"LAST week, an organisation called Climate Feedback attempted what it claimed was a factcheck of an article James Delingpole had written about a report we at the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) had published a few days earlier.
The report was about the impacts of climate change and had been put together by Indur Goklany, an American scientist whose involvement in climate goes back to 1990, when he was on the US delegation to the First Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The Climate Feedback article didn’t garner much attention, but it’s interesting to look at it because it is reveals the tactics that are used to try to discredit anyone who criticises the official ‘narrative of doom’.
... Climate Feedback invites climate scientists to comment on newspaper articles.
For Delingpole’s piece, ‘a majority of reviewers tagged the article as ‘Cherry-picking, Inaccurate, Misleading.’
Let’s see what they said to justify that claim …
‘It is repeating a series of claims made in a blog post from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) …’
... Climate Feedback knew full well there was a formal report behind the Delingpole article, but it didn’t want to mention it.
... the claim about the review of Goklany’s paper is clearly a figment of the writer’s imagination, since Climate Feedback is not party to the internal processes at the GWPF.
In fact, we have a board of academic advisers who review all our reports. In view of the many attempts to pick holes in them, we’d be foolish not to.
So we can see from the start that Climate Feedback set out to deliver a poisonous narrative to its readers.
... Delingpole’s claim that ‘most extreme weather phenomena have not become more extreme, more deadly or more destructive’ reflects perfectly the IPCC’s position that it has ‘low confidence’ that there have been increases in drought or hurricanes.
The best it can say of extreme rainfall is that there have been more areas with increases than decreases.
Only on heatwaves does its confidence in the existence of an increase rise to the giddy heights of ‘medium’.
So when Climate Feedback’s authors claim that the IPCC reports say otherwise, I have to tell them that this is not what appears in the IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers.
Another example of blatant misrepresentation of Delingpole’s article is where it says that he ‘presents an assumption that climate change will increase drought globally and then refutes this non-existent expectation of climate science’.
... Goklany’s report and Delingpole’s article are entirely backwards-looking.
Neither says anything about the future of drought, or of any other weather phenomenon.
... Climate Feedback says that Delingpole ‘deliberately ignores multiple factors that affect some phenomena to argue against the influence of climate on them.
For instance, while fatality (sic) due to weather events has either remained constant or declined over time for some types of weather events, this is primarily due to improvements in warning and evacuation systems and has little to do with climate change …’
This is profoundly misleading.
Delingpole is simply discussing claims that climate change would lead to a decline in human welfare.
Listing the 99 per cent fall in mortality from extreme weather shows simply that human welfare has not become worse, contradicting the official narrative of doom.
It says nothing about climate change.
... This is simple misrepresentation by Climate Feedback.
Some of the Climate Feedback critique is embarrassingly wrong.
For example, when it discusses wildfires, it says ‘the area burned by wildfires in the western US has also increased significantly due to climate change.
Quite why a graph relating to wildfires in the Western US should trump the observation of Delingpole (and Goklany) that global wildfires have decreased is beyond me.
But worse, the Climate Feedback author appears not to actually have understood the graph – because it doesn’t show an increase in wildfires in the Western US.
It’s a cumulative graph, which means it will always increase.
That’s what ‘cumulative’ means.
... Hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel takes Delingpole to task for saying that hurricane frequency is not increasing.
His objection is not that what Delingpole says is not true, but that he ‘neglects to mention that there was never a consensus prediction that the frequency of all hurricanes would increase’.
Really?
Because when I refer back to the Summary for Policymakers from the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, I find it stated that it is ‘likely’ that there will in an increase in hurricane activity.
The Fifth Assessment says it’s ‘more likely than not in some basins’.
Emanuel also takes issue with Delingpole’s claim that damage from extreme weather is decreasing, saying:
Since the early 1970s there has been a 380 per cent increase in global weather-related damage normalised each year by world domestic product.
Some of this is demographic; for example, there has been a 200 per cent increase in coastal population, but much of the rest is owing to worse weather disasters, as measured by damage.
... It turns out that he had worked out the figures himself, although he was a little vague about the details.
... Insurance claims are the main source of damage data, and more and more people around the world have coverage, so there is an underlying increase in the value of damage recorded that is due simply to more and better reporting.
This is the increase that Professor Emanuel has found.
To be fair, the good professor is an atmospheric physicist, so a lack of familiarity with the data is perhaps unsurprising.
We see the same thing in Professor Jennifer Francis’s comments on sea level rise.
She appears taken aback when Delingpole quotes Goklany as follows:
‘A recent study showed that the Earth has actually gained more land in coastal areas in the last 30 years than it has lost through sea-level rise.’
Dr Francis is also an atmospheric scientist too, specialising in the Arctic, so you can understand why she might not be too familiar with the sea-level literature ...
Either way, she splutters:
‘Please provide this peer-reviewed study by a legitimate practising environmental scientist to support this counterintuitive statement.’
Given that the relevant paper, by Donchyts et al, published in Nature Climate Change, was cited in Goklany’s report, it does seem that Professor Francis either couldn’t be bothered to check the details, or that she had not even been made aware of the GWPF report’s existence.
... the sense you get is of a hasty, amateur hit-job rather than a professional critique.
Climate scientists are busy with the Sixth Assessment Report at the moment, and they have perhaps been careless with their ‘take-down’ this time.
... this car crash of an article does at least allow us to see that misrepresentation and deception have become the tool-in-trade of the internet fact-checker. "