ITVs weird exchange of skeptic views – on the Alan Titchmarsh show
What do you get when a celebrity gardener and writer of erotic fiction discusses the science of climate change with a climate skeptic weather forecaster and an astronomer? Answer: a misleading combination of half-truths and downright nonsense on the Alan Titchmarsh programme yesterday.
The segment in question kicked off with a discussion – in the loosest possible terms – on the UK’s recent wet summer. Titchmarsh began by posing the question:
“Why is Britain experiencing such extreme weather? Is it something we have to get used to, or have we seen it all before?”
Titchmarsh’s guests were “stargazer and weather watcher” Mark Thompson and well-known climate skeptic Piers Corbyn. Corbyn is an astrophysicist who runs WeatherAction, an organisation specialising in long-range weather forecasts – although it is notably cagey about its secret forecasting formula. Suffice to say it is not based on mainstream climate science.
The bizarre exchange that followed led us to wonder: How many widely discredited skeptic myths about climate change (and some new weird ones) can you fit in one eight-minute slot?
Myth 1 – Global cooling not warming
When asked about the climate, Corbyn resurrected a popular myth that has done the rounds in certain media outlets in the last year or so. He said:
“What’s happening now is very similar to [that] preceding the little ice ages…that is where the world is heading now, [the globe] is cooling and heading towards a new little ice age”.
This popular skeptic theory is linked to the mistaken belief that the sun’s activity is responsible for changes in the climate, and that it has nothing to do with human activity.
During the late 17th and early 18th centuries, a prolonged period of low solar activity – called the Maunder Minimum – lasted for around 70 years and coincided with part of what was labelled the little ice age – a period of cooling in parts of the globe that lasted around 300 years.
Scientists have also linked recent cold winters in the US and northern Europe to low sunspot activity, which occurs on a natural 11-year cycle. We are currently in a period of unusually low sunspot activity, which has caused skeptics to leap to the conclusion that we are on the verge of another little ice age.
There are two things wrong with this. First, recent research suggests that the Maunder Minimum was not the main driver of the little ice age. Secondly, even if we are heading for another Maunder-style minimum, any change towards harsher winters in Europe would be dwarfed by the much bigger effect on temperature caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The bottom line is that far from the world cooling, there is a mass of evidence indicating that the globe is warming.
Myth 2 – Carbon dioxide is harmless
Corbyn explained to Titchmarsh – in his own unique way – that just because someone is an expert in climate science that doesn’t mean they know anything about it. He said
“The test isn’t who’s an expert…the test is whose predictions work, and the carbon dioxide predictions have failed completely”.
This is basic stuff. The warming effect of carbon dioxide can be demonstrated in the laboratory and back in 1896, Arrhenius first calculated the potential effect of increasing carbon dioxide on climate. Since then the theory has been rigorously tested but no other plausible hypotheses have been proposed that can account for the overall warming trend over the past 150 years. There really are no sensible grounds for disputing the role of carbon dioxide in global warming. But who said anything about sensible?
Venus link
This is where it all gets a bit strange. Titchmarsh asked Thompson about his views on what ‘they’ – the expert scientific community, presumably – claim climate change is attributed to. Titchmarsh asked:
“They will tell us that CFCs that we use, that greenhouse gases, that our city heat and industrialisation is what is causing global warming. How do you argue against that?”
Thompson took the opportunity to draw a bizarre parallel with life – or lack of it – on Venus.
“The surface temperature is 500 degrees because there are gases in the atmosphere that trap sunlight…So Venus has experienced the greenhouse effect that we are now talking about and there are no humans that live there.”
Yes, Venus is closer to the sun. But since Venus’s atmosphere is made up of 96 per cent carbon dioxide, we are not really sure what point he is trying to make in support of solar-driven climate change. Is the implication that because Venus has experienced runaway warming without humans, the warming on earth can’t be due to humans?
In any case, Titchmarsh doesn’t pick up on the fact that his two guests appear to be disagreeing about whether carbon dioxide plays a role in climate change or not.
Myth 3 – The old plant food line
Corbyn also argued that not only does carbon dioxide have no warming effect, but also that higher concentrations are good for plants. He said:
“Sulphur dioxide and things like that are bad, but carbon dioxide is actually a good thing, it makes plants grow better.”
Some studies show that it is possible to increase the growth of some plants with extra carbon dioxide, under controlled conditions inside greenhouses. But when scientists have experimented with real outdoor conditions, the outcome is less promising, with average yields around 50 per cent lower than the greenhouse experiments. Many factors affect plant growth, like temperature, water and nutrient availability, pests and diseases – all of which may be affected by climate change, which makes Corbyn’s claim that carbon dioxide will enhance growth a massive oversimplification.
No excuse for nonsense
Perhaps the most worrying part of the segment is the way Titchmarsh implied that the science of climate change has no evidence base and instead welcomed Thompson and Corbyn’s claims as “science”, stating for example:
“We don’t get any of this science, we just get ‘we are responsible for global warming, the earth is going to get hotter, seas are going to rise, the polar ice caps are melting and it’s all down to us.'”
In 2010, Alan Titchmarsh told the Express that previous ice ages and warm periods weaken the case for climate change.
Titchmarsh also asked Corbyn why it is that he is “more successful than the Met Office” at predicting the weather. Intrigued? We were.
WeatherAction claims on its website that between March and September 2008, it had an 85 per cent accuracy rate. We’re not really sure how to check this, but we do know that not all of Corbyn’s predictions as quoted in the media appear to have come true. He was, for example, quoted in the Telegraph predicting “a deluge” of rain during the London Olympics this summer – which failed to materialise.
It’s not the first time that a debate about the UK’s wet summer has led the media into slightly deeper waters than it can cope with. At least this segment didn’t appear on the BBC – and to be fair, ITV doesn’t have the same explicit commitment to accuracy and impartiality as the BBC. But that still doesn’t seem to us to be a decent excuse for promoting unfounded nonsense.