Climate change: a licence to lie

By Richard North - December 31, 2021

I thought I’d give Covid and the Omicrons a break today and return to another subject we occasionally visit – that of climate change. But, as always, it is not so much the subject which is the area of interest as the treatment of it, and especially in the media.

The essential complaint I have over so much of the coverage is the rampant dishonesty which seems to guide its authors, an issue I addressed as recently as 8 November when I dealt with, amongst other things, the treatment of California wildfires.

What brings me back to the fray this time are reports on two phenomena, starting with a BBC report, with the website heading, “Alaska ‘Icemageddon’ warning follows heat record”, telling us that: “The coldest US state of Alaska has recorded its hottest-ever December day, amid an unusual winter warm spell”.

Filed under the “climate change” category, there can be no doubt about where its author, Jack Hunter, wants to take us, as he retails the news that temperatures soared to a record 19.4ºC (67ºF) on the island of Kodiak on Sunday – almost seven degrees warmer than the state’s previous high.

This, though, applies to the island of Kodiak, sheltering in the Pacific waters of the Gulf of Alaska in one of the southernmost parts of the state, where the climate is classified as warm and temperate. Mild winter temperatures are not uncommon and early spring has recorded a comfortable 21ºC.

The reason for the current high is probably (almost certainly) the same reason why most of the UK is enjoying a mild spell, forecast to continue over the New Year. This is the stratospheric Polar Vortex, together with a strong easterly wind anomaly high above the Equator.

This interaction happens every few years and typically brings colder winters to Europe and the United States – and to Russia and parts of Asia, including Japan – as indeed it is doing. Apart from Kodiak island, in Alaska temperatures have been plunging to record lows. In the south-eastern town of Ketchikan, temperatures dropped to -18ºC (-0.4ºF) on 25 December – one of the town’s coldest Christmas Days in the past century.

That the rest of Alaska is cold, Hunter tells us, although he doesn’t explain why, and nor does he point out that the chill is not confined to Alaska, as this site conveniently summarises.

Here we learn of historic cold and snow buffeting eastern Asia in recent weeks, including the nations of China, Japan and South Korea; major blizzards have been affecting parts of Russian and Nepal, snowfall has buried towns in Turkey and Vancouver has seen its coldest temperature since 1989.

Without conveying any of this bigger picture – or mentioning the Polar Vortex – though, Hunter refers us to “climate scientist” Rick Thoman, of the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy.

Conveniently, Mr Thoman says the blasts of extreme warm and cold temperatures, which he says have been over the past two decades, are “a sign of climate change”, adding: “When all the pieces come together in a warming world we’re going to get these unprecedented events, that’s what we expect”.

Herein lies an illustration of the paucity of the debate, where the simpletons in the BBC and their allies want to reduce the complexity of the global climate to the effect of variations in one marginal atmospheric gas. Yet, when we seek a broader explanation for the changes being observed, we see this which compares the effects of solar-related and terrestrial drivers. Of the changes observed, the paper authors argue that they may be:

… due to an unaccounted or unknown variable, due to internal variability of the polar vortex or due to more complicated non-linear relations between explaining variables and polar vortex. One unaccounted factor which probably has a significant effect on the polar vortex is planetary wave activity. However, the effect of planetary waves is difficult to estimate and interpret since their activity and propagation in the stratosphere is determined not only by the tropospheric source but also by the state of the stratosphere (Scott & Polvani, 2004). Moreover, the effects of other drivers may depend on the properties of the planetary waves.

A generous interpretation of Hunter’s input might simply be one of over-simplification but what is particularly significant about his report are the omissions. Less generously, therefore, we might accuse him of lying by omission.

Where this comes particularly into focus though is in the reporting of the second phenomena, seen recently also on the BBC website and the warmist Guardian and Independent. This is the story of the Thwaites Glacier in the Antarctic, labelled the “doomsday” glacier because it could be on the verge of collapse, dumping billions of gallons of meltwater into the oceans and raising sea levels from half a metre to as much as 2 metres.

The BBC introduced the latest twist to this story on 13 December with the headline: ” Thwaites: Antarctic glacier heading for dramatic change”, introducing a report by “science” correspondent Jonathan Amos.

Once again, it is categorised on the “climate change” file, and Amos tells us that scientists are warning of dramatic changes at one of the biggest glaciers in Antarctica, potentially within the next five to 10 years. They say a floating section at the front of Thwaites Glacier that until now has been relatively stable could “shatter like a car windscreen”.

US and UK researchers, Amos adds, are currently engaged in an intense study programme at Thwaites because of its melt rate. Already it is dumping 50 billion tonnes of ice into the ocean each year. This, he says, “is having limited impact on global sea-levels today, but there is sufficient ice held upstream in the glacier’s drainage basin to raise the height of the oceans by 65cm – were it all to melt”.

Then we come to the key punchline. Writes Amos: “Such a ‘doomsday’ scenario is unlikely to come about for many centuries, but the study team says Thwaites is now responding to a warming world in really quite rapid ways”.

We get a similar story from John Vidal of the Guardian, under the heading: “Scientists watch giant ‘doomsday’ glacier in Antarctica with concern”. Thwaites is worrisome, he writes:

…but there are many other great glaciers in Antarctica also retreating, thinning and melting as the Southern Ocean warms. Many are being held back because Thwaites acts like a cork, blocking their exit to the sea. Should Thwaites fall apart, scientists believe the others would speed up, leading to the collapse of the whole ice sheet and catastrophic global sea level rises of several metres.

He then moves on to tell us:

Yet just one month after Cop26 ended in Glasgow, the warning that the 300-metre thick, 50-mile wide Thwaites glacier has started to crack up has been met with silence from governments preoccupied by Covid-19 and the return of normal politics. The danger is that the many actions pledged in November to address global heating will be shelved for another year, to become just one more risk in an increasingly dangerous world.

Thwaites underlines that global heating and glaciers do not wait for politicians, and every year action to reduce climate emissions is delayed only accelerates global disaster.

As with the Independent story, readers are left in no doubt that this is a global warming story but, while all three reports have this in common, they also share a vital omission – or such enormous significance that it changes the entire scenario.

Several reports attest to this, including this one in 2014 headed: “Volcanic activity under Thwaites Glacier contributes to melting”.

There is even this from the Guardian in 2017, headed: “Scientists discover 91 volcanoes below Antarctic ice sheet”, this one in 2018 reporting “previously unsuspected volcanic activity” and then this from August 2021, elaborating on: “High geothermal heat flow beneath Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica inferred from aeromagnetic data”. This latter paper concludes:

We show that the rapidly retreating Thwaites and Pope glaciers in particular are underlain by areas of largely elevated geothermal heat flow, which relates to the tectonic and magmatic history of the West Antarctic Rift System in this region. Our results imply that the behavior (sic) of this vulnerable sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is strongly coupled to the dynamics of the underlying lithosphere.

Now one does not have to be at all diffident in stating that the three media reports cited are lying, directly by implying (and stating) that the potential collapse of Thwaites glacier is exclusively down to climate change, and by omission in not mentioning the geothermal activity.

As to the current effect of the melting glaciers, a NASA study in 2015 showed that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.

The research challenged the conclusions of other studies, including the IPCC 2013 report, which said that Antarctica was overall losing land ice. According to this analysis, the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. But then, in October, it was reported that the last six months in Antarctica had been the “coldest on record”.

I don’t know when it was that people in the media decided it was acceptable to lie to its consumers, or the BBC felt sufficiently empowered (if that is the right word) to insult and denigrate a substantial proportion of its licence-payers by dismissing them as “deniers”, but the situation is clear for all those who wish to see it. Sections of the media are actively engaged in perpetrating lies. They ask for trust – they deserve our contempt.