Y Safle

I wrote the other day about the “Global Warming Swindle” programme on channel 4 recently, and how one of the scientists, Carl Wunsch, has objected to how he has been misquoted and edited to seem to be saying the opposite of what he was actually saying.

Someone replied to me:

Aside from Carl Wunsch, all the other Scientists interviewed in the documentary were very strident in their views that Co2 is irrelevant to climate change, and that the scientific data points to the sun as the major driver in climate change, and that the Global Warming Theory is nothing more than hype and panic dressed up as science.

Why not explain how the rest of the scientists interviewed have no credentials? Regardless of who was interviewing them, (Durkin) they made their views very clear.

I have no intention of attacking the credentials of the scientists involved, as that would be ad hominem. It is relevant that the programme makers have no scientific background, because of the way they have consistently, over the course of a decade,
misrepresented science. As journalists, their lack of scientific balance creates good controversy, which is good for their ratings.

But it is not balanced, considered or scientific.

Whilst I won’t indulge in ad hominem attacks on the scientists, I do note that there was no new material in this programme, and every point raised has been refuted before (and much of it was downright wrong!)

I mentioned that the graph looked like it had been doctored to exaggerate the post war cooling. “The Independent”, a British newspaper, looked into that very point. They asked channel 4 and the programme makers where the data had come from. The graph on the programme (click on the thumbnail to the right to see this graph full size), the source claims to be NASA. However, Durkin eventually admitted that it had been taken from another obscure publication published in the medical sentinal by some climate change sceptics. Further investigation revealed no such diagram, but something similar for terrestrial northern hemisphere temperatures from weather stations in the top third of the globe.

Eventually the data was tracked down to some data that had come from NASA but ended in the 1980s. It turns out that the line from the early 1980s onwards was extended by hand, and not correctly (and even then only to the year 2000). Mr Durkin admitted that his graphics team had extended the time axis along the bottom of the graph to the year 2000. “There was a fluff there,” he said. He also said: “The original Nasa data was very wiggly-lined and we wanted the simplest line we could find.”

I downloaded two data sets and plotted the results, and you can see how different the graph should actually look (click the thumbnail on the right for fullo sized image).

Now what about what the scientists said? The cosmic ray theory is part of a new book by Nigel Calder and Henrik Svensmark. The fundamental flaw with the theory is that whilst Svensmark posits a role for cosmic rays in cloud formation, there is no trend in cosmic rays, and there is no trend in cloud formation. Dr Gavin Scmidt from Nasa demonstrates five missing steps from Svensmark’s data to his conclusions in his press release (and now his book).

“We’ve often criticised press releases that we felt gave misleading impressions of the underlying work,” Schmidt says, “but this example is by far the most blatant extrapolation beyond reasonableness that we have seen.” None of this seems to have troubled the programme makers, who report the cosmic ray theory as if it were an accepted (and indeed only acceptable) explanation.

As “the Guardian” reports:

Professor John Christy speaks about the discrepancy he discovered between temperatures at the Earth’s surface and temperatures in the troposphere (or lower atmosphere). But the programme fails to mention that in 2005 his data were proved wrong, by three papers in Science magazine. Christy himself admitted last year that he was mistaken. He was one of the authors of a paper which states the opposite of what he says in the film. “Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human-induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected.”

Also from the Guardian:

The film’s main contention is that the current increase in global temperatures is caused not by rising greenhouse gases, but by changes in the activity of the sun. It is built around the discovery in 1991 by the Danish atmospheric physicist Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen that recent temperature variations on Earth are in “strikingly good agreement” with the length of the cycle of sunspots. Unfortunately, he found nothing of the kind. A paper published in the journal Eos in 2004 reveals that the “agreement” was the result of “incorrect handling of the physical data”. The real data for recent years show the opposite: that the length of the sunspot cycle has declined, while temperatures have risen. When this error was exposed, Friis-Christensen and his co-author published a new paper, purporting to produce similar results. But this too turned out to be an artefact of mistakes - in this case in their arithmetic. So Friis-Christensen and another author developed yet another means of demonstrating that the sun is responsible, claiming to have discovered a remarkable agreement between cosmic radiation influenced by the sun and global cloud cover. This is the mechanism the film proposes for global warming. But, yet again, the method was exposed as faulty. They had been using satellite data which did not in fact measure global cloud cover. A paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics shows that, when the right data are used, a correlation is not found.

The programme failed to mention that we know now that the post war global cooling was caused by atmospheric aerosols, despite the fact this is now well understood. It did not mention that the medieval warm period was northern atlantic only. It did state that the medieval warm period was warmer in Europe than it is now, whereas we
know now that this was not so - that it is now considerably warmer than it was then. (16 year old data was used to contest the opposite).

The history was wrong too. The suggestion that Nigel Calder discovered someone with a novel theory about burning coal to create a greenhouse effect in the 1970s is about 100 years late. Svante Arrhenius discovered the greenhouse effect and suggested burning coal to warm up the climate in 1895. (He was Swedish, so perhaps felt a warmer climate would be agreeable!)

Tim Ball gave some of the most strident polemic with the least data. I cannot remember him making any scientific point (his specialism, when he was still publishing, was historical Canadian climate) but he made many specious claims. He said that it was as though a car was broken and the climate scientists ignore the engine and transmission and look at one bolt only to try and fix the engine.

That is exactly what he, and the other handful of sceptics on the programme were doing. They ignore all the climate science, and look at only a few narrow points that bolster their own opinions. The IPCC has looked at solar forcings and included these in their report.

These sceptics are ignoring the science. Why? I don’t know. But just because a handful of scientists are looking at a single bolt, don’t ignore the thousands of diligent and intelligent scientists who have encountered all these issues and looked at them carefully, but are looking at the engine and transmission.