The BBC’s climate science problem
You could be forgiven for thinking the BBC is out to get Richard Tice. Their chosen battleground is the Reform man's position on climate and Net Zero, but it's fair to say the campaign is, thus far, not going too well.
Question Time last week was a car crash for the corporation, with chairman Fiona Bruce interrupting Tice to contradict his contention that only 4% of carbon dioxide emissions are manmade. Thirty percent was the correct figure, she boldly asserted. Unfortunately, Tice was right, and she was wrong, so the Corporation’s gophers got to work and quietly edited the recording to remove her gaffe. Unfortunately someone noticed, and sceptics had a field day.
Undeterred, the Corporation returned to the fray a few days later, when Nick Robinson had Tice on his Political Thinking podcast. They decided, somewhat surprisingly, to take up cudgels on exactly the same subject, namely the human influence on climate.
Once again, Tice expained that human emissions were dwarfed by natural ones, and there was no attempt to probe this argument more deeply. The conversation meandered off elsewhere.
However, shortly aferwards Robinson decided to stick in a metaphorical boot, tweeting a clip from the interview with the comment:
He’s denying the scientific consensus that climate change is partly man made & can be slowed or halted.”
This is a very strong take given that Robinson had not attempted to pin down Tice on precisely what he meant. But at face value it's a misrepresentation.
Tice’s words could only reasonably be interpreted as implying that the human contribution is nugatory compared to the natural one. To get to Robinson's take – that Tice believed that there was no human influence – would mean considering his words as meaning natural CO2 emissions affected the climate but human ones didn't. This would be ludicrous.
Tice’s words clearly implied that he thought mankind affected the climate, but only marginally so. In other words, far from “denying… that climate change is partly man made”, this was his starting point!
As to the rest of Robinson's claim – that Tice was denying that climate change “can be slowed or reversed”, we need to note what appears to be a fatal contradiction in Robinson's position. If climate change is “partly” manmade, then it is also partly natural. How, we wonder, does Robinson think we can halt the natural element?
It is undoubtedly substantial. We are sure that the climate changes on all timescales, from the decadal and centennial to the millennial and beyond.We know this from, for example, long-term temperature records, such as the Central England Temperature Series, the 800-year record of the waters of the Nile, and proxy climate records covering even longer periods. And the natural changes that are seen in history can be dramatic. One notable example was the sudden temperature rise at the end of the period, over 10,000 years ago, known as the Younger Dryas. Temperatures around the world are thought to have increased by 3–10 degrees in just a few decades.
How does Nick Robinson think we are going to stop that kind of climate change?
Charitably, Robinson – who is a generalist – simply hasn't thought through what he means by “climate change”. He has no robust understanding of understanding of climate history and climate science, and is therefore unable to probe the position of people like Tice, who have given the issues some thought.
That being the case, he needs to think before he speaks, and perhaps to be a little more cautious about dishing out accusations of denial.