James Delingpole:
I promised I’d leave it to Christopher Booker to give chapter and verse on what was wrong, scientifically, with the BBC’s latest desperate attempt to promulgate the cause of climate change alarmism.
The programme – Climate Change By Numbers – purported to explore global warming from a fresh, unbiased angle by getting three mathematicians not hitherto known as arch-warmists to crunch the numbers and conclude that, yes, climate change is indeed a greater threat than we could ever possibly have imagined…
In my takedown last week, I did the snark. Now Booker has dealt with the main scientific flaws with the programme. They are as follows:
First section: this attempted to make a big deal of the fact that the world has warmed by around 0.85 degrees since 1880. But as Booker notes, this isn’t really the issue of contention.
What she left out was that there has been nothing unprecedented about our recent warming. As the world has generally warmed since emerging from the Little Ice Age 200 years ago, two earlier warming phases from natural causes, between 1860 and 1880 and from 1910 to 1940, were just as great as that of the last 30 years – before CO2 levels rose as they have done recently.
Second section: this sought to tell us that just as we can use models accurately to predict the future performance of premier league football clubs, so too we can rely on them to predict climate.
What he omitted to explain was that, in the past 17 years, the IPCC’s computer model predictions have turned out to be comprehensively wrong.
Third section: this used a long sequence about Formula One motor racing to back up its assertion that pouring increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere has already led to an increase in “extreme weather events” and that, unless we radically change our lifestyles, things are going to get much, much worse.
What he failed to tell us was that, as even the IPCC concedes, such events have not become more frequent or intense at all. There have been no more floods, droughts and hurricanes than there were before the global warming scare was invented.
If the programme was such palpable nonsense you might wonder why I am giving it such attention. But its palpably nonsensical quality is precisely the point.
Here was a programme so lamentably biased, so completely uninterested in counterarguments, so blatantly determined to pull the wool over its viewers’ eyes with straw men, false analogies and calculated misrepresentations of the real points at issue, that it constituted a flagrant breach of the BBC’s statutory obligations to accuracy and impartiality.
In short, this programme broke the law.
