The BBC: Blatantly Biased about Climate

In time for the Paris Climate conference the BBC has put up a guide to global warming entitled “Six Graphics that Explain Climate Change”.  The first one entitled “What is the problem” indicates the world is getting warmer and very few would disagree. With such a rising temperature it could be anyway expected that the most recent years would, on average, be the warmest and that individual fluctuations could take it above or below this average. Concentrating on a single year is somewhat alarmist relative to its statistical significance.  It can be seen from the blue-surround graph below – charting temperatures over the last 2000 years – that the last 100 years (the interval chosen for the temperature rise by the BBC) represents the steepest part of an increasing temperature beginning from the low of the mini-ice age of the 17th Century. However, the plot for the last 2000 years indicates that firstly the current rise in global temperature isn’t unprecedented and secondly that the overall behaviour is of cyclical temperature changes within a range of less than +/- one Centigrade degree. Furthermore, no one is suggesting the high temperatures of the medieval period, higher than currently, were due to man’s activity.

 

 

The second panel below is the BBC’s explanation of why it’s happening. The BBC are firmly in the camp of man’s culpability by burning fossil fuel and releasing carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. No mention is made of the  contribution from natural sources of carbon dioxide emanating from above the earth’s mantle and escaping via faults and fissures. This is related to volcanic activity and may be variable. The BBC panel below has, by having a false origin of the y axis (representing 300 parts per million of carbon dioxide), visually over-emphasised the increase.  At first glance, if the false origin had been mistaken for zero then the increase would have seemed geometric. However, at an increase of 85 ppm over 55 years, that represents an increase of 26%. It must be remembered that the current 400 ppm represents only 0.04% of the earth’s atmosphere. Therefore as mentioned in a previous posting, the importance of carbon dioxide, so the theory goes, is to raise the temperature by a small amount leading to a feedback mechanism involving the main greenhouse gas – water vapour – which would further increase the temperature. There is no mention in the BBC’s panel that carbon dioxide on its own, without any feedback, wouldn’t be a problem. In fact such increases of carbon dioxide would be beneficial to plant life and therefore mankind.

 

 

The next BBC panel deals with the title “What are the effects” concentrates on the reduction of Arctic sea ice. What’s surprising – and suspicious – is the selection of data. After all, we’re discussing global warming and there are two main areas of the world with sea ice. Antarctic sea ice has been increasing and last year was a record, for the first time since 1979 exceeding 20 million square kilometres.

 

 

As for the BBC’s “What does the future hold?” in the panel below, this isn’t just exaggerating or using selective data but the correlation of  global warming with extreme weather  has so far not been observed. Dr Roger Pielka, professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, and a proponent of man-made climate change, presented to a US Senate hearing using data consistent with that which has been reported by the International Panel on Climate Change. He said, “It is misleading or just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornados, floods and drought have increased on climate time scales either in the US or globally. It is further incorrect to associate the cause of disasters with emissions of greenhouse gases”.

As for the predictions of temperature change, the BBC panel 4 below uses the extrapolation of the temperature change between 1985 and  2005 to predict temperatures to the end of the century. These extrapolations are then used in the final BBC panel 6 about limiting the damage with reduction of emissions (BBC panel 5 is just an indication of emissions by country of greenhouse gases, and I’ve no reason to doubt the accuracy) . With reference  to the temperature graph, above, for the last 2000 years, these predictions are based on the most rapid rises coming out of the mini ice age.  With perhaps more consistency, the predictive interval could have been taken from the very beginning of the trend in the 17th Century, but choosing periods with the most rapid rise to model future increases in temperature isn’t consistent with the previous (Medieval) high temperature period. Here, and in fact throughout the graph, the irregularity of the curve means that no trend is lasting or predictable other than indicating a general rise or fall over intervals greater than several hundred years. It seems the selection of data is crucial to how global warming is viewed and attributed, and is clearly very subjective. A more balanced view would have been more appropriate from the BBC, which has always prided itself on its impartiality.