Spin is in, but climate change still here
My Clean Break column today is a shot back at those skeptics in the media who are hopping on the kill-the-IPCC bandwagon. I’ve pasted below the fuller version of the column, which was cut to get into the paper:
Spin is in, but climate change still there
Hardcore climate skeptics smell blood and so do some in the mainstream media, adding momentum to a boisterous campaign to discredit and confuse
Tyler Hamilton
Energy Reporter
The following e-mail arrived last week from an instructor at Seneca College. He was gleeful, commenting on all the negative publicity recently directed at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“How will the Star explain to her devoted believer’s (sic) why Al Gore and David Suzuki are being led away in handcuffs?” he wrote. “ClimateGate, ThermometerGate, GlacierGate, AmazonGate… Button up Mr. Clean – it’s real (sic) cold out there this winter.”
These taunting, often hateful e-mails arrive all the time from folks who don’t believe climate change (human caused or otherwise) is happening, and who believe their case is strengthened every time some libertarian pundit adds to their arsenal of doubt.
They mock the green economy and green energy. On climate action, they worship the status quo. Lately, they smell blood. And like underfed sharks at an annual seal gathering, they’re whipping themselves into a frenzy in hopes of turning a scratch into a fatal gorging.
Sarah Palin is now writing off all climate science as “a bunch of snake oil.” Fox News host Glenn Beck said last week that IPCC scientists have so dishonoured themselves they should perform hara-kiri – that is, commit mass suicide by plunging a sword into their bellies.
Here in Canada, the Financial Post’s resident libertarian Terence Corcoran wrote a column in late January with a headline that shouted “Climate agency going up in flames,” while the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente wrote early in February that “the science scandals just keep on coming” and that the entire climate-change movement has been discredited. Columnist Rex Murphy, who has fittingly moved on to the National Post is pretty much saying the same thing, only with bigger words.
Wishful thinking doesn’t make it so.
Interestingly, both Corcoran and Wente supported their arguments by mentioning how climate scientist Andrew Weaver from the University of Victoria is, in the words of Wente, among the many climate scientists who “sense a sinking ship” and are “bailing out.” Corcoran wrote that Weaver is “heading for the exits” and this is “firm evidence that the IPCC is in trouble.”
Here’s what Weaver had to say last Wednesday when asked by the Star about the recent coverage. “It would be nice if they actually called me,” he said, referring to Wente, Corcoran and some journalists in England.
He said his comments from an earlier CanWest story have been cherry picked and twisted. “It’s all utterly ridiculous. The way it’s being spun is that there’s this sinking ship and the rats are trying to leave.”
But the true sinking ship is the Earth’s climate system, he said. “It’s as if the Titanic is going down and we’re all arguing about the colour of the deck chairs. Surely there was an error in the IPCC report. It’s wrong, and it shouldn’t have been there. But this is being used as an attempt by those who are desperately trying to undermine the IPCC.”
First, it helps to understand what the IPCC really is. It is an international scientific body established by the United Nations in 1988 to publish regular reports on the state of the Earth’s climate. The IPCC doesn’t do its own research. Rather it gets more than 2,000 of the world’s top climate scientists to review the latest peer-reviewed literature. It then gets a few hundred of them to write up its reports.
Here we have a similar body called the Royal Society of Canada.
Those who participate in the IPCC, like Weaver, are volunteers. They work for free on an issue that consumes a huge amount of their time. As scientists, they’re not the greatest communicators or managers. This contrasts with the industry-backed lobbyists and spin doctors who are paid big bucks to scrutinize, bully and discredit these scientists and add noise to the skeptics’ echo chamber.
Take the controversy some are calling GlacierGate, which relates to information on Himalayan glacier melt buried in a 3,000-page IPCC report from 2007. The report said there was a very high chance the Himalayan glaciers would completely melt by 2035. The statement was indeed rubbish, being based on a WWF-International report from 2005.
As a result, we certainly should be combing the rest of the report for similar errors. The recent obsession with this one error, however, ignores the true peer-reviewed evidence that the Himalayan glaciers are, in fact, still melting. We just don’t know exactly how fast.
And let us not forget the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland and even the Alberta glaciers. David Barber, a University of Manitoba professor who is an expert on Arctic sea ice, recently reported that the Arctic ice is melting “faster than our most pessimistic projections.”
University of Calgary climate scientist Shawn Marshall led a study published last month that found Alberta’s Rocky Mountain glaciers will lose 82 per cent of their ice by 2100 compared to 2005 measurements. Earlier, the University of North British Columbia had already concluded that the glaciers lost about 25 per cent for their cover between 1985 and 2005.
Weaver points out that the 2007 IPCC report was, in fact, conservative with its conclusions. At the time they didn’t have access to more accurate satellite data under NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission.
The new GRACE data, said Weaver, “has revealed that Greenland has been melting rather dramatically. Also, not only is Antarctica melting, but West Antarctica is melting quite rapidly.”
The GRACE data and Marshall and Barber studies are just some of the more recent developments. They reinforce hundreds, even thousands of climate-change studies from the past two decades that form pieces of this complex puzzle. But there are enough pieces in place that we’re starting to see an image, and it doesn’t look good.
Is this alarmism? Sure it is, and so it should be. Do climate change scientists sometimes get worried and show it? Sure they do, but apparently that’s bad. Do we really expect them to go about their scientific duties with Spock-like precision that’s void of emotion and human imperfection?
This is where the so-called ClimateGate scandal comes into play. Remember those e-mails that were illegally hacked from the computer servers at the University of East Anglia, home to the U.K.’s Climatic Research Unit? The comments revealed an attempt by a small group of scientists to withhold some information from climate skeptics and allegedly deceive the public by massaging data.
But on closer reading, even the U.K. Guardian newspaper, one of the IPCC’s biggest critics these days, admits the accusations are mostly baseless. “Almost all the media and political discussion about the hacked climate e-mails has been based on brief sound bites publicized by professional skeptics and their blogs,” wrote Guardian environmental writer Fred Pearce. “In many cases, these have been taken out of context and twisted to mean something they were never intended to.”
Now the skeptics are touting AmazonGate, which relates to an IPCC finding that small reductions in rainfall in the Amazon could devastate up to 40 per cent of the Brazilian rainforest. It was based on a WWF-International report. But was it wrong?
The report’s co-author, Andrew Rowell, is fighting back. In a letter to the U.K. Sunday Times, which first broke the story, Rowell said he was never called and the reporter failed to do proper research.
According to Rowell, the reporter “ignored evidence that the figure had been backed up by peer-reviewed research both before and after our publication.” One of the world’s top Amazon scientists, Daniel Nepstad, confirmed last week that Rowell’s report and the IPCC’s conclusion were both correct.
Yet the misinformation campaign continues. The skeptics say we’re cooling, pointing rather U.S.-centrically to the snowfall that has pummeled cities such as Washington, D.C. and ignoring record warming elsewhere – like in Vancouver, where snow is being flown in by helicopter so the Olympic ski events can be held.
By the way, snowfall is evidence of precipitation, not cooling, and climate science is about extremes – record snowfall and rainfall in one part of the planet, record drought in another. Same goes for temperature, where you’ll see record highs in one place and record lows in another.
It’s the rising frequency of records and higher global temperature averages we should be worried about. And that’s what we’re seeing. “In the Arctic, there have been parts that are 10 to 20 degrees C warmer this year,” said Weaver. “These are stunning temperatures.”
But why should we believe NASA, the World Meteorological Organization, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which have each declared the 2000s as the hottest decade on record?
For the pundits, it’s far more interesting – and easier — to dwell on the colour of the deck chairs. This, and not the science, is the great global warming hoax.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
February 15th, 2010 at 9:58 pm
[...] Clean Break » Blog Archive » Spin is in, though meridian shift still here [...]
February 16th, 2010 at 3:28 am
Thanks for the article Tyler- balances out the other, negative reports on Global Warming. I honestly do not know to what extent we are responsible for our current warming trend, and how much is due to other, cyclical occurrances- BUT- you have to be abjectly stupid not to believe that 6 BILLION people living within a carbon-fuel run industrialized, mechanized and motorized society are not going to impact our living environment, including our climate! Fortunately, the evidence is starting to pile up, and more people are changing their minds about the need to do something about the way we fuel our world. It is amazing how such extremists are driving me personally from being a conservative to, well, not a liberal- but at least to a conservationist stance;-)
February 16th, 2010 at 9:17 am
Good analysis.
It’s a travesty that we need to read a select few blogs to get the true story on climate change because the mainstream media are, at best, getting it wrong – and, at worst, deliberately misinforming their readers.
February 16th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Hey Tyler,
Not sure if you’ve had a chance to read Richard Gwyn’s recent take on this, but I’d suggest you corner him in the coffee room next time you see him and set him straight. At the very least ask him how many actual climate scientists he interviewed before he wrote his piece. I suspect we both know the anwser. Hint, it rhymes with “Hero”
cheers,
p.s. did you catch the news about Performance Plants?
February 16th, 2010 at 11:16 pm
Would be interested to find out whose payroll the naysayers are on and how the paymasters benefit from the status quo.
It doesn’t matter how often you say the world is flat it is still round. Even when humans couldn’t prove the world was round it still was.
So my question to the skeptics would be, what if that remote possibility that you are incorrect proves to be true? What then? Where is your backup plan? Surely they have thought this through and can tell us what we should do if the climate is changing.
Or are we all just merrily rolling along, like the US financial system in 2006, believing that Climate Backed Securities are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Sure we don’t understand them, but if everybody agrees they are good then we all get to drive big cars and buy new kitchens rather than solar panels.
hhmmm, sounds like a good idea. Maybe I’ll start selling Climate Backed Securities.
February 17th, 2010 at 2:52 am
It is exactly this kind of arrogance and poor journalism, that has cast the East Anglia CRU, IPCC and AGW climate science in a poor light.
To lament about the taunting language and hateful Emails penned by critics or skeptics of AGW over the past 3-4 months since the Email hack or leak is laughable, given that for the past 2 decades AGW proponents have derided and dismissed those who disagree as deniers, truthers, flat earth society members, scientific hacks, has beens, or in the pocket of big business.
Tyler have you ever reported that Al Gore is essentially a corporate lobbyist, guilty of blatant spin or that David Suzuki uses individual weather events (lack of snow on a low altitude Cypress Mountain for the 2010 Olympics) as proof of climate change?
If I could suggest to you and your readers that they read a very balanced article in wattsupwiththat.com called “climate plausibility and the blogosphere” written by Jerome Ravetz of Oxford University, where he is a environmental consultant, professor of philosophy of science and author of a book challenging the assumptions of scientific objectivity.
Perhaps Tyler a little bit of balance, a hint of skepticism, and a touch of humility would serve science and the mainstream media through these difficult times.
Signed a believer in Partial Manmade Climate Change
February 17th, 2010 at 1:58 pm
B.Reynolds, the problem with the “what is your backout plan?” argument is that there’s no evidence the expensive schemes put forward by the other side will work, either. But we do know they’ll be very expensive.
Nobody has come out and said that we have to do X in order to avoid catastrophe Y. There is no target that will lead to a probably positive outcome, and they don’t seem to know what we have to do to achieve stability or reversal. But, they are happy to say that we have to spend a lot of money anyway. To fix it? We don’t know.
In other words, what is the IPCC’s backout plan if they spend everyone’s money, possibly bankrupt some big economies that are already under stress, and then find out that it didn’t do anything with respect to climate change?
Would it be cheaper to funnel money into a bureaucracy whose intentions are unclear, or cheaper to simply deal with the fallout of climate change?
As an aside, the naysayers have been pretty subdued until recently. They are the ones that are underfunded. There is a lot of money to be made from climate change because government subsidies are everywhere, boosting investments. Carbon trading markets are new places to make money. David Suzuki and Al Gore don’t seem to be too hard up for funding, nor do all the people who flew to Copenhagen.
February 18th, 2010 at 9:34 am
Wow? Are you guys still on about that Climate Change/Global Warming stuff? It’s over already. Stop beating a dead horse and find something productive to do with your selves again. (There’s tons of REAL pollution out there without vilifying CO2). With all the over inflations in the IPCC WG2 report, who really cares if it gets a degree or two warmer. I hate the cold and so do millions of Russians in Siberia.
The only evidence that keeps piling up is the evidence that tells us how uncertain and anecdotal climate science is. Antarctic sea ice has been (and continues to) GROW. But they don’t tell you THAT. Do some research instead of just chanting the mantra. The amount of OLR (that CO2 is supposed to trap) hasn’t changed in 40 years. That alone is enough to kill that theory of AGW. If you bothered to look at the evidence you’d see sea level rise is actually slowing. You can no longer deny the realities.
All those bad things that Al Gore says if, could, might, possibly happen would take ten thousand years or more, so will simply never happen, even in his wildest wet dreams. We’re more likely to get hit by an asteroid in that time. Even according to the IPCC 1 billion LESS people will be stressed for water in a warmer world. And please don’t buy into all this “Hottest Decade on Record” crap either. It’s all spin… like saying the tortoise was the fastest because he beat the hare to the finish line. There hasn’t been a new continental temperature record set in over 30 years. Look it up.
Don’t worry… be happy. :^)
MrC
February 18th, 2010 at 11:43 am
Is the climate changing? Of course it does. I there would be no climate change, we would be still buried under miles of ice.
Are humans causing the change? If you believe that the small percentage addition to a trace constituent of the atmosphere that is contributed by humans is the cause of climate change, then yes, humans are the culprits.
February 19th, 2010 at 11:33 pm
spin this. all those hydrogen vehicle deniers out there need only look at natural gas with prices under or around $5 per mega btu on the TSX for the last year. NG reforming is cheap and effective at lowering our carbon footprint. even just ng vehicles alone would lower our emissions by 20% and we would all pay 10-20% less to fuel your vehicle. the pipelines already crisscross our populated centers.
its a no brainer.
February 20th, 2010 at 6:35 pm
Well there evidence on the polar caps of other planets/satellitesr of a Solar cycle at play her…but I’m still concerned about our marginal effects being enough to act as a tipping point..Besides can you think of a better reason to take a hard look at updating our auto-destructive Economies? Which are based on Growth and Consumption…at all costs !
BTW: Here’s an example of eco-spin going the other way as well…Where even MIT is prone to pumping up good stories, rather than good science…
http://environauts.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/has-pr-trumped-science-at-mit/
What will they think of next !
February 21st, 2010 at 11:16 am
The problem that the climate scientists have convincing people that the change is real and man made is one of inertia and complexity.
Human’s naturally don’t like change. We will go to great lengths to tell ourselves that everything is fine until it is blatantly obvious that it is not.
We also don’t like complexity. We can’t wrap our heads around it. With the climate you have a system that has almost an infinite number of variables and outcomes and the scientists are saying well if you look at one millionth of the outcomes (snow, floods, specific areas warming) we are pretty sure that this one specific variable which we produce is the cause.
It is easy therefore to say “no you are wrong” because we believe that we have to potentially change our lifestyle for the worse and in their two hour speech to convince us, we lost them at “Good morning, the following dissertation will show with probability of …”
I find it amusing that climate scientists must “prove” that humans are changing the climate, but people with no training in the area can just say “no your wrong” and think they have won the argument.