the climate brief Accurate Reporting of Climate Science

The following is a transcription of a feature on Arctic sea ice from the BBC2 program  Newsnight on the 5th September 2012.

The people referred to by their surnames are as follows: 

Jeremy Paxman: Presenter
Susan Watts: Science Editor
Dr. Adam Scaife: Met Office representative
Prof. Peter Wadhams: Scientist at Cambridge University
Peter Lilley: Conservative MP
Natalie Bennett: Green Party Leader

Program introduction

Paxman: "Also tonight: newsnight uncovers new evidence suggesting melting Arctic ice will have a dramatic effect on our climate. Is now the time to kick back, relax and learn to love cloudy Augusts?"

(cuts to video clip of scientist in the Arctic)

Wadhams: "The summer area of ice has already gone down from eight to four million square kilometres, and as it collapses we'll lose another four million. Now four million is about one per cent of the surface area of the earth."

(back to the studio)

Paxman: "The new leader of the Green Party and a prominent climate change skeptic are both here."

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New research monitoring cloud cover over the world's land areas for the last four decades agrees with previous studies indicating that the planet's tropical climate zones are expanding, and that consequently the atmospheric jet streams are shifting towards the poles, altering patterns of cloud cover. But skeptic blogger Anthony Watts claims the research provides evidence for the unconventional suggestion that clouds are responsible for global warming. We asked the researchers if they agree with his interpretation.

The  paper, currently in press at the Journal of Climate, also finds that cloud cover over land has decreased by around 0.4 per cent per decade, due to a decline in middle and high atmosphere clouds in the mid-latitudes - roughly between 30 and 60 degrees latitude.

The paper's authors write that their "dataset offers few surprises": it shows similar trends to the existing record of cloud observations that it updates. The researchers explain that the decrease in mid-latitude cloudiness over the last four decades is consistent with expanding tropical climate zones, adding further weight to the evidence that the planet is warming.

But climate skeptic blogger Anthony Watts interprets the new research differently. Watts suggests the research bolsters a hypothesis proposed by skeptic scientist Dr Roy Spencerthat runs counter to mainstream scientific thinking. Spencer  claims that clouds, not greenhouse gases, are causing the planet to warm.

We asked the paper's author Ryan Eastman, research scientist at the University of Washington, whether he agrees with Watts's interpretation of his research. Eastman, who seems surprised by the attention his research has generated, says that Watts' conclusions are "misleading".

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George Osborne and Ed Davey aren't the only ones to argue over the future of UK energy. An article in The Sun yesterday pits its political columnist Trevor Kavanagh against its environmental editor Ben Jackson. Kavanagh argues it's time to "scale back support of windfarms" while Jackson "warns a dash for gas would cost us dear".

It's an interesting juxtaposition, and it's welcome to see the Sun giving more than one angle on the debate over energy choices in a single article. It's unfortunate that Kavanagh's argument, which is a lengthy rejection of "windmills" - contains some inaccurate facts and figures which Jackson is not really given the space to address.

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© BBC

The Today programme is the BBC's flagship radio news programme. At best, it is characterised by challenging, critical reporting that is informative, asks difficult questions and sets the news agenda.

Why then, can the programme's standards slip so badly when it comes to reporting climate change? Listening to this morning's interview between John Humphrys and president of the US National Academy of Science  Ralph Cicerone, it was clear that the programme was out of its depth.

Just two days after a poorly-handled  phone-in on Radio 5 that pitted skeptics against campaigners over whether climate change has "caused" the recent wet weather, Cicerone found himself defending the basics of climate science against a set of increasingly strange arguments put to him by presenter John Humphrys.

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The bad weather plaguing the UK this summer has affected people in strange ways - not least the BBC, which appears to have forgotten the section of the corporation's science review advising on how to report the science of climate change. Radio 5's 'Your Call' breakfast discussion 'Is the washout summer proof of climate change?' was an excruciating trawl through just about every example of bad practice the BBC Trust report highlighted.

Ignoring what scientists have been saying and framing the debate around whether climate change is "causing" the rain

Around a year ago the BBC Trust released a review of the accuracy and impartiality of the BBC's science coverage headed up by UCL's Professor Steven Jones. Jones concluded that on controversial science topics like climate change or GM, the BBC was lending too much weight to "critics on the fringes" of scientific areas with an established body of theory.

Well, time moves on. Today, the Committee on Climate Change issued a climate adaptation report advising the government to invest in flood defences due to the likelihood of future heavy rainfall. But rather than discussing the report or getting into the details of links between weather and climate, it apparently seemed like a good time to engineer a debate over the fundamentals of climate science.

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A couple of weeks ago Telegraph blogger and climate skeptic James Delingpole and Friends of the Earth head of campaigns Andrew Pendleton went head to head on the BBC's Daily Politics show. Now, they're debating how global surface temperature has changed over the last couple of decades in a post on Daily Politics presenter Andrew Neil's blog.

What to make of this? Last year's BBC Trust review of the Corporation's science coverage concluded that as there is an agreed factbase about climate science, this should be reflected in reporting. BBC programmes sometimes give minority skeptic opinions "undue place", creating "false balance", the report said, with examples of programmes "giving equal coverage to the views of a determined but deluded minority and to those of a united but less insistent majority".

Andrew Neil is clearly sympathetic to climate skeptic arguments - although he stops short of declaring his own views. He presents the blog post as a discussion of one of the "great claims" of climate skeptics about climate science - that global temperatures stopped rising in 1995.

But in doing so, he frames acceptance of the existence of man-made global warming as a matter of belief - "Those who believe in man-made global warming, like FoE," - and presents the matter as a tussle over two competing theories - that temperature rise has stopped, or that it hasn't.

But scientists don't believe that global temperatures have 'stopped rising'. So is this another case of false balance? We take a close look at what both Pendleton and Delingpole have to say on the issue.

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New polling on people's beliefs about climate change in Canada, Great Britain and the United States has been reported fairly straight up by  some, but not by  others.

The poll, by Angus Reid Public Opinion, is the latest in a series conducted at intervals since 2009 gauging public opinion on the causes of climate change.

For all the wrangling over public opinion on climate change, the polling suggests that the proportion of people who believe climate change is real and caused by humans has not changed decisively over the last 3 years. In the UK, the poll currently puts it at 43%, and suggests it has ranged between 38% and 47% of respondents over the past few years.

Interpreting the numbers

With that in mind, let's look at IT blog the Register's take on  the polling.

First, it writes:

"Fewer Britons than ever support the proposition that global warming is caused by human-driven CO2 emissions, according to the latest survey."

That's not true. The results actually suggest that 43% of those polled in June 2012 agreed with the statement "Global warming is a fact and is mostly caused by emissions from vehicles and industrial facilities".

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The Guardian this week  reports that recent rapid melting of Arctic sea ice has seen levels reach a "record low for June". But it's premature to be heralding June 2012 as having record low Arctic sea ice extent before the month is even over, particularly as sea ice extent is not currently tracking at record low levels.

The Guardian article says Arctic sea ice "has melted faster this year than ever recorded before", under the online headline "Arctic sea-ice levels at record low for June".

This headline could be read in two ways. The first interpretation is that Arctic sea ice extent for the month of June is at a record low. But can we know that before the month is out? The second is that at some point in June Arctic sea ice was at a record low. But does highlighting a few days of sea ice behaviour best illustrate what's happening to the sea ice?

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Finding good images to illustrate climate change is hard. First up, the topic has so many abstract concepts - computer models, uncertain climate impacts, future scenarios.

What image perfectly and pithily illustrates uncertainty in climate projections, for example?

Secondly, there are some pictures which have been used to much that they have become rather devalued. Not worth a thousand words, certainly. Maybe just four: "Oh dear, not again."

Finally, there are images which get used because they push people's buttons, but don't really help unpack the topic. Polar bears on ice, burning planets - they're cliches, that you can't rely on to inform and explain.

So seeing as it's Friday, here are 9 climate change images I probably don't need to see again:

#1

(Probably a stock photo.)

Climate change will probably cause droughts that will affect people in hats. Yep, got that.

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A senior climate scientist has warned colleagues must get better at conveying the nature of scientific uncertainty in preparation for a greater range of future climate projections in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s next report.

Quoted in the Times, Mark Maslin, a former director of University College London's Environment Institute, was speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival. He's just published a commentary in the journal Nature on why it's important to explain that the range of projections climate scientists make using models will increase as they improve the modelling process, while preserving the central message that greenhouse gases warm the climate.

Writing the article was a tough decision, Maslin said, as "sceptics will jump on this and say, 'Actually climate change modellers know nothing'". But he said a "warning shot" is necessary to prepare the IPCC authors - who so far have been slow to engage with the public - to say, "You need to deal with this, and with the media".

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