The story of climate change activist Jo Abess bullying BBC reporter Roger Harrabin into altering a story about global temperatures not rising since 1998 has broken into the mainstream media.
The UK weekly magazine The Spectator mentions it in its latest issue.
Discussing claims global temperatures are falling, columnist Melanie Phillips (or Clive Davis, whose name was originally on the web version) says: “Now, you may not know about this sudden deadly chill in the MMGW atmosphere because the BBC hasn’t told you. To be more precise, it did try to report this — but then appears to have altered its report under pressure from a global warming activist.”
The article goes on to report the email exchange between Abess and Roger Harrabin I wrote about on Wednesday, including her curious statement that climate change is “an emerging truth” and sceptical views were better not reported.
“It’s an emerging truth all right,” Phillips concludes. “But not quite the one Jo Abbess had in mind.”
Meanwhile, I have had no response to my emails to Roger Harrabin seeking his comment on the Jo Abess issue. I hope he is just lying low and is not in trouble. Before this broke, he had replied promptly to my emails asking why his original story was altered.
Update 8am: The Spectator website now has this update from “a publicist for BBC News”: A minor change was made to the ‘Global temperatures “to decrease” ’ piece on our website to better reflect the science. A few people including the report’s authors, the World Meteorological Organisation, pointed out to us that the earlier version had been ambiguous. This is pretty much what Roger Harrabin told me on Sunday, and sidesteps, nay, ignores, the questions raised by the Jo Abess email trail.
13 Comments
April 11, 2008 at 7:50 am
The article in the Spectator is actually by Melanie Phillips
April 11, 2008 at 8:29 am
If something has been written by Melanie Phillips, it’s pretty much the kiss of death for anyone taking the subject seriously.
[Poneke says: I certainly wasn't endorsing the article's science, just citing it as the first mainstream media reporting of the Jo Abess - Roger Harrabin issue, which till now has been confined to the blogosphere.]
April 11, 2008 at 9:02 am
I just can’t get past the idea of the economists at the UK treasury publishing a paper by an Australian geologist making claims about the nature of future solar cycles out to 2050 when no solar physicist would claim that knowledge.
[Poneke says: Plenty of people get past the idea of lots of people making claims about the nature of global temperature cycles out to 2050 and even 2100, and in fact hold the claims up as holy grail.]
April 11, 2008 at 10:15 am
Correction; I miss read it, Archibald was forecasting out to 2020, not 2050.
Solar physicists aren’t claiming to know the sun well enough to much accurate forecasts even that far ahead though.
Poneke, such global temperature “forecasts” are based on radiation physics and made by climate scientists with strong backgrounds in physics. solar physicists know they don’t know the sun well enough to predict another Dalton minimum.
April 11, 2008 at 10:30 am
Poneke says: I certainly wasn’t endorsing the article’s science …
Just as well, really, given that its opening sentence (”There is now unequivocal evidence that the temperature of the planet is dropping like a stone”) doesn’t have a lot to do with science.
April 11, 2008 at 10:40 am
This is pretty much what Roger Harrabin told me on Sunday, and sidesteps, nay, ignores, the questions raised by the Jo Abess email trail.
If the story was in fact beefed up as a result of feedback from the authors of the report it was quoting, it does seem to leave us relying on Abess’ own claim that it was her doing, doesn’t it?
[Poneke says: The emails that Abess posted are pretty devastating, actually. They speak for themselves. I am still hoping that Roger Harrabin will come back with some context.]
April 11, 2008 at 3:18 pm
As a prelude to launching into a debate about climate change, this video is a must-see. Watch with open mind.
April 11, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Poneke – you’ve shown a climate change activist bullying a BBC reporter.
You’ve shown a story being changed.
You have *not* shown a climate change activist bullying a BBC reporter into altering a story. There is only very weak circumstantial evidence to this claim, which you have made in three successive posts on the issue.
This claim is ludicrous on its face – a few emails from Jo Civilian were enough to make a reporter go and make changes? As a journalist, would that have ever been enough to make *you* react like that?
Moreover, in this very post you mention a counter-narrative that is, surely, far more compelling – that *the authors of the report* asked the BBC reporter to alter the story.
Leaving aside the climate change stuff entirely, do you agree that the authors of the report and one activist approached the BBC reporter seeking changes? If you do, why on earth do you continue to claim that the activist is responsible?
[Poneke says: Morgue, the emails speak for themselves. How you wish to interpret them is entirely over to you.]
April 12, 2008 at 1:09 am
“Just as well, really, given that its opening sentence (”There is now unequivocal evidence that the temperature of the planet is dropping like a stone”) doesn’t have a lot to do with science.”
The “dropping like a stone” claim is rather ironic given that this saga centres on the BBC changing the word “dip” to “decrease”. So leaving aside the issue of apparent bullying by an AGW activist, I think what we have here is a standard pro/anti-AGW clash against a backdrop of human desire, language and journalistic values.
Take two headlines from my morning paper: “Drunken youths flood into hospital”; “Frozen funds’ value plunges”. In the first case, over the past year 600 youths were admitted to the emergency department of the local hospital for intoxication or alcohol-related injuries. That’s around a dozen or so a week. A flood? Perhaps, but the sub-text is more likely: parents, be very worried.
In the second case, the value of some investor funds fell 11 percent over several weeks. A plunge? I suppose if you’re an investor it counts as a plunge, in which case the sub-text is: investors beware.
In a non-AGW world, one could speak without controversy about temperatures “dropping like a stone”, just as we say ‘it’s freezing cold today’ even though the temperature might be well above actual freezing. The listener understands and the hyperbole is unremarked.
But against the backdrop of an issue such as AGW, weighted as it is with human emotion, phrases describing the weather/climate become freighted with additional meaning. So a journalist who cares about accuracy will dither over ‘dip’ vs ‘decrease’.
And while it is not strictly incorrect to say that global temperatures have not risen since 1998, it is also not strictly incorrect to say that global temperatures have risen since 1999. These statements have some connection to reality, but neither counts as a scientific claim about AGW. They more accurately describe the intent of the speaker.
And this can also be seen if we take literally the claim that “the temperature of the planet is dropping like a stone”. The ultimate destination of a falling stone is ‘rock bottom’, but I don’t think the Spectator is claiming that global temperatures are in free-fall. Rather, the sub-text is: payback, or as stated elsewhere, “…the most awesome and glorious Rubbing-It-In-Your-Face movement in living memory. We have waited a long time for this…” (I like that “we”.)
On reading revenge fantasies such as this, I remind myself that schadenfreude is a brief pleasure, but science is a long game.
April 12, 2008 at 2:15 am
Poneke said [Morgue, the emails speak for themselves. How you wish to interpret them is entirely over to you.]
I think you misunderstand what I’m trying to say.
Isn’t it possible that the report’s authors were the ones who convinced Harrabin to make changes?
Why do you prefer to believe Jo Abess’s grandiose claim of responsibility?
April 12, 2008 at 4:20 am
Temperature change has become a hot issue of concern and politics. Just hope man will find a good way around the trouble.
April 12, 2008 at 5:49 am
Read the email exchange. The BBC has confirmed the emails are genuine, in which case…it’s pretty devastating to Harrabin’s credibility.
April 13, 2008 at 2:03 pm
There is nothing going on that has anything to do with Harrabin’s credibility.
But as perhaps an endpiece to this all comes from Harrabin : “Among my e-mail exchanges was one with an environmental campaigner who published our e-mails implying that we had changed our article as a result of her threat to publicly criticise our report. We didn’t change it for that reason. We changed it to improve the piece. But we’ve stirred the wrath of some of our readers as a result.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/