Factcheck: Christopher Booker and the missing ice age
- 07 Jul 2011, 17:00
- Christian
Christopher Booker's latest
article, published by the Mail yesterday, suggests that we are
facing a new ice age, that climate scientists are unreliable and
can't actually draw any conclusions about how the planet's climate
is changing, and that green taxes are responsible for recent rises
in fuel bills.
The piece contains numerous inaccuracies, and some very odd
presentations of recent scientific papers.
It begins:
"The latest news is that the world may
be threatened by a sharp drop in temperatures, possibly so severe
that it could herald a new mini ice age."
"And one reason being put forward for
this is that all the pollution being chucked out by thousands of
coal-fired power stations may be blocking the sun's heat from the
Earth."
and ends
"..the same people who told us the world
is about to fry unless we close down all those power stations are
now telling us the same power stations may be heading us into a new
ice age".
The argument that we are about to face 'a new ice age' could be
inspired by one of two different research papers which have
attracted media attention this week. But which one was it?
Booker attributes the prediction to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, which used computer modelling to investigate the slow-down in
the warming trend over the last decade.
The paper concludes that rapid growth in sulfur emissions from
Chinese coal-fired power stations may be offsetting some of the
warming effect of greenhouse gases, but doesn't sugest
that this could lead to a new ice age. Indeed as the Daily
Mail itself
recognised in its coverage of the paper, it could indicate the
reverse - that we may face a 'spike' in global temperatures as
Chinese coal power plants are cleaned up and the impact of sulfur
emissions reduced.
Another study which attracted "new ice age" headlines last week
was a paper in
Environmental Research Letters, suggesting that there's around a
ten per cent chance that a dip in solar activity means the UK may
face harsher winters in the near future.
This was written up in some media outlets (including the
Mail Online) as heralding a new "little ice age." However as
the BBC
reported on Monday - two days before the Booker piece came out
- the lead researcher Professor Lockwood was
"...keen to point out that his team's
paper did not suggest that the UK and mainland Europe was about to
be plunged into a "little ice age" as a result of low solar
activity, as some media reports had suggested."
Lockwood's previous
work has identified a link between fewer sunspots and
atmospheric conditions that "blocked" warm westerly winds and
allowed cold easterlies from the Arctic and Russia to sweep across
Europe in the winter. However, he explained to the BBC that when
this happened previously
"...it was a regional redistribution and
not a global phenomenon like an ice age."
and
"It was nothing like as cold as a real
ice age - either in its global extent or in the temperatures
reached. The summers were probably warmer if anything, rather than
colder as they would be in an ice age."
The piece has many other questionable assertions in it, many of
which we have considered before. Booker continues
"…more recently, it became obvious that
something had gone seriously awry with the [greenhouse gas] theory…
Sure, CO2 in the atmosphere was still continuing to rise. But no
longer were temperatures rising in sync, as the computer models
predicted they should."
As we have pointed out before, computer models do not predict
that temperatures should rise 'in sync' with rising levels of
carbon dioxide, because scientists understand that the climate is
also impacted by other factors - including the solar cycle, El
Nino/La Nina and volcano eruptions, which lead to considerable
short-term variability. As the Met Office has
put it, short-term fluctuations in temperature are
"....entirely consistent with our
understanding of natural fluctuations of the climate within a trend
of continued long-term warming"
Booker also claims that
By 2007, as temperatures temporarily
plummeted by as much as their entire net rise in the 20th century,
experts were beginning to question the global warming
orthodoxy.
The perennial problem with Booker's writing is that it is
difficult to check his claims because he rarely provides any
references, and it is not clear where this claim comes
from.
However, as we have
outlined before, Booker has previously claimed that in 2007,
temperatures fell by 0.75C - "more than the entire net recorded
rise in the twentieth century".
It proved impossible to source this claim to any scientific
literature. In early 2008 however, prominent climate skeptic
website
Watts Up With That claimed NASA figures showed temperatures
falling by 0.75˚C between January 2007 and January 2008.
However, as can see from the graph below, temperatures fluctuate
all the time. This doesn't change the long term trend.
The 0.75 degrees figure appears to come from cherry-picking two
particular moments in time over a very short time period - exactly
the opposite of scientific best practice.
Booker also claims that by 2007
An increasing number of breakaway
climatologists were saying the cause of that late 20th century rise
in temperatures might not be CO2 at all. Perhaps, they suggested,
there were other factors responsible for shaping the earth's
climate - such as fluctuations in radiation from the sun and shifts
in the world's major ocean currents.
Climate scientists are clear that carbon dioxide is not the only
thing to have an impact on the earth's climate. It's possible to
understand this if you read their work - as well as examining
greenhouse gases, for example, the IPCC considers the effect of
solar variation, the
ocean, and the impact of water vapour and
clouds on the climate, as well as many other factors. Climate
scientists are
at pains to point out that only by considering both natural and
man-made factors can climate models explain the warming observed
over the course of the 20th Century.
Booker continues
Whatever happens now, whether it is hot
or cold, whether we get heatwaves or record snowfalls, floods or
droughts, sooner or later we hear those familiar little voices
piping up to tell us that the blame for all these 'extreme weather
events' still lies on 'disruption' to the climate caused by the
sinful activities of mankind.
As we
detailed last week, climate scientists make these kind of
claims only cautiously and in specific cases. For example, Dr Peter
Stott of the Met Office and a team of researchers
found that the likelihood of the devastating heatwave that hit
Europe in 2003 was 'very likely' to have been doubled by human
activity. But on the other hand, the Russian heatwave of 2010 was
found to result largely from natural climate variation by US
research institution NOAA - not necessarily influenced by human
activity.
Although scientists are traditionally very cautious about
attributing specific extreme weather events to climate change the
media is often somewhat less so. But Booker though also attributes
these predictions to the "thousands of scientists across the world"
who are "battling to keep in being the greatest scare story in the
history of the world".
The truth is that it becomes ever more
obvious that none of them really has a clue as to what is
responsible for the changes in our climate. They can't even tell us
what global temperatures will be next month or next year, let alone
what they will be in 100 years' time, as they like to pretend their
computer models can predict.
This is an old argument. Weather is very difficult to predict
into the future, but because climate can be seen as the 'average'
of weather, it can be predicted, and when scientists do so, they
include appropriate descriptions of uncertainty.
A useful analogy here is that of flipping a coin. It's not
possible to predict with any certainty whether an individual coin
flip will come up heads or tails. But if the coin is fair you know
that over a 1000 flips you'll get about half heads and half tails,
and if you're a mathematician you can give an assessment of how
likely that's going to be.
Finally, he turns his attention to energy bills:
As our politicians continually impose on
us ever higher taxes and other costs supposedly in the cause of
'fighting climate change' - costs that have already helped to
increase every family's energy bills by an average £200 a year -
they have been carried away by a collective fantasy that has no
parallel in history.
The claim that "green taxes" are adding £200 - or about 20% - to
every householder's bill is based on an estimate by the climate
skeptic think-tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation. It was
first
promoted in the Mail in a series of articles published a few
weeks ago (including a front-page lead).
When we checked the
sources for the claim however, we found that figures by Ofgem
indicate that green costs account for about 8% (or £80) of the
average householders' bill; and DECC put the figure at about four
percent. Neither the Daily Mail nor the GWPF have responded to
our queries about this figure.
The end of the article is as mystifying as the rest of it:
And all this is happening in the name of
a theory so fraudulent that the same people who told us the world
is about to fry unless we close down all those power stations are
now telling us the same power stations may be heading us into a new
ice age.
As demonstrated at the beginning of this blog, climate
scientists are clearly not telling us that we "may be heading into
a new ice age". In fact they appear to be going out of their way to
try and counteract misrepresentations of their work which suggest
this. Too bad Christopher Booker doesn't appear to be
listening.