Bob Ward2013-05-19T21:29:16-04:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=bob-wardCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Bob WardGood old fashioned elbow grease.Desperate Shenanigans as Climate Change 'Sceptics' Try to Misrepresent Reporttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22991762012-12-14T06:29:46-05:002013-02-13T05:12:01-05:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/has leaked a draft copy of the volume prepared by working group I for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the final version of which is scheduled for publication in September 2013.
The response to the leak of all of 14 chapters of the 'second order draft', will test the crisis management skills of the IPCC in much the same way as the revelation in January 2010 that the Fourth Assessment Report, published in 2007, contained a couple of small but significant errors. On that occasion, the IPCC was slow and reluctant to respond, turning the drafting mistakes into a major crisis. As a registered reviewer of the Fifth Assessment Report, I hope that the IPCC will show that it has learned the lessons of that fiasco, and will respond rapidly and effectively without becoming bogged down in arguments about 'due process'.
Under the arrangements for the review of the second order draft of the report, which drew to a close on 30 November, almost anyone could register to access the documents, as long as they agreed to keep them completely confidential. A number of 'sceptics' seized the opportunity, including Christopher Monckton, who has been boasting of his status as an "expert reviewer".
One of the 'sceptic' reviewers, Alex Rawls, posted copies of each draft chapter on the website of 'Watts Up With That', attempting to justify the breach of confidentiality on the grounds that the "taxpayer funded report" should be "properly in the public domain".
In a move that is reminiscent of the hacker who distributed e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November 2009, Rawls has attempted to give a misleading impression of the contents of the draft report by cherry-picking and quoting sections out of context.
Rawls focuses on a sentence that he claims has been significantly added to the second order draft about the potential role of cosmic rays from outer space in affecting levels of cloud cover in the Earth's atmosphere, and hence influencing surface temperature. According to this theory, cosmic rays enter the Earth's atmosphere and nucleate clouds, but periods of high magnetic activity in the Sun deflect the rays away, leading to fewer clouds. 'Sceptics' claim that the magnetic activity of the Sun has been gradually increasing over the past 40 years, so that the skies around the world have become much less cloudy, allowing the Sun's rays to gradually warm the surface.
The quotation highlighted by Rawls, which appears on page 41 in the draft of Chapter 7 on 'Clouds and Aerosols', is:
"Many empirical relationships have been reported between GCR [galactic cosmic rays] or cosmogenic isotope archives and some aspects of the climate system The forcing from changes in total solar irradiance alone does not seem to account for these observations, implying the existence of an amplifying mechanism such as the hypothesized GCR-cloud link. We focus here on observed relationships between GCR and aerosol and cloud properties."
However, Rawls studiously avoids any reference to the following conclusion which appears on page 44:
"Although there is some evidence that ionization from cosmic rays may enhance aerosol nucleation in the free troposphere, there is medium evidence and high agreement that the cosmic ray-ionization mechanism is too weak to influence global concentrations of CCN [cloud condensation nuclei] or their change over the last century or during a solar cycle in any climatically significant way. The lack of trend in the cosmic ray intensity over the last 50 years provides another strong argument against the hypothesis of a major contribution of cosmic rays to ongoing climate change."
It is clear that the second order draft of the working group I report pretty much demolishes every single argument, like the cosmic ray hypothesis, that has been put forward by 'sceptics' against the overwhelming evidence that climate change is being driven by greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.
However, it is important that the IPCC does not allow predictable shenanigans by 'sceptics' to undermine confidence in the Fifth Assessment Report. The review of the second order draft has been carried out in line with the principles of peer review which are used throughout academic science. Reviewers are expected to exhibit high standards of ethical behaviour including maintaining confidentiality. It is disappointing, if not surprising, that 'sceptics' are unable to match such high standards.
Nevertheless, the IPCC must now act quickly to defend the integrity of the draft report, and respond decisively to attempts by 'sceptics' to misrepresent its contents.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.]]>A Long Day for the UK at the United Nations Climate Change Summittag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22531192012-12-06T16:25:15-05:002013-02-05T05:12:01-05:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/
On 4 December, the UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Davey, made a positive announcement that his Government would by the end of this year complete the delivery of £1.5 billion in funding to assist developing countries with the transition to low-carbon economic development and growth, and to adapt to those impacts of climate change that cannot now be avoided.
The money is supporting a variety of projects in Africa and other parts of the world, many of which will also provide broad and multiple benefits, including an increase in energy and water security.
This was an example of British leadership in the international arena and demonstrated the enormous amount of 'soft power' that the UK can exert by helping poorer nations, many of which will be hit first and hardest by the impacts of climate change.
What a contrast a day later. Alongside the Chancellor's autumn statement, the Department of Energy and Climate Change on 5 December published its gas generation strategy which again signalled a potential weakening of the UK Government's commitment to reducing emissions such that there is a reasonable chance of avoiding global warming of more than 2°C.
Last year, the Government accepted the recommendation of the independent Committee on Climate Change that the UK's fourth carbon budget for the period between 2023 to 2027 should be set at a level that annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2025 will be 50 per cent lower than they were in 1990.
The Committee's recommendation was based on the recognition that the 2008 Climate Change Act has set a target for the UK to reduce its emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050. This goal was based on the understanding that rich industrialised countries need to reduce their emissions by this amount in order for the world to have a reasonable chance of avoiding global warming of more than 2°C.
The 2°C target was agreed by all countries in 2010 at the United Nations climate change summit in Cancún, Mexico. However, an analysis published last month by the United Nations Environment Programme indicated that pledges made so far by countries for 2020 are inconsistent with that goal and instead threaten warming of 3°C or more.
The Earth has not experienced a global average temperature that is 3°C higher than pre-industrial levels for about 3 million years, during the Pliocene epoch. In that prehistoric climate, long before the very beginnings of human civilisation about 10,000 years ago, the polar ice caps were much smaller than today and global sea level was 15 to 25 metres higher. The risks associated with plunging the Earth's climate 3 million years into the past are patently enormous, and hence the importance of trying to avoid warming by more than 2°C.
Yet that is what the UK Government appears to be considering. The gas strategy indicates that the UK's fourth carbon budget will be reviewed by the Government in 2014, with the possibility of weakening it and hence shifting it off a path that is consistent with the 2°C target.
The strategy argues that such a move might be necessary if the European Union's Emissions Trading System, which caps the level of about 40 per cent of the emissions of Member States, is not tightened so that it is consistent with the 2°C target.
This is bizarre and reckless reasoning. It proposes that if the rest of the European Union is not doing enough to limit warming to no more than 2°C, then the UK should be similarly irresponsible and reduce its ambition to manage the risks of dangerous climate change.
Although, the gas generation strategy was published by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, it had the fingerprints of the Treasury all over it, and provides further evidence of the confusion and incoherence within the Coalition Government over energy and climate policy.
Constant bickering and the lack of consistency between ministers are undermining the confidence of private investors who have the billions of pounds required to create a modern, efficient and clean power system in the UK.
These mixed and contradictory messages, as have been delivered within the space of 24 hours here in Doha, also damage the UK's reputation as an international leader on the world stage, and hinder the global political effort to effectively manage the huge risks of climate change.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.]]>Why is the UK Government's Financial Support for Fossil Fuel Companies Being Overlooked?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.22172872012-11-30T08:13:13-05:002013-01-30T05:12:01-05:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/A new Energy Bill, which was introduced into UK Parliament on 29 November, has attracted some criticism for laying out plans to subsidise renewable power up to 2020, but has elicited little comment about its silence over the massive financial support that the Government continues to provide to fossil fuel companies.
An analysis published last year by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and International Energy Agency found that gas, oil and coal companies in the UK have been receiving more than £3 billion a year in the form of tax breaks and other incentives for production and consumption.
The analysis provides "estimates of direct budgetary support and tax expenditures supporting the production or consumption of fossil fuels". It states:
"The scope of what is considered 'support' is here deliberately broad, and is broader than some conceptions of 'subsidy'. Essentially, it includes both direct budgetary expenditures and tax expenditures that in some way provide a benefit or preference for fossil-fuel production or consumption relative to alternatives."
The largest part of the UK Government's hand-out to the fossil fuel industries is the reduced rate of VAT on the consumption of electricity and heating, most of which is supplied by burning fossil fuels.
In addition, the lack of a strong carbon price across the economy means that fossil fuels enjoy a huge implicit subsidy because they do not bear the costs of the climate change impacts that result from the greenhouse gas pollution. When it comes to fossil fuels, the polluter does not pay.
Despite the severe pressures on the public purse, fossil fuel interests are set to benefit even more from the Government's largesse in the future.
In the Budget in March 2012, the Chancellor announced an increase in the size and eligibility of allowances for small oil and gas fields in the North Sea, and a new £3 billion allowance for drilling to the west of the Shetland Isles (see pages 12-13 here).
And during his speech at the Conservative Party conference in October 2012, Mr Osborne promised companies "a generous new tax regime" to encourage the search for shale gas reserves.
What is perhaps even more remarkable is that the Chancellor in November 2012 signed a communiqué in Mexico City, alongside other G20 finance ministers, which promised to "rationalize and phase-out over the medium-term inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption".
This was a renewal of a pledge made by G20 leaders at their summit in Pittsburgh in September 2009, which acknowledged that "inefficient fossil fuel subsidies encourage wasteful consumption, distort markets, impede investment in clean energy sources and undermine efforts to deal with climate change".
Yet the 'World Energy Outlook 2012' report, published in November 2012 by the International Energy Agency, points out that subsidies and other Government financial support for the fossil fuel industries reached near-record levels in 2011.
Subsidies for the consumption of fossil fuels amounted to $523 billion (£330 billion) last year, up 28 per cent from $409 billion (£258 billion) in 2010. After a major dip in 2009 during the economic downturn, Government subsidies for the consumption of fossil fuels are approaching the peak level of 2008.
When one adds support for production and general services, governments and taxpayers worldwide gifted the fossil fuel industries more than half a trillion pounds last year through direct subsidies and other forms of spending and tax breaks.
With all this public money being handed over to the private sector, one might have discussions about UK energy policy to include plans for how the Government to keep its G20 pledge on fossil fuels. Yet bizarrely, media and political attention is focused on Government support for alternative sources of energy that would reduce the UK's dependence on oil, coal and gas.
In the UK, renewables, including hydro, are expected to receive just over £1 billion, of which less than half went to onshore wind, in direct subsidies in 2011-12 through feed-in tariffs and the Renewables Obligation.
Globally, the International Energy Agency found that consumption subsidies for renewable energy in 2011 were $88 billion (£56 billion), about one-sixth of the equivalent help for fossil fuels.
But the case for Government support for relatively new renewable technologies is far clearer than it is for established fossil fuels, as Nicholas Stern pointed out in an article in The Observer newspaper in November 2012.
Subsidies help to correct market failures that hold back the rapid development of renewables, and to create a level playing field with fossil fuels. Such failures include the inability of capital markets to manage properly the risks associated with investments in new technologies. And other failures are associated with the limitations of networks to accommodate new technologies, particularly public transport and power grids.
However, such subsidies for renewable technologies should be reduced and eliminated as the costs of development and deployment fall over time, as carbon markets become stronger and as other market failures are tackled.
Onshore wind energy is expected to become economically competitive with gas-fired power stations as a source of electricity generation within the next 5-10 years, and the subsidy for onshore wind farms through the Renewables Obligation was reduced by 10 per cent earlier this year in recognition of recent cost reductions.
But such sound economic reasoning does not, apparently, apply to fossil fuels, which are likely to remain hooked on UK Government financial support for the foreseeable future, unless and until the Chancellor and the rest of the Government decide to keep the G20 pledge.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.]]>UK Government Cuts to Science Funding Threaten the British Antarctic Surveytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19316812012-10-02T19:00:00-04:002012-12-02T05:12:01-05:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/
The Survey has been responsible for the discovery of the ozone hole and many other breakthroughs, and is at the forefront of efforts to understand how climate change is affecting the land-based ice sheets in Antarctica which could cause large rises in global sea level if they melt and become unstable.
But the government's Natural Environment Research Council, which funds the Survey, has been told by Science Minister, David Willetts, to reduce its annual expenditure by more than 10 per cent in cash terms by 2015, and to slash its capital spending by 45% from £32.2 million in 2011-12 to just £17.8 million for each of the next three years.
The massive drop in funding for environmental research is part of the Government's plan to reduce annual public investment in science by 14% in real terms over the period of the Spending Review, which was carried out in 2010.
According to the Research Council, the annual budget for the British Antarctic Survey, which covers the operation and maintenance of its facilities and ships as well as its research activities, has been frozen since last year at £42 million. Taking inflation into account, this means the Survey's funding is due to be cut by about 9% in real terms between 2010-11 and 2014-15.
As part of its cost-cutting programme, the Research Council has started a consultation, due to close on 10 October, about merging the Survey in Cambridge with the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton.
The Council's consultation document admits that one of the reasons for the merger is "recognition of the increasing costs of providing marine and polar infrastructure and of the need to plan and deliver this in the most cost-effective way, particularly at a time of downward pressure on public finances".
The mission of the newly created 'Centre for Marine and Polar Science', which would be based in Southampton, will be to carry out marine and polar research "for the advancement of knowledge of the Earth system for the benefit of human well-being, the national interest and the UK economy".
This narrowly defined aim does not mention the environment or ecosystems, and shows the current Government's apparent disregard for the broad benefits of curiosity-driven research that have been realised through the achievements of the British Antarctic Survey.
The Survey was officially born in 1962 through the renaming of the Falklands Islands Dependencies Survey. Among the research stations inherited by the Survey was the Halley Base on the Weddell Sea which had been monitoring the atmosphere over West Antarctica since its establishment by the Royal Society during the International Geophysical Year in 1957-58.
In 1985, Joseph Farman, Brian Gardiner and Jonathan Shanklin from the Survey published a landmark paper in the scientific journal Nature, announcing that continuous measurements at the Halley Base had recorded that the minimum amount of ozone present in the stratosphere in spring had declined sharply since the late 1970s.
This dramatic finding confirmed theories put forward in 1975 by Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and Frank Sherwood Rowland that chlorofluorocarbons from aerosol sprays and other sources were causing the destruction of the ozone layer and exposing the Earth to more ultra-violet radiation. The United Nations subsequently created the Montreal Protocol in 1987 to phase out the use of the main ozone-depleting gases, and Crutzen, Molina and Rowland were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
But ironically the Survey's scientists might never have found the ozone hole because funding cuts imposed by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Government a few years earlier meant that its activities were due to be scaled down.
In an article in Nature in 2010 to mark the 25th anniversary of the discovery, Jonathan Shanklin wrote: "In the early 1980s, the BAS was looking at ways to economize, and the ozone monitoring at Halley was in the frame to be cut; nothing seemed to be changing, and there seemed little reason to keep it going."
But following the Falklands war in 1982, the Government increased the Survey's budget after recognising the strategic importance, if not the scientific value, of its bases on South Georgia and elsewhere.
According to Shanklin, the vital role played by the Halley Base shows that "we should invest in long-term monitoring, even when it seems to yield no immediate insights or benefits".
However, such basic research, which is driven by the quest for new knowledge rather than an immediately identifiable application, is again under threat as part of the Coalition Government's programme to reduce its investment in science.
New figures published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development this summer show that UK spending on research and development dropped to just 1.76 per cent of our gross domestic product in 2010, well below the European Union average and, for the first time ever, less than China.
The UK's science base is one of the most important drivers of economic growth. If the government wants to ensure the future prosperity and well-being of the UK, it needs to invest more, not less, in our world class researchers and scientific organisations like the British Antarctic Survey.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.]]>The Australian Echo Chamber of Climate Change Denialtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18701032012-09-10T08:11:36-04:002012-11-10T05:12:01-05:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/Australian newspaper proved last week that the echo chamber of climate change denial is not restricted to the United States and United Kingdom.
On 4 September, the newspaper, owned by News Limited, the Australian arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation empire, published an article by Peter Lilley, a veteran UK Member of Parliament from the right wing of the Conservative Party, promoting his 'sceptical' views about climate change.
Lilley is probably best-known for a cringeworthy speech he made at the Conservative Party conference in 1992 as Secretary of State for Social Security in John Major's Government, during which he adapted a song from The Mikado by Gilbert Sullivan, which began "I've got a little list of benefit offenders who I'll soon be rooting out", and included "young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list" and "all those sponging socialists".
More recently, Lilley was one of just five MPs, out of 646, who voted in 2008 against the Climate Change Bill, which introduced domestic legal targets for reducing the UK's emissions of greenhouse gases.
The article by Lilley in the Australian publicised a pamphlet which he produced for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a club for climate change 'sceptics' founded in 2009 by Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher's former Chancellor of the Exchequer, to lobby the UK government about its policies.
The foundation has published a series of campaign pamphlets, including a hype-filled plug for the supposed virtues of obtaining natural gas from shale deposits by Matt Ridley, who was chairman of Northern Rock bank until it spectacularly failed in 2007, and a vitriolic attack on the Royal Society, the UK national academy of science.
Lilley's pamphlet was a belated ideological attack on a landmark report, published in October 2006, on the economics of climate change by Nicholas Stern, who is now I.G. Patel Professor of Economics and Government and chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.
Rather than presenting new evidence, Lilley's pamphlet simply recycled a series of erroneous allegations about the Stern Review which have been debunked many times over since its publication nearly six years ago. The editorial slot which the Australian handed to Lilley contained the same characteristic blend of flawed science and bad economics as his pamphlet.
For instance, Lilley claimed to accept the assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "as given", but immediately rejected one of its fundamental findings that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere would lead to a rise in global average temperature of between 2.0 and 4.5 centigrade degrees (known as the climate sensitivity). Instead, he suggested that the climate sensitivity could be about one centigrade degree, which the IPCC concluded was very unlikely.
It is, of course, a common tactic among some 'sceptics' to claim that they accept mainstream science but to downplay or ignore the evidence of the huge risks that rising levels of greenhouse gases are creating.
At current rates of emissions, greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will be at least 150 per cent higher by the end of this century than they were before industrialisation began in the 18th century. This would mean a significant probability of global warming of 3 centigrade degrees or more to temperatures not seen on Earth for about 3 million years. As the IPCC pointed out in its last assessment report in 2007, those temperatures were associated with much smaller polar ice caps and global sea levels that were 15 to 25 metres higher than today .
Modern homo sapiens has only been around for about 250,000 years so we could be heading for a global climate that is not just without historical precedence but one of which humans have no evolutionary experience.
Yet Lilley's article expressed remarkable confidence and certainty that our children and grandchildren will prosper regardless of how much the climate changes and will be so rich that they will be able to magically fix any amount of environmental damage that we cause.
But the scientific evidence indicates that unmitigated climate change could transform the planet through sea level rise and altered patterns of extreme weather that will submerge or desertify large regions in ways that will threaten the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people. Large populations would migrate to escape the worst impacts, leading to widespread and extended conflict.
Under such circumstances, it is difficult to believe, as Lilley apparently does, that economic growth will carry on regardless. Future generations would face huge upheavals that could make them poorer, not richer, than us.
So why did the Australian agree to publish an article that was so inaccurate and misleading? As Robert Manne, a professor of politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, has pointed out the newspaper has a track record of biasing its coverage with flawed and error-strewn polemics from climate change 'sceptics'. In this respect, the Australian is different to its News Corporation stablemates in the UK and more akin to its counterparts in the United States, such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. So The Australian is clearly part of the media that have embraced unscientific climate change denial as an editorial stance and form the echo chamber which amplifies the misinformation of 'sceptics'.
But the Australian goes a step further to prevent its readers from learning the truth about climate change. I sent a letter with a colleague to correct the errors in Lilley's article, but the newspaper refused to publish it, or indeed any other critical correspondence. This filtering out of dissent conveys the false impression that the 'sceptic' article did not suffer from fundamental flaws.
It is not clear whether this is a deliberate tactic by the editors of the Australian, or whether they are so lacking in knowledge and understanding of climate change that they are unable to distinguish fact from fiction. But it appears that the news coverage in The Australian could now become as unreliable as its opinion columns, as it has made redundant Leigh Dayton, its only science correspondent. Pity its poor readers.]]>The United States is Not Leading by Example on Climate Changetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.17643072012-08-10T11:07:15-04:002012-10-10T05:12:15-04:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/which start at the end of this month, over whether the United States has shifted its position on the inclusion of a temperature target in a new treaty that is due to be agreed by 2015. But the signs are that while the United States is still not leading by example, the Obama administration has at least not resorted to the obstructionism of its predecessor.
Last week, the chief climate change negotiator at the State Department, Todd Stern, attracted criticism when he discussed during a speech at Dartmouth College the prospects for a new international treaty that "builds in the capacity for modification over time", but appeared to question the role of a target to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to avoid global warming of more than two centigrade degrees:
"This kind of flexible, evolving legal agreement cannot guarantee that we meet a two degree goal, but insisting on a structure that would guarantee such a goal will only lead to deadlock. It is more important to start now with a regime that can get us going in the right direction and that is built in a way maximally conducive to raising ambition, spurring innovation, and building political will."
Some commentators interpreted his remarks as a call to abandon the two degree target, forcing the State Department to issue a clarifying statement from Stern:
"There have been some incorrect reports about comments I made in a recent speech relating to our global climate goal of holding the increase in global average temperature to below two degrees Celsius. Of course, the US continues to support this goal; we have not changed our policy. My point in the speech was that insisting on an approach that would purport to guarantee such a goal - essentially by dividing up carbon rights to the atmosphere - will only lead to stalemate given the very different views countries would have on how such apportionment should be made. My view is that a more flexible approach will give us a better chance to actually conclude an effective new agreement and meet the goal we all share."
Stern's statement appears to be a pragmatic acknowledgement of the current limited ambition among countries to cut emissions by enough to achieve the two degree target.
Countries first began to acknowledge the importance of a temperature target at the annual United Nations climate change conference in 2009, when the hastily agreed Copenhagen Accord included a pledge to "reduce global emissions so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius". That commitment has been reaffirmed at subsequent conferences in Cancún and Durban.
However, the latest study by the United Nations Environment Programme shows that current pledges for action to cut or limit emissions by 2020 are not consistent with a reasonable chance of achieving the two degree target. This means either that global emissions would need to be reduced much more quickly after 2020, which is likely to be more difficult and expensive, or that global emissions would probably lead global warming to exceed two centigrade degrees.
Given the current levels of emissions and the uncertainties in matching a pathway for global annual emissions to a future change in temperature, most analyses have assumed that the target is a reduction that offers about a 50 per cent chance of avoiding a rise in global average temperature of more than two centigrade degrees. That would require global annual emissions of greenhouse gases to be cut from the current level of about 50 billion tonnes of carbon-dioxide-equivalent to 44 billion tonnes in 2020, below 35 billion tonnes in 2030 and much less than 20 billion tonnes in 2050. In essence, global emissions need to be reduced from an average of about 7 tonnes per head on average today to about 2 tonnes per capita by the middle of the century, assuming the population by then will be around nine billion, with rich countries making a cut of about 80 per cent.
Todd Stern's argument is that countries are unlikely to increase their 2020 ambitions enough over the next three years to be in line with the two degree target, but that this should not be allowed to prevent a new international agreement on climate change. This could be regarded as a pragmatic approach that is designed to increase the chances of securing global action and that countries could at some later point aim to increase their emissions reductions.
But one should also remember that the United States is one of the countries that is clearly failing at present to reduce its emissions quickly enough. Although President Obama's first budget in February 2009 included a target of reducing his country's annual emissions by 14 per cent by 2020 compared with 1990, and by 83 per cent by 2050, Congress has not passed the legislation required to realise it. In 2010, the United States emitted 6.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases, equivalent to average per capita annual emissions of about 22 tonnes. Future emissions by the United States are not projected to be in line with President Obama's target. An analysis by the Energy Information Administration has shown that current policies, even with increased replacement of coal with natural gas for electricity generation, are likely to mean energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide will be almost the same in 2035 as they were in 2010, and some 12 per cent higher than they were in 1990.
Still, at least President Obama is not adopting the same cynical strategy on climate change as his predecessor. One of George W. Bush's first acts as President was to announce that the United States would not honour its signature to the Kyoto Protocol and the commitment to reduce its emissions by 7 per cent by 2012 compared with 1990. In fact, annual emissions by the time President Bush left office were 13.9 per cent higher than in 1990.
Not only did the United States not show leadership on climate change under President Bush, but it was often obstructive during international negotiations, famously leading a delegate from Papua New Guinea, Kevin Conrad, to issue this appeal at the 2007 United Nations summit:
"And I would ask the United States. We ask for your leadership. We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way."
But we may yet see the United States revert to blocking tactics if Mitt Romney, the likely Republican challenger, beats Barack Obama in November's Presidential election. Last October, Romney told a rally in Pittsburgh: "My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us." His official campaign website states: "As president, Mitt Romney will eliminate the regulations promulgated in pursuit of the Obama administration's costly and ineffective anti-carbon agenda.".
If the United States does elect a climate change 'sceptic' to be President in November, an international agreement to avoid global warming of more than two centigrade degrees may become very remote prospect indeed.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.]]>The World's Most Visited Newspaper Website Continues to Regurgitate Nonsense from Climate Change 'Sceptics'tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16673382012-07-12T06:23:48-04:002012-09-11T05:12:10-04:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/Daily Mail, one of the UK's most popular daily newspapers, has proved once again that some parts of the Press are apparently oblivious to the scrutiny they are receiving from the Leveson Inquiry into their culture and practices following the phone hacking scandal.
Three months ago, I wrote about a researcher, Dr Zunli Lu, whose new journal paper was misrepresented in an article published by the Mail Online, after it was transmitted through the echo chamber of climate change denial. Dr Lu took the unusual step of issuing a statement to explicitly refute an article about his work in the Mail Online, which grudgingly responded by making some minor amendments while still refusing to correct the most egregious errors.
An official objection was made by Mr Philip Bell, and the Press Complaints Commission ruled last month that the article was in breach of the Editors' Code of Practice. But rather than correct the errors, the Mail Online simply removed the article from its website without posting any explanation or apology.
Then this week, the Mail Online demonstrated that it had learned nothing from the episode when it misrepresented a new paper on 'Orbital forcing of tree-ring data' by a group of German, Swiss, Finnish and UK scientists, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on 8 July.
The study describes a reconstruction of summer temperatures over the past 2,000 years in northern Scandinavia based on an analysis of tree rings, concluding that there has been a gradual cooling trend over this period and that regional temperatures during Medieval and Roman times may have been warmer than previously thought.
Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, issued a press release about the new paper on 9 July to publicise the role of one of its staff, Professor Jan Esper, as lead author of the study. The release provides an accurate summary of some of the key points under the heading 'Climate in northern Europe reconstructed for the past 2,000 years: Cooling trend calculated precisely for the first time'.
Somewhat predictably, the press release was picked up by climate change 'sceptics', who are obsessed with the Medieval Warm Period in the profoundly mistaken belief that if it can be proved that global average temperature was higher than today about 1,000 years ago, it will overturn the many lines of compelling evidence that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are causing the Earth to warm now. The current evidence suggests that some parts of the northern hemisphere may indeed have been as warm during the Medieval Warm Period as they are today, but it is not clear that it was a global warming.
'Watts Up With That', the climate change 'sceptic' website in the United States, reproduced the press release on 9 July under the headline 'This is what global cooling really looks like - new tree ring study shows 2,000 years of cooling - previous studies underestimated temperatures of Roman and Medieval Warm Periods'. This headline, of course, wrongly indicated that the study had investigated global temperatures, rather than just those in northern Scandinavia.
As is so often the case, the distorted account of the research paper's contents was soon transmitted to climate change 'sceptics' in the UK. On 11 July, The Register, a UK online newspaper for computing professionals which has a bizarre sideline in misleading and inaccurate reports about climate change, followed the lead set by 'Watts Up With That', with a story about the research under the headline 'Climate Was Hotter in Roman, Medieval Times Than Now'. The second paragraph of the article by Lewis Page, published at 12.44 pm on 10 July, states: "A large team of scientists making a comprehensive study of data from tree rings say that in fact global temperatures have been on a falling trend for the past 2,000 years and they have often been noticeably higher than they are today - despite the absence of any significant amounts of human-released carbon dioxide back then".
Page's inaccurate report was reproduced at 8:48 am on 11 July on the website of the UK's main lobby group for climate change 'sceptics', the Global Warming Policy Foundation, before it was eventually spotted by Rob Waugh, a journalist for the Mail Online, whose Twitter profile describes him as "UK journalist writing about the web, gadgets, games etc". Waugh's account of the research paper, published on 11 July at 1:22 pm, propagated the glaring inaccuracies introduced by 'Watts Up With That' and The Register, under the headline 'Tree-rings prove climate was WARMER in Roman and Medieval times than it is now - and world has been cooling for 2,000 years'. The opening paragraph of the article states: "Rings in fossilised pine trees have proven that the world was much warmer than previously thought - and the earth has been slowly COOLING for 2,000 years".
When I contacted by e-mail Dr Robert Wilson, a co-author on the research paper and a Senior Lecturer in Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews, he sent me this response:
"Of course the Mail has gone too far. Our paper is for northern Scandinavian summer temperatures so extrapolating to large scale annual temperatures is not really correct. However, previous regional tree-ring series have been used in large scale compilations and if there are low frequency biases in ring-width series, then it is likely that previous attempts may underestimate temperatures in previous warm periods such as the RWP [Roman Warm Period] and MCA [Medieval Climatic Anomaly]. More density series need to be developed from other regions to test this however."
This case yet again exposes the apparent total disregard that the Mail Online has for the current self-regulatory rules about accuracy, and its willingness to misrepresent the results of climate research. However its slavish regurgitation of this sort of climate change 'sceptic' propaganda is making it a national laughing stock.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.]]>The BBC Is Sacrificing Objectivity for Impartiality on Climate Changetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16491222012-07-05T19:00:00-04:002012-09-04T05:12:15-04:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/
The author of the Trust's report, Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics at University College London, warned about "false balance" in the BBC's reporting of issues, such as climate change, caused by "attempts to give a place to anyone, however unqualified, who claims an interest" in an issue.
In particular, Professor Jones questioned the application of the BBC's editorial guidelines, updated in October 2010, which require "due impartiality". His report stated:
"There is much debate within the BBC about impartiality as applied to science, with rather a split between its science specialists and its other elements. There may sometimes have been an over-rigid application of the guidelines to what is essentially a fact-based field. This can produce an adversarial attitude to science which allows minority, or even contrarian, views an undue place. The BBC has tried hard to find a suitable balance. I await with interest the results of the new Guidelines' emphasis on 'due weight' when making editorial judgements about impartiality. Whatever their influence there should be no attempt to give equal weight to opinion and to evidence."
However, a recent edition of The Daily Politics provided a stark demonstration that Professor Jones's report is being ignored in some parts of the BBC.
On 22 June, the programme featured a discussion about climate change featuring James Delingpole, who writes a 'sceptic' blog for the Daily Telegraph, and Andrew Pendleton, the head of campaigns at Friends of the Earth. The discussion was mediated by the show's host, Andrew Neil, with other contributions from two journalists, Peter Hitchens and Mary Ann Sieghart.
Although none of the five participants were climate scientists, or even have a degree in a science subject, Neil focused the largely fact-free discussion at one point on the question of whether the Earth has been warming over the past 15 years, and asked Delingpole and Pendleton to provide blogs that could be posted on the programme's website. The blogs were published earlier this week.
Neil comments in his introduction that neither blog has directly addressed the issue he raised. Pendleton, whose contribution was headed "global warming has not stopped", attempted to provide a link to a commentary I published earlier this year which points out that the rise in global temperature recorded since 1997 is not statistically significant, but also shows that there have been many such periods since 1970 when warming was undetectable from just 15 data points. The warming trend over the past 40 years is clear and statistically significant, but carrying out analyses only on small subsets of these data often means that the signal cannot be detected among the noise.
Delingpole, whose contribution was headed "global warming has stopped", merely observed that the rise in temperature over the past 15 years has not been statistically significant, before moving on to make a number of inaccurate and misleading statements clearly intended to undermine confidence in the scientific evidence. For instance, he claimed that the three warmest years on record in the United States all occurred before 1940, citing a 'sceptic' blog which alleges that the temperature measurements by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies are wrong. In fact, the National Climatic Data Center shows that the three warmest years in the United States since records began in 1880 are 1998, 2006 and 1934.
When I drew attention to Delingpole's inaccuracy, The Daily Politicstweeted: "TV debate and blog give both sides a chance to air their views - readers can make up their own mind".
Ironically, Andrew Neil complained during the programme that it was usually activists who discuss recent temperature trends, yet The Daily Politics has rarely, if ever, included a climate scientist in any of its debates about global warming. And this is not the first time that the programme has subjected its audience to inaccurate and misleading information about climate change.
This again illustrates the systemic failing of The Daily Politics and other BBC programmes such as Newsnight and Today which attempt to deal with issues of evidence-based science as if they were simply opinion-driven politics, with two opponents clashing in an argument mediated by a presenter whose knowledge of the topic is so low that he or she cannot distinguish between fact and fiction.
But the BBC persists with this format practice because it, like the rest of the UK's media, is dominated by graduates in the arts and humanities who lack any insight into the culture and practices of science, and who appear to treat all information as if it were just a 'point of view'.
To correct this fundamental failing, the BBC should take note of an excellent new report on Delivering Trust: Impartiality and Objectivity in the Digital Age, by Richard Sambrook, the former director of its global news division.
Sambrook argues that there is an important distinction between 'impartiality' and 'objectivity', even though they are often used interchangeably: "impartiality relates to absence of bias and objectivity to identifying facts and evidence". If the BBC wants to retain the public's trust in its coverage of issues such as climate change, it needs to place greater value on objectivity as defined by Sambrook, and drop its ill-conceived fetish for impartiality between facts and opinions.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.]]>More Evidence That the World's Biggest Newspaper Website is Misleading its Readers About Climate Changetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.14153802012-04-10T13:40:05-04:002012-06-10T05:12:01-04:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/a previous blog, I outlined the role that a UK newspaper, the Daily Mail, had played in a recent demonstration of the distorting and amplifying effects of the echo chamber of climate change denial.
The newspaper's contribution had been to publish on its website an article by Ted Thornhill that misrepresented a new research paper by Dr Zunli Lu and co-authors about the Medieval Warm Period, which was subsequently reproduced by other 'sceptic' blogs and media outlets.
But I omitted some interesting details that cast new light on the tactics the newspaper uses to promote public confusion about climate change.
I should have made clear that the inaccurate and misleading article was never published in the printed Daily Mail, but only appeared on its sister website, the Mail Online.
On 6 February, while giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the Press, Paul Dacre pointed out that although he is the editor of the Daily Mail and editor-in-chief of the Mail Group titles (including the Mail on Sunday), the Mail Online has its own editor, Martin Clarke.
"The beauty of the Mail Online is that it doesn't have to carry many apologies because it corrects things instantly. It gets the complaint and changes it immediately, either drops the article, carries a correction - instantly."
This provides interesting background to the article by Mr Thornhill, which was originally published by the Mail Online at 12:21 pm on 26 March and very quickly disseminated by climate change 'sceptics', including Lord Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation which posted a reproduction on its own website at 8:55 am on 27 March.
But on 28 March, Syracuse University published a short statement by Dr Lu complaining that his research paper had been misrepresented by Mr Thornhill's article. Two days later, at 12:52 pm on 30 March, Mr Thornhill's article was updated, introducing some amendments to make it less inaccurate and misleading.
For instance, the original article's claim that the research "means that the Earth has already experienced global warming without the aid of CO2 emissions" was removed from the fourth paragraph and, further on, a new sentence was added: "Lu says that his research has no direct bearing on the current climate, and points out that his research is restricted to one area of Antarctica, and is not in itself proof that the whole Earth warmed up".
The updated version, although ignored by those 'sceptics' who had regurgitated the original, represented an admission that the Mail Online had been wrong. However, the corrections were only partial and the article, particularly its headline and opening paragraph, remained inaccurate and misleading.
However, a more recent article published by the Mail Online shows that Mr Thornhill's article was part of an apparently concerted effort to create doubt among readers that emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are driving global warming.
On 4 April, the Mail Online published an article under the headline 'Could space dust be at fault for climate change? New research links particles in space to ever changing weather conditions'.
The opening paragraph stated: "Cosmic dust that fills space could be playing a part in climate change according to new scientific research".
The original source for this article was a media release issued by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) on 29 March, announcing the initiation of a new research project. But nowhere does it mention climate change. The lead researcher, Professor John Plane, told me the following in an e-mail message:
"The headline of this article is completely misleading, and bears no relation to what the article actually says, or was in the RAS press release on which it is based. It is a pity that the Mail did not contact me to check it."
Verity Payne of Carbon Brief has suggested that the Mail Online article might be based not on the original media release on the website of the Royal Astronomical Society, but instead on a version posted on the Daily Galaxy website under the headline: 'EcoAlert: Does Cosmic Dust Play a Role in Climate Change?'
This could indeed be true, particularly as the author of the Mail Online article was by-lined as "Daily Mail Reporter". As Paul Dacre explained during his testimony to the Leveson Inquiry (while, ironically, defending another inaccurate and misleading Mail Online article headed 'Cancer danger of that night-time trip to the toilet'), this by-line is used for any article that has been copied from another source and tweaked by a Mail staff member before publication:
"Actually it's a layout device to break that line, if you put a Daily Mail reporter on a story that possibly came in from an agency and the Daily Mail reporter might have put a -- would change some of it."
It is quite clear that the editor and news desk of the Mail Online instruct reporters to recycle 'sceptical' stories from news wires and other websites, and will even re-write the headline and body of an article to make it comply with the editorial line. In this case, the editorial line appears to be to create doubt in readers' minds about the link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, even if it means blatantly misrepresenting scientific research.
And one should not underestimate the extent of the damage to the public interest that the Mail Online could be causing through its misinformation campaign - it reaches a readership of more than 45 million worldwide every month, higher than any other newspaper.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.]]>Another Researcher Falls Victim to the Echo Chamber of Climate Change Denialtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13960442012-04-02T06:55:09-04:002012-06-02T05:12:01-04:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/
On 21 March, Syracuse University issued a media release to draw attention to a new paper by Dr Zunli Lu and co-authors, which was published online in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters on 25 February.
The paper, 'An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula', described the discovery of crystals of a rare mineral form of calcium carbonate, which decomposes at temperatures above 4°C, in sediments from a drilling site. By dating the occurrence of ikaite in the drilling core, the authors concluded that it "qualitatively supports that both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age extended to the Antarctic Peninsula".
These conclusions are interesting because relatively little evidence has been found that the 'Medieval Warm Period' (MWP), between about 950 and 1100 AD, and the 'Little Ice Age' (LIA) in the 17th century, extended beyond the northern hemisphere.
The paper stated: "The resolution of our record is insufficient to constrain the ages of these climatic oscillations in the Southern hemisphere relative to their expression in the Northern hemisphere, but our ikaite record builds the case that the oscillations of the MWP and LIA are global in their extent and their impact reaches as far South as the Antarctic Peninsula, while prior studies in the AP [Antarctic Peninsula] region have had mixed results".
The researchers also suggested that their results indicated "a warming relative to the LIA in the last century, possibly as part of the regional recent rapid warming, but this climatic signature is not yet as extreme in nature as the MWP". However, the paper did not include any comment on the cause of recent warming in the Antarctic Peninsula and the rest of the world.
The university's media release, headed 'Scientists use a rare mineral to correlate past climate events in Europe and Antarctic', whilst providing an accurate summary of the paper, suggested, somewhat tenuously, that the research might help to cast light on recent weather events in the United States, but did not explicitly mention global warming.
Despite the media release, the research received no mainstream media coverage. But it was picked up by the climate change 'sceptic' website 'Watts Up With That', operated by former TV and radio weatherman Anthony Watts. Its coverage of the paper on 22 March offered a rather more certain headline of 'More evidence the Medieval Warm Period was global'.
Many climate change 'sceptics', including Anthony Watts, are obsessed with the Medieval Warm Period. They believe that if irrefutable evidence can be found that the warm period in the northern hemisphere about 1,000 years ago can be shown to have occurred across the world, it will prove that the recent rise in global average temperature over the past few decades cannot be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions from human activities such as burning fossil fuels.
This is, of course, an intellectually feeble line of reasoning. Just because the Earth has experienced previous warming periods due to 'natural factors', such as oscillations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun, that does not mean that the current period of warming must also be natural. It is the equivalent of arguing that humans are not responsible for the recent increase in loss of animal and plant species on Earth because previous extinction events were caused by 'natural' factors, such as meteorite impacts.
Attempts to attribute recent global warming to 'natural' factors, such as changes in the Sun's activity or variations in cosmic rays from outer space, have failed to yield any substantial supporting evidence. By contrast, the evidence grows ever stronger that the indisputable increase in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases since the 18th century is primarily responsible for the unequivocal warming of the Earth over the past few decades.
Nevertheless, 'sceptics' continue to promote the myth that if the Medieval Warm Period was global 3,000 years ago, then greenhouse gas emissions cannot be the cause of recent global warming.
So the article on 'Watts Up With That' was seized upon by other 'sceptics, who repeated and distorted it.
First, The Register, a British website aimed at the information technology industry which regularly features inaccurate and misleading articles about climate change which it has scavenged from 'sceptic' websites such as 'Watts Up With That', covered the story on 23 March, under the headline 'Medieval warming WAS global - new science contradicts IPCC'.
The article, which reporter Lewis Page apparently based on the university media release and the coverage on 'Watts Up With That', offered an even more extreme interpretation of the significance of the new research as a refutation of the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The article in The Register stated:
"The IPCC consensus is that the medieval warming - and the 'Little Ice Age' which followed it - only happened in Europe and maybe some other northern areas. They were local events only, and globally the world was cooler than it is now. The temperature increase seen in the latter half of the 20th century is a new thing caused by humanity's carbon emissions."
The article ended with the following summary of Dr Lu's research: "In other words, global warming has already occurred in historical, pre-industrial times, and then gone away again".
This article then bounced into the offices of the Daily Mail, a UK newspaper which has been energetically promoting unscientific views about climate change ever since its editor, Paul Dacre, was lobbied over lunch by Nigel Lawson, the chair of the 'sceptic' campaign group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
On 26 March, Ted Thornhill, sent an e-mail to Judy Holmes at the press office of Syracuse University, asking: "Just writing up the Ikaite story for the Daily Mail's website - so would Professor Lu agree with the conclusions draw [sic] in The Register, that global warming in fact isn't man made, that it's just something that occurs anyway?"
Ms Holmes replied: "I highly doubt that the conclusions reached by some of the 'global warming' deniers is what Professor Zunli Lu had in mind when he published his paper". She suggested that Mr Thornhill seek a reply directly from Dr Lu.
But Mr Thornhill decided not to wait for Dr Lu to comment and instead published his article on the website of the Daily Mail under the headline 'Is this finally proof we're NOT causing global warming?'
The opening paragraph of Mr Thornhill's story, which drew heavily, but without attribution, on the article in The Register, stated: "Current theories of the causes and impact of global warming have been thrown into question by a new study which shows that during medieval times areas as far apart as Europe and Antarctica both warmed up".
Dr Lu was understandably unhappy about the misrepresentation of his work by the Daily Mail. Syracuse University posted on the home page of its website a statement of rebuttal, including the following quote from Dr Lu: "It is unfortunate that my research, 'An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula', recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, has been misrepresented by a number of media outlets".
The statement ended: "Our study does not question the well-established anthropogenic warming trend".
However, other 'sceptics' ignored Dr Lu's statement and instead continued to propagate the misrepresentation of his work, with the Global Warming Policy Foundation reproducing on its website the articles from the Daily Mail and The Register. And Fox News re-wrote the article from the Daily Mail for its website on 1 April under the headline 'Study Refutes Manmade Warming'.
This episode demonstrates once again the way in which 'sceptics' and their champions in the media use the amplifying and distorting echo chamber of climate change denial to shamelessly misrepresent the work of researchers.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.
]]>News Corporation, the Murdochs and Climate Changetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13206202012-03-05T07:53:55-05:002012-05-05T05:12:01-04:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/Wall Street Journal last month published the latest in a series of inaccurate and misleading articles about climate change in the form of a lengthy editorial by 16 'sceptics', led by former French Education Minister Claude Allègre.
It represented the newspaper's attempt to draw a line under an exchange between mainstream scientists and the fringe group of 16 activist 'sceptics' who have been seeking to sway the views of Republican hopefuls for the presidency of the United States.
The exchange began on 27 January when the Wall Street Journal published an article by the 16 'sceptics', describing themselves as "concerned scientists", which urged each "candidate for public office" to "understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true". The article disputed the evidence for man-made climate change, highlighting "the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now". It also told the political candidates that "aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically".
Following complaints about the numerous errors in the article, including its meaningless assertion about recent trends in global average temperature, the newspaper agreed to publish on 1 February a short letter of response from 37 scientists, led by Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
This was followed by a devastating critique in The New York Review of Books by Professor William Nordhaus, a distinguished economist at Yale University, debunking the claims of the 16 'sceptics' and pointing out that they had misrepresented his work in their article.
But the Wall Street Journal deprived the mainstream scientists of having the last word by publishing on 21 February the lengthy rebuttal from the 16 activist 'sceptics', again making numerous inaccurate and misleading claims about the evidence for man-made climate change.
This episode is perhaps not surprising. The Wall Street Journal has a well-established reputation for promoting unscientific denial of climate change, a manifestation of its dogmatic adherence to an editorial line that champions an extreme 'free market' ideology and opposes environmental regulation.
In this respect, the Wall Street Journal is closely aligned with the unscientific stance adopted by other media outlets, such as Fox News and The Australian newspaper, which are operated by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
However, the climate change denial of these newspapers appears to be the product of their editors' own disregard for, or ignorance of, the scientific evidence, rather than the result of a top-down company policy.
At the media launch, Rupert Murdoch said: "Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can't afford the risk of inaction."
While such explicit statements about climate change cannot now be found on the pages on the News Corporation website that are dedicated to the Global Energy Initiative, the "long-term vision" includes a commitment to "engage our readers, viewers and customers on sustainability issues through partnerships and content of the highest caliber".
The failure by the Wall Street Journal the fulfil News Corporation's pledge to provide its readers with "content of the highest caliber" about climate change is similar to the behaviour shown by a UK newspaper, the Daily Mail, which also subjects its readers to unscientific denial of global warming, even though its owners appear to take the issue seriously.
However, News Corporation's UK papers do appear largely to have taken heed of the commitment to provide its readers with high quality information about climate change.
Rupert Murdoch's son, James, assumed control of the UK titles in December 2007 when he became Executive Chairman of News International. He is married to Kathryn Hufschmid, who works for the Clinton Climate Initiative, a charitable foundation set up by former President Clinton in 2006. Asked about his views on climate change denial during an interview with The Observer newspaper (which is not owned by News International) in June 2009, James Murdoch replied:
"How we deal with climate change deniers depends on who they are. If they run energy policy for large governments, then they're a problem. If it's a random columnist, ignore them for a while. If they're in my paper? Well, I don't tell people what to write."
In early 2008, shortly after James Murdoch took the helm at News International, the company's most profitable tabloid newspaper, The Sun, appointed its first environment correspondent, Ben Jackson. The newspaper has sought to report environmental issues, including climate change, more prominently, as did its now-defunct Sunday stablemate, the News of the World, which carried out a very successful 'Go Green and Save' campaign in February 2009.
However, the reputation of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal for subjecting their audiences to misreporting of climate change has led some to assume that unscientific denial is hard-wired into all News Corporation media businesses, including its UK newspapers.
Indeed some have made the extraordinary allegation that News Corporation may have been involved in the hacking of the so-called 'Climategate' e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
This far-fetched notion apparently stemmed from the arrest in July 2011 of Neil Wallis, the former executive editor of the News of the World, in connection with the phone-hacking scandal.
Wallis had left the News of the World in August 2009, and his departure, at that time, was not being publicly linked to the phone-hacking scandal.
Wallis joined the Outside Organisation as a freelance consultant. According to the Eastern Daily Press, the University of East Anglia contacted the Outside Organisation for public relations help during the 'Climategate' crisis. Wallis was at least partly responsible for arranging a sympathetic feature in The Sunday Times (also owned by News International) about Professor Phil Jones, the climate scientist at the centre of the controversy.
Given that Wallis had just started to try to make his living from public relations, it is a little far-fetched to suggest that he would have been trying his best to fail, rather than succeed, in countering the negative publicity for University of East Anglia.
With last week's news that James Murdoch is stepping down as executive chairman of News International, there perhaps should be concern that News Corporation's UK media outlets will start to downplay climate change, if not embrace outright denial. The Times has yet to replace Ben Webster, its excellent environment correspondent, who has been re-assigned to report on the phone hacking scandal.
And it remains to be seen how much longer the Wall Street Journal and other News Corporation media outlets will blatantly disregard the company's commitment to provide audiences with "content of the highest caliber" about climate change.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.
]]>False Sea Level Articles Expose Failure of UK Press Self-Regulationtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11492602011-12-14T15:29:33-05:002012-02-13T05:12:01-05:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/he Spectator have helped to clearly expose the utterly farcical failure of self-regulation of the British Press.
Two weeks ago, the magazine adorned the front cover of its 3 December 2011 issue with the eye-catching headline The Sea Level Scam: the rise and rise of a global scare story.
Inside, the magazine devoted two pages to the views of Nils Axel Mörner, a retired professor of geology from Stockholm University, who made a number of extraordinarily inaccurate and misleading claims about the impacts of climate change on the world's oceans.
Not only did Mörner assert that global sea level has "remained roughly flat" since 1970, but he also suggested that the tidal gauge on the low-lying Pacific island of Tuvalu "clearly shows there has been no rise" over the past 25 years.
These statements by Mörner were not new and have been debunked many times over by genuine experts on sea levels. But the editor of The Spectator, Fraser Nelson, apparently was unaware or of, or ignored, Mörner's previous track record. Comprehensive rebuttals, pointing out the many errors in the flawed article, duly appeared on the website of the Guardian, and in the Independent.
Obviously stung by the criticism, Nelson offered George Monbiot a page in the 10 December issue of the magazine to respond to Mörner. While this could have repaired some of the damage to the magazine's reputation, Nelson nullified Monbiot's essay by publishing on the opposite page an article by Christopher Booker, the veteran columnist for The Sunday Telegraph, which repeated some of Mörner's inaccurate and misleading assertions.
These actions by Booker and Nelson have highlighted yet again how the self-regulation of newspapers and the oversight of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) have failed to promote the public interest when it comes to the science of climate change.
Booker's article in The Spectator had much in common with a column he wrote two and a half years ago for The Sunday Telegraph which publicised Mörner's opinions about sea level.
His article on 29 March 2009 contained many erroneous statements including "in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades".
I wrote a letter to the newspaper to correct the inaccurate and misleading statements in the article, but it refused to publish it or anything else that disputed Booker's column. In doing so, the newspaper had blatantly breached the PCC's Editors' Code of Practice, which states not only that "[t]he press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures", but also "[a] significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and - where appropriate - an apology published".
So I wrote to the PCC on 14 April 2009 to complain about the violations of its Code. I pointed out that Booker's article offered no evidence to substantiate his statements about sea level around Tuvalu, and I drew attention to a paper by John Church and co-authors, published in the journal 'Global and Planetary Change' in 2006, which concluded that relative sea-level at Funafuti, the capital of Tuvalu, since the late 1970s has been rising at a rate of about 2 millimetres per year, based on satellite measurements and tidal gauge records.
In its response on 11 May 2009, the newspaper stated that "Dr Morner has on several occasions produced evidence as to why the tide-gauge readings since 1978 have shown sea levels remaining level". But instead of citing a report by Morner in support, it referred to a paper by Cecile Cabanes, Anny Cazenave and Christian Le Provost, published in the journal 'Science' in 2001, claiming that it "confirmed" his finding that "there has if anything been a fall in sea levels around Tuvalu".
I replied on 21 May 2009 that the paper by Cabanes and her co-authors does not mention Tuvalu at all, and concluded that tidal gauges showed global average sea level rose at a rate of about 1.6 millimetres per year between 1955 and 1996, while satellite measurements indicated an increase of about 3.2 millimetres per year between 1993 and 1998.
But the newspaper did not relent. Instead, in its letter of 12 June 2009, it suggested that the global maps presented in the paper by Cabanes and co-authors could be used to deduce that sea level around Tuvalu fell by 99 millimetres between 1993 and 1998, and by 105 millimetres between 1955 and 1996. This was a remarkably precise estimate for two reasons.
First it was no mean feat to pinpoint on the world map in the paper by Cabanes and her co-authors the location of the six atolls and three islands that make up Tuvalu, spread along a 676-kilometre chain and together covering an area of just 25 square kilometres on the outer western edge of Polynesia.
Second the only map in the paper for the period from 1955 to 1996 shows the amount of "thermosteric" sea level rise that was calculated to have taken place due to changes in temperature in the top 3000 metres of the ocean, and so did not show total increase.
Nevertheless, the PCC's secretariat wrote to me on 16 June to warn that it was likely to accept that the paper by Cabanes and co-authors "indicates sea level fell between 1955 and 1996 in the Central Pacific region where Tuvalu is located". The letter stated:
"Whilst the graph in question refers to thermosteric data, and the paper, as you have said, compares these results to satellite and tide gauge data to evaluate their relative validity, it appears to conclude that the thermosteric data is largely accurate and that it is more likely the tidal gauge data that is inaccurate [sic]. In this context, the Commission is again likely to consider that the author of a comment piece is entitled to prefer one set of data, or the opinion of one scientist, over another."
It concluded:
"In general, the Commission is likely to support the newspaper's right to report and to comment on the opinion of Dr Morner, where it does not directly conflict with established fact. The difficulty that arises when the Commission considers matters such as this is that it cannot take a position on the science itself, but only on whether the newspaper has demonstrably breached the Code. So long as respected scientists such as Dr Morner continue to express contrarian opinions on matters such as sea level rises, it is not possible to say that the mainstream position has been established as a matter of irrefutable fact."
So I again responded on 7 July 2009 to highlight the fact that Cecile Cabanes and Anny Cazenave had published a paper with other co-authors in 2006 acknowledging errors in their earlier 2001 paper. They concluded that the earlier paper "was based on an ocean temperature database which overestimated temperatures during the 1990s and contained anomalous high temperatures in the Gulf Stream region, leading to incorrect results". The authors re-calculated the results and found that thermal expansion only explained 25 per cent of the observed sea level rise in the 50 year period between 1955 and 1996. Furthermore, the paper contained an updated map of sea level changes recorded by satellites between 1993 and 2003, showing rises in the western Pacific where Tuvalu is located.
But 'The Sunday Telegraph' persisted with its attempts to justify Booker's false assertions with an inaccurate and out-of-date paper that had been corrected by the same authors in their later work.
On 26 July 2009, the newspaper published another column by Booker in which he repeated his error, stating: "The tiny Pacific nation of Tuvalu, we are yet again told, is pleading for international aid, as it sinks below the rising ocean - even though an expert study in 2001 showed that sea levels around Tuvalu have in fact been falling for 50 years". The newspaper again refused to publish a letter from me pointing out the inaccuracy.
On 4 September 2009, the newspaper sent an e-mail to the PCC secretariat declaring "we do not feel that there is any merit in continuing to debate the issue with Mr Ward, given that the crux of the complaint seems to be rooted in differences of scientific opinion". But it did suggest it "would be happy to offer Mr Ward a letter for publication (in line with standard lengths and subject to the Editor's final approval), setting out his views on this matter".
Given that the newspaper had not conceded that it was wrong about any of the errors about which I had complained, I rejected the offer and asked the PCC to reach its own verdict. In my e-mail of 19 September, I also stated:
"I have noted earlier suggestions that the Commission might have difficulty in assessing this complaint because its members may be unfamiliar with the scientific facts about sea level rise. If this is the case, I would appeal to the Commission to seek independent authoritative scientific advice on this issue, for instance from the Royal Society, to inform its deliberations."
On 5 October 2009, the PCC secretariat sent an e-mail indicating that the newspaper had made a further offer: if I agreed to write a letter, the original article would be marked accordingly in its cuttings. The PCC secretariat urged me: "it would be a shame to pass up another rare opportunity to publish a rare letter in support of the consensus scientific position on this matter in this particular newspaper".
On 20 October 2009, I indicated that I would be willing to accept the offer of writing a letter or opinion piece as long as it could be of similar length to Booker's column, and was accompanied with "a genuine undertaking by the newspaper not to repeat the inaccurate and misleading statements that were contained in the original article".
'The Sunday Telegraph' refused, and made a garbled attempt again to justify its position by pointing out that the 2006 paper I had highlighted "fails to mention Tuvalu", while neglecting to acknowledge that the 2001 paper on which it was relying so heavily also failed to mention Tuvalu! The newspaper even tried in an e-mail on 29 October 2009 to persuade the PCC not to consider my complaint formally, stating: "We do not believe there was a breach of code and moreover we are not convinced that this is even a matter for the commission as the 'facts' being discussed are under debate within the scientific community itself".
The PCC eventually considered my complaint on 16 December. On 23 December, the PCC e-mailed its verdict and posted a summary on its website.
Predictably, the PCC ruled in favour of 'The Sunday Telegraph', concluding:
"On this occasion, it was clear from the way in which the article was presented that it was a comment piece primarily concerned with highlighting Dr Mörner's views. The newspaper was entitled to do this under the Code, and its responsibility was for publishing his views accurately rather than for the accuracy of his views."
In short, the PCC decided that the newspaper was free to ignore the Editor's Code of Practice and publish inaccurate and misleading statements as long as they were somebody's opinion!
So Booker's inaccurate and misleading article remains uncorrected on the newspaper's website, and the abdication by the PCC of its responsibility to enforce its own Code has encouraged a perpetuation by 'The Sunday Telegraph' and 'The Spectator' of the myth that sea level around Tuvalu is falling, not rising.
This then is the unscientific self-regulated world of UK newspapers where the laws of physics are treated as just a 'point of view', and ideology can trump facts and evidence. Meanwhile, back in the real world, a paper by French and US researchers, published in the journal 'Global and Planetary Change' in September 2011, concluded that sea level around the Tuvuluan capital of Funafuti has risen by about 30 centimetres over the past 60 years.
Perhaps the Leveson Inquiry into the culture of the British Press should turn its attention to the harm caused to the public interest by newspapers and magazines which systematically misrepresent the scientific evidence about climate change?
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.
]]>Is Accuracy Being Frozen Out of the BBC's Climate Change Coverage?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11336772011-12-08T07:00:15-05:002012-02-07T05:12:01-05:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/
The final episode of Frozen Planet featured narrator Sir David Attenborough at centre stage as he explained the ways in which shrinking ice sheets and other impacts in the Arctic and Antarctic are radically changing life at the poles for all species, including humans.
But the seventh instalment of the BBC's extraordinarily successful series, called On Thin Ice, has attracted undeserved controversy for its focus on the impacts of climate change.
First, the Daily Telegraph newspaper reported that some broadcasters in other countries that have bought the series, particularly the United States, will not be showing the final programme because of its content.
Caroline Torrance, the Director of Programme Investment at BBC Worldwide, offered a plausible, if not entirely convincing, denial, pointing out that "the vast majority of broadcasters have licensed the Frozen Planet: On Thin Ice episode".
However, an even bigger stir was caused by this week's issue of Radio Times which offered Lord Lawson, the chair of the 'sceptic' Global Warming Policy Foundation, the opportunity to 'balance' the clear and stark messages conveyed by Frozen Planet. Lord Lawson attacked Sir David Attenborough, alleging that "when it comes to global warming he seems to prefer sensation to objectivity".
But in attempting to substantiate his accusations against Sir David, Lord Lawson merely demonstrated that the Radio Times did not bother to fact-check his article.
First, Lord Lawson attempted to create a false balance between the dramatic shrinking of the Arctic ice cap and the increase in sea ice in some parts of East Antarctica. What he failed to mention is that the mass of ice across Antarctica as a whole is declining, and sea ice is increasing in those areas of East Antarctica that are experiencing abnormally low temperatures because of the man-made hole in the ozone layer.
Second, Lord Lawson claimed that the polar bear population in the Arctic has been rising. This is untrue. As the new 'Arctic Report Card: Update for 2011' indicates, of the 19 sub-populations of polar bears, only one has recorded an increase while 7 have recorded decreases.
Third, Lord Lawson suggested that increased evaporation from the Arctic Ocean will increase cloud cover that will counteract the impact of global warming. In fact, the temperature of the Arctic is rising faster than regions at lower latitudes, and the loss of albedo caused by the melting of the ice cap, which tends to reflect the Sun's rays, is increasing warming.
Fourth, Lord Lawson asserted that global warming stopped in 2001, but his argument was based on an apparently weak grasp of statistics. If one analyses each of the 32 sequences of 10 consecutive years (including 2001 to 2010) of global annual temperatures that occurred between 1970 and 2010, only seven define statistically significant (at the 95% level) warming trends, even though the trend over the entire 41 year period is clearly upwards and statistically significant. Measuring trends from just 10 data points carries the serious risk of failing to detect statistically significant signals amid the noise.
One should perhaps admire the chutzpah of Lord Lawson's claims of bias, given that the campaign by the Global Warming Policy Foundation against UK Government policies on energy and climate change relies so heavily on promoting inaccurate and misleading information about the science.
What is very disappointing is that the Radio Times has ignored a report which criticised the disproportionately large amount of coverage that climate change 'sceptics' have received from the BBC.
Perhaps this is a consequence of the BBC Trust abandoning its plans to promote the report because Lord Lawson threatened legal action over a sentence which accused him of making statements that are not supported by the facts.
Whatever the reason, the BBC must not be cowed by fringe campaign groups which stridently believe that impartiality should trump accuracy and which insist that the broadcaster must position itself halfway between scientific facts and 'sceptic' fictions. The Global Warming Policy Foundation on 8 December again put pressure on the BBC to give in to its demands when it published a report by Christopher Booker, a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, attacking the broadcaster's coverage of climate change.
Nevertheless, the BBC should resist this lobbying and should instead follow the outstanding example set by Sir David Attenborough, whose reputation remains unimpeachable, by continuing to promote public awareness and informed debate about the risks posed by climate change.
Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.
]]>Climate Change 'Sceptics' Exploit Weaknesses in Journal Review Processestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9500762011-09-06T00:00:00-04:002011-11-05T05:12:03-04:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/
However, it is becoming increasingly obvious that these papers, which usually contain fundamental flaws and errors, only find their way into the scientific literature by exploiting weaknesses in the review processes operated by some journals. But after publication, other authors point out the acute shortcomings in these papers, usually leading to a retraction or other remedial action.
So it was perhaps not surprising to learn last week that Wolfgang Wagner had resigned as Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing after his journal published a controversial paper by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell, which purported to show that climate models make wrong assumptions about the amount of energy that escapes from the Earth's atmosphere.
In an extraordinary resignation statement, Wagner admitted that the journal had "unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate sceptic notions of the authors". He accepted that the reviewers of the paper had failed to acknowledge that Spencer and Braswell had simply ignored published research which refuted their findings. Wagner declared that the paper "should therefore not have been published" and announced that he was stepping down as a result.
Wagner also expressed concern about the way in which the paper had been misrepresented by climate change 'sceptics' and some parts of the media. In the days following its publication, the quality and significance of the paper were exaggerated on blogs and in news reports, creating an 'echo chamber' effect.
Wagner's is not the first editorial resignation that has been prompted by the publication of a paper celebrated by climate change 'sceptics'. In 2003, Hans von Storch stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Climate Research after it published a paper by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas which concluded that "the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium."
In his resignation statement, von Storch stated that the review process for the paper had "utterly failed" and that its publication was "an error".
However, not every editor has accepted responsibility for the publication of a flawed paper, even when it has been retracted. Earlier this year, Stanley Azen, the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, requested the retraction of a paper by Yasmin Said, Edward Wegman and co-authors which had been published in January 2008.
The paper by Said and co-authors presented a 'social network analysis' of work by Michael Mann and other palaeoclimatologists who had published studies of the 'hockey stick' graph, showing that the recent rise in global average temperature is unprecedented over the last 2,000 years.
The retracted paper concluded that the work of the 'hockey stick' authors had been "refereed with a positive, less-than-critical bias" by authors within a social network of palaeoclimatologists. It claimed that the "entrepreneurial style" of co-authorship between the palaeoclimatologists "could potentially lead to peer review abuse".
The retraction stated that parts of the paper had been plagiarised from the work of others. However, questions have been raised about the quality of the paper itself, and about whether it could have received a proper review in just six days between its submission and acceptance for publication by Azen.
Of course, some journals refuse to accept any wrongdoing for the publication of a bad paper promoting climate change 'scepticism'. In 2008, Economic Analysis and Policy, the official journal of the Queensland branch of the Economic Society of Australia, published a paper by Bob Carter apparently refuting the main scientific conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But the article contained numerous serious errors, as I pointed out in a rebuttal last year in the same journal. Even though Carter's paper about the science of climate change had not been subject to review, and contained demonstrable inaccuracies, the editors attempted to justify its publication in their economics journal on the grounds that "our objective is to publish controversies on current topics that are interesting to economists and a more general readership".
Climate change 'sceptics' often complain that researchers and editors conspire to use the journal review system to keep their work out of the scientific literature. But it is increasingly apparent that 'sceptics' have actually been able to exploit weaknesses in the review processes of journals in order to publish their work, even when it contains blatant mistakes.
]]>Is This The 'Smoking Ray-Gun' from The Extra-Terrestrial Origin of Global Warming?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9353692011-08-24T13:38:59-04:002011-10-24T05:12:01-04:00Bob Wardhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ward/new paper by scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, has been enthusiastically seized upon by some lobbyists and bloggers as a vindication of their claims that the cause of global warming is not the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, but instead are cosmic rays from outer space.
However, a careful examination of the new research shows it is not the 'smoking ray-gun' of climate change denial that many are claiming. To understand why, we must first step back to examine some of the main 'scientific' arguments that self-proclaimed climate change 'sceptics' put forward to try to justify their opposition to the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of oil, coal and gas.
Some 'sceptics' accept the indisputable evidence that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that increasing its concentration in the atmosphere directly causes the Earth to warm, as John Tyndall pointed out more than 150 years ago. They also accept, although often with equivocation, the clear evidence that the average temperature of the Earth's surface has increased by about 0.8 Centigrade degrees since the beginning of the 20th century. Furthermore, they grudgingly concede that greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and other activities are at least partially responsible for this global warming through the increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of about 40 per cent that has occurred over the past 200 years or so. However, these 'sceptics' simply reject any suggestions that there may be significant further warming in the future, no matter how high greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere grow, usually citing doubts about the accuracy of computer models of the climate used by researchers.
Other 'sceptics' offer a different argument, and while accepting that the Earth is warming, they simply reject the evidence that the unequivocal rise in concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is responsible to any significant degree. Instead they appeal to 'natural causes', often referring to periods over the Earth's 4.5 billion-year history when it was much colder or warmer than today. Of course, saying 'it's natural causes' is the equivalent of exclaiming 'it's magic', unless some plausible scientific explanation is also put forward in support. So these 'sceptics' often suggest an extra-terrestrial alternative.
Past periods of extreme warmth or cold in the Earth's history, such as Ice Ages, have been triggered by fluctuations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun, but we know that has not caused the global warming of the past 100 years. However, the amount of energy released by the Sun also varies over time, so some 'sceptics' try to blame it for global warming. The problem with this is that detailed measurements from satellites and other instruments indicate that changes in the energy released by the Sun can only really explain up to 10 per cent of the global warming that has been recorded.
So some have pointed to another ingenious potential explanation for how the Sun might cause global warming in an indirect way, by altering the amount of cosmic rays that enter the Earth's atmosphere from outer space. This theory relies on linking together a number of steps. First we know that the Earth is bombarded by cosmic rays from outer space, and that the Sun can deflect these rays through changes in its magnetic field, which creates a solar wind. We also know that when cosmic rays from outer space enter the Earth's atmosphere, they can create charged particles that might possibly help to produce the 'seeds' from which clouds can grow. And we also know that clouds block out light from the Sun, leading to cooling of the Earth's surface.
The galactic cosmic ray theory puts these steps together, and proposes that the Sun's magnetic field has been gradually increasing in activity over the past century, decreasing the amount of cosmic rays from outer space that enter the Earth's atmosphere, which, in turn, has reduced the cloudiness of the skies across the world, therefore allowing more sunlight to warm the Earth's surface.
The researchers at CERN today report their findings about one step of this theoretical process - they have successfully produced microscopic particles of aerosol in the laboratory by bombarding a mixture of gases similar to that found in the Earth's atmosphere, including sulphuric acid, with the equivalent of cosmic rays.
While these are new and interesting results, they hardly constitute the 'smoking ray-gun' claimed by some 'sceptics'. For instance, they have not been able to show that the microscopic particles that they produced could grow into the droplets that act as the seeds for clouds.
While cosmic ray theory may seem theoretically possible, there are strong reasons to conclude that it cannot really explain global warming. There is a lack of evidence that the amount of cosmic rays reaching the Earth from outer space has really diminished, particularly over the past 50 years, let alone convincing proof that the sky has become less cloudy over that period.
So while climate change 'sceptics' may try to claim that CERN's results are a 'smoking ray-gun' from the extra-terrestrial origin of global warming, the vast and overwhelming weight of scientific evidence still points to the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities as the primary cause of climate change.