EU Referendum


Climate change: déjà vu all over again


16/09/2013



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Readers today no doubt enjoyed yesterday's revelations in the Mail on Sunday, telling us that global warming is "just half what had been previously predicted", as "world's top climate scientists admit computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong".

This is good to know, really good, but it really isn't news, not to those of us with memories who recall a piece on 27 December 2008 telling us that "2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved".

This was from Christopher Booker who, those five years ago, was already telling us that all over the world, temperatures had been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which had been used as the main drivers of the scare. Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy were admitting that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures had failed to rise as predicted.

Booker also told us that 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. Hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, had been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

And now we get it all over again, this time from the Mail, courtesy of a "leaked copy" of the forthcoming IPCC report. This, we are told, makes "the extraordinary concession" that the world has been warming at only just over half the rate claimed by the IPCC in its last assessment, published in 2007.

Back then, the IPCC said that the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2ºC every decade – a figure it claimed was in line with the forecasts made by computer climate models. But the new report says the true figure since 1951 has been only 0.12ºC per decade – a rate far below even the lowest computer prediction.

However, in November 2009, it was Booker who was slating "climategate" as "the worst scientific scandal of our generation", at a time when the Mail wouldn't even allow the term to be used and was insisting on "warmergate ". And then, a year later, Booker was arguing that the climate change scare was dying.

In March of this year, Booker was again pointing out that the evidence of global warning was slight, highlighting a graph from the Financial Post newspaper showing the temperature changes of the past 15 years in proper perspective. From 1997 to 2012 we had seen a rise of 0.08º C.  Such fanatical proponents of the warmist orthodoxy as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, James Hansen of Nasa, and the Met Office had all had to concede that since 1997, the warming trend has stalled virtually to a standstill, Booker told us.

Of course, he wrote, there had been a modest temperature rise in the 20th century, as a continuation of the warming that began 200 years ago as the world naturally emerged from those centuries of cooling known as the Little Ice Age. But the 0.5ºC rise between 1976 and 1998 was no greater than the 0.5ºC rise between 1910 and 1940 (with 35 years of cooling between them, so that the net rise in the past century has been only 0.8ºC).

But now the Mail has adopted the cause, we see the classic legacy media behaviour. Nothing is news until it says so, and nothing ever happened before it "revealed" the truth to the waiting world. 

Nevertheless, we are pleased that the paper has run the story, but there are times when we wish the media would recognise that there are other toilers in the vineyard. This insistence on having to "own" an issue in order to report it is more than a little tiresome. 

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