BBC perpetuates scientific fraud

Yes, that’s quite a claim to make but I’ve just been reading the Ethical Man’s blog on the BBC’s Newsnight website and discovered the BBC publishes fraudulent and misleading posts without a sign of any of the Beeb’s much-vaunted moderation.

The blog entry, “Ethical Man my a***”, is fairly inane as the writer, Justin Rowlatt, prattles on about flying to Jamaica to see if carbon offsets can alleviate the carbon dioxide emitted during his flight. It can’t, but that’s an argument for another time.

But as I was reading through the “moderated” comments from readers, I came across one from someone called John Finn.

It contained a large amount of “scientific” information, debunked global warming and was warmly welcomed by some of the other readers, who clearly did not want to believe they should curb their lifestyles.

But as I read Mr Finn’s comments, I became more and more suspicious so I spent half an hour doing the research the BBC should have done before allowing the post to appear.

I then submitted my own comment on the blog and will be interested to see if it appears:

Please do not be taken in by the likes of “John Finn”. The more I read his post, the more suspicious I became so I did a little research of my own.
First, I googled Professor Jack Barrett and it turns out he is a member of the Scientific Alliance. This turns out to be a lobby group set up by the British Aggregates Association (which represents quarrying businesses) and a former adviser to Tony Blair, Mark Adams OBE.
The Scientific Alliance’s website says it is “committed to rational discussion and debate on the challenges facing the environment today“. Really?
Why pass itself off as a scientific body when it is quite clearly a lobbying front for the quarrying industry and certain political interests?
I then googled the quoted paper, Greenhouse molecules, their spectra and function in the atmosphere, and soon found the Energy and Environment journal in which it had been published is not a science journal. It’s a social science journal with an openly admitted political agenda.
Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003, Richard Monastersky quoted Energy and Environment’s editor, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, a reader in geography at the University of Hull, as saying she “sometimes publishes scientific papers challenging the view that global warming is a problem, because that position is often stifled in other outlets. “I’m following my political agenda — a bit, anyway,” she says. “But isn’t that the right of the editor?”
In other words, Finn was quoting from a paper that was not what it appeared to be - it was not a rigorous, peer reviewed paper from a respected scientific journal with expertise in environment and energy.
Finally, I looked up Richard Lindzen - who turns out to be a consultant to both the tobacco and oil industries with a long history of using contrary science to prove that tobacco is good and oil is not to blame for pollution!
If I can find out all that in 30 minutes, then the BBC should be able to as well and at least put a warning on posts like the one from Finn. Better still, remove them as they’re quite clearly pretending to be something they’re not.

The BBC should take a lot more care in moderating posts , especially if they appear to carry such a lot of “scientific” facts and figures as Mr Finn’s.

It’s quite clear that some readers of the blog were taken in or, if I want to be really paranoid, were shills working to Mr Finn’s barker.

(And if you don’t understand that reference, it’s how conmen take in the gullible - the barker offers you the real deal, the shill beats you to it, and then you buy the next one. But when you look at what you bought later, it’s junk.)

And by allowing posters like Mr Finn to peddle his misinformation without warning or removal, the BBC is perpetuating scientific fraud.

I expected better and decided to complain, only to discover a fraudulent or misleading post is not grounds for complaint.

That really is appalling.

* * *

And now for the Finn comment:

85. At 12:57 PM on 19 Oct 2006,
John Finn wrote:
It’s no good – enough is enough. I can’t listen to any more drivel on ‘climate change’ from programmes like Newsnight. It was bad enough when they were simply urging the government or somebody or other to act, like some latter day King Canute, to “stop”, “tackle” or “combat” Climate Change. More recently though, we’ve been fed regular slots featuring some imbecile called “ethical man” and his crackpot wife, but Tuesday night really plumbed the depths. I am referring to the ‘debate’ between some token presence from the aviation industry and what appeared - from the level of his argument- to be a particularly bolshie 10 year old. It was chaired by Jeremy Paxman who’s clearly getting madder by the day. None of the three participants had the faintest idea what they were talking about. At some point. Paxman asked what must be the stupidest question ever which went something like “Why should millions of Africans die just because ‘we’ want to travel abroad on holiday?” What!!. Where on earth does this come from? I can only assume from some study with the usual plethora of ‘could bes’, ‘may bes’ and ‘up tos’. There is actually good reason to believe that Africa would, for reasons I’ll go into later, be one of the least affected regions in the world in the event of CO2-enhanced global warming. But first, for the benefit of the 10 year old, here is a brief background to the “Science”.
The earth warms due to the incoming solar radiation it receives from the Sun. It cools by convection, evaporation and by emitting Infra-Red (outgoing Long Wave) radiation from the earth’s surface. If the earth receives more radiation than it gets rid of – it warms up. If it gets rid of more than it receives - it cools down. Over the long term the Incoming is broadly equal to the Outgoing, implying that the earth’s mean temperature is more or less stable though there are millions of factors which, over hugely different time-scales, can disturb this state.
THE “GREENHOUSE EFFECT “
Without the so-called greenhouse effect the earth would absorb and emit energy at a mean temperature of –18 degrees C. This is 33 degrees C lower than the current mean global temperature of around 15 degrees C. To put this in perspective, global temperatures during the last Ice Age were around 5 or 6 degrees lower than they are to-day. In other words. the greenhouse effect is absolutely essential for the continuation of human life. So how does it work?
The earth’s atmosphere includes a number of gases – i.e. the ‘greenhouse’ gases – which warm the atmosphere by absorbing some (around 73%) of the IR radiation which is emitted from the earth’s surface. The most abundant and dominant greenhouse gas is water vapour though, because it’s individual molecules are short-lived in the atmosphere, many scientists refer to water vapour as a feedback. Other greenhouse gases include Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Methane plus smaller quantities of N2O, Ozone ..etc. It might seem reasonable, therefore, to think that any increase in CO2 concentrations could cause the earth to warm. But there are a couple of key questions here, i.e. does it and more importantly by how much. It might be useful here to use an analogy (not mine thanks Richard C.) to illustrate a crucial point. Imagine you are shining a torch. Now cover the torch beam with a sheet of paper. The paper will absorb some of the light and reduce the brightness of the beam. Keep covering the beam with sheets of paper until the light can no longer be seen. At this point covering the torch will have no further effect. All the light will have been absorbed (to the naked eye, at least). Now back to the CO2 increase. As we have previously implied CO2, as a greenhouse gas, can absorb IR radiation – but not all IR radiation. CO2 only absorbs in a narrow band about a peak absorption wavelength of 15 microns (wavenumber : 667 per cm). If we look at plots of the earth’s radiance emission and GHG absorption, it’s quite clear that the CO2 absorption band is already at (or very close to) ‘saturation’ point. That is, all the IR radiation which can be absorbed by CO2 is already being absorbed by the existing GH gases in the atmosphere or to refer back to our analogy we’ve already covered the torch with enough sheets of paper to prevent any light shining through.
When atmospheric CO2 concentrations were at pre-industrial levels (around 280 ppm), in the first 100m of the atmosphere (See Dr Jack Barrett’s paper at http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/barrett_ee05.pdf), the earth’s emitted radiance was apportioned as follows;
72.9% was absorbed by GH gases; 22.5% escaped through the IR window (i.e. that region which is outside the GH gas absorption bands); leaving a remaining 4.6% for absorption in the next layer.
Doubling CO2 concentrations (to 560 ppm) alters the ratio as follows:
73.4% absorbed by GH gases; 22.5% escapes through the IR window (i.e. that region which is outside the GH gas absorption bands); leaving a remaining 4.1% for absorption in the next layer.
This is an increase of 0.5% absorption of total radiance (in the lower 100m). Bearing in mind that 73% absorption equates to a temperature increase of 33 deg C it’s hard to see how doubling CO2 can possibly result in an increase of any more than a few tenths of a degree.
I can well imagine some of the better informed readers will be pointing out that the reported rise of 0.6 degrees in the past century is already more than a “few tenths of a degree”. Others might want to draw attention to the much larger increases being forecast by IPCC modellers. If I have tine and can be bothered I’ll deal with both these issues (failing that I’ll respond if I’m specifically asked), but I did promise a comment on Africa, so here goes
The atmosphere in the tropics, including Africa, consists of high concentrations of water vapour – the dominant greenhouse gas. The absorption bands of water vapour overlap those of carbon dioxide. Hence the addition of CO2 will not have the same impact as it might in other parts of the world. Also – radiation energy and therefore wavelength varies as a function of the temperature of the emitting body. Basically the higher the temperature – the shorter the wavelength of the emitted radiation. Peak CO2 absorption wavelengths occur at colder temperatures, i.e. in the extreme latitudes towards the poles. In a nutshell CO2 should, theoretically, be most effective in the cold dry regions of the Arctic and the Antarctic. Ah - I hear you cry – isn’t this exactly what’s happening. Well - Yes and No. The Arctic has certainly warmed in the past 30 years, but it has only just reached the temperatures it reached in the 1940s. Check GISS station data for confirmation. The Antarctic, on the other hand, has actually cooled over the past 3 decades. Forget what you hear about Antarctic warming. This only refers to the Antarctic Peninsula – a small finger of land which juts out into the Southern Ocean. The climate of the Antarctic Peninsula is extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in ocean circulation. The large mass of the Antarctic interior shows a definite steady cooling trend.
Right that’s all for now. But for any interested ‘layperson’ it ’s worth reading the following
Two papers by Richard Lindzen (Professor of Atmospheric Physics at MIT)
‘Global Warming: The nature and Origin of the Alleged Scientific Consensus’ and the more recent ‘Understanding Common Climate Claims’ .
Also this highly readable and hugely significant paper by Ross McKitrick
‘What is the Hockey Stick debate about’
You’ll find all 3 on the web.