The website of the 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.
Follow Bob Ward on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ret_ward
There is no doubt the planet is experiencing climate change, of that there is no doubt whatsoever. This planet has experienced climate change ever since the oceans formed approximately 4.2 billion years ago. The climate will continue to change for the next 5 billions years or so until our sun dies!
The question is whether or not mankind plays a part in this change, Climatic variability on the timescale of tens of thousands of years has turned out to be the predominant pattern in the Earth's history. The last two and a half million years have been marked by many global climate oscillations, between warmer and cooler conditions!
Greenhouse gases are often cited as and indicator of man affecting the climate. The biggest contributor water vapour is ignored in most pro-man-made-climate change reports. Water vapour equates to a 95% contributor of the so called greenhouse gasses. Man contributes a mere 0.001% of this total!
Of CO2, methane, Nitrous oxide, CFCs and other gasses, man's total contribution is 0.28%.
There are many other factors, such as surface reflectivity, dust particulates, seasonal sunlight, sunspot activity, Milankovitch cycle variations to name but a few.
This planet is too big (75% seas and oceans, 25% land. Humans only inhabit 10% of that land), the climate has too many variables and man is too insignificant!
Water Vapour % of G/H effect 95.000% Natural 95.000% Man made 3.618%
Carbon Dioxide 3.618% 5.502% 0.117%
Methane 0.360% 3.502% 0.066%
Nitrous Oxide 0.950% 0.294% 0.047%
Misc gases (CFCs etc) 0.072% 0.025% 0.046%
Don't be fooled by percentage increases. the actual amounts are small anyway, except for water vapour which as you can see = 95% (White fluffy clouds)!
And that is just plain wrong.
Atmospheric CO2 has increased by about 40% since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Multiple lines of evidence show that we are responsible for essentially all of that increase, so a bit over 29% of all the CO2 in the atmosphere is ours.
Your number is off by two full orders of magnitude.
http://pages.science-skeptical.de/MWP/MedievalWarmPeriod1024x768.html
Relevance is an alien concept to you, no?
The DAILY MAIL is for the Privet Drive market.
Bob doesn't seem to give a link to the Daily Mail piece he is so agitated about, so let me provide it here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2171973/Tree-ring-study-proves-climate-WARMER-Roman-Medieval-times-modern-industrial-age.html. The leadline says the world has been cooling for 2,000 years. I would have thought this is hard to dispute if you are looking at things on the scale of the Holocene in which the temperature peaked the order of 4 to 6,000 years ago. Timescales are important. Over hundreds of millions of years, we are clearly in a very cool period indeed. Over hundreds of thousands, we are in a warm one. Messy old business, eh?
I wonder if you are old enough to recall when global cooling was the thing for up and coming merchants of despair? That headline would have delighted them back then, and spurred them to even greater heights of hyperbole. But, pesky old Mother Nature gone and went and warmed up a bit. So, not to miss a trick, the merchants made out this was the new catastrophe. But what do you know, MN has stopped the warming for the past decade or more! Maybe time to switch horses again? If you do have the ear of Bob, you might mention this to him.
I would have thought that a study of northern Scandinavia wouldn't be taken as a proof about 'the world' of anything whatsoever. The Mail article blatantly misrepresents the scope of the scientific study it is reporting on. It's simply a fact that the Mail reported a falsehood. And an author of the study unequivocally agrees.
Not only does a study of tree rings in Lapland have nothing to say about GLOBAL climate, the cooling period in question ended in 1900, as is clearly shown in the paper in question.
The headline is flat wrong, period.
As regards Mark Raven. Read the press release from the Johannes Guttenberg University; it starts with
" Climate in northern Europe reconstructed .....". Not just Finland then. In the Nature article Esper et al discuss orbital changes in insolation. So only Finland affected. But then I forgot you only read Wards bullet points!
BTW here is some recent summer weather from northern scandinavia.
http://yle.fi/uutiset/cold_snap_chills_summer_in_lapland/6199852
Because I promise you, it doesn't.
' Willingness to misrepresent the results of climate research.' Because the CAGW pushers have never been guilty of that, have they, Bob; their behaviour has been exemplary. Oh wait, hang on; Gore's, Pachauri's, the IPCC's lies, fraud and exaggeration (among so many others); the hockey stick disgrace; Hansen's, Lovelock's, Flannery's laughable doomsday predictions (among so many others); I could go on.
Ward shows his true colours by putting the word 'sceptics' in quotes, because he obviously prefers to label us as 'deniers' and thus make us comparable to Holocaust deniers, which is of course grotesque. He is a disgrace.
It's highly entertaining watching the increasingly desperate scrabbling of the CAGW lobby, as the colossal fraud continues to fall apart before our eyes.