Cold Comfort

Five years ago, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change". But the laying of such foundations subsequently has been far from peaceful. At best, we have seen stasis on the international treaty-making front. At worst, there have been vitriolic exchanges between those who ham up natural weather variations as apocalyptic and those who underplay them to challenge the reality of man-made climate change. One example of the latter kind was published by David Rose in the Daily Mail this week. He claimed that a new report by the UK Met had been quietly released online, without any publicity-attracting press release, specifically because its data showed that global warming had plateaued between 1997-2012. Within hours, not only had Rose's story been widely circulated on the Internet, it had also got like-minded TV pundits proclaiming economic-political judgements like, "It seems the White House is pushing their green energy agenda for nothing." But the UK Met's unambiguous response clarifies (a) it had released no new report, (b) Rose was reinterpreting extant data, and (c) he was doing this in a fashion categorically rebutted by the Met in response to his queries: "Looking at successive decades over this period, each decade was warmer than the previous—so the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, and the 2000s were warmer than both. Eight of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade."

Spokespeople of the UK Met have long been making the point that, even setting aside the scientific evidence, long-term changes in the Earth's climate system being observed even by laypeople range from shifts in rainfall patterns to a decline in Arctic sea-ice. But as elsewhere, partisanship here continues to trump what's in plain sight.

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