Long haul flights always make me
feel like I'm doing my bit for climate change. Every time I board a plane, I
hope for some acceleration to scale of aviation biofuels.
Last night, on the way back from
London to San Francisco, I read the Daily Mail. It's not my usual choice of
newspaper, but it always offers an insightful glimpse into Britain's unlikeable aspects.
One piece in particular caught my
eye by David Rose, a controversial journalist who was discredited for his
blind reporting in the run up to the Iraq war of Ahmed Chalabi's claims that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Even Chalabi later retracted
his claims, according
to George Monbiot, forcing Rose to admit he was wrong.
Monbiot has previously criticised
Rose's reporting on climate change - something that Rose himself seems proud
of, boasting in his column yesterday that Planet
3.0 had awarded him its Golden Horseshoe award for the "most brazenly
damaging and malign bad science of 2013". Praise indeed. Perhaps he can
hang his horseshoe over the mantelpiece where his award for his reporting on
Iraq should have been.
Rose claims that Met Office data shows global warming stopped 16 years ago because of a revision in its decadal forecast which is routinely updated every December. But this assertion looks almost like comedy. Even before it was published, attempts by Britain's right wing press to join the dots with the most migraine-inducing logic were debunked by the Met Office itself:
8 January 2013 - There has been media coverage today about our experimental decadal global temperature prediction, which is routinely updated in December each year.The latest decadal prediction suggests that global temperatures over the next five years are likely to be a little lower than predicted from the previous prediction issued in December 2011.However, both versions are consistent in predicting that we will continue to see near-record levels of global temperatures in the next few years.This means temperatures will remain well above the long-term average and we will continue to see temperatures like those which resulted in 2000-2009 being the warmest decade in the instrumental record dating back to 1850.
Why can't Rose be bothered to
mention this?
But like war, this really is no
laughing matter if you believe that columnists help readers form opinions that
they are too busy to develop through their own research and that opinion can be
converted into political power at the ballot box. Rose contrives an argument to get
readers to believe there is really no urgent need to deal with climate change as he contrived an argument for the need for action on non-existent
weapons of mass destruction. But the stakes are higher and if such "thought leadership" prevails, it could potentially lead us into a crisis much worse
than even the disastrous tragedy of the Iraq war.
To be fair to Rose, he does acknowledge the need to develop lower carbon energy sources. That's much more than you might expect from a US right-wing columnist. But he perniciously suggests that the Met Office data indicates that we have many more decades to act on climate change.
Rose isn't a moron. He knows
exactly what he is doing: manipulating the reader. Unfortunately like too many
journalists, he clearly writes from a perspective that shows contempt for his
readers and that they are not intelligent as he.
And even worse, if you're not a member of the digerati, you have no
hope in hell of finding out the truth. My mum reads the Mail, but she has no internet.
But people like my mum never have
the advantage of limitless information over the internet to scrape away the
artifice of posturing columnists like Rose and uncover the simple fact that
Rose and the Daily Mail had their knuckles rapped by the Met Office when it
tried to get away with the same nonsense
in October.
My taxi driver in London yesterday told me that he left school
without any qualifications at 16. Alan, now 44, described himself as
"uneducated". But in the 40 minutes to Heathrow, he talked informatively
about climate change, extreme weather, the energy industry, colonisation of other planets if we
screw this one up… not bad for someone without even a CSE to his name. Alan
said he was a Sun reader, because the Guardian was "too deep". But if
Alan can get his head around such complex concepts and issues of our time, surely
there's hope they can see beyond this tit for tat willy waving that no one else cares about except expensively educated and highly paid columnists.
The newspaper-buying and tax-paying public deserve better discourse about climate change.
In December, I went to see climate scientist Michael Mann in a
panel discussion during which he spoke about the six stages of denial where Rose's argument fits squarely. In my next blog, I will explore the demands on scientists
like Mann to defend their work in a way that scientists in no other disciplines
are required to.
