David is a bit slow on the uptake, since we reported on the “US Congress probe” several days ago. He also seems not to have taken on board any of the copious quantities of evidence that his “climate data that duped world leaders over global warming” allegations are the purest fantasy. This time around Mr. Rose claims, amongst other things:
Last week Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK Met Office, admitted that notwithstanding the Pausebuster, it was clear ‘the slowdown hasn’t gone away’.
The ‘pause’ is clearly visible in the Met Office’s ‘HadCRUT 4’ climate dataset, calculated independently of NOAA.
Let’s see if we can discover if Peter Stott has any recollection of being interviewed last week by the Mail on Sunday and/or The Mail’s leading fantasy fiction writer shall we?
The online version of the Mail on Sunday have just published a “correction” to the most egregious of their long list of recent errors and inaccuracies. It reads as follows:
On February 19 we reported a Met Office official’s announcement that the average global temperature in January 2017 was about the same as in January 1998. In fact, this was incorrect, and the temperature was 0.25C higher.
So there you have it. This buck doesn’t stop on David Rose’s desk, or Benny Peiser’s desk, or John Wellington’s desk, or Geordie Greig’s desk. We’re expected to believe it stops on an unidentified desk of an unknown official somewhere inside the UK Met Office.
For some relevant background to this weekend’s dose of “Alternative Facts” from David Rose in the Mail on Sunday you may wish to peruse this article in our sister journal “Alternative Facts Wetware™“:
From the conclusions to that article on Donald Trump’s rise to power:
Reflecting on the implications of this analysis for the specifics of this election, we can see that many Trump voters knew full well that their man was a reprobate, that they deplored his crudities and that they saw him as a risky choice. And yet in a world where the system is seen to be against “us” and where things appear to be driven in the wrong direction by “them,” the really irrational thing to do is to vote for the conventional candidate who represents sticking with that system.
Getting back to this morning’s batch of post truth alternative facts from the poison pen of David Rose, the latest porky pie fresh off the Mail’s production line is entitled:
It is of course Mr. Rose who is “twisting the truth” yet again. His opening salvo:
They were duped – and so were we. That was the conclusion of last week’s damning revelation that world leaders signed the Paris Agreement on climate change under the sway of unverified and questionable data.
A landmark scientific paper –the one that caused a sensation by claiming there has been NO slowdown in global warming since 2000 – was critically flawed. And thanks to the bravery of a whistleblower, we now know that for a fact.
Mr. Rose wouldn’t recognise “a fact” if it hit him in the back of the head at a million miles an hour. The “landmark scientific paper” in question isn’t “critically flawed” anywhere but in the fertile imagination of David Rose and the other “Merchants of Doubt”. Take a look at the facts:
As predicted yesterday, I’m off down to the local paper shop. I wonder if there’s an associated editorial this week too? I’ll be back in a bit with more. As David Rose so eloquently put it this morning:
We cannot allow such a vital issue for our future to be mired in half truths and deceptions.
[Edit – February 12th PM]
My pocket is now £1.70 lighter in exchange for the following information:
It seems that is what passes for “due prominence, and — where appropriate — an apology” in MailSpeak? Here’s the actual facts once again:
I don’t see an accurate graph in Mr. Rose’s profuse apology. I see no mention of “World leaders not duped, Mail readers conned again”. Do you?
[Edit – February 15th]
This will come as no shock to seasoned Lamar Smith watchers. The U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee have issued another news release:
Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today sent a letter to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Acting Administrator Benjamin Friedman requesting information on the Karl study following reports the study ignored NOAA standards, was rushed to publication, and was not free from political bias.
“Allegations of politicization of government funded scientific research cannot be ignored. The Committee has a constitutional responsibility to conduct oversight in instances of alleged fraud, abuse, and misconduct especially where the government’s scientific integrity is called into question. Dr. Bates’ revelations raise additional questions as to whether the science at NOAA is objective and free from political interference. In light of this new information, the Committee requests the below information to better understand the depth and scope of internal debate at NOAA related to the Karl study,” the letter states.
Today’s letter requests documents and communications related to the release of the Karl study, the datasets used in the Karl study, concerns raised about datasets used in the Karl study, and the scientific integrity of the study. The committee also requested a briefing on the independent experts NOAA is engaging with to review this matter.
The news release continues to describe the alleged “background”, but I think we’re all pretty familiar with that by now? The letter itself is addressed to Benjamin Friedman, NOAA’s acting administrator. It demands to see a big pile of documents “related to the Karl study”. It will come a no surprise whatsoever to our regular readers that it references the leading actors in the David & Judy show!
If that’s the case then it doesn’t actually answer my repeated question, which included the word “amicably”. See below.
I’d be most grateful if you could confirm that my interpretation of your email is correct. In any event I shall give IPSO a call on Monday to see what they suggest.
I think I’ll head to the newsagents first thing tomorrow morning, to make sure I grab a copy of the MoS before it sells out. What “Shock News” might be next I wonder?
“New NOAA Whistleblower says Ice Age Imminent!”
Please feel free to plagiarise that one if you so desire.
Shock News! The David and Judy Show took to the road once again last night, aided and abetted by all the usual suspects. We’ll skip the Breitbarts, Hellers and Watts of this world and head straight for the now ex Prof. Judith Curry‘s “Climate Etc.” blog. There we will discover “Climate scientists versus climate data“, a guest post by ex NOAA scientist John Bates. According to John:
The most serious example of a climate scientist not archiving or documenting a critical climate dataset was the study of Tom Karl et al. 2015 (hereafter referred to as the Karl study or K15), purporting to show no ‘hiatus’ in global warming in the 2000s (Federal scientists say there never was any global warming “pause”). The study drew criticism from other climate scientists, who disagreed with K15’s conclusion about the ‘hiatus.’ (Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown). The paper also drew the attention of the Chairman of the House Science Committee, Representative Lamar Smith, who questioned the timing of the report, which was issued just prior to the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan submission to the Paris Climate Conference in 2015.
Regular readers of our humble scribblings will be well aware that here in Great White Con Ivory Towers we are firmly of the opinion that there never was a ‘hiatus’. Exhibit 1:
Animation by izen
What’s all the fuss about then? Perhaps our old friend David Rose can explain in layperson’s terms? In his latest article for the Mail on Sunday, catchily entitled “Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data”, he assures us that amongst many other things:
The [K15] report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.
But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.
It was never subjected to NOAA’s rigorous internal evaluation process – which Dr Bates devised.
Now “never subjected to NOAA’s rigorous internal evaluation process” isn’t quite the same thing as “manipulated global warming data”, but Mr. Rose has more!
The misleading ‘pausebuster chart’: The red line shows the current NOAA world temperature graph – which relies on the ‘adjusted’ and unreliable sea data cited in the flawed ‘Pausebuster’ paper. The blue line is the UK Met Office’s independently tested and verified ‘HadCRUT4’ record – showing lower monthly readings and a shallower recent warming trend
That graph looks convincing enough, doesn’t it? However there is a teensy weensy little upward adjustment in there that Mr. Rose is apparently unaware of, as NASA’s Gavin Schmidt pointed out late last night:
This morning Carbon Brief has published a much longer takedown of the aforementioned purple prose by Zeke Hausfather, who points out amongst other things that:
What [David Rose] fails to mention is that the new NOAA results have been validated by independent data from satellites, buoys and Argo floats and that many other independent groups, including Berkeley Earth and the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre, get effectively the same results.
As per usual Mr. Rose doesn’t stick to science, however dubious. He also dabbles in politics. On that front we are assured:
Karl’s ‘Pausebuster’ paper was hugely influential in dictating the world agreement in Paris and sweeping US emissions cuts. President Trump, above right, has pledged to scrap both policies – triggering furious claims by Democrats he is a climate ‘denier’ and ‘anti-science’.
Thanks to today’s MoS story, NOAA is set to face an inquiry by the Republican-led House science committee.
We’ll have much more to say on this controversy in the context of our “Alternative Facts” investigation in due course, but for the moment at least it looks to us as though the nth iteration of “Climategate 2” barely made it out of the starting gate. However Mr. Rose’s loyal army of “rebloggers, retweeters, plagiarisers and other assorted acolytes” and that “Republican-led House science committee” may of course have other ideas?
[Edit – February 5th PM]
Commentary on Judith Curry’s blog brought to light an article by Peter Thorne. He says, amongst many other things:
I worked for three and a bit years in the NOAA group responsible in the build-up to the Karl et al. paper (although I had left prior to that paper’s preparation and publication). I have been involved in and am a co-author upon all relevant underlying papers to Karl et al., 2015.
The ‘whistle blower’ is John Bates who was not involved in any aspect of the work. NOAA’s process is very stove-piped such that beyond seminars there is little dissemination of information across groups. John Bates never participated in any of the numerous technical meetings on the land or marine data I have participated in at NOAA NCEI either in person or remotely. This shows in his reputed (I am taking the journalist at their word that these are directly attributable quotes) mis-representation of the processes that actually occured. In some cases these mis-representations are publically verifiable.
See if you can spot where Dan & Dan mention the term #Climategate.
[Edit – February 6th]
It’s been a busy day! Several of my carefully crafted comments have ended up on Judy’s cutting room floor, but this one has eluded the red pencil thus far. I bring you this warming and educational nightcap created by an ad hoc team of celebrity international chefs for “warmists” around the planet:
You have to keep clicking through to the very bottom of the virtual mug in order to experience the full benefit of the beverage.
Thank you and good night from May or May Not Land. I’ll see you all in the morning (UTC).
[Edit – February 7th]
Lot’s of pertinent papers just in from Great White Con guest author Kevin Cowtan of York University. Kevin is part of the by now world famous team of Cowtan & Way, who have long championed the cause of accurate Arctic temperature measurements. Kevin tells us:
The paper by Karl and colleagues corrected two known problems with the temperature observations: poor coverage of the Arctic, and a change from ships to buoys. Both had been known about since 2008:
It took NOAA seven years to produce a paper correcting their temperature data, and even now their monthly updates still omit much of the Arctic. The UKMO temperature record is also missing much of the Arctic and only partially corrects the ship problem. Both lead to an underestimation of recent warming.
The agencies face an impossible dilemma – on one hand they have to slowly and carefully evaluate new results, and on the other they have to provide an up-to-date temperature record. Rather than rushing out corrections, they appear to have been extremely conservative.
So there you have it. For more accurate Arctic temperature metrics turn to Cowtan & Way and/or the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study! The long delay in improving the quality of the data published by NOAA and the UK Met Office has led to confusion amongst the public, politicans, and even other scientists. All three groups have been trying to understand a supposed “pause” in warming, which in our (humble?) opinion never actually happened. If you disagree with that assessment please feel free to take a good long look at izen’s animation at the top and then explain to us very slowly where you see a “hiatus”.
You may also wish to take a good long look at another guest post on the topic of “the pause”, this time authored by our very good friend Bill the Frog.
[Edit – February 8th]
Watch this video to discover how “The Land of the Free” has morphed into “TrumpLand” in a matter of weeks. The “interrogation” of Rush Holt of the AAAS:
A show trial of the American Association for the Advancement of Science? Congressman Lamar Smith presiding!
[Edit – February 9th]
We like the UK Met Office’s new style. They have taken off the kid gloves, rolled up their sleeves, and they’re extracting the Michael from David Rose on Twitter with great glee:
“Post-truth” is the the Oxford Dictionaries word of the year for 2016. The definition reads as follows:
post-truth – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
and according to Oxford Dictionaries:
The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase post-truth politics.
Post-truth has gone from being a peripheral term to being a mainstay in political commentary, now often being used by major publications without the need for clarification or definition in their headlines.
Our old friend David Rose has been remarkably quiet on the topic of Arctic sea ice recently. Presumably the objective facts from the Arctic are impossible to spin to his satisfaction even for a man of David’s talents? However that didn’t stop him from penning an article for The Mail on Sunday at the end of November on the topic of the recent “record highs in global temperatures“:
Global average temperatures over land have plummeted by more than 1C since the middle of this year – their biggest and steepest fall on record.
The news comes amid mounting evidence that the recent run of world record high temperatures is about to end. The fall, revealed by Nasa satellite measurements of the lower atmosphere, has been caused by the end of El Niño – the warming of surface waters in a vast area of the Pacific west of Central America.
The Mail article helpfully included this one year old video from the World Meteorological Organization, explaining the basics of the El Niño phenomenon:
According to the commentary:
This phenomenon affects weather conditions across the equatorial Pacific, with potential knock on effects in other parts of the world.
We’ll get on to the “potential knock on effects” in the Arctic eventually, but let’s start with a snippet of Mr. Rose’s “post-truth politics”:
Some scientists, including Dr Gavin Schmidt, head of Nasa’s climate division, have claimed that the recent highs were mainly the result of long-term global warming.
Last year, Dr Schmidt said 2015 would have been a record hot year even without El Nino. ‘The reason why this is such a warm record year is because of the long-term underlying trend, the cumulative effect of the long-term warming trend of our Earth,’ he said. This was ‘mainly caused’ by the emission of greenhouse gases by humans.
Other experts have also disputed Dr Schmidt’s claims. Professor Judith Curry, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, said yesterday: ‘I disagree with Gavin. The record warm years of 2015 and 2016 were primarily caused by the super El Nino.’ The slowdown in warming was, she added, real, and all the evidence suggested that since 1998, the rate of global warming has been much slower than predicted by computer models – about 1C per century.
David Whitehouse, a scientist who works with Lord Lawson’s sceptic Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the massive fall in temperatures following the end of El Nino meant the warming hiatus or slowdown may be coming back. ‘According to the satellites, the late 2016 temperatures are returning to the levels they were at after the 1998 El Nino. The data clearly shows El Nino for what it was – a short-term weather event,’ he said.
In case you’re wondering where the politics is in all of this, you need look no further than here:
The last three years may eventually come to be seen as the final death rattle of the global warming scare. Thanks [sic] what’s now recognised as an unusually strong El Nino, global temperatures were driven to sufficiently high levels to revive the alarmist narrative – after an unhelpful pause period of nearly 20 years – that the world had got hotter than ever before.
In case you’re also wondering about the objective facts of the matter David Rose quotes with approval “the authoritative Met Office ‘Hadcrut4’ surface record” in his latest article in the Mail on Sunday this very morning:
New official data issued by the Met Office confirms that world average temperatures have plummeted since the middle of the year at a faster and steeper rate than at any time in the recent past.
The huge fall follows a report by this newspaper that temperatures had cooled after a record spike. Our story showed that these record high temperatures were triggered by naturally occurring but freak conditions caused by El Nino – and not, as had been previously suggested, by the cumulative effects of man-made global warming.
The Mail on Sunday’s report was picked up around the world and widely attacked by green propagandists as being ‘cherry-picked’ and based on ‘misinformation’. The report was, in fact, based on Nasa satellite measurements of temperatures in the lower atmosphere over land – which tend to show worldwide changes first, because the sea retains heat for longer.
There were claims – now exploded by the Met Office data shown here – that our report was ‘misleading’ and ‘cherry-picked’.
Yet bizarrely, the fiercest criticism was reserved for claims we never made – that there isn’t a long-term warming trend, mainly caused by human emissions.
This just wasn’t in our report – which presumably, critics hadn’t even read.
We’ve explained all this to David before, yet bizzarely we obviously need to do so again. Here’s the Mail’s version of the latest HADCRUT 4 data from the Met Office:
Can you spot any “cumulative effects of man-made global warming”?
Messrs Smith, Rose, Delingpole, Whitehouse et al. may well be unaware of the fact that the satellite temperature data they’re so fond of cherry picking doesn’t include data from the lower troposphere between 80 degrees North and the North Pole. Just in case they fancy spinning the latest objective facts from the Arctic in the near future, here’s the long term autumnal temperature trend:
Our regular reader(s) may recall that this time last year we took umbrage at an article by David Rose in the Mail on Sunday about the joint NASA/NOAA press briefing outlining their findings about global surface temperatures in 2014.
We’ve been discussing Mr. Rose’s recent misleading “Tweets” about the Arctic with him:
As a consequence we also found ourselves in conversation with Gavin Schmidt of NASA about this year’s NASA/NOAA press briefing about global surface temperatures in 2015, which takes place on January 20th. Pencil it into your diary:
Climate experts from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will discuss the release of new data on 2015 global temperatures, and the most important weather and climate events of the year, during a media teleconference at 11 a.m. EST Wednesday, Jan. 20.
The teleconference panelists are:
Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York
Thomas R. Karl, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina, and chair of the Subcommittee on Global Change Research for the U.S. Global Change Research Program in Washington
Media can participate in the teleconference by calling 888-790-1804 (toll-free in the United States and Canada) or 415-228-4885 (international) and use the passcode “climate.”
Audio of the briefing, as well as supporting graphics, will stream live.
Whilst we wait with bated breath for the NASA/NOAA announcement, here’s how the Gavin, David & Snow show has been going over on Twitter:
You will note from the exchange on Twitter that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project are one of the organisations that have already declared 2015 “The Warmest Year in the Modern Record”, which brings me to the Arctic connection. Tamino explains over at “Open Mind”, in an article entitled “Hottest Year On Record“:
When it comes to global temperature over land and sea, Berkeley produces two versions, different in the way they treat areas covered with sea ice. Version 1 uses air temperature estimates for sea-ice covered regions, version 2 uses ocean temperature estimates.
and quotes BEST as follows:
For most of the ocean, sea-surface temperatures are similar to near-surface air temperatures; however, air temperatures above sea ice can differ substantially from the water below the sea ice. The air temperature version of this average shows larger changes in the recent period, in part this is because water temperature changes are limited by the freezing point of ocean water. We believe that the use of air temperatures above sea ice provides a more natural means of describing changes in Earth’s surface temperature.
As Tamino puts it:
Let’s not keep you in suspense any longer. Here are annual averages through 2015 (which is now complete) according to version 1:
Here it is according to version 2:
Any way you look at it, 2015 is the hottest. Any way you look at it, there was no “pause” in global temperature.
[Edit – 17:30 UTC on January 20th 2016]
The joint NASA/NOAA media briefing on 2015 global average surface temperatures has just finished. The recording of the event is due to go online “in 2 hours” or so from:
I waited patiently in the NASA/NOAA queue to ask some Arctic related questions, but never received the call. I’ll let you know when I receive the promised answers by email.
I therefore cannot see that Clause 1(ii) of the Editors’ Code has been breached in any way.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Independent Press Standards Organisation’s Editors’ Code of Practice here are Clauses 1(i-ii)
i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.
ii) A significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distortion once recognised must be corrected, promptly and with due prominence, and – where appropriate – an apology published. In cases involving the Regulator, prominence should be agreed with the Regulator in advance.
Without telling us, or as far as I can tell any of their other readers apart from one other complainant, the Daily Mail have changed the wording of the online version of the editorial comment in question. Can you spot the difference? We’ve given you some help!
Online version of the Daily Mail’s “Climate change and an inconvenient truth” editorial comment captured on July 24th 2015
The Daily Mail evidently have trouble doing basic mathematics, so it seems necessary to point out that one decade is ten years. That is a factor of ten. Using the Mail’s preferred units that makes this a 1000% mistake!
More from us on a variety of other Mail mathematical mistakes shortly. At this juncture however, we cannot help but wonder whether IPSO considers that taking no action whatsoever to rectify a print article that contains an admitted error of at least 1000% satisfies Clause 1(ii) of their Editors’ Code? Here’s clause 2:
A fair opportunity for reply to inaccuracies must be given when reasonably called for.
We hereby call on the Daily Mail to provide us with a fair opportunity to reply to this egregious inaccuracy and a number of others in the same article.
Thank you for your prompt reply, and my apologies for my slightly sluggish one. As you can tell from my details below I have a “day job” to attend to, and if you’ve clicked the links I sent in my original complaint you’ll realise I’ve also been very busy following up on some other allegedly inaccurate articles in the Daily Mail and a number of other Great British newspapers. See for example:
We hereby call on the Daily Mail to provide us with a fair opportunity to reply to this egregious inaccuracy and a number of others in the same article.
Despite your “I therefore cannot see that Clause 1(ii) of the Editors’ Code has been breached in any way.” below, and apart from your admittedly at least 1000% timescale error, the Guardian article linked to highlights a number of other gross inaccuracies in last week’s “Daily Mail Comment” concerning Arctic sea ice volume. I fail to see how “Putting the Arctic sea ice volume record straight” for the unfortunate readers of that editorial can be achieved without prominently displaying to your print readers the Arctic sea ice volume graph extracted from Rachel Tilling’s recent academic paper:
and in addition showing your online readers the “Arctic ice cube” video together with a link to it in print.
I shall have much more to say to you on that topic in the near future but I’m theoretically “on holiday” for a week from tomorrow, so it may well not arrive in your inbox until after my return.
Not only does Dana kindly link to our recent efforts to educate the Daily Mail’s leader writer about the Arctic facts of life. He also does a much better job of explaining the issues than a previous Guardian article about Arctic sea ice volume which we were recently somewhat critical of. This therefore seems like the perfect time to provide an “Arctic Sea Ice Volume 101” lesson for Daily Mail leader writers and their wholly independent “legal eagles”.
Let’s take things one small step at a time shall we. The Daily Mail leader last week starts by saying:
In a major report last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave a grave assessment of how man-made global warming was rapidly destroying the Arctic ice cap.
Steadily increasing temperatures had made the pack ice contract by up to 12 per cent between 1979 and 2012, leading to rising sea levels which threatened to swamp coastal regions – not to mention endangering stranded polar bears.
By the middle of the century ‘a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean’ was likely for a large part of the year, the report predicted.
The Mail’s leader writer isn’t very specific about which of the numerous IPCC reports they are referring to , but the Mail’s legal eagle tells us that:
This item was written on the basis of… the 2014 synthesis report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – arguably the definitive authority on the subject.
This is a quote from that IPCC report (p4 notes). ‘The annual mean Arctic sea-ice extent decreased over the period 1979 to 2012, with a rate that was very likely in the range 3.5 to 4.1% per decade.’
Given that there are over three decades between 1979 and 2012, the shrinkage of the ice-cap couldn’t have been more than 12 per cent.
This is the first of many “misunderstandings” in the Daily Mail’s leader and their legal eagles response. Here is an extract from Section B.3 “Cryosphere” on page 9 of the IPCC AR5 Working Group 1 Summary for Policy Makers:
The annual mean Arctic sea ice extent decreased over the period 1979 to 2012 with a rate that was very likely in the range 3.5 to 4.1% per decade (range of 0.45 to 0.51 million km2 per decade), and very likely in the range 9.4 to 13.6% per decade (range of 0.73 to 1.07 million km2 per decade) for the summer sea ice minimum (perennial sea ice).
As you can see, the Mail’s “definitive authority on the subject” subject says that “for the summer sea ice minimum” Arctic sea ice extent in fact decreased by more like 12% per DECADE.
Moving on the next paragraph in the Daily Mail’s leader, we are told that:
How interesting then, that the latest analysis of 88million measurements from the European Space Agency’s Cryosat satellite show the northern ice-cap INCREASED by a staggering 41 per cent in 2013 and, despite a modest shortage last year, is bigger than at any time for decades.
whilst the Mail’s legal eagle explains to us that:
Researchers used 88 million measurements of sea ice thickness recorded by the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 mission between 2010 and 2014.
The results showed that there was a 14 per cent reduction in the volume of summertime Arctic sea ice between 2010 and 2012 – but the volume of ice jumped by 41 per cent in 2013, relative to the previous year, when the summer was five per cent cooler than the previous year.
Notice that in this article the author is talking about “summertime Arctic sea ice volume” and not “mean Arctic sea ice extent”. Let’s see if instead of trying to compare apples with oranges like the Mail’s leader writer we can in fact compare like with like shall we?
Firstly let us recall (if we can) from our school days that Volume = Area x Thickness. Next returning to the IPCC AR5 WG1 report we need to turn to the technical summary of their full report where in the TS.2.5.3 “Sea Ice” section on page 40 we can read that:
There is high confidence that the average winter sea ice thickness within the Arctic Basin decreased between 1980 and 2008. The average decrease was likely between 1.3 m and 2.3 m. High confidence in this assessment is based on observations from multiple sources: submarine, electromagnetic probes and satellite altimetry; and is consistent
with the decline in multi-year and perennial ice extent.
Now unfortunately for our purposes this decline in thickness is not expressed as a percentage and is in winter rather than summer. Nevertheless it should be readily apparent to all and sundry by now that the thickness of Arctic sea ice has been declining at the same time as its extensiveness. Moving on to page 136 in section 1.3.4.3 “Ice” of the full IPCC WG1 report we find:
There has been a trend of decreasing Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent since 1978, with the summer of 2012 being the lowest in recorded history (see Section 4.2 for details). The 2012 minimum sea ice extent was 49% below the 1979 to 2000 average and 18% below the previous record from 2007. The amount of multi-year sea ice has been reduced, i.e., the sea ice has been thinning and thus the ice volume is reduced.
Following the IPCC’s instructions let’s now move on to page of section 4.2.2.4 “Arctic Sea Ice Thickness and Volume”, where we read that:
For the Arctic, there are several techniques available for estimating the thickness distribution of sea ice. Combined data sets of draft and thickness from submarine sonars, satellite altimetry and airborne electromagnetic sensing provide broadly consistent and strong evidence of decrease in Arctic sea ice thickness in recent years.
That’s followed by many paragraphs of learned discussion, but still no statement of Arctic wide volume decline in percentage terms to keep the Mail’s legal eagle happy.
Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University has just written to the UK’s Independent Press Standards Organisation about recent articles that “ha[ve] substantially damaged my reputation for scientific integrity, and I believe that this was the deliberate intention”. Here is the text of his complaint.
The writer of this article, Ben Webster, phoned me up cold in my office at Cambridge University on Thursday 23 July, saying that he was writing a piece on the retreat of sea ice in the Arctic, and whether it was increasing or not. We discussed the scientific data, then he asked who else was working in this field in the UK, in order to contact them. I mentioned that there are not many others in this field, since three of the leading figures died within a short space of time in accidents in 2013. He asked for further details.
I asked that this be completely off the record because of (a) the sensibilities of relatives of the deceased (Prof Laxon’s partner was particularly upset by the subsequent publication),
(b) my own scientific reputation (I did not want to be made out to be a crazy person),
(c) the fact that these deaths were investigated and were very clearly simply an extraordinary coincidence.
He raised the question of whether they were murdered. I agreed that for a short time I thought that they were, since I had had the experience of being run off the road at the same time by a lorry, but that it was very clear afterwards that the three deaths were individually explainable accidents.
I did not make any of the statements enclosed in quotation marks by the reporter. Webster promised that this was in confidence and that if he wanted to use it he would contact me first. The next thing I saw was the article plastered over Saturday’s “Times”. He had clearly done some research in procuring photographs, but did not bother to contact me, and broke his promise of confidentiality.
The publication, subsequently picked up by the Sunday Telegraph and Mail on Sunday, has substantially damaged my reputation for scientific integrity, and I believe that this was the deliberate intention.
Here are our edited highlights of the story so far:
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