BBC news chiefs attack plans for climate change campaign

It shows how much pressure they have been under that the Beeb wants to return to impartiality

Two of the BBC's most senior news and current affairs executives attacked the corporation's plans yesterday for a Comic Relief-style day of programming on environmental issues, saying it was not the broadcaster's job to preach to viewers. The event, understood to have been 18 months in development, would see stars such as Ricky Gervais and Jonathan Ross take part in a "consciousness raising" event, provisionally titled Planet Relief, early next year.

But, speaking at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival yesterday, Newsnight's editor, Peter Barron, and the BBC's head of television news, Peter Horrocks, attacked the plan, which also seems to contradict the corporation's guidelines. Asked whether the BBC should campaign on issues such as climate change, Mr Horrocks said: "I absolutely don't think we should do that because it's not impartial. It's not our job to lead people and proselytise about it." Mr Barron said: "It is absolutely not the BBC's job to save the planet. I think there are a lot of people who think that, but it must be stopped."

Planet Relief appears to contradict BBC guidelines on impartiality. In June a BBC-endorsed report set out 12 principles on impartiality, warning that the broadcaster "has many public purposes of both ambition and merit - but joining campaigns to save the planet is not one of them". A BBC spokeswoman said: "This idea is still in development and the intention would be to debate the issue and in no way campaign on a single point of view."

Meanwhile, in a session at the festival yesterday titled How Green is TV, the documentary producer Martin Durkin attacked the BBC as stifling debate on climate change. Durkin, whose film The Great Global Warming Swindle attracted a large number of complaints when it was shown on Channel 4 this year, said: "The thing that disturbs me most is that the BBC has such a leviathan position ... that if it decides that it is going to adopt climate change as a moral purpose, I have got a lot of trouble with that. I don't think it is the role of the BBC to spend my money on a moral purpose."

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Key Lesson from the NASA temperature-record debacle

The key lesson here is not that NASA GISS or Jim Hansen or anyone else was intentionally making mistakes, but that in complex data compilations and analyses, no matter how diligent you try to be, mistakes work there way in. This is why it is important to be as open as possible as a scientist about what you did and how you did it, i.e. to make full disclosure of all your data and methods. This allows others to replicate your work and helps assure that science moves forward on the best possible footing, and that policy-makers operate off of factual data and not belief systems.

It is for this reason that it is of the gravest concern that leading climate scientists and organizations, up to and including even the IPCC, are still failing to make full disclosure regarding many of the data that they spin into the public domain. Stephen McIntyre's earlier work that exploded the myth of the hockey-stick temperature curve should have been all that was needed for politicians and agencies to enforce full disclosure of all data that is related to public climate policy formulation. Alas, McIntyre's revelations were not adequate to overcome the vested interests and bureaucratic inertia of the responsible persons, and so now he has had to repeat the dose of education with his second discovery regarding the flawed GISS temperature data. How many flaws is this unpaid investigator going to have to discover before someone establishes the needed climate audit agency (perhaps as an organ of the Asia-Pacific climate partnership)?

Policymakers and voters, take note

Surely there are other problems in the variety of temperature data collected and compiled on local, regional, national and international scales. Just in the past few days, there's been news about defects in all three of the global temperature datasets upon which the entire climate scare is founded. McIntyre and McKitrick have taken apart the Hansen GISS dataset as discussed above (www.climateaudit.org), of which there's always been suspicion; another researcher has accused Jones (who masterminds the Hadley/CRU dataset) of falsification of his results (http://www.informath.org/WCWF07a.pdf); and now NCDC, after exposure of the unsuitable heat-island locations of many of its US temperature stations, has responded by withdrawing from the public domain the list of station locations, which had previously been public for years, vacuously citing "privacy considerations (www.surfacestations.org)."

Conclusions

Errors of the sort described herein may sometimes lead to either an underestimate or overestimate of temperature trends, whereas other errors may have little impact at all. But one thing is certain, errors are undoubtedly present in all large, complex datasets. In reality, it is impossible to develop the one and only U.S. average temperature or THE global average temperature. There are simply too many confounding factors that cannot be accounted for. Policy makers also need to understand that one certainly cannot project temperature or climate trend decades or centuries into the future, however stridently the CGM modelers promulgate their wares.

So, next time you encounter a breathless announcement that we have set another "all-time record" high temperature, first realize that there is always a level of uncertainty in both what is being measured and how it is being compiled and interpreted. And second, reflect upon the fact that such records have absolutely no meaning unless they take account of the natural cyclicities that are present in all climatic data.

Has the earth been in a modern warming cycle coming out of the Little Ice Age? Yes. Is it therefore significant that any given year should be a couple of hundredths of degrees warmer or cooler , give or take, from some other nearby year in the record? Of course not . Unless, that is, someone is trying to sell you something, to con you, to raise taxes, to increase the reach of the state, or is simply trying to be elected President of the United States - or perhaps even all of the above.

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"Consensus"? What "Consensus"? Among Climate Scientists, The Debate Is Not Over

Abstract

It is often said that there is a scientific "consensus" to the effect that climate change will be "catastrophic" and that, on this question, "the debate is over". The present paper will demonstrate that the claim of unanimous scientific "consensus" was false, and known to be false, when it was first made; that the trend of opinion in the peer-reviewed journals and even in the UN's reports on climate is moving rapidly away from alarmism; that, among climate scientists, the debate on the causes and extent of climate change is by no means over; and that the evidence in the peer-reviewed literature conclusively demonstrates that, to the extent that there is a "consensus", that "consensus" does not endorse the notion of "catastrophic" climate change.

The origin of the claim of "consensus"

David Miliband, the Environment Minister of the United Kingdom, was greeted by cries of "Rubbish!" when he told a conference on climate change at the Holy See in the spring of 2007 that the science of climate and carbon dioxide was simple and settled. Yet Miliband was merely reciting a mantra that has been widely peddled by politicians such as Al Gore and political news media such as the BBC, which has long since abandoned its constitutional obligation of objectivity on this as on most political subjects, and has adopted a policy of not allowing equal air-time to opponents of the imagined "consensus".

The claim of "consensus" rests almost entirely on an inaccurate and now-outdated single-page comment in the journal Science entitled The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change (Oreskes, 2004). In this less than impressive "head-count" essay, Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science with no qualifications in climatology, defined the "consensus" in a very limited sense, quoting as follows from IPCC (2001) -

"Human activities . are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents . that absorb or scatter radiant energy. . most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."

The limited definition of "consensus"

Oreskes' definition of "consensus" falls into two parts. First, she states that humankind is altering the composition of the atmosphere. This statement is uncontroversial: for measurement has established that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen over the past 250 years to such an extent that CO2 now constitutes almost 0.01 per cent more of the atmosphere than in the pre-industrial era. However, on the question whether that alteration has any detrimental climatic significance, there is no consensus, and Oreskes does not state that there is.

The second part of Oreskes' definition of the "consensus" is likewise limited in its scope. Since global temperatures have risen by about 0.4C in the past 50 years, humankind - according to Oreskes' definition of "consensus" - may have accounted for more than 0.2C.

Applying that rate of increase over the present century, and raising it by half to allow for the impact of fast-polluting developing countries such as China, temperature may rise by 0.6C in the present century, much as it did in the past century, always provided that the unprecedented (and now-declining) solar activity of the past 70 years ceases to decline and instead continues at its recent record level.

There is indeed a consensus that humankind is putting large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere; that some warming has resulted; and that some further warming can be expected. However, there is less of a consensus about whether most of the past half-century's warming is anthropogenic, which is why, rightly, Oreskes is cautious enough to circumscribe her definition of the "consensus" about the anthropogenic contribution to warming over the past half-century with the qualifying adjective "likely".

There is no scientific consensus on how much the world has warmed or will warm; how much of the warming is natural; how much impact greenhouse gases have had or will have on temperature; how sea level, storms, droughts, floods, flora, and fauna will respond to warmer temperature; what mitigative steps - if any - we should take; whether (if at all) such steps would have sufficient (or any) climatic effect; or even whether we should take any steps at all.

Campaigners for climate alarm state or imply that there is a scientific consensus on all of these things, when in fact there is none. They imply that Oreskes' essay proves the consensus on all of these things. Al Gore, for instance, devoted a long segment of his film An Inconvenient Truth to predicting the imminent meltdown of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheets, with a consequent global increase of 20 feet (6 m) in sea level that would flood Manhattan, Shanghai, Bangladesh, and other coastal settlements. He quoted Oreskes' essay as proving that all credible climate scientists were agreed on the supposed threat from climate change. He did not point out, however, that Oreskes' definition of the "consensus" on climate change did not encompass, still less justify, his alarmist notions.

Let us take just one example. The UN's latest report on climate change, which is claimed as representing and summarizing the state of the scientific "consensus" insofar as there is one, says that the total contribution of ice-melt from Greenland and Antarctica to the rise in sea level over the whole of the coming century will not be the 20 feet luridly illustrated by Al Gore in his movie, but just 2 inches.

Gore's film does not represent the "consensus" at all. Indeed, he exaggerates the supposed effects of ice-melt by some 12,000 per cent. The UN, on the other hand, estimates the probability that humankind has had any influence on sea level at little better than 50:50. The BBC, of course, has not headlined, or even reported, the UN's "counter-consensual" findings. Every time the BBC mentions "climate change", it shows the same tired footage of a glacier calving into the sea - which is what glaciers do every summer.

What Oreskes said

Oreskes (2004) said she had analyzed - "928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords `climate change'." She concluded that 75% of the papers either explicitly or implicitly accepted the "consensus" view; 25% took no position, being concerned with palaeoclimate rather than today's climate; and -

"Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position. . This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect. . Our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it. . There is a consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change."

It is not clear whether Oreskes' analysis was peer-reviewed, since it was presented as an essay and not as a scientific paper. However, there were numerous serious errors, effectively negating her conclusion, which suggest that the essay was either not reviewed at all or reviewed with undue indulgence by scientists who agreed with Oreskes' declared prejudice - shared by the editors of Science - in favour of the alarmist position.

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Sometimes "saving the planet" is even more harmful

There is a certain amount of amusement in watching the Greenies trip all over themselves trying to figure out what they can do to "save" Mother Earth. After all: the planet is dying! Now another one of their more radical exponents is complicating the simplistic views that Greens often love to embrace. For instance, they like the simple message that cars are bad and walking is good. Walking is natural where cars are evil since they are man-made. So save the planet and walk instead.

But Greenie Chris Goodall argues, in his book How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, that the choice isn't so simple. That is only one side of the equation. People know driving emits carbon but assume walking is carbon free. But it isn't. Goodall notes that if you walk you burn calories and calories need to be replenished or you die (which is the ultimate green solution). He says that if you walk 3 miles you burn 180 calories. If you replenish that with a piece of beef that would require 100 grams of meat.

A driving that distance, he says, would add about .9kg of carbon to the atmosphere. But the 100g of beef, he contends adds 3.5 kg of emission. Walking emits more carbon than driving. He says: "The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better." People forgot that walking consumes energy which requires replenishment which is also carbon based.

The Times of London notes that there are many such problems for the environmentalist.

Catching a diesel train is now twice as polluting as travelling by car for an average family, the Rail Safety and Standards Board admitted recently. Paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic because of the extra energy needed to manufacture and transport, the Government says.

The train issue is interesting because government policies are often based the simplistic slogans of the Greens. If cars are evil then mass transit is good, or at least less evil. So there has been a tendency to penalize driving and subsidize mass transit. But, in the case of these trains, that is actually increasing environmental impact not decreasing it.

It also appears that organic is not helpful either, at least not when it comes to cattle. Cows belch and belching releases methane so cows are killing Mother Earth. But the Times notes, "Organic beef is the most damaging because organic cattle emit more methane."

Mr. Goodall suggests a solution: "Don't buy anything from the supermarket or anything that's travelled too far." I suppose we are to forage like squirrels.

Alas Mr. Goodall still thinks life is simple when it comes to the distance food traveled. Apparently he assumes that food from a distance is more carbon intensive than local food. That is not necessarily the case. Mr. Goodall is only looking at that which is seen -- the miles traveled by the imported food.

James McWilliams, in the New York Times, says this concept of "food miles" "joins recycling, biking to work, and driving a hybrid as a realistic way that we can, as individuals shrink our carbon footprint and be good stewards of the environment." Apparently Mr. McWilliams, in promoting biking to work, is unaware of the point Mr. Goodall is making. But that's fair. Mr. Goodall seems to be oblivious to the point Mr. McWilliams makes regarding food miles.

McWilliams refers to a study undertaken by Lincoln University in New Zealand. They tried to look at a broader picture than just the simplistic miles traveled equation. They expanded,

...their equations to include other energy-consuming aspects of production - what economists call "factor inputs and externalities" - like water use, harvesting techniques, fertilizer outlays, renewable energy applications, means of transportation (and the kind of fuel used), the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed during photosynthesis, disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs.

Once the broader picture were put into context the picture changes substantially.

Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand's clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.

In reality the food mile scam is a combination of antiquated protectionism and counterproductive mercantilism. Many Greens would do well to read the essay by Frederic Bastiat, That Which is Seen and That Which is Not Seen. Understanding this one essay undoes a lot of economic fallacies.

The food miles are easy to see. That which is harder to see is the different kinds of input for agricultural products around the world. Miles are easy to measure. Total input is hard to discern, especially for the layman. Often the simplest statements in economics are riddled with falsehoods. There are two sides to the economic coin and proponents of new programs tend only to look at the benefits and never the costs. And if they do consider costs they do so in only the most cursory of ways.

For instance when a government has a "make work" project they focus only on the jobs created. Those are easy to see. The funds, however, came from the productive economy reducing demand there. The result is a decline in employment. At best the state has merely rearranged things, creating nothing in the process. In truth, it tends to produce something people didn't want as much, at the expense of something they wanted more, making the consumers worse off on average.

Food miles are a similar myth. The carbon reduction obtained by limiting miles traveled is seen easily. That this forces production away from more efficient producers to less efficient producers, increasing the carbon impact along the way, is far more difficult to see. It gets ignored and replaced with the simplistic sloganeering that is so prevalent among the Green Left.

Too much environmental slogans are based on one-sided thinking, focusing only on the most obvious costs and ignoring the benefits. Then they flip-flop when it comes to their solutions at which point they concentrate only on the benefits while ignoring the costs.

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INQUISITORS PROPAGATING THE THEORY OF CLIMATE CHANGE WON'T SUCCEED

Comment from India

Inquisitors propagating the theory of climate change cannot do today what had been done to Galileo. We recently went to see Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, which provides interesting parallels between the last large paradigm shift about Man's relationship to the stars, and the current one, in the new theory of cosmoclimatology discussed in my last column. The scientific establishment was wedded to a theory which the celestial observations of the scientific sceptics Copernicus and Galileo contradicted. The Inquisition tried to suppress the heretics, by excommunication (Copernicus) or silencing them through showing them the instruments of torture (Galileo).

Today, the peer reviewed process of funding and validation of scientific research in climatology is equally controlled by the modern equivalent of the Collegium Romanum (the Vatican's Institute of Research), the Inter-government Panel of Climate Change (IPCC). They in turn answer to the equivalent of the Inquisition, the Green ideologists, who, mercifully, can only torment through derision or denying the heretics research funding, and not the frightening instruments of torture.

But, even the Collegium Romanum was imbued by the rational scientific spirit and confirmed Galileo's discoveries in his lifetime, though it took the Pope till 1993 to formally recognise the validity of Galileo's work. Finally, in both cases the new theories were dismissed by the theologians as they seemed to downgrade the primacy of God's agents (human beings) in the universe.

Fortunately, it is much more difficult to suppress the scientific enterprise today. A recent seriously flawed paper (Lockwood and Froelich, Proc. R. Soc. A, 25 May, 2007) hyped in the media seeks to reinforce the CO2 theory. It argues that, whilst the sun had an effect on the climate during most of the 20th century, since 1988 its activity has declined but global warming has continued.

However, the paper's data stop in 2000. In fact, the global temperature record shows that, when the sun was active the world warmed, and since "it peaked in the late 1980's within a few years global warming stalled" (Whitehouse: "The truth is we can't ignore the sun," Sunday Telegraph, July 15, 2007).

When the CERN CLOUD experiment is completed in 2010 and (hopefully) vindicates Svensmark's cosmoclimatology theory, the CO2 theory of climate change will be buried. It will be recognised that humans cannot control the climate and must adapt as they have done for millennia to its continual changes. Hence it is ironic that many economists (and policymakers) base their climate change policy recommendations on acceptance of the CO2 theory upheld by the IPCC as the irrefutable scientific truth, the latest example being the Stern Review put out by the UK government.

There is nothing particularly novel about the cost-benefit methodology which is used, nor about the model used to incorporate the scientific judgments, as William Nordhaus (the author of the most serious previous study of the economics of climate change) has noted in a recent review (W D Nordhaus: "The 'Stern Review' of the Economics of Climate Change," NBER WP. 12741, December 2006). What is novel is its conclusion that, without drastic immediate action to curb greenhouse emissions, the world faces economic catastrophe "on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century".

This is a dramatically different conclusion from earlier models of climate change (Nordhaus: Managing the Global Commons, MIT, 1994; Nordhaus and Boyer: Warming the World, MIT, 2000) that find that the "optimal climate change" policies involve modest reductions in emissions in the near future. The reason for the contrary Stern results is the near zero social rate of discount used, representing a contentious ethical judgment of the weight placed on the consumption of future relative to present generations.

Apart from the "pure" time preference component of the discount rate, there is also the component that depends upon the fact that, with ongoing economic growth, future generations are going to be richer than the current generation. Hence a rupee accruing to the richer future generation should be less valuable than that accruing to the current poorer generation. How much less valuable depends upon the inter-generational distributional judgment. The discount rate crucially determines how far future costs and benefits need to be counted. If the discount rate is close to zero, the whole of the infinite future stream of costs and benefits becomes relevant.

Hence, the highly speculative economic damage the Stern Review adduces from rising temperatures two centuries from now can be valued equally with any economic costs we have to currently incur to mitigate them. But, as Nordhaus rightly notes, this low discount rate can lead to absurd results. It would imply trading off a large fraction of today's income to increase the income stream of those living two centuries from now by a tiny fraction. For, with a near zero discount rate, this tiny increase in the future generations income stream is cumulated to near infinity.

By contrast, the estimates I made for the Planning Commission in the early 1970s (see Lal: Prices for Planning, HEB, 1980) based on the same methodology as the Stern Review, but with more plausible parameters, yielded a social discount rate of 7 per cent for India. At this discount rate, the present value of Re 1 accruing 75 years from today would be worth nothing, making most of the speculative economic costs and benefits, and the apocalyptic predictions of the Stern Review, irrelevant for India.

This does not downgrade the serious current environmental problems caused by rapid growth in India and China. Anyone who has choked in the fetid air of Chungking, Xian, Beijing or Delhi will know that no climate scares are needed to provide a case for dealing with their unhealthy air pollution. Similarly India and China face a growing water crisis irrespective of what is happening to global CO2 emissions. Subsidies to energy and water use need to be removed for efficiency reasons.

Whilst, given the political instability and growing political determination of supplies of fossil fuels from the countries where they are concentrated, it is sensible to diversify energy sources. Both nuclear power and India's coal reserves provide more secure alternatives. Bio fuels, by contrast, have the disadvantage of competing for limited land with essentials like food.

However, the sun, which most probably controls the climate, also offers the backstop technology which will provide the unbounded energy for India's continuing economic growth. In thinking about all these economic issues, the changing climate is a red herring.

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowleging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

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