Climate change and the noble lie

Boosted by climate change?

At what point does science reporting stop being news and become propaganda peddled by uncritical journalists who read off press releases from approved providers with no critical assessment of what they are relaying to the public? If you pay attention to how climate science is reported in the media you will have noticed how much of it is related to climate attribution studies. This is when a particular extreme weather event is studied and then said to have been made much worse by human climate change. Sometimes it is said to have been impossible without climate change.

Take the LA wildfires. They were made 35% more likely because of human climate change. It must be true: the BBC said so, and so did almost everyone else.

The basis for this claim is an estimation of what the climate would have been without any human-induced changes. This is compared with the climate as it actually is. Then follows some statistical calculations and violà, a result appears. The event was, say, twice as likely to have happened because of human-induced climate change.

However academically pure the initial intentions of this line of study were at its dawn about a decade ago, it has changed. Over the years, the field came to be driven by more politics, and with a desperation alien to science. It has come to symbolise media manipulation and, by some scientists, exhibits a lack of conscience. I say ‘lack of conscience’ because I know of scientists who see the results of climate attribution spread alarmingly  across the media, yet keep quiet about their distrust of the attribution procedure. Why do they do this?

The attribution studies quoted in the press come from the World Weather Attribution group (WWA), which provides quick responses to the question of wether any weather event has a human-altered climate contribution. Their contributions are not peer-reviewed – there isn’t time – so they use a procedure that was previously approved via peer review. It is therefore clear that this work is not for science, it for headlines in the next day’s media.

So it was interesting to see that science YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder has done what the BBC didn’t – check the results. She found that the LA wildfires were also statistically consistent with no human-climate interference, and even got one of the authors of the report to admit it.

We all make mistakes. News journalists are under pressure to produce, and the WWA certainly takes advantage of this. But there is no excuse for such blatant lack of enquiry. Some journalists have, for decades, been wedded to a particular narrative, becoming in the process what every journalist should despise – a tribe pushing untruths and not even caring to question them. They have become accomplices rather than journalists.

But what about the scientists involved? Are they happy with this manipulation? Why did that author who admitted to Sabine that the press release wasn’t accurate speak up?

The noble lie

Part of the reason has recently been elucidated recently in the Conservative Woman. Professor Norman Fenton described his interaction with BBC documentary makers a decade ago after he asked some awkward questions while co-presenting a documentary on the statistics of climate change. None of his reasonable equivocations made it into the final cut, nor was he ever invited to present for the BBC again. The documentary he was involved in had a foregone conclusion, no matter what the facts. He was effectively cancelled.

It was an attutude that permeated the BBC at the time. It was something that happened to me when a BBC science editor told his colleagues not to interview me on space and astronomical matters because I was part of Nigel Lawson’s climate group.

It is the dishonesty of the noble lie. Tolerate untruths to serve a greater good. Let us not forget that extreme climate scientists and partisan journalists were there at the start of cancel culture. Almost 20 years ago, the TV documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle stirred up vitriol among some scientists, who then actively campaigned for a new law of scientific blasphemy, based of course on their own self-appointed judgement of what could be said. Free speech? Nah.

For the public all this debate is behind the scenes. They deserve better. Now read the BBC LA fires report again in the light of what I have written.