Sunday Age Climate Agenda: ACM's question reported

Fairfax parodies itself - gold!

The Sunday Age today publishes a lengthy article (and deserves a lengthy response) regarding my question on the OurSay website, which was, by way of reminder:

It is accepted that man’s carbon dioxide emissions are causing an amount of warming of the climate. However, the magnitude of any future warming is highly uncertain. The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledges that its understanding of a number of key natural climate drivers and feedbacks is ”low” or ”very low”. Why is it, therefore, that the Fairfax press is reluctant to engage with and investigate this uncertainty with an open-minded impartiality, and instead continues to publish articles based on a rigid editorial agenda that ‘the science is settled’?

Michael Bachelard, the writer, discovered that the question was from this site – I had used a nom de plume to avoid the question being tainted in any way by being from a “sceptic” blog as I wanted the question to be judged on its merits not its provenance – but given that they had established it had come from this site, I have to admit to being a little disappointed at not being contacted by him to expand a little on the premise of my question before the article was written, which I would have liked the opportunity to do. Never mind.

The article is entitled:

“Majority Report: why consensus is all the rage”

And this is the first trap: consensus is a word of politics, not science. I will return to this later.

The article firstly describes briefly the history of the IPCC, but fails to mention that the purpose of the IPCC, as set out in its Principles (terms of reference) was to investigate, specifically, “human-induced” climate change. This, I submit, is a significant reason why the reports of the IPCC will inevitably have an intrinsic (even if inadvertent) bias towards findings that support the AGW theory.

The article then discusses some of the issues raised by my question:

But despite the endeavours of its 1250 scientific authors and 2500 peer reviewers over four reports – from 1990 to 2007 – the panel still has ”low” or ”very low” certainty about a number of the drivers of climate change. When it measures uncertainty, the panel looks at both the scientific evidence, and also the consensus among scientists about the evidence. If either of these measures is low, then the IPCC flags an uncertainty.

In its most recent report, in 2007, the impact on climate change of clouds, snow, aircraft vapour trails, the ash, soot and chemicals from volcanoes, water vapour, cosmic rays and the ”surface effects” of vegetation, buildings and other things occupying land space, were all considered uncertain. There were further doubts about the history of the changing climate and the growth and shrinkage of ice sheets in the past.

All agreed so far. However, the justification given by Sydney Morning Herald editor, Peter Fray, for running alarmist stories is less convincing. He claims:

”The IPCC … may still be investigating the natural drivers of climate change but that is not the same as saying climate change does not exist or the science is in doubt,” he said.

On the first part of this claim, I would suggest that is not very likely, and on the second, it is a misrepresentation of my position, and the position of sceptics. At no point did I say climate change does not exist – in fact I expressly acknowledged the effect of anthropogenic emissions on the climate. [This is a long post so click through to continue reading – thanks]

Further, the science surrounding the effect of greenhouse gases on the atmosphere is extremely well advanced – thanks to about $70 bn of research spent on it since 1990 as a result of a pre-conceived notion that CO2 was driving the late 20th century warming, a point confirmed by Prof Roger Jones:

”How greenhouse gases influence the energy balance of the global climate is very well understood,” he said. ”We know the climate is warming now and that continued warming this century is virtually certain. What we are not so certain about is … how these changes are transferred through the climate system – how it is distributed between the atmosphere and the ocean, for instance. We’re getting the rough amount right, even if we’re not always getting the process right.”

Fray acknowledges that there is an editorial agenda, but attempts to explain it thus:

”In editorials we have accepted the views of the IPCC, just as we would have accepted the peer reviewed work of a [Sir Isaac] Newton or [Michael] Faraday,” Fray said. ”[But] we have reported, for instance, the Climategate leaks saga and we have often reported alternative or sceptical views about climate science.”

I would certainly not utter the name of the IPCC in the same breath as Newton or Faraday. For a start, the science undertaken by those two greats was not tainted by a highly influential political agenda and an associated Green movement, which has compromised the integrity of climate science to such a degree over the past decade or so. To my knowledge there were no organisations that were ideologically opposed to the concept of gravitation or electromagnetism, whereas there are plenty opposed to the health and prosperity brought to the planet by fossil fuels.

And as for the reporting of alternative or sceptical views, I would refer Fray to the very recent example of an article by Bob Carter being published in The Age [Opinion, 27 June 2011]. The very next day, the same paper ran a piece by John Cook, editor of the (Un-) Skeptical Science website, which rubbished Carter and did everything possible to discredit his views – there was little if any attempt to engage with Carter’s points on any kind of sensible level. If that wasn’t enough, the paper ran yet another story the following day, this time by Jo Chandler, rubbishing Carter again and referring to him (offensively) as “long-term climate change denier” rather than the “highly respected geologist” that he is.

The fact that The Age responded in such a way is, I suggest, obvious evidence of a clear editorial agenda at work – to support the alarmist viewpoint, and to dismiss anything which challenges it.

Age editor in chief Paul Ramadge draws a distinction between “editorial opinion” and reporting. However, the reality is that the reporting is similarly skewed towards alarmist stories. An example, very recently, is that there was no coverage in The Age of the results of the recent CLOUD experiment at CERN. Now this is a very interesting scientific story in its own right, on which any newspaper should have at least run a small story. Was the lack of coverage because of the fact that it may provide an explanation for natural warming of the climate rather than by man-made CO2? Contrast this will the swathe of alarmist stories (amusingly parodied in the graphic above), that Fairfax press will run, copied almost verbatim from any Greenpeace or other activist’s press release.

There is also a difference of opinion between the position of AFR editor Paul Bailey, who claims that there has never been a “Fairfax line” on climate (I will leave readers to make up their own minds on that), and Sunday Age editor Gay Alcorn, who concede that the paper had “broadly accepted the IPCC’s conclusions”.

The article also falls into the trap of relying on the argument from authority to justify its position:

Professor Jones says only a few scientists agree with Spencer and Lindzen, and that their work has been refuted in the scientific literature.

A 2009 paper by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, of the University of Illinois, found 96 per cent of scientists agreed with the proposition that temperatures are rising and it is caused by human activity.

We all know that this is a logical fallacy, and that it only takes one contradictory experimental result to invalidate a hypothesis. Just recall the stomach ulcer story: there was a consensus that said ulcers were caused by stress and spicy foods, but it took a pair of Australian scientists (whom the consensus would have regarded with mild amusement, one would hazard) to prove that ulcers were the result of a bacterium. As mentioned above, consensus is not a word of science, it is a word of politics. And when Jones says that the sceptics work has been “refuted” by the consensus scientists, the exact reverse could also be said to be true.

In conclusion, however, Gay Alcorn acknowledges that climate reporting could be improved:

“As far as I know, we have never done a detailed story before about what the uncertainties around the science actually are. It is one of the reasons why debate on climate change can get so fraught so quickly. It is a complex subject and the reporting in Australia has at times lacked depth and context.”

As I said at the start, I would have like the opportunity to raise some of these points with Michael Bachelard in advance, as it may have given him a fuller opportunity to respond to some specific points. However, notwithstanding that, I must give full credit to Fairfax and The Sunday Age for setting up the Climate Agenda project, and thank them, and Mr Bachelard, for taking the time to respond to my question.

You can read the full article here.