Media cools on global warming

Climate-change sceptics are being vindicated by scientific scandals that are no longer being ignored

LAST weekend looks likely to have been a tipping point in the media debate on climate change in the English-speaking world.

The two daily papers in Britain which have campaigned most single-mindedly on the urgent need for action on man-made global warming have begun to change their tune.

The Independent's environment editor, Michael McCarthy, filed a piece under the head "Professor in leaked email scandal tried to hide fact that numbers he used were wrong". Previously The Independent has been underwhelmed by revelations arising out of Climategate, the hacking of computer files from the University of East Anglia's climate research unit.

But the evidence of suppressing data and trying to sideline freedom of information requests has called into question research findings which are fundamental to modern climatology.

Phil Jones, the suspended head of the East Anglia climate unit, collaborated with Wei-Chyung Wang on a major paper in Nature magazine on the urban heat island effect in 1990. Human activity and machinery emit heat, concrete and buildings store it. They found that urban developments near weather stations had had a negligible effect on the temperature increases recorded.

A lot of supposedly settled science rests on the assumption that we can rely on the integrity of the temperature record as presented, which explains why the issue has been pivotal for true believers in British journalism. McCarthy wrote: "It has been reported that when climate sceptics asked for the precise location of 84 stations, Jones at first declined to release the details. And when eventually he did release them, it was found that for the ones supposed to be in the countryside, there was no location given."

The only British newspaper more intensely committed to the theory of man-made global warming than The Independent is The Guardian. Its environment correspondent, Fred Pearce, took the story a step further.

He wrote: "The history of where the weather stations were sited was crucial to Jones's and Wang's study, as it concluded the rising temperatures recorded in China were the result of global climate changes rather than the warming effects of expanding cities . . . Wang said: `When we started on the paper we had all the station location details in order to identify our network, but we cannot find them any more'."

In journalism this is usually referred to as "the-dog-ate-my-homework" excuse and that's clearly how Pearce views Wang's response.

He also quotes tellingly from one of the Climategate emails to Jones, which he once disdained. It was from Tom Wigley, an East Anglia colleague of Jones who harboured misgivings about the Nature paper. "Were you taking W-C W (Wang) on trust? Why, why, why did you and W-C W not simply say this right at the start?"

What makes these stories remarkable is less the content than the sources. Since about 2004 neither paper has previously displayed any intellectual curiosity over the possibility that the global warming paradigm might be open to question. Nor have they given balanced coverage to problems like "the hockey stick graph", a statistical trick that purported to abolish the medieval warming period.

It may be that the papers are testing the waters with a view to a more nuanced approach to unfolding evidence.

Alternatively, their editors may have concluded that not covering fresh facts that don't fit the theory is a sure-fire way of losing readers and reputation. Asked about The Guardian's change of tack, a spokesman said: "The Guardian editorial line is that global warming is happening and caused by human activities, but that does not mean we are blind to contradictory evidence.

"It would be remiss of us journalistically to ignore a story like this where the actions of leading scientists are being seriously called into question. We asked Fred to do a thorough investigation into some of the unanswered questions."

On the domestic front, the collapse of Copenhagen and the catalogue of embarrassments for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have seen a number of unexpected developments in the past fortnight.

Melbourne ABC Radio's Jon Faine, who flatly refused to discuss Climategate on the grounds that it was unimportant, interviewed the visiting English campaigner, Christopher Monckton.

Another true believer institution in Melbourne, The Age, for the first time in recent memory carried a sceptical piece in its op-ed pages by John Carroll.

In The Australian Financial Review, Laura Tingle allowed that the Rudd government's handling of the politics of climate change might have been overtaken by events. "On first appearances, you'd think that it all looks pretty depressing for the government. It's stuck with an ETS that almost everybody has now dumped on, even if they don't understand it (or in some cases because they do). It has stuck its colours to the mast of international co-operation and harmony, which has evaporated and become discredited."

In The Age, Michelle Grattan's commentary took a sudden, sibylline turn. "The warming Earth and Australia's expanding population are forcing the policy makers to lift their eyes beyond the short term. Admittedly, things change so quickly that trends can alter, and what we think now about some issues could be at odds with how people view them 40 years on." I may be reading too much into that gnomic second sentence, but it sounds like a preface to thinking the unthinkable; that the apocalyptic tide which threatened to inundate us may in fact be receding.

The ever-pragmatic Alan Kohler cut to the chase in Business Spectator with a summary of the main thrust of the Coalition's climate change policy and a comparison with the ETS. "The Coalition is proposing to pay the Latrobe Valley companies to convert from brown coal to gas . . . The Coalition's policy will have the benefit of being small and targeted, while the government's will have the benefit of being big enough to generate cash for a lot more voters than those living in the Latrobe Valley. But while the government's scheme used to have the benefit of being an ETS, in line with the global movement towards emissions trading, that movement has now stalled. If that global process doesn't restart soon, the government will be a shag on a rock with a new tax round its neck."

Tuesday's Newspoll, which unsettled the government and encouraged the opposition, is further evidence that while the nation was notionally on holidays the IPCC's credibility problems had not gone unnoticed. Since Tony Abbott's rise to the leadership and the rejection of the ETS, the ALP's primary vote has fallen three percentage points (to 40), its two-party preferred vote has fallen four points ( to 52) and dissatisfaction with Kevin Rudd has risen six points (to a high of 38 points).

In the past week the Prime Minister has made veiled threats about the option of a double dissolution and an election which would be at least in part a referendum on the ETS. Publicly and privately Abbott has welcomed the prospect, because opposition to the ETS is what has suddenly brought the Coalition back into serious contention.

Early elections are problematical at the best of times, because they suggest a government with the jitters. An election that might end up overlapping with Abbott's opinion poll honeymoon would be folly.

I expect an August or September poll in which, if the government has its way, the ETS will play a relatively minor part. Since Rudd and Penny Wong have clearly decided that their scheme is too hard to explain, and one of the main attractions of the Coalition's is that it's easy to grasp, it's likely that the election will be fought on more familiar turf.