Factcheck - Ann Widdecombe on climate in the Daily Express
- 04 Aug 2011, 16:00
- Verity Payne
In her Daily
Express column, novelist and former Conservative MP Ann
Widdecombe uses current controversy over a US researcher being
suspended for scientific misconduct to advocate reducing goverment
funding into climate science research.
Ms Widdecombe seems to feel that the suspension of Dr Charles
Monnett, which we wrote
about here, justifies her sceptical stance on manmade climate
change, suggesting:
"That scientists are now being
challenged is a sure sign that somebody somewhere knows they may
have been getting it wrong."
She then shares her take on climate science, noting:
"The Hadley Centre itself, on whose
statistics the claims for global warming are largely based, has
shown through those same figures that there has been no change in
Earth's temperature for a decade despite record carbon
emissions."
This gets a number of points wrong. The Hadley Centre supply
just one of five major global temperature
records. The other four are collected by NASA's Goddard
Institute of Space Studies (GISS), NOAA's National Climatic Data
Center (NCDC), the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), and
by the Japanese Meteorological Agency.
There are also many other temperature records and measurements
which are combined into complementary datasets. So information
about global temperatures comes from a variety of sources, not
'largely' from the Hadley Centre. But it is a popular climate
skeptic talking point to suggest that information about global
warming comes largely from the Climatic Research Unit at UEA which
is affiliated with the Hadley centre, so perhaps this is why the
former MP mentions it. We debunked the argument in more detail here.
As well as this, temperature trends are just one piece of
evidence for climate change. The NOAA state
of the climate report, published last month, notes that dozens
of other observations indicate that climate is changing, including
ice loss from glaciers and ice caps, changes in snow cover,
decreasing stratospheric temperatures, shrinking Arctic sea ice,
rising sea levels and increased ocean heat content. Temperature
rise is one important part of a larger web of evidence.
Suggesting that Hadley Centre data shows that the Earth's
temperature hasn't changed over the last decade is also incorrect
on a number of levels - not least because global temperature have
varied over the last decade in response to a number of natural
cycles, including the
El Niño southern oscillation and the eleven year solar
cycle.
But Ms Widdecombe is likely referencing another familiar sceptic claim
that 'global warming has stopped in the past decade', an argument
which ignores the evidence compiled by NOAA and considers only the
Hadley centre's temperature data. It's worth quoting Professor Phil
Jones, who works on the data, explaining
why this argument is invalid, with the final point about
considering temperatures over a longer time period probably the
most important:
"The trend over the period 1995-2009 was
significant at the 90% level, but wasn't significant at the
standard 95% level that people use," Professor Jones told BBC
News.
"Basically what's changed is one more year [of data]. That period
1995-2009 was just 15 years - and because of the uncertainty in
estimating trends over short periods, an extra year has made that
trend significant at the 95% level which is the traditional
threshold that statisticians have used for many years.
"It just shows the difficulty of achieving significance with a
short time series, and that's why longer series - 20 or 30 years -
would be a much better way of estimating trends and getting
significance on a consistent basis."
In summary, Ms Widdecombe's views on climate - presented in the
Express as comment - are inaccurate and misleading. If the Press
Complaints Commission required columnists to stand up the facts in
their comment pieces, (
they don't), and if the Express was covered by the PCC, (
it withdrew earlier in the year), this piece would be worthy of
a PCC complaint.
Anyway, the article does demonstrate quite neatly why we fund
scientists to research these issues, rather than relying
exclusively on the efforts of columnists.