This week’s top six rebuttals to David Rose’s “warming has stopped” claim
- 19 Oct 2012, 16:30
- Roz Pidcock
It's been a busy week for climate skeptics and myth debunkers
alike. David Rose's Mail on Sunday
article, in which he rehashed an old and widely discredited
claim that "global warming stopped 16 years ago", very quickly went
viral. Many
media outlets worldwide chose to accept Rose's version of
events unquestioningly. But science hit back and this week has seen
a plethora of rebuttals of Rose's claims, including one
we published on Monday. Here's our pick of the best of the
rest.
Rose's version of events
In his article, Rose presents the graph below, which shows
global atmospheric temperature data for 1997 to 2012 compared to
the average for this century, and uses it to claim that it is proof
that global warming has stopped.
You can read our full explanation of why Rose's claim is
unjustified
here. But to summarise, the period in question shows
reduced warming compared to previous decades. Such periods are
not
unusual in the historical record, however. Natural variability
in earth's climate, due to things like the
El Niňo/La Niňa cycle, also affect global temperature. This
means you have to look at the trend over a much longer time period
than 16 years. Just looking at land surface temperature also
ignores all the other ways we know the planet is warming, like melting ice
sheets and absorption of heat
by the oceans.
Six articles explain why different aspects of Rose's article are
unfounded:
Number 1. On the same day that The Mail on
Sunday published Rose's article,
The Met Office released a public statement on its blog,
correcting claims in Rose's article about what the
Hadcrut4 dataset does or doesn't show about climate change. The
post included the Met Office's full response to Rose's direct - and
in some cases leading - questions, exposing Rose's
misrepresentation of the science.
Number 2. Rose picked part of a graph that
appeared to support his argument, so
ThinkProgress published an article on Monday with ten charts
that clearly show that global warming didn't stop 16 years ago,
including how much global warming is going into other components of
the climate system, notably the oceans.
Number 3. On Tuesday, the
Guardian re-published a deconstruction of Rose's argument by
Dana Nuccitelli, an environmental scientist and contributor to
Australian fact checking website
Skeptical Science. Nuccetelli published a
scientific paper with colleagues a few days before the Mail on
Sunday's article, which pre-bunked Rose's claims. The Guardian
article also criticises Rose's other interviewee, Professor Judith
Curry, for her interpretation of the role of natural climate
variability and her attack on climate models.
Number 4. Also on Tuesday this week,
Media Matters, a not-for-profit organisation which corrects
misinformation in the US media, issued a no-holds-barred criticism
of Fox Nation for accepting Rose's story uncritically, after the
Met Office had already branded it misleading.
Number 5. An article yesterday by
Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham
Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, dug
deeper into the Met Office's Hadcrut4 dataset and suggests Rose
manipulated it to create a false graph. The article also describes
Rose's track record for producing similar pieces for the Mail on
Sunday.
Number 6. Earlier today, Potholer, a
Youtube channel which reports on scientific research and fact
checks mainstream media coverage of science, released a video
highlighting how quickly media outlets around the world accepted
Rose's story without checking the source.