BBC Contradictions and Bias on Global Warming

[Teddy Bear]

Those brainwashed by the BBC will be convinced that global warming is purely a result of mankinds way of life around the planet. Notwithstanding that thousands of reputable scientists and climatologists have signed a petition refuting it, with typical BBC 'balance', you will find very little if anything sharing this particular viewpoint.

A recent article on NewsBusters (hat-tip Steevo) details contradictions and blinkard reporting exhibited by the BBC on this issue.

BBC Report on Sun and Climate Change Contradicts Its Own 2004 Story
By Noel Sheppard | July 12, 2007 - 17:34 ET
On Thursday, Jules Crittenden wondered if American media are lazy, stupid or willfully ignorant with how they’ve been reporting events in Iraq.

Given the BBC’s recent piece concerning the relationship between the sun and climate change which hysterically ignored an article it published almost three years ago with a completely diametric view, one might ask the same question of that British television network.

To set this up, as NewsBusters reported Thursday, the BBC.com published a piece concerning Mike Lockwood’s paper discrediting a connection between the sun’s activities and global warming in the past 22 years.

However, on July 6, 2004, BBC.com published an article entitled “Sunspots Reaching 1000-year High” (h/t Global Warming Hysteria):

A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years.

Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past.

They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer.

In fact, this report included the following (emphasis added):

Over the past 20 years, however, the number of sunspots has remained roughly constant, yet the average temperature of the Earth has continued to increase.

Hmmm. Yet, three years later, the BBC reported this:

A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun's output cannot be causing modern-day climate change.

It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun's output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen.

Fascinating, wouldn’t you agree?

Now, to be sure, these articles are reporting the findings of different scientists. However, shouldn’t the BBC have done some back-checking to identify articles that it had published on this subject in the past?

This is especially the case given statements made in the current piece (emphasis added):

The IPCC's February summary report concluded that greenhouse gases were about 13 times more responsible than solar changes for rising global temperatures.

But the organisation was criticised in some quarters for not taking into account the cosmic ray hypothesis, developed by, among others, Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen of the Danish National Space Center.

Their theory holds that cosmic rays help clouds to form by providing tiny particles around which water vapour can condense. Overall, clouds cool the Earth.

During periods of active solar activity, cosmic rays are partially blocked by the Sun's more intense magnetic field. Cloud formation diminishes, and the Earth warms.

Mike Lockwood's analysis appears to have put a large, probably fatal nail in this intriguing and elegant hypothesis.

Given the BBC’s report three years earlier based on a Zurich study, along with the countless other papers on this subject supporting the connection between solar activity and climate, it hardly seems Lockwood has put a “probably fatal nail” in this “elegant hypothesis.”

Furthermore, it seems the BBC ought to do a better job of checking its own articles on such subjects before asserting questionable conclusions. This seems especially critical given the recent self-examination the network went through concerning its reporting activities, and the findings related to global warming:

Climate change is another subject where dissenters can be unpopular. There may be now a broad scientific consensus that climate change is definitely happening, and that it is at least predominantly man-made. But the second part of that consensus still has some intelligent and articulate opponents, even if a small minority.

[...]

But these dissenters (or even sceptics) will still be heard, as they should, because it is not the BBC’s role to close down this debate.

[...]

They cannot be simply dismissed as ‘flat-earthers’ or ‘deniers’, who ‘should not be given a platform’ by the BBC. Impartiality always requires a breadth of view: for as long as minority opinions are coherently and honestly expressed, the BBC must give them appropriate space. ‘Bias by elimination’ is even more offensive today than it was in 1926. The BBC has many public purposes of both ambition and merit – but joining campaigns to save the planet is not one of them. The BBC’s best contribution is to increase public awareness of the issues and possible solutions through impartial and accurate programming. Acceptance of a basic scientific consensus only sharpens the need for hawk-eyed scrutiny of the arguments surrounding both causation and solution. It remains important that programme-makers relish the full range of debate that such a central and absorbing subject offers, scientifically, politically and ethically, and avoid being misrepresented as standard-bearers.

Sounds like good advice, folks. Maybe you should take it.

—Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and a contributing editor to NewsBusters.

[Teddy Bear]

Excellent videos specifically targetted at the BBC, one that demonstrates how the BBC agenda on AGW is pure propaganda and nothing to do with science, and the second - the consequences of this brainwashing

Here's what its producer has written about it.

The debate about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) rages within the blogosphere, but not in the U.K. mainstream media, which is led by the leftwing newspaper The Guardian and the BBC.

In Britain the BBC wields more power to shape public opinion than any other organisation over any other nation on earth. Moreover, the BBC invariably takes its cue on the big issues from The Guardian, from which it stands accused of adopting its political outlook.

Consequently the BBC has relentlessly promoted one side of the argument whilst suppressing the other, with catastrophic consequences for the nation's governance.

There is however a significant fact-based scientific consensus that argues against the theory that man has had, or is having, any significant impact on the climate.

These scientists cite the fact that past rises in global temperate predated the atmospheric rises in CO2; that the past rises in CO2 were actually a product of temperature rise, not their cause; and that the temperature rises were actually a product of increased solar activity.

It is, however, a side of the debate that the BBC refuses to air, contrary to its lawful obligations.

This twelve-minute video introduces the style in which the BBC covers the warming debate, followed by a selection of clips featuring renowned scientists whom the BBC freezes out, delivering the arguments that the BBC refuses to air.

The final four minutes introduces a major story of Press criminality, which for the last thirteen years the BBC and the rest of the media have suppressed.

The relevance of this notorious political scandal to the issue of AGW may not be readily apparent. However, all will become clear by the sequence of captions leading up to the video's climax.

A short version based on the first three minutes of this video can be viewed here:

(hat-tip David Vance)

[Teddy Bear]

The BBC terms it a closed science, and one that it has no need to bring in alternative views to balance their claims.

Like gravity, or the fact that we live on a round planet earth revolving around the sun.

Except the facts in this case show the 'flat earth believers' are the BBC themselves, refusing to countenance the evidence to show otherwise.

It's not really that they believe the 'earth is flat', or in real terms, their climate change agenda, but they have a vested interest on making it appear that way.

The Great Green Con no. 1: The hard proof that finally shows global warming forecasts that are costing you billions were WRONG all along

By David Rose

No, the world ISN'T getting warmer (as you may have noticed). Now we reveal the official data that's making scientists suddenly change their minds about climate doom. So will eco-funded MPs stop waging a green crusade with your money? Well... what do YOU think?

The Mail on Sunday today presents irrefutable evidence that official predictions of global climate warming have been catastrophically flawed.

The graph on this page blows apart the ‘scientific basis’ for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. These moves have already added £100 a year to household energy bills.



Steadily climbing orange and red bands on the graph show the computer predictions of world temperatures used by the official United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The estimates – given with 75 per cent and 95 per cent certainty – suggest only a five per cent chance of the real temperature falling outside both bands.

But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely.

The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. Yet those forecasts have had a ruinous impact on the bills we pay, from heating to car fuel to huge sums paid by councils to reduce carbon emissions.

The eco-debate was, in effect, hijacked by false data. The forecasts have also forced jobs abroad as manufacturers relocate to places with no emissions targets.

A version of the graph appears in a leaked draft of the IPCC’s landmark Fifth Assessment Report due out later this year. It comes as leading climate scientists begin to admit that their worst fears about global warming will not be realised.

Academics are revising their views after acknowledging the miscalculation. Last night Myles Allen, Oxford University’s Professor of Geosystem Science, said that until recently he believed the world might be on course for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than five degrees this century.

But he now says: ‘The odds have come down,’ – adding that warming is likely to be significantly lower.
Prof Allen says higher estimates are now ‘looking iffy’.

The graph confirms there has been no statistically significant increase in the world’s average temperature since January 1997 – as this newspaper first disclosed last year.

At the end of last year the Met Office revised its ten-year forecast predicting a succession of years breaking records for warmth. It now says the pause in warming will last until at least 2017. A glance at the graph will confirm that the world will be cooler than even the coolest scenario predicted.



Its source is impeccable. The line showing world temperatures comes from the Met Office ‘HadCRUT4’ database, which contains readings from more than 30,000 measuring posts. This was added to the 75 and 95 per cent certainty bands to produce the graph by a group that amalgamates the work of 20 climate model centres working for the IPCC.

Predictions of global warming, based on scientists’ forecasts of how fast increasing CO2 levels would cause temperatures to rise, directly led to Britain’s Climate Change Act. This commits the UK to cut emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.

1977 - THE YEAR WE WERE TOLD TO FEAR TERROR OF...GLOBAL COOLING

In the Seventies, scientists and policymakers were just as concerned about a looming ‘ice age’ as they have been lately about global warming – as the Time magazine cover pictured here illustrates.

Temperatures had been falling since the beginning of the Forties. Professors warned that the trend would continue and food crises were going to get worse because of shorter growing seasons.

Newsweek magazine reported that evidence of cooling was so strong ‘meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it’. But, it lamented, ‘scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections’. It said the planet was already ‘a sixth of the way towards the next ice age’.

While recently every kind of extreme weather event has been blamed on warming, in the Seventies the culprit was cooling. One article predicted ‘the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded’, along with ‘droughts, floods, extended dry spells and long freezes’.

The current Energy Bill is set to increase subsidies for wind turbines to £7.6 billion a year – leading to a combined cost of £110 billion. Motorists will soon see a further 3p per litre rise in the cost of petrol because this now has to contain ‘biofuel’ ethanol.

Many scientists say the pause, and new research into factors such as smoke particles and ocean cycles, has made them rethink what is termed ‘climate sensitivity’ – how much the world will warm for a given level of CO2.

Yesterday Piers Forster, Climate Change Professor at Leeds University, said: ‘The fact that global surface temperatures haven’t risen in the last 15 years, combined with good knowledge of the terms changing climate, make the high estimates unlikely.’

And Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at the prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said: ‘The models are running too hot. The flat trend in global surface temperatures may continue for another decade or two.’

James Annan, of Frontier Research For Global Change, a prominent ‘warmist’, recently said high estimates for climate sensitivity now look ‘increasingly untenable’, with the true figure likely to be about half of the IPCC prediction in its last report in 2007.

Avowed climate sceptics are more unequivocal. Dr David Whitehouse, author of a new report on the pause published on Friday by Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, said: ‘This changes everything. It means we have much longer to work things out. Global warming should no longer be the main determinant of anyone’s economic or energy policy.’

I said the end wasn't nigh... and it cost me my BBC career says TV's first environmentalist, David Bellamy

This graph shows the end of the world isn’t nigh. But for anyone – like myself – who has been vilified for holding such an unfashionable view, possibly the most important thing about it is its source: the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Since its creation in 1988, the IPCC has been sounding the alarm about man-made global warming. Yet here, in a draft of its latest report, is a diagram overlaying the observed temperature of the earth on its predictions.

The graph shows a world stubbornly refusing to warm. Indeed, it shows the world is soon set to be cooler.

The awkward fact is that the earth has warmed just 0.5 degrees over the past 50 years. And Met Office records show that for the past 16 years temperatures have plateaued and, if anything, are going down.

As the graph shows, the longer this goes on, the more the actual, real-world temperature record will diverge from the IPCC’s doom-laden prediction.

Yet this prediction is used to justify the ugly wind farms spoiling our countryside and billions in unnecessary ‘green’ taxes that make our industry less competitive and add up to £100 a year to household energy bills.

Man-made global warming has become scientific orthodoxy, with no room for dissent. Tragically, the traditional caution of my brethren has gone out of the window along with the concept of sceptical peer reviewing to test new theories.

Opponents of man-made global warming are regarded as dangerous heretics, as I learnt to my cost. Soon after the IPCC was created, I was invited to what is now the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter to hear a presentation on global warming.

As the face of natural history on the BBC and a science academic, they wanted to enrol me in their cause. But when I read the so-called evidence, I realised it was flawed and refused to ‘sign up’.

I rapidly found myself cast out from the BBC and the wider scientific community. When I helped some children campaign against a wind farm as part of a Blue Peter programme, I was publicly vilified. Abusive emails criticised me. I realised my career at the BBC was over.

But scientific theory should be tested. That’s why I question the science which casts carbon as the villain that will bring about the end of the world.
David Bellamy argues that we should be able to test theories about global warming and that the world can live with fluctuations of carbon levels in the air

Geology tells us that fossil fuels are predominantly carbon which was part of our atmosphere before being locked away in the earth millions of years ago. At that time, there were more than 4,000 carbon parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere. Over time this has been as low as 270ppm and is now about 385ppm.

It is obvious the world can live with these fluctuations in the level of atmospheric carbon.
There is a correlation between temperature and CO2, but some of my colleagues have put the cart before the horse.

The evidence shows CO2 levels follow temperature, not the other way around.
Indeed, there may be many factors that determine our climate. Australian scientist David Archibald has shown a remarkable correlation between the sun’s activity and our climate over the past 300 years. Climate scientists insist we must accept the ‘carbon’ orthodoxy or be cast into the wilderness.

But the scientists behind the theory have a vested interest – it’s a great way to justify new taxes, get more money and guarantee themselves more work.

The reality is that man-made global warming is a myth: the global temperature is well within life’s limits and, indeed, the present day is cooler by comparison to much of Earth’s history. Perhaps this will be the moment that this fact becomes the new scientific orthodoxy.

[steevo]

Good article. I don't bother debating any more. What other subject can you state hard factual evidence the world is not coming to an end as we know it with people who truly believe that is the bad news. Good grief. The only hope for the BBC rests with total sheep.

[Teddy Bear]

The only hope for the BBC rests with total sheep.

BBC = Baa Baa Ccchhhit

[charmbrights]

More BBC propaganda this afternoon (11.iv.13) on Radio 4's usually sensible "Material World".
It gave almost ten minutes of totally uncritical time to a researcher from Reading University who has been computer modelling and announced that new research, published in Nature Climate Change, suggests that turbulence could double by 2050. This (he claims) threatens that on transatlantic flights "many more" accidents with broken skulls or limbs when 'planes "hit clear air turbulence" long before that.
This contrasts with the usual careful questioning of all scientific results being quoted on the programme.

[Teddy Bear]

I just read the article from Nature Climate Change, and while I'm no scientist, that anybody can take it seriously is beyond me. If it was a high school essay it still would have got a D.

I notice the previous article on that site is
Retrospective prediction of the global warming slowdown in the past decade

Retrospective prediction???
They can tell what happens - after it happens

I think we call it hindsight.
So far it shows they've been completely wrong with their predictions, and the only reason they carry on, with any intelligent person knowing how stupid they are, is the likes of the BBC wants their propaganda 'out there'.

[charmbrights]

Apr 11, 2013 20:49:14 GMT Teddy Bear said:

... the only reason they carry on, with any intelligent person knowing how stupid they are, is the likes of the BBC wants their propaganda 'out there'.

Actually the reason they carry on is that they can find someone or some organisation to pay them to do so. If the BBC takes them up and publicises them that will help convince a grant committee.

[Teddy Bear]

Win Win for the BBC

[charmbrights]

The age of miracles is not yet over!

On News at Ten on 17th June discussing the weather in Britain it was said that climate change might be affecting our weather "but we just don't know".

[Teddy Bear]

I notice their partners in GWime - the Met Office have rightfully come in for some stick recently showing how consistently wrong they are in their forecasts. So long as they and the BBC continue to adhere to their own desired narrative instead of reality, the results will always be not fit for purpose.


12 good reasons to scrap the Met Office By James Delingpole

Met Office in crisis meeting as sun comes out By Rod Liddle

[Teddy Bear]

To understand what is really happening in the 'Climate Change' world, despite no evidence to match their claims, is to see just what the real purpose of it is. Christopher Booker helps us through recent developments, and the desire of warmists to get £90 TRILLION over the next 15 years.

Given their 'concern', isn't it somewhat hypocritical for them to be flying thousands of representatives to Lima, Peru to whip up support for next year's planned 'universal climate treaty' in Paris. With all the money and influence floating around, any wonder why the BBC wants to be onside?

Billions won’t satisfy warmists
Last week’s claims that 2014 is set to be 'the hottest year ever' are frankly a load of nonsense, says Christopher Booker.

By Christopher Booker

Led by the BBC, the usual media suspects were quick to trumpet last week’s claims by the Met Office and the World Meteorological Organisation that 2014 is set to be “the hottest year ever”. It’s funny that the rest of us hadn’t noticed; least of all those citizens of North America and Russia whose lives were lately disrupted by record snowfalls. It is true that the temperature records compiled by the avid warmists of the Met Office and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (the one formerly run by climate activist James Hansen) have managed to show this year squeaking just ahead of 2010 as “the hottest year since records began”. But the much more comprehensive and reliable satellite records agree that 2014 is way down the list, with six of the past 16 years ahead of it.

The reason for this excitement just now, even before the final 2014 data are in, is that it is timed to coincide with yet another two-week UN climate conference in Lima, where thousands of officials and activists are gathered to whip up support for next year’s planned “universal climate treaty” in Paris.

What worries them more than anything is the unavoidable evidence that global temperatures have shown no significant rise for 18 years, making ever more nonsense of all those scary computer model predictions relied on by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But so carried away are they by their quasi-religious belief system that, when it was again proposed in Lima that richer nations should pay poor countries $100 billion a year to protect them from runaway global warming, the UN’s chief spokesman, Christiana Figueres, dismissed this as “a very, very small sum”. What is needed to decarbonise the global economy, she said, is “$90 trillion over the next 15 years”. It makes the £1.3 trillion we Brits are committed by the Climate Change Act to pay to halt global warming within 36 years look like chicken feed.

[Teddy Bear]

Christopher Booker with his latest observations on the BBC AGW agenda.

The BBC on global warming is beyond a joke
Green activists, aided by the state broadcaster, are whipping up support for a new climate treaty


So what’s changed? Climate scientists told us the Arctic would be 'ice-free’ by now

By Christopher Booker
The BBC’s relentless efforts to promote the need for that treaty to “decarbonise” the world’s economies they so desperately want to see agreed in December are getting way beyond a joke. On Monday’s Today programme, for instance, they yet again wheeled on that joke figure Lord Stern to tell us that renewable energy now enjoys “very little subsidy or none at all” (don’t tell the owners of offshore wind farms, who imagine they are getting subsidies of more than 200 per cent). Most energy from fossil fuels, Stern went on, is “heavily subsidised”, to the tune of “$500 billion a year”. Even John Humphrys sounded faintly disbelieving when Stern explained that most of this “subsidy” was the taxation not imposed on fossil-fuel companies for “polluting” the planet.

An hour later, we had the BBC’s science editor, David Shukman, telling us how he had gone up to the Arctic (presumably with the aid of fossil fuels), to join a bunch of Norwegian scientists (also presumably there with the aid of fossil fuels), who were discovering that the ice had got thinner than ever, and that this was causing irreparable damage to the “biodiversity” of the poor little creatures which live under that vanishing ice.

Not a shred of scientific evidence was offered to support this scare story, let alone the latest data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, which show that the thickness of multi-year ice across the Arctic has been making a dramatic recovery from its low point seven years ago (for details see Paul Homewood’s Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog).

All this drearily make-believe propaganda is designed to whip up support for a treaty which, as the Indian government yet again confirmed last week, is never going to happen, because India and China – still building enough coal-fired stations to add more CO2 to the air every year than the total emitted by the UK – are simply giving two fingers to a treaty they regard as an even bigger joke than Lord Stern.

[Teddy Bear]

Excellent piece by James Delingpole

WHAT THE BBC DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT POLAR ICE

by JAMES DELINGPOLE

The BBC’s Science Editor David Shukman recently got back from an expedition to the high Arctic. Amazingly, despite having gone all that way, he seems completely to have missed the big story: that contrary to the doomsday predictions we’ve been hearing from all the experts over the last few years the ice up there seems to be getting thicker and thicker.

Here, courtesy of Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat is the evidence.

Multi-year ice in the Arctic Ocean is now at its highest levels since the winter of 2007.


Volume too has been growing rapidly – and is now back at 2006 levels


But this wasn’t what Shukman told BBC viewers in his report. On the contrary, Shukman’s version of events could scarcely have been more different.

Changes in the Arctic Ocean are so profound that the region is entering what amounts to “a new era”, according to Norwegian scientists.

A switch from a permanent cover of thick ice to a new state where thinner ice vanishes in the summer will have far-reaching implications, they say.

Ooh. Scary.

But you wait for the killer evidence that backs up these extravagant claims. And instead what you get is flannel like this, from the Norwegian Polar Institute’s Jan-Gunnar Winther:

“We have almost no data from the Arctic Ocean in winter – with few exceptions – so this information is very important to be able understand the processes when the ice is freezing in early winter and we’ll also stay here when it melts in the summer,” he explained.

“A new era has entered, we are going from old ice to young ice, thinner ice and the climate models used today have not captured this new regime or ice situation.

“So knowing how it is today can improve climate models which again improve the projection for global climate change.”

Well hang on, just a second. If there’s “almost no data from the Arctic Ocean in winter”, how come Winther has been able to reach such hasty conclusions? How can he be so sure that what he bills as a “new era” isn’t in fact just an entirely normal part of a multi-decadal Arctic climate cycle? What does he say about the sea ice growth – shown on the charts above – since 2007?

And if the thinning of Arctic sea ice is really so dire a problem, how come the research vessel RV Lance – on which Shukman stayed for his Arctic jolly – only got as far as it did with assistance from an icebreaking vessel KV Svalbard?

These are all pretty basic journalistic questions that any half-way curious, Old Etonian Science Editor ought in all conscience to have asked. The fact that he failed to do so wouldn’t perhaps matter so much if he worked for an obviously parti-pris newspaper like the global-warming obsessed Guardian or the Independent.

But Shukman, remember, works for the BBC: an institution which is not only required by its Charter to remain politically impartial but which also becomes extremely petulant and defensive at the suggestion that it is guilty of any kind of left-wing bias. So how, exactly, does he excuse the one-sidedness of his report?

[Teddy Bear]

James Delingpole spells it out eloquently and humorously as always.

‘HIDE THE HIATUS!’ HOW THE CLIMATE ALARMISTS ELIMINATED THE INCONVENIENT ‘PAUSE’ IN GLOBAL WARMING

by JAMES DELINGPOLE
What’s the most embarrassing and inconvenient truth for the cause of climate alarmism?

Probably the fact that there has now been no “global warming” for 18 years and six months. Not only does this contradict all the doomladen climate models cited in the IPCC’s various reports – none of them predicted the so-called “Pause” – but it also means that not one of the kids in school being fed climate propaganda by their on-message teachers has ever personally lived during a time of global warming.

So it’s quite understandable that – just as they tried to do with the “Medieval Warming Period” and also “the decline” (which proved so troubling to Michael Mann and his pals) – the alarmists are doing their damnedest to write the “Pause” (or, if you will, “hiatus”) out of scientific history.

And now they’ve done it!

Or so the journal Science tells us in a new paper being greeted with a predictably rapturous reception by the usual suspects at the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times.

Here, for example, is Pravda’s take:

The so-called hiatus has been touted by non-scientists who reject mainstream climate science. Those claims have resonated; two years ago, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change felt the need to explain why the Earth was not heating up as expected, listing such reasons as volcanic eruptions, reduced solar radiation and the oceans absorbing more heat.

“The reality is that there is no hiatus,” said Tom Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. He is the lead author of a study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science

So that’s it then, is it? Game over for the deniers, now dramatically disarmed of their most powerful weapon by “the Science”?

Er, not quite, no, as this exquisitely damning rebuttal from the Global Warming Policy Forum makes clear.

The thrust of Karl’s paper is this: that far from staying flat since 1998, global temperatures have carried on rising. It’s just that scientists haven’t noticed before because they’ve been looking in the wrong place – on land, rather than in the sea where all the real heat action is happening.

And how did Karl et al notice what everyone else has missed until now? Well, by using a specialised scientific technique called “getting your excuses in early before the Paris climate conference in December.”

Essentially, this technique involves making adjustments to the raw temperature data (sound familiar?) and discovering – lo! – that the sceptics were wrong and the alarmists were right all along.

Karl’s paper makes much of the fact that the methods used for gathering sea temperature data have changed over the years: in the old days it used to involve buckets; more recently, engine intake thermometers. Hence his excuse for these magical “adjustments”. Apparently (amazingly, conveniently), the measurements used since 1998 have been “running cold” and therefore needed correcting in a (handy) upward direction in order to show what has really been happening to global warming. Once you realise this – global warming turns out to be as real and present and dangerous as ever it was.

As the GWPF reports there are several glaring problems with Karl’s paper, starting with the fact that it contradicts all the other surface temperature data sets and also satellite data (which clearly shows no warming post 1998). Also, without any plausible explanation, Karl also chooses not to use the data from the Argo array “that is our best coherent data set on ocean temperatures.” The suspicion naturally arises that this is because if Karl had used the Argo findings, they would have made his paper look ridiculous.

But, of course, accuracy and scientific integrity was never the point of this exercise.

Rather, it’s sole point was to garner quotations like the ones amassed by the Guardian (et al) and relayed to the faithful who will now unquestionably accept it as evidence that their cause is just.

Here below is the rationale for Karl’s paper. The actual science is a sublime irrelevance for, as ever, this is all about politics.

Prof Michael Mann, whose analysis of the global temperature in the 1990s revolutionised the field, said the work underlined the conclusions of his own recent research.

“They’ve sort of just confirmed what we already knew, there is no true ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ in warming,” he said. “To the extent that the study further drives home the fact … that global warming continues unabated as we continue to burn fossil fuels and warm the planet, it is nonetheless a useful contribution to the literature.”

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at London’s Grantham Research Institute, said the news that warming had been greater than previously thought should cause governments currently meeting in Bonn to act with renewed urgency and lay foundations for a strong agreement at the pivotal climate conference in Paris this December.

“The myth of the global warming pause has been heavily promoted by climate change sceptics seeking to undermine the case for strong and urgent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions,” said Ward.

Since scientists began to report a slower than expected rate of warming during the last decade, climate sceptics have latched on to the apparent dip in order to question the validity of climate models.

Last February, US Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)96%
told CNN: “The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened.”

Cruz’s rival for the Republican nomination, Jeb Bush, was using the pause to argue for inaction as early as 2009.