Peter C Glover

We see the headlines almost daily. “Global warming: passing the tipping
point” (The Independent, February 11, 2006), “Climate change a bigger
security threat than terrorism” (The Guardian, June 12, 2006) and “Sea rise
could be catastrophic” (BBC News, March 23, 2006). Anyone familiar with
the flow of media reports might easily conclude from all the media hype that
man-made global warming or climate change is established science-fact. Yet
nothing could be further from the truth. Which begs the question: why, in the
face of the highly speculative and selective nature of climate science, do
media reports assume there is a consensual view – and collude with it in
articulating a wholesale return of conjecture?

For those of us who have taken the trouble to study the issue and the
media coverage of it, the shrillness of the mainstream media’s approach
appears to owe more to scaremongering than to good investigative reporting
– on an issue that could waste billions if the climate dissenters are correct.
The fuss over global warming and climate-change revolves around one basic
fact: that the world has undergone a one-degree warming of the ambient
atmosphere over recent decades. And there is no doubt that a number of key
scientists subscribe to the basic premise that global warming is primarily due
to man’s activities and that, unless man cleans up his act, will continue on an
upward-linear warming trajectory for the next 100 years. These include Sir
David King, chief adviser to the UK Government, Dr James Hansen, director
of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science, and Dr Michael Mann,
director of the Earth System Science Centre. No one questions that the
media’s reporting of these scientists is perfectly valid. But there are many
other eminent scientists who we are rarely hearing from.

As Richard S Lindzen and Alfred P Sloan, professor of atmospheric
science at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asked in
the The Wall Street Journal in April of this year: “How can a barely discernible,
one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late
19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather
catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future
catastrophes?”

Lindzen believes: “The answer has much to do with misunderstanding
the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a
triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are
hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus the political stakes for
policy makers provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to
increase the political stakes. After all, who puts the money into science –
whether for AIDS, or space, or climate – where there is nothing really
alarming?” And he detects “a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy.
Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds
disappear, their work derided, and themselves libelled as industry stooges,
scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain
credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their
basis… what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute
support for alarm nor establish man’s responsibility for the small amount of
warming that has occurred”. Lindzen has also drawn attention to what he
sees as “the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles
submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At
Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest”.

Questioning the wisdom

He is not alone in doubting the scientific veracity of global warming
claims. Dr Robert E Davis, associate professor of environmental sciences at
the University of Virginia, takes up the running: “In reality, we have a
tragically short record of good [climate] observations.” In an article entitled,
“Climate Cycle or Climate Psychic?” in TCS Daily, the online journal in which
experts examine a wide range of contemporary issues, on May 12, 2006,
Davis points to the variable and cyclical nature of climate change throughout
history and questions the perceived wisdom that man-made greenhouse
gases are proven to be the chief cause of climate change. “With the
phenomenal accuracy afforded by hindsight, we know that, sometime
around 1977-78, our planet underwent an abrupt shift from one climatic state
(generally cold) to another (warm)… Of course, this climatic shift was
retrospectively blamed on increasing greenhouse gases, because such
dramatic and abrupt shifts just couldn’t be natural. Presumably nature, left
to her own devices, does not cotton to wild mood swings. But is global
warming really to blame? Not likely, based on some new analyses by
University of California at Los Angeles geographers.” Davis goes on to set
out the recent analysis from the university for which I do not have space here,
but which can be seen via TCSDaily.com.

Davis alludes to new research confirming that warming and cooling are
naturally cyclical. Further that the findings are borne out by the global
cooling cycle experienced between 1940 and 1975. During this period – and
this is a major stumbling block for the future catastrophe theorists – the
ambient global temperature actually fell while carbon emissions kept rising.
Davis concludes: “The biggest problem with all of these somewhat cyclical
shifts is that no one knows for sure that a shift has actually taken place until
many years after the event, when its too late to be useful. So be wary of global warming psychics warning us of unprecedented climate shifts. In most cases, they are only unprecedented because of the short life span of most scientists. Remember one of the absolutely fundamental and too-often unstated tenets of science – there’s little point in studying anything that doesn’t vary during a scientist’s lifetime.”

Dr Robert Balling, director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona
University, deals specifically with one of the key problems – the variability
and critical effect of clouds that makes accurate prediction just about
impossible, leaving researchers “scratching [their] heads over climate
change” (TCS Daily, April 5, 2006). Balling quotes Dr James Herbert,
responsible for getting the whole global warming ball rolling in the 1980s, as
admitting: “The forces that drive long-term climate change are not known
with an accuracy sufficient to define climate changes.”

Dr Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at Huntsville, University of
Alabama, observes of media coverage: “An intense global warming
propaganda campaign by the media is currently under way” (“Global
warming hysteria has arrived”, TCS Daily, April 4, 2006). He asserts that
“government heavily funds a marching army of climate scientists whose
funding depends upon man-made global warming remaining a threat. That is
not to suggest that there is a conspiracy going on. It is merely to point out
that climate scientists aren’t always unbiased keepers of the truth. The arena
of global warming overflows with more strongly held opinions than it does
unbiased or scientific truths”. (“Global warming, science or policy?”, TCS
Daily, January 13, 2006). Spencer concludes: “Scientists who don’t believe in
predictions of climate catastrophe need to rise above their fears of losing
funding and speak out. Otherwise, this growing storm of global warming
could do some real damage.”

As a recent House of Lords report noted, the mainstream media do have a
history of, and predilection towards, reporting alarmist stories. On March
14, 2005 a BBC news bulletin announced that violent crime was “spiralling”.
Not according to the police and British Crime Survey figures, however. In
fact, as the police and the survey pointed out, crime had declined steadily
since 1998. In January 2003 the BBC, warning of a potential smallpox
epidemic, broadcast: “Smallpox kills about 30 per cent of those infected.”
The result? Lots of vaccine sold; no epidemic. Numerous other similar media
scare stories could be cited. Prospective media epidemics related to killer flu
viruses, killer bees, SARs and MMR jabs, mad cow disease, the return of TB
and of course bird flu. None of which materialised. Whenever a research
scientist warns of a potential “global catastrophe” (and presumably receives
a grant to combat the threat) it seems that quite a few reporters, editors,
broadcasters and publications are only too willing to oblige with appropriate
headlines.

Pandora’s Box of scare stories

On March 1, 2006 the BBC announced: “Bird flu could kill your cat” – on
the basis of a single cat turning up its paws in Germany. The very same day
the BBC ran the headline: “Cancer chemicals found in drinks cans.” The Food
Standards Agency quickly put this scare story into perspective, pointing
out: “The levels found are of no concern.” Even so, the public climate had
received yet another media-induced dose of fear. But nothing seems to appeal quite as much as the Pandora’s Box of scare stories that climate change affords. Perhaps because their obvious “irrefutability” – we’ll all be dead by the time they do or do not happen – lends dramatic appeal.

We’ve all probably heard or read that the Gulf Stream may be in danger of
“expiring”. But most of us will not have heard the report debunked by,
among others, Professor Carl Wunsch of the Massachusetts Institute. In a
letter to Nature, Wunsch wrote: “The occurrence of a climate state without
the Gulf Stream any time soon – within tens of millions of years – has a
probability of little more than zero. The only way to produce an ocean
circulation without a gulf stream is either to turn off the wind system, or to
stop the Earth’s rotation, or both.” In short the original reports posited an
entirely phoney climate scenario.

We have been told that the Greenland ice-cap, the whole of Antarctica
and various glaciers are melting away, threatening catastrophic rising sea
levels. The only problem with this scenario is that, as many other
climatologists report, such assertions are wholly selective. While the ice is
receding in some places, it is reported as advancing in others. And we were
recently warned that polar bears were in danger of “facing extinction”. This
report was however immediately rubbished by Dr Mitch Taylor, a polar bear
biologist from the Eskimo nation Nunavut, an area four times as big as
France. He wrote in the Toronto Star: “They are not going extinct, or even
appear to be affected at present. This complexity is why so many people find
the truth less entertaining than a good story. It is silly to predict the demise of
polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria.”

A few months ago 60 scientists wrote an open letter to new Canadian
Prime Minister Stephen Harper. They called on him to “re-visit the science
on global warming and review the policies inherited from his left-wing
predecessor”. Referring to Kyoto as “pointless” – now proven to be a correct
analysis based on the failure of almost every signatory nation to meets its
ludicrously ambitious targets – the letter questioned both the climate
science and the public billions about to be “wasted” on it. The letter received
no coverage at all in the UK however until co-signatory Emeritus Professor
Phillip Stott pursued the media “omission” with national broadcasters and
editors, largely, as he notes on his website, without success. Can we imagine a letter from 60 pro climate-change scientists being ignored?

In July, Professor Lindzen again took up his pen in The Wall Street Journal,
this time to respond to the further media hype created by former presidential
candidate Al Gore’s “disaster” movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore’s film
claims that we are headed for “a planetary emergency” made up of melting
ice-sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and
invasions of tropical disease. Lindzen however reminded WSJreaders of the
scientific fact that the Arctic was actually “warm or warmer in 1940”, before
the last cyclical cooling period, after which a warming cycle took over again.
He also noted that the latest scientific research suggests that, on average, the
Greenland ice cap is actually growing, that mosquitoes, necessary for
“tropical invasion”, “don’t require tropical warmth”, and that we have not
been able to “attribute any particular hurricane to global warming”.

Most significantly, he approaches the whole issue with a humility rare in
today’s scientific research community, referring to “the primitive state of
weather and climate science”. The effect of this, he suggests, is that “science
just does not know” as “the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always
changing”. Lindzen sums up the climate case thus: “Most of the climate
community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have
increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early 1970s, increased again until the 90s, and remained essentially flat since 1998.” As “we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task… [of prediction]… is currently impossible”, he points out.

Infamous summary

“Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise,
and with surprising impact.” He also reminds us how the known climate
science was “accurately presented” in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change’s report, in which scientists had made it clear they
could not say with any certainty what role man played in climate change. By
the time the panel’s administrators re-drafted the now infamous “summary
for policy makers”, however, it read: “The balance of evidence suggests a
discernible human influence on global climate.” As Lindzen says: “This
sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.”

What we, as journalists, personally believe about the science of
climatology and its associated predictions for global cataclysm is hardly the
point. What clearly is the point, however, is that we ought not to be
propagating media myths based on a “consensus” science view on global
warming and climate change. Dissident climate scientists are not the only
ones who cannot get the dissident science view into the mainstream. I have
had the same difficulty convincing some editors and producers of the need to
question the basic assumptions and wild predictions for the climate in 100
years time – surprising, really, when you consider the irony that
climatologists (or meteorologists, as we otherwise know them) can’t predict
what the “climate” will be in two weeks’ time with any degree of accuracy.

Peter C Glover is a freelance journalist and writer on media and cultural issues with a leading British current affairs blog (according to Technorati rankings) at www.wiresfromthebunker.com.