BBC Africa climb down over bogus temperature spike

[marchesarosa]

The BBC has been forced into an embarrassing climbdown over climate change claims made in Sir David Attenborough’s groundbreaking Africa series. In the last episode of the series, entitled ‘Future’, Sir David discussed the challenges facing the region.

Speaking over footage of Mount Kilimanjaro, Sir David made the assertion that ‘some parts of the continent have become 3.5C hotter in the past 20 years’. However, figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that since 1850 global temperatures have risen by 0.76C....

The comment, first broadcast in the final episode of the Africa series last Wednesday, was removed from Sunday night’s repeat of the show.

A BBC spokesman said: ‘There is widespread acknowledgement within the scientific community that the climate of Africa has been changing as stated in the programme.

‘We accept the evidence for 3.5 degreesC increase is disputable and the commentary should have reflected that...Therefore that line has been removed from Sunday’s repeat and the iPlayer version replaced.’

The BBC initially defended the claim, saying it was taken from a report by Oxfam and the New Economics Foundation, but in turn this report suggested the figure had come from a report by Christian Aid. The BBC says the mistake was made by researchers, and not the presenter.

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2276888/BBC-climbdown-climate-change-claims-David-Attenboroughs-Africa.html#ixzz2KhjWsC3A
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2276888/BBC-climbdown-climate-change-claims-David-Attenboroughs-Africa.html


Well if the 3.5 degreesC figure had come from such respected scientific organisations like Oxfam, The New Economics Foundation and Christian Aid, I can fully understand why the BBC believed them.
Shame on the denialist viewers who complained.
they must all be in the pay of “Big Oil”

courtesy of WUWT
wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/12/bbc-edits-out-climate-warming-data-in-climbdown/#more-79445

[visitor]

The phrases "some parts of the continent have become 3.5C hotter in the past 20 years" and "since 1850 global temperatures have risen by 0.76C" are not mutually exclusive.

[marchesarosa]

Of course not, but you know how gullible the average viewer, is visitor, unlike you with your PhD in an -ology! Think of poor Aubrey!

I dare say other parts of Africa are cooling down so the purportedly scary changes probably average out to sod all.

But why spoil a nice alarmist tale with details like this?

[ncsonde]

Feb 12, 2013 16:49:41 GMT visitor said:

The phrases "some parts of the continent have become 3.5C hotter in the past 20 years" and "since 1850 global temperatures have risen by 0.76C" are not mutually exclusive.

They are, actually. The second may well be true, and therefore a fact. The first is a falsehood, and therefore can't be.

[aubrey]

I dare say other parts of Africa are cooling down

That "I dare say" is a very scientific phrase, isn't it? I dossn't, missen.

[marchesarosa]

Lies are OK if you "believe", eh, aubrey?

Just like horse meat is beef?

How very broad minded of you!

[marchesarosa]

Donna Laframboise, in her usual thorough way, gets to the bottom of this particular canard about a 3.5 degreesC temperature rise in Africa over a mere 20 years here nofrakkingconsensus.com/2013/02/13/the-workshop-presentation-that-never-was/

The BBC African temperature exaggeration is worse that we thought. It also has an IPCC connection.

The BBC now has egg on its face. As Leo Hickman at the Guardian explains, a television show narrated by David Attenborough recently claimed that:

Some parts of the [African] continent have become 3.5C hotter in the past 20 years.

Hickman is no climate skeptic, but even his radar went off. After some investigation he discovered that, in 2006, a collection of pressure groups had published a report titled Africa – Up in smoke 2. It relied on another, 48-page document, titled Climate of Poverty produced by the UK charity, Christian Aid.

This charity believes that the poor “are already suffering disproportionately from the effects of global warming” and that “No other single issue presents such a clear and present danger to the future welfare of the world’s poor.” (See Ben Pile’s brilliant rebuttal of those sorts of arguments here.)
Page 32 of the PDF version of Climate of Poverty contains the following statements:

Kenya is getting warmer. This is confirmed by measurements on the ground. For example, the maximum temperature in Kericho, a highland area in the Rift Valley province where most of Kenya’s tea exports are grown, has increased by 3.5C during the past 20 years.

Readers interested in the source of that claim are directed to endnote #3 of the Kenya chapter. Appearing on page 45 of the PDF, it reads:

S Wandiga, ‘Assessment of the Impact and Adaptation to Climate Change’, AIACC Regional Workshop, Dakar, 23 March 2004.

In other words, the alarming info about temperatures in Kericho came from a presentation made at a workshop. Except that it didn’t.

For starters, the webpage devoted to that 4-day workshop says it hadn’t yet begun on March 23. It says that Shem Wandiga, a professor of chemistry, chaired a session on March 24th, during which other people made presentations. It says the talk he himself delivered three days later had a different title: Community stakeholders’ discussions and workshops in the Lake Victoria Region.

You can read the abstract here and the PowerPoint presentation here. Neither mentions temperatures in Kericho. Instead, this is a discussion about what people in focus groups said about “climate-induced malaria and cholera.”

In other words, the Christian Aid citation is utterly bogus. No presentation by that name was delivered by that person at that workshop.

On page 16 of Wandiga’s CV, under the heading Research Accomplishments, we learn that he was involved in an “Assessment of Impact and Adaptation to Climate Change.” He says he was the

Principal investigator in project called “Capacity building to evaluate and adapt to climate-change-induced vulnerability to malaria and cholera in the Lake Victoria Region.”

That sounds more like social work than chemistry, but never mind.

Yesterday, Christian Aid issued a statement that Hickman has added to the bottom of his account. The charity has now changed its story. It says it got its information about the Kericho temperature rise not from a 2004 workshop but from interviews it conducted with experts who were interpreting research published in 2006. Here’s a direct quote:

The statistic suggesting the maximum temperature in Kericho, Kenya had risen by more than 3 degrees from the year 1978 – 2001 was included in good faith in Christian Aid’s 2006 report The Climate of Poverty.
It was based on interviews with Kenya academics who in turn based their remarks on a peer reviewed report Vulnerability to climate induced highland malaria in East Africa (P7,11 and 41) by Assessments of Impacts and Adaptations to Climate Change (AIACC), which put the temperature rise at 3.6 degrees.”

Even charities these days won’t acknowledge when they’ve made a mistake. Instead, they blithely substitute a 2006 citation for a fake 2004 citation as if that sort of thing happens every day. No big deal. All in good faith, don’t you know.

Christian Aid now wants us to take the word of unnamed “Kenyan academics” that they’ve interpreted a 2006 “peer reviewed report” correctly. Except that this research has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It is a Working Paper. Its publisher, as Christian Aid tells us, is an organization called Assessments of Impacts and Adaptations to Climate Change project (AIACC).

The AIACC is the brainchild of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One of its stated purposes is to encourage research in developing countries that might eventually be published in peer-reviewed journals.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the AIACC’s About Page, you’ll find a steering committee that includes IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, the former IPCC chairman Robert Watson, and many other familiar names.

So after citing an imaginary source, Christian Aid now rests its case on research that came into the world via the IPCC.

To recap, then, in 2006 Christian Aid released a report that contained a startling claim about a temperature spike in Kenya. The source it cited was entirely bogus. Nevertheless, the claim got repeated. The Church of Sweden, for example, released a climate change report in 2007 that told us about this temperature spike and directly cited the non-existent 2004 source (see page 12).

Another report, titled Africa – Up in smoke 2, also repeated the claim (see page five). Its lead author, John Magrath of Oxfam, didn’t independently verify the info. He simply assumed that the Christian Aid authors knew what they were talking about.

Later, the temperature claim made it onto page two of a 2009 brochure under the subheading Evidence of climate change in Africa. Those authors didn’t check the facts, either. They used the Africa – Up in Smoke 2 report as their source.

And then the BBC got in on the act. Like the brochure authors, the BBC relied on the Africa – Up in Smoke 2 report even though that document is miles away from being peer-reviewed science.

The fact that Africa – Up in Smoke 2 was written by Oxfam and funded by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund and other pressure groups should have been a warning to BBC personnel.

But it wasn’t. Some lessons, it seems, need to be learned the hard way.

..........
See Donna's original article for all the links.

[ncsonde]

This sort of bandying about of absurdly inflated figures by the global warming lobby is very common - it's getting increasingly so the more desperate they get, it seems to me. Take this casual aside by Stefan Rahmstorf to his gullible cohorts on RealClimate:

I just got back from central British Columbia, which has warmed about 3 C in the last 50 years...


According to BC's Ministry of Environment, the average temp of inland BC warmed by 1.1 C between 1895 and 1995. Unless the temp there has suddenly rocketed by 2 degrees in the past 15 years, when the rest of the world's temperature has been in stasis, I'd say he's just casually made this figure up out of his head. This guy advises the government of Germany on climate change.

And then yesterday Tony Robinson was digging in a cave on the Scottish coast, looking for evidence of Picts that might have lived there sometime back when. He earnestly informed us something along the lines of: "We have to do this quickly because sea level rises means this and many other vitally important sites around our coasts will soon be gone forever. This may be the last time we can ever dig in this cave."

[marchesarosa]

When unadjusted pristine rural sites are used to provide the global data on temperature change over the last century, say, there is very little increase at all. The rest of the GHCN network are mainly in urban locations or at airports therefore totally untypical and incapable of representing the true background temperature.

One would have thought these facts would have begun to have some impact on the debate by now, wouldn't you?

[marchesarosa]

Alaska underwent a step change upward in its temperature when the Pacific Decadal Oscillation underwent one of its periodic changes in 1976. It is called The Great Pacific Climate Shift.

The Significance of the 1976 Pacific Climate Shift in the Climatology of Alaska
BRIAN HARTMANN AND GERD WENDLER
Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska
(Manuscript received 20 April 2004, in final form 25 February 2005)

ABSTRACT The 1976 Pacific climate shift is examined, and its manifestations and significance in Alaskan climatology during the last half-century are demonstrated. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation index shifted in 1976 from dominantly negative values for the 25-yr time period 1951–75 to dominantly positive values for the period 1977–2001.
Mean annual and seasonal temperatures for the positive phase were up to 3.1°C higher than for the negative phase. Likewise, mean cloudiness, wind speeds, and precipitation amounts increased, while mean sea level pressure and geopotential heights decreased. The pressure decrease resulted in a deepening of the Aleutian low in winter and spring. The intensification of the Aleutian low increased the advection of relatively warm and moist air to Alaska and storminess over the state during winter and spring.

The regime shift is also examined for its effect on the long-term temperature trends throughout the state. The trends that have shown climatic warming are strongly biased by the sudden shift in 1976 from the cooler regime to a warmer regime. When analyzing the total time period from 1951 to 2001, warming is observed; however, the 25-yr period trend analyses before 1976 (1951–75) and thereafter (1977–2001) both display cooling, with a few exceptions. In this paper, emphasis is placed on the importance of taking into account the sudden changes that result from abrupt climatic shifts, persistent regimes, and the possibility of cyclic oscillations, such as the PDO, in the analysis of long-term climate change in Alaska.

[/left]

climate.gi.alaska.edu/researchprojects/hartmann%20and%20wendler%202005.pdf


Although the Pacific decade Oscillation and El Nino/La Nina phenomena are now understood to have an impact on global temperature trends marked regional changes occur as a result of them. It is wrong to attribute these stark regional effects to mankind when it is the NATURAL variability of the worlds oceans which are the main means by which variations in sunshine reaching the earth's equator, thanks to cloud cover changes, are spread around the globe.

Sun, clouds and ocean about sum up the causes of temperature change. Fossil fuel burning is an also ran.

[visitor]

Feb 17, 2013 1:49:01 GMT marchesarosa said:

When unadjusted pristine rural sites are used to provide the global data on temperature change over the last century, say, there is very little increase at all.

This is simply not true.

ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/papers/hausfather-etal2013.pdf

"An assessment quantifying the impact of urbanization on temperature trends from the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) is described. Stations were first classified as urban and non]urban (rural) using four different proxy measures of urbanity. Trends from the two station types were then compared using a pairing method that controls for differences in instrument type and via spatial gridding to account for the uneven distribution of stations. The comparisons reveal systematic differences between the raw (unadjusted) urban and rural temperature trends throughout the USHCN period of record according to all four urban classifications. Based on these classifications, urbanization accounts for 14% to 21% of the rise in unadjusted minimum temperatures since 1895 and 6% to 9% since 1960. The USHCN]Version 2 homogenization process effectively removes this urban signal such that it becomes insignificant during the last 50]80 years. In contrast, prior to 1930, only about half of the urban signal is removed. Accordingly, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies urban]correction procedure has essentially no impact on USHCN version 2 trends since 1930, but effectively removes the residual urban]rural temperature trend differences for years before 1930 according to all four urban proxy classifications. Fina ly, an evaluation of the homogenization of USHCN temperature series using subsets of rural]only and urban]only reference series from the larger U.S. Cooperative Observer (Coop) Network suggests that the composition of Coop stations surrounding USHCN stations is sufficiently gruralh to limit the aliasing of urban heat island signals onto USHCN]Version 2 temperature trends during homogenization."

What is clear is that denialists claim 'fraud' if raw data is corrected to control for UHI yet if the data is not adjusted in this manner they claim that UHI is the sole reason for the increase in temperature.

What is also clear is that Marchesarosa is a true denier in that she claims there has been no significant warming.

[ncsonde]

Feb 17, 2013 13:01:13 GMT visitor said:

Feb 17, 2013 1:49:01 GMT marchesarosa said:

When unadjusted pristine rural sites are used to provide the global data on temperature change over the last century, say, there is very little increase at all.

This is simply not true.

It is, actually - in the US, Russia, and Australia. When genuinely long-standing rural temp records are used, the rise over the past century is a fraction of the rise shown by other stations - which are, of course, in the vast majority. The methodology of the paper you cite is obviously flawed from the outset - a six-year old child can immediately see why. The "rurality" of the stations needs to be ascertained properly, not just selected by their distance from an urban centre.

Bob Carter breifly discusses this issue in the first five minutes of this film. If you want a fuller more scientific review, all you need to do is to go to WUWT where Watts' sterling work to address what should have been from the start a basic matter in the whole debate is thoroughly discussed.

What is clear is that denialists claim 'fraud' if raw data is corrected to control for UHI yet if the data is not adjusted in this manner they claim that UHI is the sole reason for the increase in temperature.

No, they don't. Whoever "denialists" are. If you mean those scientific researchers who have properly looked into the question, then they've never denied temperature has not increased since the LIA. No one has, as far as I'm aware.

What is also clear is that Marchesarosa is a true denier in that she claims there has been no significant warming.

I should think she acknowledges what everyone else acknowledges, that since 1850 there has been an increase of about 0.8 C (+/- 0.2 C).

The question is how much of that increase is anthropogenic - a quarter of it, at most, seeing as solar forcing in one way or another accounts for three quarters of it.

How "significant" is it? If the role of the sun as the main driver of global warming has been as understood as it is now in 1980, 1990, or even in 2000, no scientist let alone any politician would have said it was "significant" at all. Certainly not enough to spend the two trillion dollars the whole misconception has already cost us.

[ncsonde]

Feb 17, 2013 1:55:09 GMT marchesarosa said:

Alaska underwent a step change upward in its temperature when the Pacific Decadal Oscillation underwent one of its periodic changes in 1976. It is called The Great Pacific Climate Shift.

Yes - though it's now been analysed to be a 30 yr+ cycle, timed by solar system barycentric orbits.

The Alaskan anomaly is yet another example of the global warming lobby's ready propensity to exaggerate ad lib. As you point out, certain parts of Alaska have experienced a measured rise in temperature of about 3 degrees. Roger Pielke has pointed out the political advocacy and various distortions of the scientific facts by Susan Hassol - as here in the HBO documentary she wrote, Too Hot Not To Handle, synopsised on its website thus:


TOO HOT NOT TO HANDLE offers a wealth of chilling evidence that the greenhouse effect is intensifying and the Earth is warming faster than at any other time in human history.

Among the startling facts revealed are:

Deadly heat waves in the U.S. have increased threefold since 1950 and today kill more people than hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning and blizzards combined.

The average temperature in Alaska has already risen five degrees, causing 99 percent of its glaciers to be melting, retreating and shrinking.

Rising sea levels are eroding our shoreline and may eventually displace large numbers of Americans.

The intensity of catastrophic storms, such as 2005Œs devastating hurricanes Katrina and Rita, , has increased dramatically in the last half-century, as hurricanes draw their strength from warm ocean water...etc etc


All a load of bollocks, factually speaking. But note how the temperature rise in Alaska, which in any case is not "average", but ephemerally recorded, and on the coast, has mysteriously become the increasingly quoted rounded-up five degrees.

This busy little bee is an editor of the last IPCC report, responsible for communicating the "science" to the public, for crissakes!