Publish and be wrong: Daily Mail prints article even after scientist says it "misrepresents" his work
- 02 Apr 2012, 17:00
- Ros Donald and Verity Payne
A scientist whose team wrote an interesting paper on a new
climate proxy was rather surprised to see his findings trumpeted in
the
Daily Mail as the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic
climate change theory, according to Climate Crock of the Week. He
has come out to say that,
contrary to the Mail's argument, his study does not prove that
the so-called
Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global, or undermine mainstream
climate science.
The Daily Mail's piece is headlined '
Is this finally proof we're NOT causing global warming?'. This
probably wasn't what Dr Zunli Lu and his team had in mind when they
published their paper, which is about the discovery that ikaite, a
mineral that forms in cold waters, can be used as a "reliable proxy
for studying past climate conditions" because water that holds
ikaite crystals together "traps information about temperatures
present when the crystals formed", according to the paper's
press release.
The scientists compared the climate history revealed by the
ikaite with climate patterns identified using other
proxies - indirect indicators of past temperatures
- from the Antarctic peninsula. The group looked at both
the MWP and the cold period - the Little Ice Age - that scientists
believe followed. According to the abstract:
"This ikaite record qualitatively
supports that both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age
extended to the Antarctic Peninsula. [This is because the] Northern
European climate events influence climate conditions in
Antarctica".
So is this the piece of scientific research which overturns what
we will for the sake of brevity call the remarkably strong
scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change? It seems like
quite a leap, but here's the Mail's argument:
"A team of scientists led by geochemist
Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that
contrary to the 'consensus', the 'Medieval Warm Period'
approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn't just confined to
Europe.
"In fact, it extended all the way down
to Antarctica - which means that the Earth has already experience
[sic] global warming without the aid of human CO2 emissions.
"At present the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) argues that the Medieval Warm Period was
confined to Europe - therefore that the warming we're experiencing
now is a man-made phenomenon."
Critically, the paper suggests that the MWP, a time of unusual
climate conditions generally thought to span the
10th to 14th centuries, may have affected not just Europe, but
also extended as far as Antarctica.
Off the back of this argument, the Mail claims "the Earth has
already experience[d] global warming without the aid of human CO2
emissions." Hence, it concludes, this could "finally" be proof
that human activities are not causing global warming.
So, what does Dr Lu think about all this? Climate Crocks' Peter
Sinclair contacted him for his initial response, which was
simply:
"The reporter of that Daily Mail article published it anyway,
after we told him the angle that he chose misrepresents our
work."
The Mail's angle echoes several skeptic blogs' take on the
paper, which has has been knocking around in the
blogosphere for a while.
Anthony Watts - who has argued for a long time both that the
MWP was global - first covered it on his site. UK technology
site The Register,
which takes a curious climate skeptic line on articles about
climate change, then picked the story up. And it looks like the
Mail got the story from The Register. This piece by Bob Ward in
HuffPo today nicely describes the
transmission of the story up the media food chain. Watts,
incidentally, was rather sniffy about the Mail piece's
lack of graphs.
Why is the Mail's angle on the paper such a
leap?
First, the Mail's presentation of this as conclusive proof that
the MWP was global is a bit of a stretch. As Lu
points out in a fuller statement:
"We clearly state in our paper that we studied one site at the
Antarctic Peninsula. The results should not be extrapolated to make
assumptions about climate conditions across the entire
globe."
Climate scientists have been discussing whether the MWP was a
global phenomenon or simply confined to some regions of the globe
for fifty years now. They cannot yet be sure because climate proxy
data, such as is used in this study, is still sparse, particularly
from the tropics and the southern hemisphere, but the available
evidence suggests that warming during the Medieval Warm Period was
probably not as globally widespread as the warming seen since
the 1970s.
As we have discussed before, it's
possible that temperatures in the MWP were comparable with today's
- while the ikaite proxy is helpful in filling in the picture of
what happened, uncertainties still remain. The National Academy of
Sciences Report on Climate Reconstructions indicates that even in
the Northern Hemisphere, where the majority of the evidence for
warmer temperatures lies,
temperatures today are probably higher than they were during
the MWP.
Anyway, the question of whether or not the MWP was a global
phenomenon, or whether MWP were comparable to today's is beside the
point.
Sinclair points out that the Mail's piece is a bit of a straw man argument . The Mail
is arguing that "if there was [anywhere ] on the planet that
experienced temperatures close to 20th Century warmth" at any time
during the MWP, the warming temperatures we are experiencing today
are just part of natural cycles, not a result of human
activity.
As Lu says, statements such as the Mail Online claim that the
study "throws doubt on orthodoxies around global
warming,"
"completely misrepresent our
conclusions. Our study does not question the well-established
anthropogenic warming trend."
The evidence strongly suggests that the
previous warming was driven by different factors like higher
than average solar radiation and less volcanic activity - not
rising levels of carbon dioxide. It does not follow that the same
factors are responsible for the rising temperatures we are
currently observing.
The warming of the Earth since the 70s is consistent with the
basic physics of greenhouse gases. Greenhouse gases trap heat in
the atmosphere. Levels of greenhouse gases have been going up, and
temperature have been rising. Other natural changes (like changes
in the sun's activity) are not able to explain the observed
changes.
So this is why Lu is probably perturbed at the Mail's coverage
of his findings - though given that his clarification doesn't fit
with the paper's usual line on climate change, it's safe to assume
the skeptic media won't pay much attention to it.