Disinformer David Rose of the Daily Mail takes another denialist "swinge"

Update: The UK Met Office has commented on David Rose's latest article.

Serial disinformer David Rose from the tabloid rag the Daily Mail doesn't care about facts, only headlines.  He's come out with another "not even wrong" article (archived here) as a follow up to his last one.

David starts with a false headline: Global warming is just HALF what we said: World's top climate scientists admit computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong

Unsurprisingly, David doesn't cite any of the world's top scientists so I figure he just made that up.  It's what he does - see here and here and here and here and here and here and here (and more here).

David Rose "swinges" about clean energy and taxation

David could hardly be seen as more "wrong" if he wore a sandwich board saying "I reject and deny science". He goes on to write about the IPCC reports that "they are cited worldwide to justify swingeing (sic) fossil fuel taxes and subsidies for ‘renewable’ energy".

Now we've got his reason for rejecting science out of the way (he prefers dirty energy and doesn't like paying tax), let's see what lies he's spouting this time.

David Rose flunks arithmetic

Remember his headline of just HALF? In addition to wanting dirty energy and not liking taxation, David Rose can't do simple sums, he writes:

Back then, it said that the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2C every decade – a figure it claimed was in line with the forecasts made by computer climate models. 

But the new report says the true figure since 1951 has been only 0.12C per decade – a rate far below even the lowest computer prediction.

David, like some other deniers we know, fails at arithmetic.  0.12 is 60% of 0.2, not 50%.  That amount of difference can make or break a candidate's hope for re-election :D

David also lied.  Here is what is written in the IPCC AR4 report - a linear trend from 1956 to 2005 = 0.13°C per decade. Not a 0.2°C per decade in sight!

If anything, the linear trend has increased!

Do you still wonder about David's implied claim that the IPCC said the world has warmed at 0.2 degrees since 1951 and is only warming at 50% of that - or 60% if you use David's numbers rather than his wrong calculation?  What I think he must have done is try to convince his readers that the modeled projection for future temperature rises under a "business as usual" scenario was the same as the actual rise since 1951.  But who knows.  The mind of the science denier is a tangle of lies and disinformation and it's not for me to try to fathom.

So instead let's look at the record itself.  Here is a chart of global average surface temperature from 1951 to the present, and from 1951 to 2006 - the last full year before the publication of IPCC's AR4 report:

Interesting, eh.  To get a very rough estimate, subtract the value at the bottom of the trend line (the straight line) from the value at the top of the trend line, divide by the number of years and multiply by ten.  (But don't tell Tamino I said this!)  If you do the sums you'll get the following:

• 1951-2006 trend ~ 0.124 degrees per decade
• 1951-2012 trend ~ 0.127 degrees per decade.

If you want to quibble about decimal places, let's round it to two decimal places.  The linear trend has increased from 0.12 degrees a decade for 1951 to 2006 to to 0.13 degrees a decade for 1951 to 2012!

David Rose has a lot of cheek, too.  Pretending that he "first reported" a pause.  He doesn't say, but what he is most likely referring to is another slab of lies and disinformation that the Met Office called him out on - here and here.

The Incomprehensible Judith Curry

I'll mention that David quotes Judith Curry (scientist turned denying fan of David Rose) as saying it's "incomprensible to me" that the IPCC would state, very conservatively, that it is 95% certain that humans have caused more than half the temperature rise from 1951 to 2010.  Some science suggests we've caused more than 100% of the rise in temperature since the 1950s.  Here's an article on realclimate.org about attribution and one on SkepticalScience, with this chart:

Figure 1: Net human and natural percent contributions to the observed global surface warming over the past 50-65 years according to Tett et al. 2000 (T00, dark blue), Meehl et al. 2004 (M04, red), Stone et al. 2007 (S07, green), Lean and Rind 2008 (LR08, purple),Huber and Knutti 2011 (HK11, light blue), and Gillett et al. 2012 (G12, orange). . 
Source: SkepticalScience.com

Going by David Rose's record, I won't take it as read that Judith Curry did say that.  However there is little that she says these days that surprises me.  She could claim tomorrow that the moon was made of cheese and it wouldn't surprise me.  Although she probably wouldn't be categorical and would add "but there is a lot of uncertainty" and "we can't be sure if it's Italian cheese". (Apologies to Italians and their wonderful cheeses.)

And he has a long blurb about how Nic Lewis, who is not a climate scientist, reckons he knows a lot more about climate than do the meteorologists at the UK Met.  I can't follow that bit at all.  Here is a report of decadal forecasting by the UK Met Office and a link to information on its HADCM3 model.

This article is more of a mish mash than other articles by David Rose.  It hops and skips and jumps all over the place.  I'd say he's rattled.  He denies the science but is finding it hard to balance his denial with his possible desire to be viewed as anything but another James Delingpole or Anthony Watts.

I won't bother** going into any more detail of the rest of it because it's a gish gallop of "the models are wrong", Bob Ward said his last article was "error strewn" (it was) and complaints about allusions to Nazis - which I myself abhor but which denialati more commonly resort to than do people who accept science.

Message to David Rose - you are just another denier who has somehow managed to hold down a job with a UK tabloid.  Try writing an article on UFOs and little green men from Mars and your typical fans will probably "believe" you.



** I ended up bothering, because it reappeared on WUWT and elsewhere.  Read more here.

Hat tip to Lars Karlsson in the comments.