The Sunday Times rebuts itself over global cooling claims
The world is cooling, claims an article in yesterday’s Sunday Times. But perhaps uniquely, the article then rebuts itself.
In an article published yesterday, the Sunday Times’s environment editor Jonathan Leake claims that “The world’s climate has cooled during 2011 and 2012,” a discovery which he suggests may prove embarrassing for upcoming UN climate talks. Leake writes:
“In such a febrile situation, any data casting doubt on climate scientists predictions is potentially explosive.”
So, does the fact that 2010 was warmer than this year or last year according to Met Office data “cast doubt” on climate scientists’ predictions? The answer is no, as the end of the Sunday Times article itself reveals.
“Significantly hotter”
Leake has written the article on the basis of not-quite three years of data, which comes from the Met Office. The data suggests that global average temperatures were higher in 2010 than in either 2011 or 2012. NOAA’s dataset shows 2011 was cooler, as does NASA’s dataset. Neither show figures for the whole of 2012 yet, however.
Using the Met Office data, Leake concludes the average temperature in 2010 was 0.11 degrees Celsius warmer than temperatures over the first 10 months of 2012 – a change he describes as “significantly hotter”.
But the piece then backtracks, acknowledging that 2010 was an unusually warm year thanks to a natural climate pattern called the El Niño Southern Oscillation. It also notes that global temperatures over the last few years have been well above the long-term average.
The issue of what changes in global temperature signify for long term climate trends is a well-worn and much discussed topic. Recently, David Rose, writing in the Mail on Sunday, claimed “Global warming stopped 16 years ago“. We took a look at his article here.
Global temperatures routinely jump around from year to year because of natural variation in the climate. But the long-term trend shows that over the last 140 years global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.8ºC.
Given this background, it might seem odd to argue that the world is cooling based on looking only at 2010, 2011 and part of 2012.
Self-rebuttal
On this occasion, however, the Sunday Times slightly bizarrely rebuts its own argument.
The headline of the article is ‘Cooling world is hot potato for UN’, but the piece then explains that the headline is without basis. It quotes Peter Stott, who is the head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office, to point out that looking at data over so few years is “scientifically meaningless”.
It’s a remarkable case of having your cake and eating it. Despite temperature fluctuations over shorter timescales, it remains the case that scientists believe long-term warming of the planet continues.
As Peter Stott explains in the article:
“Climate change can only be measured over decades – and the record shows that the world has warmed by 0.75C [degrees Celsius] over the past century.”
Not much of a hot potato
Perhaps this is a fiendishly clever piece of science writing. The Sunday Times does a pretty good job of highlighting conclusions people might draw from the data, and then effectively rebuts them.