Met Office criticises 'misleading' Mail article predicting 'mini ice age'
- 30 Jan 2012, 18:00
- Christian Hunt and Verity Payne
Columnist David Rose's latest article for the Mail on Sunday - "
Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and
if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over
again)" - repeats what is becoming a common misconception in
the tabloid press: that a drop in solar activity is about to cause
a 'mini ice age'.
In the piece, Rose so badly misrepresents the Met Office's work
that they have taken the unusual step of
responding to it on their blog, describing his article as
containing
"numerous errors in the reporting of
published peer reviewed science undertaken by the Met Office Hadley
Centre."
Rose has a poor
track record
on accurately portraying climate science. This latest effort
doesn't improve matters.
The sun and climate change - the story so
far
The sun's energy fluctuates, rising and falling on an 11-year
cycle. This has an effect on the planet's climate. The graph below
shows how solar activity has changed over time:
Source: NASA
You can see that during a 70 year period in the late 17th to
early 18th Century, the sun went through a period of particularly
low energy - known as the 'Maunder Minimum'. (There's another
period of low activity at the start of the 19th Century called the
'Dalton Minimum'.)
The Maunder Minimum overlapped with part of what is called the
'Little
Ice Age' - a 300 year long period of cooling which affected
areas of the planet. People sometimes link the Little Ice Age and
the Maunder Minimum, but there isn't a clear link, and
research is still going on into what actually caused the Little
Ice Age.
Scientists have been speculating for some time that the next
solar minimum (called 'cycle 25') could be a
particularly low one - perhaps even another
Maunder-style minimum.
But because of the extent to which man-made greenhouse gases are
affecting the Earth's climate, this probably won't have much of an
effect on global warming.
In 2010, scientists modelling the possibility of another
Maunder-minimum style event found that it will cool
global temperatures by a only small amount - not enough to
counteract the projected future warming due to human activity.
Now new research by Professor Mike Lockwood of the University of
Reading and colleagues at the Met Office (not yet published, but
available online)
essentially echoes this finding. A less active sun would have a
small cooling effect, if man-made greenhouse gases weren't having a
much bigger warming one.
How does Rose report this new research?
The new Lockwood paper features heavily in Rose's article for
the Mail. Remember, the Lockwood paper argues that a decline in the
Sun's activity will not lead to significant cooling of the planet.
Rose uses this as a hook to write a piece suggesting that a decline
in the Sun's activity is going to lead to a 'mini ice age'.
How is this possible? Simple - Rose reports that the paper says
we're heading for a solar minimum, and then says that the findings
of the paper that this won't lead to significant cooling are
'fiercely disputed by other solar experts'. By this, Rose means
'climate skeptics', and he then quotes several who suggest that the
sun's behaviour means that global warming has stopped.
So... this means global warming has stopped,
right?
No.
Other work from Professor Lockwood suggests that a big drop in
the Sun's activity changes atmospheric patterns giving cold UK and
European winters - but Lockwood stresses that this is a
regional affect, and is balanced out by warmer Greenland winters.
So this will cause little change in global temperatures
overall.
This wasn't the answer Rose appears to have been after. In the
Mail article, he promotes his personal belief that global warming
has stopped in the article's opening lines, with reference to
another piece of Met Office research:
"THE supposed 'consensus' on man-made
global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the
release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed
for the past 15 years.
The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice
age to rival the 70-year temperature drop … in the 17th
century.
The data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office
and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It
confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in
1997."
Just in case you were wondering whether this was right, the Met
Office responded:
"This article includes numerous errors
in the reporting of published peer reviewed science undertaken by
the Met Office Hadley Centre and for Mr. Rose to suggest that the
latest global temperatures available show no warming in the last 15
years is entirely misleading.
Despite the Met Office
having spoken to David Rose ahead of the publication of the story,
he has chosen to not fully include the answers we gave him to
questions around decadal projections produced by the Met Office or
his belief that we have seen no warming since 1997."
So here's what happened. The Met Office were approached by Rose.
They told him what they thought about global temperatures. Rose
then presented their research in what they call a 'misleading' way,
and included only a fraction of their response, so this wouldn't be
obvious.
The full Met Office response - which they provide on their blog
- reads:
"However, what is absolutely clear is
that we have continued to see a trend of warming, with the decade
of 2000-2009 being clearly the warmest in the instrumental record
going back to 1850."
Compare this with the headline of the article, which begins:
"Forget global warming..."
The Met Office tried to explain this was wrong to Rose before
publication - and he appears to have ignored them.
Coda: The perils of only reading the press
release?
One line in the article suggests that Rose may not have actually
read the Lockwood paper. We don't know that he didn't, but it is
our guess.
Rose says that the Lockwood paper shows a very high chance of a
very low solar minimum in the near future:
"According to a paper issued last week
by the Met Office, there is a 92 per cent chance that both Cycle 25
and those taking place in the following decades will be as weak as,
or weaker than, the 'Dalton minimum' of 1790 to 1830."
Where does this 92 per cent figure come from? It's not in the
paper itself, of the
press release, which quotes Professor Lockwood:
"The most likely scenario is that we'll
see an overall reduction of the Sun's activity compared to the 20th
Century, such that solar outputs drop to the values of the Dalton
Minimum (around 1820). The probability of activity dropping as low
as the Maunder Minimum - or indeed returning to the high activity
of the 20th Century - is about 8%. The findings rely on the
assumption that the Sun's past behaviour is a reasonable guide for
future solar activity changes."
The 8 per cent suggests that Rose has made a fairly basic
mistake and assumed that he could just reverse the number from the
press release.
We checked with Professor Lockwood, who said that his research
has shown there's actually around a 50 per cent probability of a
Dalton-style solar minimum over the next forty years, almost a 10
per cent chance of solar activity dropping to Maunder Minimum
levels, and about a 10 per cent chance that solar activity will
hardly drop at all.
So the 92 per cent figure is way off, and this would have been
clear from reading the paper - or checking with the
scientists.