There are a couple of reasons why I'm not doing so at the moment.
Firstly, as regular readers will know, we work in a somewhat co-operative way here and if Roger Harrabin, Paul Hudson, Martin Rosenbaum and others are working on this story it's likely I'll be working on something else - as I have been, on climate change relating to the US and to Africa. We know what a scandal it is when the BBC sends more than one reporter to cover a story...
Secondly, it's not really BBC practice for correspondents simply to comment, as opposed to analyse. It's quite appropriate for columnists and bloggers working for commercial publications so to do - it's what they're employed for, and sometimes the louder they shout the more they get paid - but the BBC has obligations on impartiality and balance and so on that other news providers do not. As of now, I do not see much scope for analysis beyond what Roger and other colleagues have written. That may change, of course.
One general point I could make - and some of you will hate this, but there it is - is just to urge appropriate scepticism when looking at the material that's been posted on various websites. Much of it is available in excerpts only, is of undisclosed provenance, and often we're seeing one component of what was obviously a much bigger e-mail chain. I raise again the Journal of Geoclimatic Studies episode as a cautionary tale. Jack_Hughes_NZ, you ask why I use the word "stolen" and suggest the e-mails may have been leaked. The university is quite adamant that they were hacked - ie stolen - and I haven't seen any evidence (as opposed to assertions) to the contrary. If you have such evidence, please let me know - it would be a public service. If you have information that you're not willing to post publicly - well, my e-mail address is on the bottom of my news articles - discretion assured.
Some of the other comments have, to be honest, been more than mildly offensive. The only observation I would make is: if you think that's the way to persuade people you have a point worth listening to - well, best of luck with that strategy.
A couple of other points. mattiebl, I spoke with Piers Corbyn by phone afterwards to confirm my notes on this. In your previous comment you're putting words into my mouth. HumanityRules, I don't think anyone who's looked at this seriously would expect climate (or even climate change) to be explained by a single idea. But certain combinations of ideas are mutually exclusive. Roy Spencer sees a role for greenhouse gases, Piers Corbyn doesn't - they can't both be right.
As quite a few of you have pointed out, there is a fair bit of "shooting the messenger" going on here and while all's fair in love, war and bloggery, I'm not sure what some of you really want. You castigate us for not covering overtly "sceptical" issues - then when we do cover one, you complain it's the wrong one (diggerjock, BishopHill - diggerjock clearly missing the several articles I've written relating to the Svensmark theory, see for example here). As Muddy Waters put it: I Just Can't Be Satisfied... And frankly, I think that when we're getting to the level of suspicions being raised about why someone chooses to sit in a particular seat there's a case for sitting back, taking a deep breath and smelling the coffee. Thanks for your comments on this issue John_from_Hendon and you are absolutely right I think about the irrelevance of a reporter's personal opinions. Although that's just my personal opinion...
simon-swede, I don't know why the paper hasn't been submitted yet.
There seems to be a bit of confusion around about ocean acidification and thanks, eddhind, for clarifying it. Just to amplify; the seawater doesn't have to become acidic enough to corrode organisms, it doesn't even have to be on the acidic side of neutral at all. If organisms need a certain level of alkalinity to form their shells, then they'll be impacted when the alkalinity falls below that level. As a simple analogy, how well would your digestive system work if you could neutralise the pH in your stomach? Not too well - it needs a certain range of pH, but that range isn't close to neutral. More here.
It's worth pointing out that coral scientists do not see warming oceans or acidification as the only causes of reef decline - over-fishing, local pollution, invasive species and others are cited alongside warming and acidifying water.
For personal reasons I'm not going to be in a position to post for a few days now, but I'll get back on the thread eventually.
I don't recognise the description you cite, to be honest. And I love the line "The BBC sent two employees".. Roger and I both proposed going - no-one asked us, ordered us, or even directed us remotely using neural implants.
And thanks to you and to mrgrump for providing a neat example of how two pairs of eyes can see diametrically opposed things in the same piece of text. To one, I appear to be a "sceptic" - to the other, I apparently believe "we can change the climate by changing the way we live". Best brush up on the mind-reading, chaps...
But this thread isn't about me, it isn't about the BBC, it's about what purports to be a new theory of climate change... shall we stick to that?
You may have seen the recent Guardian blog post by climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf on BBC "bias". In Stefan's last paragraph he says that on this blog I have argued that if BBC reporting "gets criticised equally from both sides, it must be about right". I pointed out that this blog has not said the BBC gets criticised equally from "both sides", that any notion of there being just two sides is not accurate, and that I didn't say equal criticism from both sides makes everything alright. As you'll see at the end, The Guardian has made a correction, for which thanks.
Let me have a final stab, then, at some of your comments. As to how many people have been reading the thread, Bryn_hill, I don't have an exact figure - last week, between 10,000 and 15,000 people access the blog each day, I'm told by our blogs team.
PAWB46, I'm really stumped by you asking this question. What do we think scientific evidence is? How can there be a mystery? Evidence is published every week in its reams in journals; it's announced in conferences, and sometimes by other methods. It is catholic in its nature.
I've commented on this before, but let me go through it again. To me, the assertion that "there is no evidence for CO2 causing global warming" is so clearly and obviously wrong that I am absolutely amazed anyone can make it. There is evidence filling up journals and conferences every week, and there's probably not a single field of science where the data has so much scrutiny.
What I think you mean - and what I think you should say - is that you have seen no evidence that you find convincing. That, I think, is eminently defensible, as anyone is perfectly entitled to read and evaluate evidence any way they want.
The sea level rise issue raised first (I think) by LabMunkey has been thrashed around a bit so I'll just make two points.
Firstly, this is one area where there are real, on-the-ground (or in the sea, anyway) measurements being made in a lot of places round the world. So unless you think all the scientists running tide gauges and so on are either terminally incompetent or corrupt, there's no real reason to dispute the picture we have of sea level rise. The second thing is that the IPCC is explicit in its recognition that the AR4 projections of sea level rise were almost certainly too low, because the physical understanding of accelerated ice sheet melt was too poor to model and so could not be included, even though it was likely to be "significant".
pogo50, I've dealt with the fact that our index includes both science and environment, and that environment is acknowledged to be more than science, in a previous comment.
Looking at the Copenhagen Q&A, oldgifford, you ask: where is the balancing statement that many distinguished scientists are increasingly dissenting from the IPCC view?
It's not there because I do not find it to be true. If by "dissenting" you mean those who - such as Mojib Latif and Noel Keenlyside - project that a period of stable temperatures or even a slight cooling is on the way, they certainly do not dissent from AGW in general. If you mean those who do seriously dispute the entire basis of AGW - well, I don't recognise the picture you paint. And please don't bother posting links to this petition or that declaration - yes, I do know about them, and also about the cautions that have been made on the qualifications of those on the lists.
Clearly, HaloBurn, not every article on climate change we produce is based on peer-reviewed science. That would disallow all of the political articles, to start with, as the political sphere tends to work in other ways (which might or might not include smoke and mirrors). Even within climate science, not everything is based on peer-reviewed papers - and there are many peer-reviewed papers, of course, that do not make news articles.
Sometimes it is necessary to write things up because of some event or announcement. And sometimes it's necessary to revisit that afterwards (there's a good example of this right now with the HIV vaccine trial that ended recently in Thailand, where initial results appeared promising but more detailed analysis is suggesting a less optimistic picture). So long as the reader knows the status of the research - published or not, preliminary finding or something more substantial, etc - what's the problem? We have to assume readers are smart enough to make their own judgements.
I'm going to have to swap formats for referencing comments now. For some reason when I try to pick up the URL for comments after #500 it's taking me back to the original post. I don't think it's a sign of bias, though of course that's for the beholder to judge...
So: LabMunkey #504 - thanks for your appreciative comment. It's good to read.
The belief that the IPCC is heavily politicised appears to be fairly widely held but it isn't really one that I recognise. Scientists and economists that I've chatted with at IPCC meetings - and I've chatted with many - do not feel they are forced into writing what they write by government delegates who attend the final week of deliberations whence the Summaries for Policymakers emanate. At one of the 2007 meetings there was a walkout by at least one of the lead authors on the final night - she felt some governments were trying to water down scientists' projections of impacts (note - if this was political interference, it was in a "sceptical" direction) - but she was happy with the eventual language, as was just about every other delegate I've spoken to.
In contrast to the impression sometimes given that scientists are helpless lackeys so dependent on grant income that they have to doff their caps to the government line without whimper, most are anything but; independent-minded and argumentative would be a better blanket description. So I can see where the accusation comes from - and John Christy, a scientist involved with several of the organisation's reports, has written about his experiences on this website - but the overall picture of a politicised organisation is not one I have found personally to have much basis in fact.
In any case, if you believe governments shape the IPCC reports to suit their own ends, you have to explain how it is that the US under George W Bush, Australia under John Howard and oil states such as Saudi Arabia endorsed the reports when the clear political consequence of doing so was that they were backing the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
That said, as a journalist one should not assume (and I do not) that everything the IPCC does is glowing and wonderful. Eyes must always be kept open.
On your final point - the BBC doesn't have "in-house specialists" on climate change in the sense of employing scientists - as we don't employ surgeons or astronauts or anthropologists or any other specialists in such fields. Knowledge helps; but journalists can and do have to write about subjects they are not immediately familiar with. That involves several skills, the most important of which is knowing the extent of your own ignorance.
MangoChutneyUKOK #505: I too look forward to the CLOUD experiment beginning, and to what it may find. But I think it's worth pointing out that even if CLOUD does demonstrate that cosmic rays can affect cloud formation through nucleation, that will not prove it is a major determinant of climate change in the real world.
On the "signature" of warming: you might disagree with the IPCC view on this, but I don't think you'd dispute that this is their view.
JaneBasingstoke #506: you're absolutely correct, and you could also bring in the fact that the NASA-GISS dataset yields a different conclusion as well about which was the hottest year.
Thanks for your proverb, ghostofsichuan #512; sometimes, though, the mother has to come into the open and take whatever arrows might come her way...
yertizz #516, I'm not sure why you think the "sceptical" voice is bring censored on BBC television. A TV version of Paul Hudson's report was, I'm told, broadcast on The Politics Show on BBC One (the main BBC national channel, for readers outside the country).
And TV more important than the web? Dude, come into the 21st Century...
toughNeilHyde #534, once again I refer you to the BBC Trust report on impartiality. Once again, I refer you to the MMR saga. Once again, I point out that there are not just "two sides" to climate science, but a nuanced field. I do not understand why these things are so hard to grasp - unless you're simply saying that anything that does not reflect your personal stance (bias?) must be biased.
I'm going to ask you, Neil, and yertizz #563 to do something. You both write, in terms that brook no discussion and admit of no shades of grey, that the BBC is biased against "scepticism". So please - if the bias is here rather than just in your eyes, tell me how others can look at our output and come to the conclusion that we are biased in the "sceptical" direction? Would you do that?
carboncoach #535, I have no idea how I'll look back on things in 15 years time. Regrets? I already have quite a few...
Like you, grumpy-mike #531, I thought we might have broken a record with 500+ comments here... until our blogs editor alerted me to one that broke the 13,000 barrier. Mind, for me that wasn't so much a blog as a survey, so I reckon we've done pretty well.
Thanks too for your kind comments at #538. You're absolutely right to flag up the precautionary principle - it is something that influences governments in climate change, no doubt about it. What does "precautionary" mean in this context? One simple approach might be looking at the high end of the IPCC projections and seeing where that would leave the world if it turned out to be true.
Sparklet #546, this is one canard that I think can be laid to rest quite easily.
Back in 2007, I ran a series of articles on climate "scepticism" and "catastrophism". Intrigued by this notion that there might be a legion of "sceptical" scientists out there who were having trouble getting things published because their conclusions didn't tally with the orthodoxy, I wrote an article asking people to tell me about their experiences of this, either on an attributable or non-attributable basis. The article went round the blogosphere and more than 100 people wrote back.
When the time came to analyse the responses, I wrote:
Given the fury evidenced by sceptical commentators, I was expecting a deluge.
I anticipated drowning in a torrent of accusations of research grants turned down, membership of the IPCC denied, scientific papers refused by journals, job applications refused, and invitations to speak at conferences drying up.
I anticipated having to spend days, weeks, months even, sifting the wheat from the chaff, going backwards and forwards between journal editors, heads of department, conference organisers, funding bodies and the original plaintiffs.
The reality was rather different.
In a nutshell, five people complained of bias. One concerned a magazine article rather than a piece of research for a journal; one was a seriously incomplete paper; one was a paper endorsing AGW, from a scientist who said the bias was in a "pro-sceptic" direction; and the fourth respondent didn't want to send me the paper as he was preparing. he said, to submit it to another journal.
Only the fifth of those e-mails concerned real "sceptical" science; but as the scientist writing in hadn't kept his rejection letters, it was impossible to follow it up.
"The difficulties sceptics are experiencing in getting their views published in peer-reviewed journals", Sparklet? I don't think so; quite apart from the fact that peer-reviewed journals are principally there to publish scientific advances, not views.
PAWB46 #556, I've already answered this point. If you can't see that some of the environmental NGOs are well-informed on the politics of making this deal, I honestly don't know what to tell you.
LabMunkey #562, you mention (correctly) that a hypothesis may take 100 scientific papers to become established, but only one may be needed to disprove it. But in the climate sphere - as in many others - it's a bit more complex than that. Different ways of trying to measure the same phenomenon can produce different answers. So when you post a link to a paper suggesting Antarctica is accumulating ice, someone else can point to papers suggesting it - or at least certain bits of it - is losing ice. This kind of science is evolving fast. But as journalists, we have to report the advances - often, as noted above, with the proper caveats as to the state of the science.
NiceLinesGiddo #575, it's simple. Most of the funding for scientists researching climate change comes from governments, through one route or another. In the UK, a large proportion goes through the various research councils, in particular NERC. Many journals now require scientists to detail their sources of funding on their scientific papers.
omnologos #580, I'm impressed by the rigour of your structuralist approach to journalism. But I'm not sure what it proves. Can you tell me why space for "climate scepticism" was needed in the article? Through its endorsement of the IPCC reports, the Japanese government has accepted AGW as a reality. Its government presents the policy as something that can tackle AGW. No player in the whole picture is saying AGW isn't real, or doesn't need tackling - no-one. So I should introduce a random "sceptic" voice saying "AGW is a myth and sea levels are falling and we're heading for an ice age" (or whatever)? Really? That would be relevant to the political development how, exactly?
Phew. As I said at the start of this comment, this is it from me, although the thread remains open until the internet fills up (that's a joke btw). Thanks everyone who's written. Realistically, it is unlikely that I'll have the time to comment on any entry in anything like this detail in future... but given the importance of the issues that sparked it off, I hope it's been worthwhile.