Y Safle

Caredig i Natur wrote an article (in almost illegible yellow text on a bright green background – yuck) titled “Whingy Car Lovers” in which they made this wonderful observation:

Update, Thursday 7th January 2010: Today at 8.45 AM there were only two vehicles in Llanbadarn on Primrose Hill, where there would normally be a hundred blocking the road. Also today the local schools were closed as a precaution due to ‘snow’, even though in reality it isn’t bad at all. This shows how much of the local traffic is school-run based, and therefore a bypass would do nothing to reduce traffic in Llanbadarn Fawr. More roads won’t fix a car-addicted culture, they just encourage it.

So based on this so scientific analysis, they have assumed that nearly all traffic in Llanbadarn Fawr is caused by the school run.

Except look at the date they chose. 7 January 2010. The Daily Telegraph headline for that day was “Britain’s Freezing Weather: Worst Snow for 50 Years Paralyses Transport Networks”.

Aberystwyth is close to the sea and sheltered by hills from north-easterly winds that bring snow. Consequently on 7 January the snow in Aberystwyth and Llanbadarn was not as bad as the rest of the country. The whole of the rest of the country though was white! Even Aberystwyth and Llanbadarn were frozen and had some snow.

Now Caredig i Natur’s point is that the empty roads indicate that no Llanbadarn bypass is called for because most of the traffic is school traffic and not through traffic. He conveniently forgets to mention that there was no through traffic at all on that day because all the roads in and out of town were blocked by snow!

It wasn’t just the schools that were shut (because the teachers, support staff and many children could not get in). Everything was shut. Offices that were open were all but empty, and staff had walked in where they had got in at all. I myself could not move my car for the whole of that week despite living in Aberystwyth itself.

Such terrible sloppy misrepresentation of the facts does no one any good. Caredig i Nature? Angharedig i’r gwirionedd. (Kind to nature? Unkind to the truth).

the writer of the Caredig i Natur blog really really does not like cars taking children to school. To be fair he is not alone. Many people, including most of the parents in the cars, are not happy with the necessity of a daily school run. However, the blog writer is rather disingenuous with his use of evidence, so let’s shine the spotlight on his errors.

In one article he tells everyone to use public transport.

He links to the transport direct CO2 emissions calculator and says:

Private car transport is the least environmentally-friendly way to travel

But look at the assumptions he has plugged into that CO2 calculator to generate the graph showing large cars consuming way more CO2 emissions. He has calculated a journey of nearly 40 miles with a single occupant. To be honest there are really not many children driving themselves 40 miles to school every day.

So I have produced the more representative graph. I have chosen a more realistic 2 mile journey with 4 occupants, and this is the result:

So in fact for the average family school run, a small private car has significantly lower emissions than any other kind of motorised transport. Even a large family car does better than the bus, and comes in at the same emissions level as the train (assuming you have a train connecting your home and school).

Now my assumptions: 2 miles is about average in this area for the school run, but 1 and 3 miles produce almost identical results (more emissions, but the same relative emissions). I am comfortable that is accurate.

Not so firmly established is the number of occupants of the vehicles. However the CIN writer rages against primary schools in particular, and so parents must accompany the children so the minimum number of occupants is 2. 4 is actually extremely common, but there are also many vehicles with three occupants, and otehrs with more. Parents who share the school run may have up to 7 occupants in a private car.

Whilst I am comfortable with 4 in my assumption, we could find average occupancy is closer to 3. In this case the calculator shows the large private car rising to .3kg per person, worse than the train but still better than the bus. The small private car is still at the .1kg per person mark and remains far and away the most efficient means of motorised transport.

Now even though this is a rant against Caredig i Natur’s nonsense and extremely selective choice of facts, I feel duty bound to point out some assumptions in what I have said. It is clear that private cars have lowest emissions, but if a train or bus travels the journey in any case, doesn’t that mean that their pollution will be spent anyway? Shouldn’t we use public transport if the buses are already going our way?

And to that the answer is presumably yes. If the bus is already travelling the route we wish to follow, then we reduce overall emissions by taking the bus.

Of course most school runs do not start or end near public bus stops. Almost no school runs start and end near train stations. The moral here is we should not be fighting for better public transport. If we want to reduce emissions we need to do two things:

1. Encourage walking and cycling where appropriate.
2. Encourage smaller and more efficient cars

caredig i Natur will agree with my first point but he seems not to recognise there may be times when a motor vehicle is actually necessary for the school run. That is his silly assumptions blinding him again. But to more reasonable people, I think those two measures taken hand in hand could considerably help our environment, our wallets, our health and our quality of life.

You know, when you are just plain flat out wrong, blogs are a wonderful resource. You can make a wrong statement and if challenged and it looks like you are losing the argument, you can simply make a last reply and then close the comments! This is what Caredig i Natur’s writer did to me. The writer of that blog argued children should not use the pedestrian footpath on which bicycles are permitted because they have a perfectly good alternative pedestrian path across the road. I and others pointed out the alternative path was more dangerous, and I described the route. In his reply before “closing comments”, the Caredig i Natur writer wrote:

[In response to my saying the alternative route means walking around a roundabout which does not have a footway all the way round]:

Our contact said this isn’t true. There is a path all the way around.

I present exhibit A:

No pavement is available at the far end of the roundabout

Notice the lack of footpath. There are mud verges that can be used, but I was correct, there is clearly no footway all around the roundabout, and people coming around the roundabout are frequently observed walking on the road – especially in winter when the mud verges are permanently damp and uneven.

Note also that this route involves the children beginning their journey in the opposite direction to the direction they wish to travel!

The CIN writer continued:

Basically if the pavement was unsafe the council would not allow people to walk on it, or would put up barriers. It is easy to amplify dangers in our minds on emotive topics.

My response on the CIN blog was part of a chain that ran as follows (I paraphrase onlys slightly for brevity):

CIN: Children should not use the western footway as cyclists wish to use this unimpeded.
Anonymous commenter: You are not going to get my support for asking children not to use the safest route
CIN: It is debatable as to whether the western footway is safest

My response was to point out that CIN themselves had made the case that the greater danger to pedestrians comes from motor vehicles. Whilst the risks to pedestrians are small when walking around Plascrug roundabout and along the narrower eastern pavement that lacks the protections from motor vehicles on the other side, it nevertheless remains the case that the risks are higher. The anonymous writer was quite correct. CIN are asking children to use the more dangerous route, simply so that they may be afforded exclusive use of a footway that the council have confirmed is a dual use pedestrian and cyclist footway.

“the corner by Ysgol Gymraeg, they reach a point where inconsiderate and illegal parking by some parents at that school causes an obstruction that frequently causes vehicles to mount the pavement on the side the children will now be on.”

We are behind you a 100% there, but can’t see any way of doing anything about that situation.

The solution to this situation is to use the western footway which contains bollarded protection for pedestrians, and does not suffer this risk. Again, the anonymous poster was correct. The western footway, even with cyclists on – even with the deranged cyclist who shouts at pedestrians and motorists alike on an almost daily basis – is safer than the eastern footway

“On reaching the end of the avenue the children must now (to avoid the cycle path) cross the road at the car park junction and then cross the feeder road to Ysgol Gymraeg. Even then they find themselves sharing the cycle path with cyclists so they must now either walk on the road in the car park or cross the cycle path and walk on the muddy verge instead.”

Our contact said that is wrong. By being on the pavement the pupils would cross the road once, to Ysgol Gymraeg (and thereby avoid two crossings which they encounter if they stayed on the cycle path). The route you have listed would indeed be rather silly, we agree.

I present exhibits B, C, and D.

The cycle path veers right here but too late for pedestrians to gain any benefit from crossing the road

Here in exhibit B we see the cycle route veer away into the access road for Ysgol Gymraeg. The eastern pavement preferred for pedestrians by CIN is on the left. To avoid the cycle path pedestrians must stay on the eastern pavement to the end of Plascrug avenue. You also see the junction to Ysgol Gymraeg on this pavement. Notice that had Pedestrians used the western pavement, they could stay on the school side of this junction and avoid crossing the road here at all. At this point they would also be off the cycle/foot path.

“By being on the pavement the pupils would cross the road once, to Ysgol Gymraeg” is clearly wrong. If the children cross to Ysgol Gymraeg, they will again be on the dual use path.

So CIN is wrong again. Their solution is more dangerous and longer. Pedestrains must now remain on the eastern footway to the junction, or they can cross to the western footway here and proceed to the junction. In any case this is the first crossing I mentioned.

The junction. The dropped kerbs will be where children would need to cross. Notice the four directions of approaching traffic.

Having crossed one road, children must now cross a second

Exhibit C and D show the double junction children must now cross. This is the only way they can avoid the foot/cycle path. It is longer and has involved them crossing two roads. Children are taken by schools on these routes at the start and end of school session including lunch times, which are the exact same time that traffic on the route is at its greatest. I agree with the anonymous poster. You are not going to get my sympathy from forcing children off the safest route just so you can have exclusive use to a path that was not designed to be an exclusive use cycle path.

Finally here is Exhibit E: which shows the dual use cycle path and pavement running up to the leisure centre. You will notice that children, to avoid this path, must now either walk on the grass (muddy from October to May and other times) or else walk in the car park, at significant risk from reversing vehicles.

Notice the pavement is again dual use cycle path, so CIN want the children either on the road behind the parked cars or the grass area (muddy for much of the year).

Now Caredig i Natur say there is nothing more to say on this issue and to some extent I agree. It is plainly absurd to tell people it is better for all that people be excluded from a footpath that has remained a right of way to them for a hundred years or more, and they should use a more dangerous route instead just so a few cyclists can have unrestricted access to it. They have nothing more to say. I think therefore they should take down the erroneous article and issue an apology.

It is even more absurd because the number of cyclists is dwarfed by the number of pedestrian users.

I am a cyclist too. I sometimes ride this path, but I think it is crass, insensitive and frankly stupid to tell pedestrians that best practice dictates they no longer use the footpath. As long as cyclists behave like this, the green issues we wish to promote in a spirit of co-operation will continue to be ignored or mocked.

There is space on the avenue for an exclusive use cycle path. If CIN’s writer wishes to campaign for that in a cooperative and helpful manner, I would be right behind it. But as long as the blog remains whingy, disrespectful and unhelpful, I guess we must all just ignore everything he says.

The title reads “Kind to nature, unkind to children” and refers to a blog that demonstrates some very bad practice:

Caredig i Nature (CIN)

One problem with blogs is that they are not a conversation amongst equals. If the blog writer refuses to post up your comments you have no recourse but to shut up and go away.

I and others have questioned the writer’s use of our children’s images on this blog without our permission or the permission of our children, and the blog writer now refuses to post up my comment. Thus my comment is reproduced here:

The CIN author wrote: “Re: the photos, that was covered in the comment above.”

No the comment was directed against a poster who thought that the use of such photos is illegal. You, the CIN author, and I know that it is not illegal to take pictures of anyone on public land, nor to publish the photos if doing so does not contravene the Data Protection Act.

Of course, in naming the school in question, an argument could be made that the picture constitutes personal data under the act.

But my point was not about the legality of publication. Your article states, about pedestrians using the pedestrian footway (on which cycling is permitted): “Although not illegal, this is bad practice…”

So my question again. The NSPCC provides guidance of best practice on use of children’s photographs on websites here:

NSPCC Guidance on Use of Children’s Images on Websites

You will note the best practice is to request consent from the parents and the children concerned.

I take it you, the CIN author, followed best practice, and obtained consent. Yes?

*

For the record, the answer is no. Neither I nor my daughter was asked consent.

For a site wishing to lecture us on “Best Practice”, there is a remarkable lack of best practice here. Poor practice both in the use of my daughter’s image, and in running a blog, and in responding to complaints.

For the record I allow all comments on this blog except when they are personal and vulgar attacks. Most comments do not even go to moderation unless they contain links.

The BBC carries details of a report on the possible effects of climate change. Predictions, of course, are hard (especially about the future)! But after a great deal of debate, some conclusions have been drawn – one of which is not entirely surprising: the people most at risk from climate change are the world’s poor – those least able to avoid its effects.

According to the BBC:

The impact of climate change has been a major source of dispute
Billions of people face shortages of food and water and increased risk of flooding, experts at a major climate change conference have warned.
The bleak conclusion came ahead of the publication of a key report by hundreds of international environmental experts.

Agreement on the final wording of the report was reached after a marathon debate through the night in Brussels.

People living in poverty would be worst affected by the effects of climate change, the gathered experts said.

“It’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6532323.stm

The report may be downloaded in PDF format.

Global Temperature Anomalies. Photo: yeimayaDiscussion of climate change can seem so academic at times, and I wanted to make it a little more family friendly. Thus I was pleased when a commentator on this blog (Jason) wrote regarding global warming:

OK, this is the theory [referring to role of greenhouse gases in warming our climate, and the means by which they do this. Carbon dioxide included.] I thought you meant. I agree with the physics behind this theory, and consequently believe that it is true. (except for the part about positive feedbacks exceeding negative feedbacks, The models clearly assume substantial positive feedbacks, and I don’t think that the data supports this at all. But a model is just a model. Either it will prove right or it won’t. I can wait for experimental validation.)

But you said that this theory had been experimentally validated. I am not aware of any such validation and am fishing for a reference.

Swindled by Global Warming Sceptics

Jason claims he agrees with the physics, and yet he still wants to know about the experimental validation. I suppose this means that the theory is plausible to him, but he is not aware of experimental validation of the greenhouse effect (outside of the data from climatologists of course – but our warming our atmosphere is not a controlled experiment).

But rather than dredge up more scientific references, I thought we could add some fun to this question, and perform our own experiment. So here are instructions to build your own global warming experiment using CO2 and water vapour. Note that we could extend this to methane too, but the collection of household methane is usually a smelly process, best left to the more intrepid amateur scientist.

Equipment

• Two 2 litre plastic drink bottles
• Two thermometers (preferably digital ones)
• A drill bit to drill a hole large enough for the thermometer (if you have a large rectangular digital thermometer, you will need to improvise a bit!)
• Two clamp stands and clamps (or some ad hoc support!)
• Carbon Dioxide. (For me, the best way to get CO2 is from a Soda Stream, although there are other ways, using bicarbonate of soda for instance).
• Two desk lamps (don’t use energy saving bulbs – 60W or better incandescent bulbs are required)
• Plasticine (That staple of home physics experiments!)

Method

Remove the labels from the drinks bottles and drill holes in the tops large enough to allow the thermometers in. Set up the clamp stands close to the lamps. Make sure that the bottles will not be so close to the lamp that they will melt. Also be very careful about placement. The stands (and the bottles) must be placed identically for the two bottles – the same distance away, and keep the desk lamps at the same angle and the same height. Keep the lamps turned off for now.

Fill one of the bottles with carbon dioxide from your soda stream! screw the top on tight and plug any gaps with the plasticine. The other bottle should also be sealed with plasticine (but don’t fill it with anything. You just want the ordinary atmospheric air that is already in there).

Now check the temperature in the bottles. The carbon dioxide bottle may be cooler as it was filled from a canister of compressed gas. Wait until the temperatures equalise, and when they do so, switch on the lamps, note the temperature and time.

Over the next half hour, monitor temperature and time regularly (at least 5 minute intervals).

Expected Results

Over the course of the experiment, the temperature in the bottle filled with CO2 should rise higher than the bottle filled with just plain old air. For extra credit you could try altering the concentration of CO2 in the bottle to see how the concentration affects the results (rather hard to do scientifically with this equipment, but give it a go!)

Water Vapour

Water vapour is another greenhouse gas. You can repeat this experiment for water vapour. Instead of filling the bottle with CO2, fill it with water vapour. First make sure the other bottle is filled with air in a cool dry place. Next take the bottle to be filled with water vapour to the bathroom. Have a hot steamy bath. Take your bottle with you and during your bath, seal it as before.

Note that it is quicker to fill the bottle from a steaming kettle, but you will almost certainly scald your fingers, and much of the vapour will just condense in the bottle. Better off with the bath methodology.

Now repeat the experiment. If your atmosphere was quite humid when you performed this experiment you may not see much difference – try leaving the ordinary atmosphere bottle in the fridge for 10 minutes, then seal it quickly before removing it. Allow it to return to room temperature and repeat (this will reduce the water vapour in the bottle because cold air holds less water).

Most of all – have fun. This experiment is best performed with the help of young children. No animals were harmed in the making of this experiment.

Someone wrote to me regarding the amount of carbon dioxide we are producing, saying:

It is your opinion that the amount of carbon dioxide being put in the atmosphere is not puny, it is not an established fact.

We know what we are pumping into the atmosphere. We know that we have
increased CO₂ levels in the atmosphere by more than a third since the 19th century.
This is not my definition of puny.

Human emissions are dwarfed by the emissions of termites.

I am unconvinced by this claim. I have seen no sources, and it seems highly unlikely to be correct. However, the fact that the natural carbon cycle pushes CO₂ into the atmosphere in vast quantities is
irrelevant, because it is only an issue if you are relying upon vegetation
to act as a permanent carbon sink – which it will not.
What termites do, and have always done, remains in perfect balance: A
termite cannot produce CO₂ if it does not eat. Termites eat
wood – not fossil fuels – so the carbon dioxide they release into the
atmosphere has been locked up in wood for at most a hundred years or so.
They are part of the natural balance

Burning fossil fuels releases carbon locked up for millions of years. This
is additional carbon dioxide to that produced each year by termites and
other living creatures. Unlike the activities of living things, this burning
of fossil fuels is not in balance – and growing forests will not solve the
problem, because of those pesky termites.

Consider it another way. Let us suppose you have a houeshold budget. Each
year you receive an income, which consists of salary and dividends on
investments. Your outgoings each year go on cost of living and a small
amount of investment.

Now if our outgoings are no larger than our income, then everything is just
fine. Indeed, your investment will grow slowly.

But now consider what would happen if you increased your cost of living, by
purchasing bigger cars, private jets and so forth. Suppose that your cost of
living alone now exceeded your income by half as much again. How would you
finance this?

Instead of growing investments slowly, you would eat rapidly into your
capital.

And if your capital is not very large, then before you know it, you will
have no capital left, and be worse off than when you began – because you now
have no dividend income either!

This is the way it is with the carbon budget. Until now, the carbon cycle
has recycled nearly all carbon back into the atmosphere, helped by termites
and other living creatures – including us! But the budget has been balanced,
and little by little, carbon has been tucked away.

But for the last century we have been squandering that capital, and pushing
carbon back into the atmosphere beyond the means of the earth to cope with
the increase.

Blaming termites and flatulent cows (or even breathing humans) is the straw
man. It is our eating into the carbon capital that is the problem – not the
natural process of the carbon cycle.

Not enough is known about the effects of adding CO₂ to the
atmosphere to say for certain that burning fossil fuels leads to any
problem at all.

Enough is known to say that it is very likely to cause a problem, and that a
problem consistent with that expected is being seen.
To wait for more is foolhardy – indeed sinful.

For instance, some scientists have suggested and
are working on proving or disproving that increased temperatures, if they
do exist, will cause more evaporation of ground and ocean water, which
creates more clouds, which may block more sunlight, which could
allow the earth to cool,

What is the temperature on Venus? About 464 °C on average. What is the temperature on Mercury? About 167°C on average. Why is Venus hotter?

No sources are cited again, but this argument appears to be quite wrong. If we warm the oceans they release more CO₂.

I wrote a post yesterday about Martin Durkin’s junk science programme on global warming designed to convince people with no knowledge of the issue that – in his words – global warming is not our fault. I took issue with a number of points, including the graph on which Durkin manipulated temperature data to make it look as though the post war cooling period was much larger than it actually was.

Someone (Jason) commented that my own graph, that I included for comparison, had a trend line that seemed to hide the post war cooling period. The graph had come from a previous article where it was demonstrating that the warming trend had not (contrary to the arguments of some) stopped in 1999. The trend line is superfluous to establishing the deceit of Durkin’s graph.

Whilst the data is quite clear in the graph, demonstrating the point, I considered the point, and thought that it would be better if I construct a new graph, comparing Durkin’s data and at least one well respected source of historic climate data. I have used Crutem 3v, because I had it available after creating the previous graph.

The problem is that Durkin’s data is not published anywhere. The “source: NASA” attribution hides the fact that the graph has been redrawn and in fact now matches no known data set. Thus I carefully used a ruler(!!) to reconstruct the data set from Durkin’s graph. It is not perfect, but it is pretty close. (You can check it against the original included in yesterday’s post).

I then plotted Durkin and the Crutem 3v dataset (which is a bit “wiggly lined” in Durkin’s words). In order to average out the wiggly lines and make it more directly comparable with Durkin’s data, I calculated a 10 year moving average and plotted this.

This average, I think, suggests that Durkin’s dates are a little off in his data – but the shapes do approximate to something similar (a 5 year moving average was too granular for Durkin’s graph).

So here is the complete graph. Click on the thumbnail to see it full size. I have shaded the same area that Durkin shaded – the period of post war cooling due to industrial aerosols prior to the agreements to reduce these. Notice particularly how much more strongly the temperature anomaly grows after this period than in Durkin’s graph. Bear in mind that in Durkin’s graph, his team made up these data for this period.

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.

Viewers of channel 4 have been swindled by director Martin Durkin (again), and Carl Wunsch of MIT is angry about it. He was approached by Durkin to make a supposedly balanced film about global warming issues, getting away from the hysterical propoganda from the polarised political debate (particularly in the American political arena).

What concerned scientist would object to such a thing? But Durkin misled Wunsch. For instance, Wunsch writes:

In the part of the “Swindle” film where I am describing the fact that the ocean tends to expel carbon dioxide where it is warm, and to absorb it where it is cold, my intent was to explain that warming the ocean could be dangerous—because it is such a gigantic reservoir of carbon. By its placement in the film, it appears that I am saying that since carbon dioxide exists in the ocean in such large quantities, human influence must not be very important — diametrically opposite to the point I was making — which is that global warming is both real and threatening in many different ways, some unexpected.

You can read the whole of Carl Wunsch’s open letter.

So what do we make of this programme? It is the most biased an scientifically illiterate documentary I have seen in a while – but actually true to form for channel 4 and Durkin. In 1997 he made a series for Channel 4 called “Against Nature”, which compared environmentalists with Nazis, conspiring against the world’s poor. The people he interviewed thought that he was making a balanced critical examination of environmentalism, but the contributors were lied to about the contents of the programmes and given no chance to respond to the accusations the series made.

The Independent Television Commission handed down one of the most damning verdicts it has ever reached: the programme makers “distorted by selective editing” the views of the interviewees and “misled” them about the “content and purpose of the programmes when they agreed to take part.” Channel 4 was forced to make a humiliating prime time apology.

As formal complaints have made by this programme’s contributors too, we can but await another apology from channel 4. The question is why this channel ever agreed to use this same producer again.