By Paul Homewood
Readers will probably recall the following Booker piece from last January:
One of Shakespeare’s persistent themes in Hamlet is that when people set out to fool others, it will eventually catch up with them. Repeatedly he emphasises that “purposes mistook fall on their inventors’ heads”, that such people end up “hoist with their own petard”, or get caught like a “woodcock” in their own trap.
There was a delightful example of this on our letters page last week, when that well-known propagandist for global warming, Bob Ward, tried to challenge what I had written about the recent series of unusually cold winters in North America.
The winters of 2007-08 and 2013-14, which Mr Booker highlights as particularly cold, were respectively only the 68th and 33rd coldest since records began in 1901. The mean temperature for the US in December 2017 was above average.
Bob Ward, letters
Mr Ward is employed by the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics, sponsored by a climate change-obsessed billionaire, and challenges anyone who publicly questions global warming orthodoxy. His point last week was to claim that, contrary to what I had written, recent US winters have not been unusually cold at all.
But the only evidence he could cite to support his point was the latest figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), suggesting that seven out of the past 10 US winters have in fact been “warmer than average”.
What Mr Ward has not said here is that, in a way which has aroused widespread suspicion, NOAA’s figures have lately been significantly “adjusted”, to suggest that several famously severe recent winters, such as those in 2008 and 2014, were not unusually cold by the standards of the 20th century.
Several expert bloggers have been analysing the surprising picture given by NOAA’s new figures, as in a post by Paul Homewood on his blog Notalotofpeopleknowthat headed “US cold winters mysteriously disappear”. Indeed, this is only the latest in a whole series of similarly suspect adjustments made to official US temperature figures in recent years, which I have described as one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.
Even odder in this instance, however, was the way Mr Ward failed to mention the continuing stream of academic papers and other interventions by scientists on his own side of the argument trying to explain how these freezing US winters are in fact further proof of global warming.
Their theory, as I mentioned in the item Mr Ward objected to, is that a warming Arctic is pushing the jet stream further south, to grip North America in a swirling “polar vortex” of sub-zero air, snow and ice. All of these papers are predicated on the claim that recent US winters have indeed been exceptionally cold.
Mr Ward may happily ignore all this, preferring to rest his case only on those questionable NOAA figures. But what makes it indeed delightful is that the warmists themselves have now come up with two wholly contradictory ways to explain why the runaway global warming in which they all believe should repeatedly be giving the people of North America such a horribly cold time. Only one of them pretends that this isn’t really happening at all.
Bob Ward took umbrage to this and decided to complain to IPSO, the Press Regulator, firing off a typically long winded, rambling and inchoate multipage letter.
Ward was particularly vexed that Booker should listen to a “mere blogger”, rather than NOAA or the Met Office! But his ramble boiled down to just two simple points, which he claimed had been inaccurately reported:
1) Some recent US winters had been exceptionally cold.
2) NOAA’s official temperature record had been adjusted with the effect of making recent years appear milder than the actual record suggested.
After being requested to help, I strongly advised the Telegraph to ignore most of Ward’s rant, which simply muddied the waters, and instead focus on those two issues.
It was easy to show that both of Booker’s claims were accurate, as I myself had shown in a series of posts around the time. I submitted a suggested a draft response to the Telegraph, based on these posts.
IPSO have subsequently considered Ward’s complaint and firmly rejected it. Below are their findings:
Findings of the Committee
17. Clause 1 does not prevent a newspaper from publishing controversial opinions on topics which continue to be divisive, such as the existence or impact of climate change. Newspapers are entitled to publish opinions on such topics, and communicate this information in an accessible way, provided that it takes care not to do so in an inaccurate or misleading way.
18. The newspaper provided a number of examples of coverage, from both within and outside of the scientific community, which commented on the cold weather which had affected areas of North America over recent winters, including the winters of 2008 and 2014. The columnist was entitled to rely on this coverage to form the basis for their claim that recent winters in North America had been unusually cold and there was no failure to take care over the accuracy by doing so. The complainant had argued that winter temperatures should be determined by considering seasonal mean temperatures over a three month period using data from a specific landmass. However, in the context of an opinion piece within a publication for general public consumption, the Committee did not establish that readers would have been misled in a significant way, where it was a matter of public record that areas of North America had experienced periods of extreme cold weather over recent winter months. There was no breach of Clause 1 on this point.
19. It was a matter of public record that “adjustments” had been made by NOAA on raw climate data to take into account differences in how, when and where these measurements had been taken; it was not in dispute that some of these adjustments had resulted in the temperature measurements from weather stations to increase. The columnist had questioned whether it was appropriate for the adjustments to have been made on the raw data; they did not comment further on why these adjustments had been made, nor did they interrogate the validity of the corrective action which had been taken by NOAA. The columnist had commented that the adjustments were “suspect” and “questionable”. The complainant strongly disagreed. However, this was an opinion which the columnist was entitled to express and he did not state that raw climate data had been tampered with by NOAA, as suggested by the complainant.
20. The columnist was entitled to reflect critically on the corrective adjustments which NOAA had made to raw data records, in circumstances where it was a matter of public record that some of these adjustments had resulted in temperature measurements from some weather stations being increased. The Committee did not establish that the columnist’s discussion of these adjustments represented a failure to take over the accuracy of the article, nor did it establish that the columnist’s discussion of this issue was significantly misleading or inaccurate, such as to require correction. There was no breach of the Code.
Conclusions
21. The complaint was not upheld.
https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/ruling/?id=01570-18
[IPSO’s verdict was published in May, but could not be reported on while there was a chance of an appeal from Ward]
In simple terms, IPSO found that both of Booker’s claims were essentially correct, that there had been some exceptionally cold winters in the US, and that NOAA’s temperature record had been adjusted.
Ward is, of course, paid to clamp down on any dissent from the global warming party line; that is his job. I have now been involved in rebutting at least four of these sort of spurious complaints from Ward, Richard Black and others. On each occasion, they have gone away with their tail between their legs.
However, their objective is to discourage in the first place articles which question global warming dogma. While they are paid to write long rambling complaints, journalists and editors have better things to do.
You may also have noticed how often the likes of Bob Ward get to have letters printed in the press. Editors find it easier to do this than spend time fighting a complaint.
It is worth comparing this situation with the BBC, who regularly and blatantly publish fake climate claims, without fear of any comeback.
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August 15, 2018 at 04:06AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 