations in predicted temperatures by 2100. They are uncertainty of climate sensitivity. And yes it's a level of uncertainty for sure, but the raw range of numbers is a bit misleading. The weight of evidence puts the number at most probably 3.0 degrees. Most of the research points firmly at that number, especially the quality research. So its not quite as uncertain as it seems.
Its quite false of the writer to claim nothing has changed and his claims of observed climate sensitivity is very dubious, as it appears based on the pause, and the pause was not as big as was first thought, and has ended and these two things change the picture a lot.
Nevertheless the IPCC acknowledge we do not have 100% certainty on this sensitivity issue, so they have a range of forward temperature predictions. Business as usual emissions is expected to generate between about 3.5 -5 degrees by end of this century. This still has uncertainty, but less than the information you printed on climate sensitivity.
NorrisM @ 45 and elsewhere
You are beating a drum of uncertainty on aboslute knowledge of what a specific temperature has been (e.g., choosing a baseline, etc.). You can have a degree of uncertainty on what the exact temperature is, but still have a very high degree of certainty on how it has changed.
To iilustrate through an analogy: let's say I have a neighbour, Sarah, who lives 6 houses up the street - about 100m north of me. I can describe the location of my house in latitude/longitude using NAD27, NAD83, or WGS84 coordinate systems, which will disagree on exactly how to label where I live. They may differ by 100m or more. I may not even know the lat/long very well at all - being kilometres off.
...but does this affect the accuracy with which I can direct someone from my house to Sarah's? No, not at all. I don't even need to know that NAD27, NAD83, and WGS exist.
The different global temperature series are akin to NAD27, NAD83, and WGS84. Regardless of what baseline is used, and how different temperature records are merged into a global measurement, they all show pretty much the same thing with a high degree of certainty.
The drum you are beating is a dead horse.
Bob Loblaw, MA Rodger & Nigel
I am about to spend about 10 hours on planes (to Europe) and I have brought along Chapter 9 of IPCC 2013 (Evaluation of Climate Models) & Chapter 10 of 2014 IPCC on Mitigation Potential and Costs. Nigel I am trying!
Do not have time to respond re measurements but it is confusing to the layman. I am sure international shipping and aviation have agreed on what GPS system they will all use. I appreciate somewhat why anomalies are charted rather than absolute temperature changes but you lose the average person when you do so.
If the purpose of the climate research is to influence public policy then it has to be understandable to the politicians and the general public.
Getting some agreement on baselines seems to me to be absolutely basic so we are not always arguing about the basic facts. Just as a recent example, the Millar et al paper gets criticized for using HADCRUT rather than some other one which included the Arctic. Why do we have this? It just confuses the people you are trying to convince.
NorrisM @53
"It just confuses the people you are trying to convince."
It only confuses people who do not want to be convinced. Anyone who even reads a little bit of the accurate and honest information out there, not the dishonest stuff from well known AGW denier sites, will not be cofused with the things you claim to be confused about.