BBC News upset a good many people on Friday by claiming that the oceans are cooling and that global warming has stopped happening – this during the hottest decade in recorded history. The story, What happened to global warming?, was completely discredited yesterday by no less an expert than Joe Romm at Climate Progress.
Meanwhile the damage was done as the erroneous story was picked up by other newspapers as being true, and flashed across the Internet.
Paul Hudson, a weather presenter writing under the byline of climate correspondent for BBC News, claimed that “for the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.” He cited Britain’s Met Office for this claim.
The problem is that even Met Office data show that the planet has continued to accumulate heat. See their own report: Global temperature slowdown – not an end to climate change.
And a related BBC story linked on the same page (by the environment correspondent) cited a Met Office warning of projected temperature gains even greater than previously forecast. See Four degrees of warming ‘likely’.
Hudson was fooled by the so-called “warming pause,” attributed to a short-term oscillation either side of the trend line. The cool side of the swing has tended in the past to mask the long-term trend line, which has continued unwaveringly upward.
As of Monday, Hudson still didn’t seem to grasp the magnitude of his error, despite numerous comments on his blog. In partial response there, he claimed that “the Met Office are currently conducting research into why temperatures have levelled off/fallen from their peak.”
But as Climate Progress reported at the end of last year, Met Office Hadley Center has concluded:
Comparing observations with the expected response to man-made and natural drivers of climate change it is shown that global temperature is now over 0.7 degrees C warmer than if humans were not altering the climate.
And from the same Climate Progress post, in collaboration with Hadley Center the World Meteorological Organization concluded:
The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. Global temperatures for 2000-2008 now stand almost 0.2 degree C warmer than the average for the decade 1990-1999.
Just 3 days before Hudson’s foray into climate analysis, award-winning climate science website Real Climate published a useful review of the warming pause phenomenon, pointing out among other things that the Met Office Hadley Center model was incomplete – it was missing the Arctic:
The largest warming has occurred over the Arctic in the past decade and is missing in the Hadley data.
[...]
Hence the GISS data are clearly more useful in this respect, and the supposed pause in warming turns out to be just an artifact of the “Arctic hole” in the Hadley data — we don’t even need to refer to natural variability to explain it.
- A warming pause?
And to clear up more mainstream media error, back in April at Capital Climate two then-current stories, from Andy Revkin at the New York Times and George Will at the Washington Post, were both set straight with regard to the warming pause theory. See It Hasn’t Warmed Since 1998
Finally, in case you wondered about the oceans, Joe Romm called Paul Hudson’s description “utterly backwards” and delivered the correct science, which concludes from all the reliable data that the oceans have continued to warm unceasingly.
The only problem is that everything Easterbrook and Hudson just said is bunk. First, the PDO is a long-term fluctuation of the Pacific Ocean that waxes and wanes between cool and warm phases approximately every 5 to 20 years – it has no net impact on the long-term warming trend. Moreover, contrary to Easterbrook’s and Hudson’s un-fact-checked assertion, the oceans have continued to warm, as the peer-reviewed literature makes clear [see link]
- The BBC asks “What happened to global warming?” during the hottest decade in recorded history!
We still don’t know how it came to happen that such an error-riddled piece of work could be published by the BBC, which had gained a good reputation for reporting climate science reliably.
It was just the other day in my last post that I said we can’t trust any of the mainstream media, nor even those independent sources we’ve recently come to trust. All assertion is only provisionally acceptable until it passes an array of fact checking, and the tests of reason.
I suppose it’s good we’re being forced to learn how to use our wits again. But it’ll be sad days for those who skip the exercise.
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