Monthly Archives: July 2010

The BBC in general, and Richard Black in particular, have been warning us for years, in typical alarmist fashion, that Greenland’s ice is melting and we are all going to drown. This is what Mr Black wrote in 2009:

The Greenland ice sheet is losing its mass faster than in previous years and making an increasing contribution to sea level rise, a study has confirmed…The team used weather data, satellite readings and models of ice sheet behaviour to analyse the annual loss of 273 thousand million tonnes of ice…Melting of the entire sheet would raise sea levels globally by about 7m (20ft).

There are dozens more references to this Doomsday picture over the years; the tone throughout is that we are in serious danger; the sort of scenario that gives our kids nightmares. I searched in vain for any mention on the BBC wenbsite that such fears might be doubtful, that other scientists thought differently. Steve Goddard, though, on Watt’s Up With That? is more rigorous in his approach. He’s actually checked the Greenland ice records (unlike, it seems, Richard Black et al – never let the facts get in the way of good climate change scare), and found that not only were the stories based on cherry-picked data, but also that even those scientists who were predicting Armageddon some time back have now retracted:

Ice loss in Greenland has had some climatologists speculating that global warming might have brought on a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level. But glaciologists reported at the American Geophysical Union meeting that Greenland ice’s Armageddon has come to an end.

Chances of Black and co reporting this? And of noting that Greenland, despite their scare stories, remains as cold and icy as ever? Zero.

I don’t know how much Richard Black is paid by the BBC. They spend almost a billion a year on their newsgathering and news programmes, but don’t reveal individual salaries. I do know, however, that a friend of mine who is a BBC presenter is paid north of £150,000 a year; on that basis Mr Black, as a specialist correspondent, probably gets at least £70K and probably substantially more.

He is presumably asked as part of his responsibilities to be reasonably thorough in his assessment of material.

But is he thorough enough? On July 5, he filed an analysis of three reports into aspects of climate change, by Oxburgh, the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee and the Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL). Yesterday, I wrote about severe reservations about the first two. Mr Black,however, was convinced of their rectitude, and wrote that:

…none is judged….to undermine the central tenets of man-made climate change.

He singled out from the Dutch report these paragraphs:

Our findings do not contradict the main conclusions of the IPCC on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability related to climate change… The negative impacts under unmitigated climate change in the future pose substantial risks to most parts of the world, with risks increasing at higher global average temperatures.

This, he clearly believed, particularly supported his conclusion. In other words, he took the PBL report as a massive vindication of the BBC’s stance in support of AGW.

But was he correct? Indur M Goklany, by contrast, is a scientist, and has been writing about these issues for decades. There isn’t space to summarise here all his arguments, and I urge you to read the piece, which was filed on the What’s Up With That? website a few hours ago. But his conclusion about PBL?

To summarize, the PBL gave the IPCC’s summary statements on regional impacts a relatively clean bill of health because it only looked for errors of commission in a limited number of chapters while deeming errors of omission to be an acceptable part of a “risk-oriented approach.” Under the latter approach, it would be acceptable for executive summaries to emphasize costs and, moreover, highlight the upper end of these costs, even as they eschew information on benefits. And providing policy makers with the broader context might be nice, but optional.

PBL may label this a “risk-oriented approach”, but most rational people would label it “biased and unbalanced”.

So where does that leave Mr Black? I contend with egg all over his professional, highly-paid face. He was eager to rush into print in support of the climate science conclusions of PBL (and the other two reports), but unlike Dr Goklany, seemingly did not sufficiently analyse the core issues, or whether the extravagant press-released claims of the authors were properly supported.