Environmental News Guardian Style

This rather leapt out of the Guardian's coverage of a new environmental report:

Scientists examined published reports dating back to 1970 and found that at least 90% of environmental damage and disruption around the world could be explained by rising temperatures driven by human activity.

It would really be rather a surprise if any group of scientists had anything quite so damn silly. The drying up of the Aral Sea is due to global warming? The rape of the fisheries is? The oil spills in the Niger Delta are?

Well, no, quite. Here's the report in Nature (where the paper itself is published) on the same subject.

Researchers led by Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York created a map of the planet with a colour-coded grid showing how much different regions have warmed or cooled between 1970 and 2004. They then placed each of the thousands of datasets on the map and determined whether they were “consistent with warming” or “not consistent with warming”. Trees, for example, might flower earlier in regions where the climate has warmed significantly. In around 90% of cases where an overall trend was observed, it was consistent with the predicted effects of climate warming, the researchers report in this week's Nature.

So what they actually did was go looking for things (changes in breeding seasons, flowerings, melt times and so on)  which would be affected by global warming, looked at the temperature changes and found that things we would expect to change alongside a change in temperatures did in fact change along with a change in temperatures.

Interesting but hardly earth shattering findings really: more of a test of scientists predictions about what might be affected by global warming than anything else.

But even if we take it in the larger sense that the researchers themselves do, that this is proof that global warming is both happening (as I think is obvious, despite short terms variations around trend*) and also affecting the world as predicted (as I've also no doubt is happening*) this is most certainly a very long way away from the contention that global warming is causing 90% of environmental damage and disruption around the world.

* Yes, really, I do. My arguments have always been what we should do, if anything, about this, rather than arguing with the IPCC's interpretation of the models.