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In a rare moment of honesty, in 2009 the BBC published an article that admitted that no increase in global temperatures had been observed for 11 years even though carbon dioxide continued to rise.  The BBC soon returned to its global warming propaganda and Climategate emails may indicate the reason why.

On 9 October 2009, BBC published an article titled ‘What happened to global warming?’.  This became the subject of BBC’s U-turn on “global warming” because at last BBC’s climate correspondent, Paul Hudson, had written a story about the well-established fact that at the time the earth’s temperature had not risen since 1998.

Paul Hudson is an English weather presenter and climate correspondent for BBC Look North. He has been interested in weather and climate for as long as he can remember and worked as a forecaster with the UK Met Office for more than ten years locally and at the international unit before joining the BBC in October 2007.

The BBC article began: “This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998. But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.”  Hudson continued:

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting … claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures … If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

What happened to global warming? Paul Hudson, BBC, 9 October 2009

Hudson’s scrupulous approach made things tricky for BBC executives who had swung the might of the corporation behind the climate change orthodoxy, often producing what amounts to propaganda.

The story of BBC’s affinity for the greatest pseudoscience fraud in history – aka “climate change” – began in 2004 when the UK government’s hysterically warmist chief scientific adviser Sir David King successfully persuaded the then Prime Minister Tony Blair to put action on global warming at the heart of UK government policy. Government policy soon became BBC policy too.

Although Hudson had written an article that appeared to show a U-turn in BBC’s reporting, the newly found honesty was short-lived as is demonstrated by a ten-part series titled ‘The Climate Connection’ that the BBC began airing on 30 November 2009.  The titles of the episodes speak for themselves, for example:

• Are There Too Many People on The Planet? Can population growth be managed if consumption and emission levels are reduced?
• Does the World Need Meat? Can vegetarianism reduce the effects of global warming?
• Travel – Good for Humanity; Bad for the Planet? The people urging their fellow citizens, and the world, to rethink their travel attitudes.
• Can We Build a Better Future? How architects are aiming to create zero-carbon buildings and whole cities.
• The Selfish Ape.  How can economics be used to change personal behaviour around climate change?

So why did the BBC do a second U-turn after Hudson’s article?  Climategate emails leaked in November 2009 may provide some answers.  Below we let the story unfold for itself by reproducing articles and emails published in the weeks that followed.

BBC’s Amazing U-turn on Climate Change

The following was written by Damian Thompson and originally published on Telegraph Blogs on 11 October 2009. At the time, Thompson was Blogs Editor of the Telegraph Media Group. 

I think the BBC wanted to slip this one out quietly, but a Matt Drudge link put paid to that. The climate change correspondent of BBC News has admitted that global warming stopped in 1998 – and he reports that leading scientists believe that the earth’s cooling-off may last for decades.

[Related: The Drudge Report and The Drudge Report Archives]

“Whatever happened to global warming?” is the title of an article by Paul Hudson that represents a clear departure from the BBC’s fanatical espousal of climate change orthodoxy. The climate change campaigners will go nuts, particularly in the run-up to Copenhagen. So, I suspect, will devout believers inside the BBC. Hudson’s story was not placed very prominently by his colleagues – but a link right at the top of Drudge will have delivered at least a million page views, possibly many more.

[The UN’s COP15 was held in Copenhagen between 7 and 18 December 2009.]

Hudson’s piece is a U-turn – not because he has joined the ranks of sceptics who reject the theory of man-made global warming, but because at last he has written a story about the well-established fact that the earth’s temperature has not risen since 1998, and reports seriously the theories of climatologists (themselves not sceptics) who believe that we are in for 30 years of cooling caused by the falling temperatures of the oceans.

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Professor Easterbrook says: “The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.”

Hudson’s piece must have been a nightmare to write: talk about an inconvenient truth. All the caveats are in place, distancing him from hardline sceptics and giving plenty of space to the climate change orthodoxy. But, in fact, his scrupulous approach only makes matters worse for BBC executives who have swung the might of the corporation behind that orthodoxy, often producing what amounts to propaganda.

The BBC now has serious questions to answer. It has used millions of pounds of licence-payers’ money to advance a simplistic point of view that is beginning to fall apart under scrutiny. Did it not foresee that this might happen? And, now that statistics are beginning to point in the other direction, is it prepared to give equal prominence to a debate about climate change that is both respectable and urgent?

Climategate: Warmist conspiracy exposed?

Shortly after the Climategate emails had been released, Andrew Bolt wrote: 

The Hadley University of East Anglia CRU director admits the emails seem to be genuine … The 1,079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science.

I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below – emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle.

Climategate: Warmist conspiracy exposed? Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun Blogs, 20 November 2009

One of the “most astonishing” emails that Bolt added below his text was an email dated 12 October 2009 with the subject line “BBC U-turn on climate.”  Hudson’s article had been published by the BBC three days earlier and both his article and Bolt’s blog were the subject of the email exchange.

On 11 October 2009, Narasimha Rao, who at the time was a PhD Candidate at Stanford University, wrote to Stephen Schneider, who died in 2010 and was actively involved with the IPCC since its inception:

You may be aware of this already. Paul Hudson, BBC’s reporter on climate change, on Friday wrote that there’s been no warming since 1998, and that pacific oscillations will force cooling for the next 20-30 years. It is not outrageously biased in presentation as are other skeptics’ views.

BBC has significant influence on public opinion outside the US.

Do you think this merits an op-ed response in the BBC from a scientist?

The next day, Schneider forwarded Rao’s email to others adding:

Hi all. Any of you want to explain decadal natural variability and signal to noise and sampling errors to this new “IPCC Lead Author” from the BBC?  As we enter an El Nino year and as soon, as the sunspots get over their temporary–presumed–vacation worth a few tenths of a Watt per meter squared reduced forcing, there will likely be another dramatic upward spike like 1992-2000. I heard someone–Mike Schlesinger maybe??–was willing to bet a lot of money on it happening in next 5 years?? Meanwhile the past 10 years of global mean temperature trend stasis still saw what, 9 of the warmest in reconstructed 1000 year record and Greenland and the sea ice of the North in big retreat?? Some of you observational folks probably do need to straighten this out as my student suggests below. Such “fun”

Michael Mann, a lead author on the 2001 IPCC report and co-founder of the website RealClimate, wrote:

extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on BBC.  its particularly odd, since climate is usually Richard Black’s beat at BBC (and he does a great job). From what I can tell, this guy was formerly a weather person at the Met Office.

We may do something about this on RealClimate, but meanwhile it might be appropriate for the Met Office to have a say about this, I might ask Richard Black what’s up here?

Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports, wrote:

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming?  We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record.  We had 4 inches of snow.  The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F.  The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.  This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. 

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.  The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.  Our observing system is inadequate. That said there is a LOT of nonsense about the PDO.  People like CPC are tracking PDO on a monthly basis but it is highly correlated with ENSO.  Most of what they are seeing is the change in ENSO not real PDO.  It surely isn’t decadal.  The PDO is already reversing with the switch to El Nino.  The PDO index became positive in September for first time since Sept 2007.  

See http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_gif/global_ocean_monitoring_current.ppt

Other recipients of the emails above were:

• Allen Myles, University of Oxford and Director of Oxford Net Zero.
• Peter Stott, UK Met Office and contributor to IPCC reports.
• Philip Jones, University of East Anglia, a Professorial Fellow at the Climatic Research Unit and contributor to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 13 (Climate Action).
• Benjamin Santer, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and former researcher at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.  Santer’s early research on the climatic effects of combined changes in greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols contributed to the historic “discernible human influence” conclusion of the 1995 report by the IPCC and he served as the report’s convening lead author.
• Tom Wigley, formerly the director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.  He is perhaps best known for developing the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas-Induced Climate Change (“MAGICC”). Wigley developed MAGICC largely during his tenure as director of the Climatic Research Unit. MAGICC is often used by the IPCC for key scientific publications. Wigley currently has honorary academic positions at UEA and NCAR and a Professorship at the University of Adelaide.
• Thomas Karl was formerly a director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Centre and was the lead author and editor on each of the major IPCC assessments from 1990 to 2009.
• Gavin Schmidt, Director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
• James Hansen, formerly a Director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
• Michael Oppenheimer, a Professor at Princeton University. He is a long-time participant in the IPCC. In the late 1980s, Oppenheimer and a handful of other scientists organised two workshops under the auspices of the UN that helped precipitate the negotiations that resulted in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (signed at the 1992 Earth Summit) and the Kyoto Protocol.

You can find all the Climategate emails on Tom Nelson’s blog HERE and a specific link to the emails reproduced above HERE.

We Should End This Unscientific Nonsense Now

In November 2009, Corbyn appeared in a live debate on Moscow’s RT TV and said of man-made global warming in light of the Climategate revelations:

“The case is blown to smithereens and this whole theory should be destroyed and discarded … The world is cooling and has been cooling for 7 years and the leading scientists, so-called ‘scientists’ have been trying to hide that evidence … We should end this anti-scientific nonsense now.”

“Carbon dioxide levels are driven by temps, not the other way around. There have been big peaks in CO₂ in past…carbon dioxide is actually a good thing for the world,” Corbyn explained. “More CO₂ makes plants and animals more efficient.”