At eleven o’clock-ish this morning, the media regulator OFCOM will announce whether a 2007 documentary about global climate change broke the rules on accuracy and fairness. That result will almost certainly be in before I have completed writing this blog. On Saturday, while having quick scan of the papers, I noticed the Grauniad‘s front page lead broke this story. I was delighted, not least because my own father-in-law has cited this particular documentary as evidence that the popularly espoused view that there is a scientific consensus that global warming is man-made is wrong.
The Great Global Warming Swindle is a polemic by a chap called Martin Durkin. Durkin is... I was going to say well known. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, because if it were, people would almost certainly know to steer clear of anything bearing his name. He is, however, relatively known in certain circles. In the UK, he is perhaps best known for an earlier Channel 4 film critical of the environmental movement called Against Nature. The Independent Television Commission found the programme was guilty of misrepresenting and distorting the views of interviewees by selective editing. Now, to suggest merely because he has been guilty of it in the past that The Great Global Warming Swindle must be similarly terrible would be unreasonable, but perhaps we should be careful to examine it's claims more carefully, and listen when scientists say they're being misrepresented or that key data claims are inaccurate and disproved.
The latest broadcast has been a tremendous success globally, and is often cited by those who wish to convince themselves that there’s nothing happening. The trouble is, it’s just wrong. That global climate change is a man-made phenomenon is not a fiction. Wouldn’t it be lovely if it were? Who wouldn’t be thoroughly delighted to know we were off the hook and it wasn’t our faults? Woo hoo!
But it is true, and it is down to us.
The facts are actually uncontroversial and moreover, they’re really not that difficult to understand.
The chemical element carbon has three isotopes. Isotopes are simply versions of an element with differing numbers of neutrons, while the number of protons in the nucleus remains the same. Carbon has six protons, but may have either six, seven or eight neutrons. Adding the number of protons and neutrons gives the different names for the isotopes; respectively C12, C13 and C14.
C14 is radioactive and will decay to form a stable nitrogen isotope.
C12, C13 are stable elements, and luckily for us, each can be associated with different types of activity. C13 naturally occurs at a rate of about 1% of total carbon with C12 forming about 98.89% of carbon. Everyone knows that when plants respire they take in oxygen and release CO2. That’s C12.There are various natural phenomena that can record the amount of carbon of any given period. Using tree rings which capture carbon isotopes in their growing cycles, and cross checking with ice cores and corals and sponges, we can check to see what type of carbon are present in the atmosphere at any given point.
In fossil fuels, the ratio of C13:C12 is much lower and from 1850, the start of the industrial revolution, those lower ratios suddenly appear in the coral, sponge, tree and ice records. This also marks the point at which the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere significantly rise. Current levels of the C13:C12 ratio are the lowest they've ever been, directly correlating with our use of fossil fuels. The changes in the ratio of different isotopes of CO2 (C12 and C13 respectively) going from full glacial-to-interglacial change over a period of several thousand years is 0.03%. The changes in same isotopes in C02 levels as a direct consequence of antropogenic (man-made) C02 levels since 1850 is 0.15%.
We cannot affect natural CO2 production. CO2 is held both in the atmosphere, but also in the oceans, which act as a carbon sink. Without man, the atmosphere still could not support the levels of CO2 except for the fact that the oceans hold it. Imagine the oceans are at 9/10 capacity with just naturally occurring CO2. That is the starting position. Remember, we cannot affect natural CO2 production.
Now we want to add a load more C02 into the sink, the equivalent of 2/10. If we add too much, it will end up in the atmosphere where we know it will cause climate change.
That's the problem. It's not that the natural stuff doesn't contribute, it's that that we can't do anything about that but the stuff we can do something about is too much for the system.
We know that CO2 levels are significantly higher now than at any point in history. We know that our activities are directly responsible for that CO2 and we know that CO2 is responsible for global climate change. We are producing CO2 at a level that cannot be completely taken up by the carbon sinks of the oceans, resulting in an increased (and increasing) level of atmospheric CO2.
According to a 2008 MORI Poll, 60% of people agree with the statement, ‘many scientific experts still question if human beings are contributing to climate change’. This is worrying on a number of fronts.
Firstly, it’s worrying because it suggests people won’t change their minds and more importantly their behaviour. If we are to ride out the consequences of global warming, a massive adjustment is going to have to happen. Instead, you only have to read the comments in various online fora to see most people have reduced the arguments to a general distrust of scientists and government and demands for their ‘stolen taxes’ to be returned.
The reality is that at this time, the only credible explanation of what is happening, based on the interpretation of the vast quantities of testable data from multiple independent sources, is that mankind's activities are causing global warming.
That may change in the future as we learn more, but right here, right now, that conclusion is the only one that makes sense of the facts. Wishful thinking will do nothing to affect that. (This issue actually illustrates another problem, namely that science is often quite woolly in how it presents its results. This is technically quite correct because science is always the best explanation available to fit the evidence at a given time, but this appropriate level of caution about being to definitive can give the impression that there may be reasonable grounds for doubt. I don’t want to get into another of my pet bug bears here - that of the creationist’s arguments against ‘The Theory of Evolution’ - but there are a lot of people saying that we really ought to be more forceful and rename it ‘The Law of Evolution’ because there really isn’t any credible dissent. Maybe the same should happen with Global Warming, however unnatural that may feel?)
While I’m at it, we really need to stop referring to ‘Global Warming’; it’s a total misnomer and it just leads to people saying, ‘but it’s been colder/wetter this year, therefore it’s not true…’
..and the result is in.
It’s not as good as I had hoped, but it’s not all bad news either. According to OFCOM, Channel 4 ‘did not fulfil obligations to be impartial and to reflect a range of views on controversial issues’. However, it judged that the film did not mislead audiences ‘so as to cause harm or offence’. The logic is that as ‘the link between human activity and global warming... became settled before March 2007’, it cannot be controversial.
Eh..? Is that just me, or..?
This, I suppose, is one problem of a press that always feels it has to show two sides to every argument. It’s fine when there is no consensus, but when 99% of scientists agree that man-made climate change is a multiply independently-verified reality, that has repeatedly been falsified (a key principle by which scientific ideas are deemed to be valid if it has been determined what would cause the claimed facts to be disproved and that this has not occured), is it really fair to give the other one percent half the air time..?
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