‘Mostly Peaceful’ Climate Alarmism
Truth abstraction masks a puzzling lack of curiosity about our ever-changing climate
Reaction has just published an article of mine entitled “Has the mainstream press lost all desire to investigate climate alarmist claims?”:
At the weekend I finally lost – appropriately enough – my cool, though I can blame no one but myself. I succumbed to an old habit and picked up a Saturday paper.
Being something of a questioning soul, I have found mainstream news sources somewhat unsatisfactory in recent years – banal reporting, simplistic (and error-strewn) reporting and homages to vested interests have turned me off the commonly used channels for consuming the output of the fourth estate.
Having leafed through various fairly anodyne articles that mostly avoided the difficult questions of the day, tucked away on page 36 was a small article by the environment editor of The Times entitled “Antarctic Ice Melts to ‘Shocking’ Low”. Intrigued – because there are some fascinating observations coming from the world’s oceans that are worthy of closer investigation – I read the article in more detail. I was genuinely astonished.
Not, I should say, by the quality of the article, or the incisiveness of the reporting.
The Times article doesn’t seem to be available online, but here it is in, in full:
I was astonished by the extent – not of any ice loss – but of the twisting of facts to fit an agenda. Bereft of nuance, we seem to be spiralling into a polarised world where broadsheet ‘journalism’ can see fit to distill context-free factoids into an easily-digestible apocalyptic pill to be popped down a reader’s gullet:
Antarctic sea ice is apparently at a “‘shocking’ record low for the end of June“
There is a “missing mass equivalent to an area about five times the size of Britain“
“One reason… appears to be that the region is up to 4°C warmer than usual in some places“
“We are concerned,” says Ed Blockley of the Met Office Polar Climate Group
“the loss comes as scientists warn that the Greenland melt has been ‘off the chart’ as the area faces a heatwave“
“Greenland records temperatures 10°C above average… melt rates were ‘punching off the charts‘”
I won’t regurgitate the rest of my Reaction riposte here in full, but I will use the opportunity to post the source data that I used.
The alarmist Times article, authored by Environment Editor Adam Vaughan, has a simple structure:
Points to low antarctic sea ice as at end of June 2023;
Jumps to the northern hemisphere pointing to a snapshot of heavy melt in Greenland in recent days;
Cherry-picks some specific local geographies that have recorded high temperatures for short periods of time in recent days and weeks;
Makes sweeping conclusions about the direction of travel, throwing in a reference to the Industrial Revolution in the absence of specific claims that ‘humans are at fault’.
This would all be fine and descriptive, if it were not for the fact that the cherry-picked facts are examples of constantly varying weather, and less so of our constantly varying climate. Mr Vaughan’s southern hemisphere examples miss the fact that most of the Antarctic mainland has been particularly cold for extended periods of time, which may (or may not - this is not discussed) lead to less ice calving. Mr Vaughan’s worrying statistics about Greenland are, in fact, not-so-worrying when looked at in context:
Source: polarportal.dk (run by the Danish Meteorological Institute, the Technical University of Denmark and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland), data from 4 July 2023
As I point out in my article regading the Greenland Snow Mass Balance (SMB):
Having seen a particularly unusual, and huge, net gain earlier in the month of several gigatonnes of snow mass, is it any surprise that the rate of melt is higher than usual for a few ensuing days? Might it not fit the author better to point out that the actual level of SMB (i.e. after the “punching off the charts” melt) still remains higher than normal and may well stay well above the 1981-2010 mean for the rest of the season?
Here’s what actually happened in Greenland from early May to late June 2023, which can be summarised along the lines of (“very cold… cold… very cold” until Greenlanders get a brief respite/thaw shortly after the summer solstice - the dark blues over Greenland indicate (negative) temperature anomalies between -6°C and -12°C; light red only appears in late June):
Source: http://polarportal.dk/en/weather/nbsp/current-weather/
Cross-referencing with data from the Danish Meteorological Institute, it seems that most of the Arctic was particularly cold in May, and below average in June:
Source: https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
My huge frustration with all this is that ‘experts’ (in this case the leader of the Met Officue Polar Climate Group, “whose focus is understanding climate change in polar regions and development of the sea ice model component of the Met Office prediction systems” and the Environment Editor of The Times) have lent their credentials to a poor conflation of weather/climate, making simplistics statements that imply causation from questionable correlations where the underlying data has been quoted out of context or just incorrectly. This allows other journalists to jump on a bandwagon and propagate a fear-mongering narrative that does not get subsequently corrected.
Consider Walter Ellis, writing his Letter from Zaragoza for Reaction on 13 May that “as a direct result of climate change, temperatures even in the more northerly regions [of the Iberian peninsula], including Aragon, are at record highs” and that “It hasn’t rained here for months and the prognosis is for more – that is to say, less – to come”. Well, readers may remember what happened next!
If the professional forecasters, and consequently journalists, can get their short-term forecasts so completely out of kilter, how can they at the same time specifically ascribe every extreme temperature and weather extreme – free of context – to anthropological climate change?
The consumer of mainstream news is therefore fed a simplified diet of quasi-religious propaganda, rather than fascinating insights derived from ‘real’ science, i.e. the postulation of new hypotheses in an attempt to explain observed phenomena.
So here is an appeal to the masses and the media – please can we hold crony vested interests and inept (and corrupt?) politicians to account by at least having an adult conversation about these topics? Otherwise impoverishment and pauperisation loom. The West needs to have this discussion urgently otherwise we risk losing not just our metaphorical bread and circuses, but also our actual bread and butter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1mjG_F8ppw&t=0s
(does that link work? it's a chap called Jorgen Peder Steffensen from the Niels Bohr Institute, Department of geophysics explaining how the climate catastophe narrative is a load of hogwash!)
Well said 👏 I seem to remember in my late teens all the handwringing over the Maldives - they were going to be under the sea by 2020. So what did people do to help the stricken population? Booked long haul holidays there......and of course, 30 years later the islands ARE STILL THERE! They haven't disappeared because its all a con. Its yet another way for govts to take money from the populace and give it to their cronies.....