The trail goes cold

Saturday, 4th February 2012

The Met Office has given climate sceptics some powerful arguments – not that you’d hear about it in the local press

Armchair philosophers of old used to ask whether, if a tree fell in the woods with no one nearby to hear it, would it still make a sound? Today the question might well be rephrased thus: if the readings from 30,000 weather stations around the globe were to punch a very large hole in the theory of man-made climate change and no journalists wished to report it, would it make any difference to public opinion or policy?

The short answer is probably no — at least not for quite some time. Yet this is exactly the thought experiment right now being played out in Australia, where with one or two honourable exceptions the local media has all but refused to cover the news from the British Met Office and the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. According to numbers released this week by these institutions, global warming — which was supposed to take off in the past decade as concentrations of CO2 gas increased — all but stopped in 1997.

What’s more, the numbers suggest that factors such as solar activity and ocean temperature make far more of a difference in the real world than they do in climatologists’ computer models, where CO2 is given by far the most weighting. It is a lot easier to tax and regulate CO2 than sunlight or oceans, so it is not hard to see why this is the case. Nor does it take a master logician to see the faulty circular reasoning in the Met Office relying on the same failed computer models that predicted an increase in global temperatures of 0.3 degrees Celsius between 2004 and 2014 to also rubbish the impact of the sun’s activity as minimal. Indeed, it is this sort of reliance on computer models, which can always be adjusted to fit the data ex post facto (which is what the ClimateGate emails largely suggested has been happening all along) that gives the sceptic cause so much weight.

Today the Met Office’s 2007 promise that global warming was about to ‘come roaring back’ looks even flimsier than it did at the time. And let’s not even speak about Tim Flannery’s predictions of Australian cities running out of water or Al Gore’s apocalyptic visions of hurricanes ruining America (if anything, hurricane activity has decreased over the last decade). Given that the sun appears to be heading to a sort of ‘grand minimum’ in activity, it may be that in fact it was the apocalyptic scientists of the 1970s who were right all along, just ahead of their time. In 1975 the American magazine Newsweek even ran a cover story, ‘The Cooling World’, which warned of disruptions to food supplies, concluding on the dire note, ‘Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.’ Plus ça change, as they say.

But while the news was trumpeted in England (London’s Daily Mail led the coverage), in the US and especially Australia, it has sunk without trace in the mainstream media, even as it was taken up by bloggers and other new media outlets. The Fairfax broadsheets ignored it. Only the Melbourne and Sydney tabloids gave it any play, with Andrew Bolt devoting a column to the issue. The TV networks, as well as the ABC, gave it no airtime at all.

This is, of course, not the first time the media has ignored an inconvenient data point in favour of the all-too-familiar hairshirt narrative: sinful, Western man has polluted the planet and must atone through deindustrialisation and massive transfers of wealth to the developing world. Anyone who reads Australian newspapers is familiar with the rule of thumb that if the mercury is down it’s just a case of weather, whereas if things are hot it is obviously evidence of climate change. One of the lowest moments on the ABC program Insiders occurred when Bolt’s fellow panellists gave him the three wise monkeys treatment when he dared suggest that warming had indeed paused — a fact which the Met Office’s own numbers now support. Likewise academics and NGOs have known for years that hitching their work to global warming is an easy ticket to publicity, no matter how outlandish the claim: UN researchers recently declared that climate change was leading to an increase in child prostitution in Cambodia.

Yet it may be time for the media to start paying attention. While we are correctly warned against drawing inferences about the global climate from one-off events, it is worth noting that Sydney went for 61 days this summer without cracking the 30-degree mark; soon afterwards, the temperature settled back down into the low twenties, accompanied by wind and rain. Meanwhile, in northern Europe a freeze is underway; as The Spectator Australia goes to press, cold weather in Ukraine has killed nearly 60 people.

All of this has the potential to lead to some very inconvenient truths that will need to be reported — to say nothing of policies and subsidies which will have to be reversed. If Tony Abbott has a big job ahead of him to fulfil his promise to unwind the carbon tax, imagine how difficult it will be to dismantle the vast web of subsidies and regulation imposed in the name of fixing the weather? Commenting on the Met Office data, Harvard University physicist Mike Stopa asked, ‘Suppose it turns out that CO2 has essentially nothing to do with the earth’s climate. How will the history of this colossal mistake be written?’ One thing is for sure: at least it will be written by the soft, warm glow of incandescent light globes.

James Morrow blogs about food and culture at prickwithafork.wordpress.com.

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