Did Christopher Booker read the study he was attacking?
Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker recently celebrated his 21-year anniversary of writing for the paper. Booker, who has labeled global warming ” the greatest scare of them all” has been criticized in the pastfor misrepresenting the science of climate change.
His most recent article was published last Sunday under the headline “Unscientific hype about the flooding risks from climate change will cost us all dear”, but it leaves me wondering if he actually read the scientific paper he’s criticising.
The “unscientific hype” in question is a paper in Nature by a group of academics, including Oxford physicist Myles Allen. The research used computer models to examine whether a single historical event – the UK flooding of 2000 – had been made more likely as a result of climate change.
When the paper was published, climate science blog Realclimate gave a rundown of what it was about:
“[examining] a specific event – floods in the UK in Oct/Nov 2000. â?¦ Pall et al set up a very large ensemble of [climate model] runs starting from roughly the same initial conditions to see how often the flooding event occurred. â?¦ Then they repeated the same experiments with pre-industrial conditions (less CO2 and cooler temperatures). If the amount of times a flooding event would occur increased in the present-day setup, you can estimate how much more likely the event would have been because of climate change.”
The study used volunteer time from the climateprediction.net project, through which members of the public have donated time from their PCs to increasing the accuracy of climate models. It was covered fairly extensively in the media – in the Guardian under the headline “Climate change doubled likelihood of devastating UK floods of 2000.”
However, Mr Booker says
“When less partisan observers examined the paper, however, they were astonished. Although Nature has long been a leading propagandist for man-made climate change, this example seemed truly bizarre.”
So what are his criticisms? He says
The Met Office’s own records show no upward trend in UK rainfall between 1961 and 2004 â?¦ In the real world, the data show no evidence of an increase in UK rainfall at all. Any idea that there is one seemed to be entirely an artefact of the computer models.
This is a strange criticism of the paper, which doesn’t draw any conclusions about UK rainfall trends, upwards or otherwise.
It reserves its conclusions to talking about the UK flooding of Autumn 2000 in fairly cautious terms, concluding that while “the precise magnitude of the anthropogenic contribution remains uncertain”, model results suggested that in nine out of ten cases climate change increased the risk of flooding in Autumn 2000 specifically by more than 20%, and in two out of three cases by “more than 90%”.
(As an aside, Booker fails to mention that although total rainfall hasn’t changed significantly, UK rainfall patterns have. Over the last 100 years all regions in the UK have experienced an increase in winter rainfall and many regions a decrease in summer rainfall. Researchers at the Climatic Research Unit have said that this is consistent with scenarios of man-made climate change.)
However, the crux of Booker’s argument lies in the following statement:
Why had this strangely opaque study been based solely on the results of a series of computer models – mainly provided by the Hadley Centre and RMS – and not on any historical data about rainfall and river flows?
The modeling work done in the paper was calibrated against real rainfall and river runoff data, but this isn’t really the point. This paper was the write-up of a computer modeling experiment. It doesn’t come to broad conclusions about flood risk in the UK, as Booker seems to believe. It is applying some innovative computer modeling method to a specific flood event. This does apparently produce some insights – as Myles Allen tells the Guardian
“It shows climate change is happening here and now to load the dice towards more extreme weather”
But the research does not make more general claims about current or future rainfall trends in the UK, or what that might mean in terms of flood damage. The paper published in Nature bears only a passing resemblance to the one Booker is criticising.
It does make you wonder if he read it. Booker’s criticisms of the research are based on a blog post by Willis Eschenbach at the climate sceptic website Watts Up With That, who Booker describes as “a very experienced computer modeller”.
The Economist has considered some of Mr Eschenbach’s previous claims about climate science, coming to this conclusion:
Mr Eschenbach is not a scientist; he’s an amateur. His first effort in climate scepticism apparently came in 2002 while working as the construction manager for a beach resort in Fiji, when he published a non-peer-reviewed article claiming to have found that sea levels in Tuvalu were not actually rising â?¦ He’s been beating this drum for years; he does not approach this issue from a position of neutral scepticism, he approaches it from a position of certainty that AGW is a hoax.
To rely on this kind of research assistance seems like a questionable decision, but Booker does appear to have a track record of relying on poor-quality research.