Lies, Damned Lies, and Fox “News” (with apologies to Mark Twain)

I have recently seen an online video of an interview by a Fox “News” presenter of Piers Corbyn, an independent weather forecaster and activist on multiple issues, including anti-global warming, in the UK. I will not post a link to this video, because I do not want to grant it any bit of credibility in so doing.

It is not so much Mr. Corbyn's statements that I object to, as Fox's irresponsible propagandizing in what should have been a news story on scientific issues. The title for the video clip was “Mocked Meterologist Gets Last Laugh” because, unlike the UK's Met Office – their equivalent to the National Weather Service – Mr. Corbyn predicted a very cold winter, “December through February inclusive”, to quote Mr. Corbyn. So, on the basis of just the first month, we are going to presume he will be correct for the entire winter? And, though Mr. Corbyn has making weather forecasts even before founding his “Weather Action” company in 1995, Fox waits until this one month when his forecast differs significantly from the Met Office's, and his is closer to what happened. Doesn't this sound like a bit of selection bias?

As the BBC's Roger Harrabin reports,

many other meteorologists mistrust Mr Corbyn himself because he refuses to publish his scientific methods. I have been asking him for several months to offer independent corroboration of his forecasting successes but none has been supplied.
Some other forecasters say he has major forecasting successes but equally large failures which he does not mention.

For example, Mr. Corbyn incorrectly predicted “raging weather” for the UK in 1997. And, while his company, WeatherAction, stated in early January 2008 that “temperatures could plummet to -17C (1.4F) in the Midlands later this month, and that the average temperature for January would be close to freezing”, in fact “The final CET [Central England Temperature] for January 2008 ended up over 3 °C above the standard reference average making the predictions for a cold Jan very poor. In fact it ended up being one of the warmest Januarys since records began.”[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Corbyn]. In perhaps the most neutral evaluation of Mr. Corbyn's accuracy,

Researchers Ian and Nils Jolliffe had this tough-to-dispute summary of Weather Action's outlooks: "It is unusual for most of the detail to be completely correct, but equally it is rare for nearly everything to be wrong ... Some forecasts are clearly very good, and a few are very poor, but the majority fall in the gray area in between, where an optimistic assessor would find merit, but a critical assessor would find fault."

Where Fox's true irresponsibility came into play was the presenter's repeatedly implying that this one month difference invalidated the theory that global warming is taking place, from the obvious “So much for global warming” comment that one would expect as a joke from local newscasters, to referring to the Met Office as “the same office pushing a global warming agenda”.

Anyone with at least a high school education should be able to distinguish between weather and climate, and global warming is a matter of long-term climate change, not short-term weather fluctuations. To state that one cold month in Europe is proof that there is no such thing as global warming is at least as irresponsible and ridiculous as to state, solely on the basis that this week is well above freezing and it has been raining rather than snowing here in Minnesota in late December, that there is irrefutable proof of global warming. As another, more localized, example of weather compared to climate, I can clearly recall specific instances when a winter day in Minneapolis was colder than in Anchorage, Alaska; and a summer day, just before a big thunderstorm, when the current temperature and humidity in Minneapolis were both higher than in Miami, Florida. So, from these specific instances, would anyone say that Minneapolis is generally colder than Alaska, or hotter and more humid than Miami? Of course not; anyone can see that these are isolated weather events, and that Minneapolis has a climate that falls somewhere between those of Anchorage and Miami for temperature and humidity – though probably closer to the former in winter, and the latter in summer.

Despite Mr. Corbyn's claim in the Fox interview regarding the theory that global warming is occurring, that “there's no science in there, no facts to back them up”, there is in fact plenty of published scientific research. Much of it, which, unlike Mr. Corbyn's work, is scientifically peer reviewed and freely available for anyone to review on the web, comes from NASA.

One particular summary of research, shown here, mentions updated research that disproves Mr. Corbyn's statement in the Fox interview that “the Antarctic has been cooling for the last 30 years”, which was more in line with an older analysis, with older data, and a more flawed method.

A good – peer-reviewed and approved – paper on “Global Surface Temperature Change” by Hansen, et. al.[6.7 MB], on the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies web site, includes the following interesting paragraph (numbered 92) on “WEATHER VARIABILITY VERSUS CLIMATE TRENDS”:

Public opinion about climate change is affected by recent and ongoing weather. North America had a cool summer in 2009, perhaps the largest negative temperature anomaly on the planet (Figure 14a). Northern Hemisphere winter (December, January, and February) of 2009–2010 was unusually cool in the United States and northern Eurasia (Figure 14b). The cool weather contributed to increased public skepticism about the concept of “global warming,” especially in the United States. These regional extremes occurred despite the fact that June, July, and August 2009 were second warmest (behind June, July, and August 1998) and December, January, and February 2009–2010 were second warmest (behind December, January, and February 2006–2007).

This section of the paper concludes with the following paragraph:

Monthly temperature anomalies are typically 1.5– 2 times greater than seasonal anomalies. So loading of the climate dice is not as easy to notice in monthly mean temperature. Daily weather fluctuations are even much larger than global mean warming. Yet it is already possible for an astute observer to detect the effect of global warming in daily data by comparing the frequency of days with record warm temperature to days with record cold temperature. The number of days with record high temperature now exceed the number of days with record cold by about a 2:1 ratio [Meehl et al., 2009].

Those wanting to read a less-academic summary for the lay reader should check out “2009: Second Warmest Year on Record; End of Warmest Decade”. The warming trend is probably best seen in the graph of the “Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index”, whose image has the following caption in the article:

Except for a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s, Earth's surface temperatures have increased since 1880. The last decade has brought the temperatures to the highest levels ever recorded. The graph shows global annual surface temperatures relative to 1951-1980 mean temperatures. As shown by the red line, long-term trends are more apparent when temperatures are averaged over a five year period.

Mr. Corbyn and other global warming skeptics make claims that solar activity, rather than carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, are what drive global temperatures. NASA scientists do not claim that solar activity has no effect; journal articles repeatedly indicate that there are multiple factors that effect global temperatures. Specifically with regard to solar activity, the summary article has the following:

Warmer surface temperatures also tend to occur during particularly active parts of the solar cycle, known as solar maximums, while slightly cooler temperatures occur during lulls in activity, called minimums.

A deep solar minimum has made sunspots a rarity in the last few years. Such lulls in solar activity, which can cause the total amount of energy given off by the Sun to decrease by about a tenth of a percent, typically spur surface temperature to dip slightly. Overall, solar minimums and maximums are thought to produce no more than 0.1°C (0.18°F) of cooling or warming.

"In 2009, it was clear that even the deepest solar minimum in the period of satellite data hasn't stopped global warming from continuing," said Hansen.

So, there is plenty of scientific evidence to refute Mr. Corbyn's claims that global warming is not occurring. Does that mean that we know all the causes of it? Do we know that it is primarily due to the impact of increased burning of fossil fuels in the past century and increases in carbon dioxide levels due to that, rather than centuries-long trends of climate warming and cooling? Not necessarily, and further scientific study is certainly desired. But when you consider evidence that global oil production has either peaked or will peak soon, that there are hundreds of millions of potential additional motorists to be hitting the roads in coming years in the rapidly economically expanding China and India, and that so much of our oil comes from countries with large segments of the populace that hate us, there are plenty of reasons, in addition to reducing carbon dioxide emissions, to work on improving efficiency, burning less oil, and seeking alternative fuel technology.

To conclude, by taking as Gospel truth the statements of someone with such controversial scientific theories without so much as asking for statements from a reputable scientist with an opposing view, Fox “News” once again proves that it should long ago have dropped its “fair and balanced” claim.

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