Bob Ward: The Climate Crisis Cover-up

In a Special Report, published as a series of long reads, Bob Ward – Director of Policy at the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment – will give an exclusive, detailed account of his own battle to improve press accountability.

In Chapter One Bob reports on his brushes with IPSO, and how the complaints-handler has failed to properly sanction press inaccuracies in a series of climate change stories.

Since IPSO was first established by the big newspaper companies in 2014, Bob has written to the body 13 times with complaints about inaccurate climate change coverage in the press.

 

CHAPTER ONE:

Climate change, the Press and IPSO: Falsehoods and Flawed Decisions 

Since it was established on 8 September 2014 in the aftermath of the phone-hacking scandal and the dissolution of its discredited predecessor, the Press Complaints Commission, IPSO has considered 13 articles about climate change that I have drawn to its attention for breaches of the Editors’ Code of Practice.

The first section of the Code addresses accuracy, and states that “[t]he Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information or images, including headlines not supported by the text”.

Every article about which I complained was systematically inaccurate and misleading. However, IPSO’s Complaints Committee only took action in response to three of my complaints, and in no case acknowledged the full extent of inaccuracies.

Most of the authors of these articles had track records of promoting false information about climate change, and many had undeclared affiliations with the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a campaign group set up in 2009 which lobbies against policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels. The Foundation, well-funded by secret donors since it was launched by Lord Lawson of Blaby in 2009, denies that climate change poses a significant risk. It was sanctioned in 2014 for the dissemination of propaganda that broke the Charity Commission’s rules.

All the articles about which I complained were published in newspapers (‘The Times’, The Daily Telegraph’, ‘The Sunday Telegraph’, the ‘Daily Mail’ and ‘The Mail on Sunday’) that have had editorial lines rejecting to some extent the scientific evidence on the causes or potential consequences of climate change. These newspapers have regularly published comment articles by a small group of climate change sceptics.

“His article appeared on the hottest day of a heatwave that resulted in the deaths of 409 people across England”

The late Christopher Booker wrote columns regularly for ‘The Sunday Telegraph’, and occasional polemics for the ‘Daily Mail’. He enjoyed a cosy relationship with the Global Warming Policy Foundation, for whom he produced a pamphlet attacking the BBC’s coverage of climate change.

One of his articles in the ‘Daily Mail’ was published on 26 July 2018, under the headline: “Yes it’s scorching, but claims that the heatwave is down to climate change are just hot air”. The article denied that climate change has been making spells of hot weather in the UK more frequent and intense, and claimed that the high temperatures during summer 2018 were not unprecedented. In fact, overwhelming evidence of a link between UK heatwaves and climate change did exist, and the Met Office subsequently concluded that the record-breaking heat of summer 2018 was 30 times more likely due to climate change.

But IPSO decided that the article by Mr Booker, who did not have any training or qualifications in climate science or meteorology, did not breach the Editors’ Code, noting that “newspapers are entitled to publish opinions” and that “the newspaper had taken care to clearly present the article as an opinion piece”.

The IPSO ruling stated: “The article had made clear that it had been claimed that heatwaves had become more frequent, and had accurately reported the position of a number of prominent experts in this area who supported this theory and attributed it to global warming”. It added: “The article had then gone on to outline the columnist’s theory as to why he did not believe the recent warm weather was part of a pattern of weather attributable to climate change”.

His article appeared on the hottest day of a heatwave that resulted in the deaths of 409 people across England.

“He tried to support his argument with a false claim”

Some articles against which IPSO has failed to take action have misled the public about decisions that they make as consumers. ‘The Sunday Telegraph’ published an erroneous polemic on 11 August 2019 by Viscount Matt Ridley, a member of the all-male “Academic Advisory Council” of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, wrongly arguing that eating less meat would not have any significant impact on climate change.

As is typical of many who promote climate change scepticism in national newspapers, Viscount Ridley, a Conservative hereditary peer, framed efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as an assault on personal freedom, writing that “the climate is just the latest feeble excuse for the nannies who love to lecture us about our diet”.

But he tried to support his argument with a false claim, including: “A recent ‘meta-analysis’ of all the peer-reviewed papers on this topic found that giving up meat altogether would cut individuals’ total emissions by just 4.3 per cent”. This was untrue, as the figure did not appear at all in the 2015 study that he cited. Instead, the academic paper concluded that “dietary change, in areas with affluent diet, could play an important role in reaching environmental goals, with up to 50% potential to reduce GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions and land use demand associated with the current diet”. The figure cited by Viscount Ridley had in fact been concocted by Bjorn Lomborg, who promotes ‘lukewarmer’ climate change scepticism by understating the risks of climate change and exaggerating the challenges of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Dr Lomborg wrote his PhD thesis on “simulating social science” but has no qualifications in climate science or economics.

In addition, Viscount Ridley completely ignored the content of a comprehensive international review of research on climate change and land use, including the role of diets, which was published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just three days before his newspaper article. The IPCC report found “robust evidence with high agreement that the mixture of foods eaten can have a highly significant impact on per capita carbon emissions, driven particularly through the amount of (especially grain-fed) livestock and products”.

But the judgment by IPSO’s Complaints Committee only required the newspaper to tack on a confusing “clarification” to the bottom of the online version of the article, still hiding the fact that the source of the inaccurate 4.3 per cent figure was Dr Lomborg.

“Articles excused by IPSO have attempted to undermine democratic processes”

Other articles excused by IPSO have attempted to undermine democratic processes. In June 2019, the UK Government put forward legislation to set a new ambitious national target of reducing annual domestic emissions effectively to zero by 2050. Ahead of the critical vote in Parliament, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ published an inaccurate leading article, under the headline ‘Theresa May’s net-zero target is the wrong approach to climate change’, claiming that the Government’s move would cost the equivalent of 5.3 percent of the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP).

The false figure had been taken from an online article by Dr Lomborg that was published on the newspaper’s website a few days earlier. His bogus calculation assumed that New Zealand has the same economy as the UK, and omitted all of the benefits from avoided damage by climate change and local air pollution. It was also completely inconsistent with the robust analysis by the statutory UK Committee on Climate Change which concluded that the investment required to achieve the 2050 target would be equivalent to no more than 1 per cent of GDP.

However, IPSO’s ruling on the leading article showed that its staff and Complaints Committee had not grasped the details of my complaint, stating: “The article was entitled to be sceptical of the likelihood of the UK achieving its current emission’s targets; the article did not reference any formal predictions or data and where the article was a leader column this was clearly the publication’s viewpoint and not presented as point of fact”. It added that “the article had accurately reported the prediction as to the possible loss to GDP should emissions be reduced to zero”, but did not even admit that the newspaper had used a figure invented by Dr Lomborg.

Some of the articles that escaped sanction from IPSO have, ironically, criticised communications to the public about climate change that have actually been accurate. On 21 April 2019, ‘The Mail on Sunday’ published an attack by its reporter David Rose on a BBC documentary on ‘Climate Change: The Facts’, presented by Sir David Attenborough. Mr Rose has had a chequered journalistic career, having been the subject of several adverse adjudications by IPSO for misreporting, and previously admitting that he was a conduit for false information about weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Mr Rose frequently vents his feelings about climate change in feature articles. His April 2019 rant alleged that “Sir David and the BBC presented a picture of the near future which was so much more frightening than is justified”. He insisted that the documentary was designed to create “panic” that “is not helpful when it comes to making policy designed to tackle it”. But Mr Rose’s case against Sir David was based on distortions.

For instance, Mr Rose’s article stated: “Equally questionable was the film’s claim that global warming is triggering a wave of extinctions, with eight per cent of species under threat solely because of it”. He argued that it “appears to oversimplify the findings of the IPCC”, and he quoted from a report it published in 2014. In fact, the eight per cent figure was drawn from a study published in 2015 and referenced in a more up-to-date IPCC report that was published in 2018.

Mr Rose also highlighted a section of the programme which “showed a father and son narrowly escaping from one of several devastating fires last year in California”, claiming that they “were ascribed to global warming”. Mr Rose claimed that “several recent scientific papers suggest that wildfires have been declining in recent years – even in California, where statistics gathered by the local agency, Calfires [sic], says the number across the state has roughly halved since 1987, following a peak in the 1970s.”.

In fact, the programme footage was filmed in Montana, not California. But Mr Rose was also wrong to suggest that wildfires have been decreasing in the west coast State. While the number of fires that started in State parks at lower elevations have fallen in recent decades, due to greater efforts to stop people from igniting them, wildfire activity as a whole across California has been increasing.

In its defence against my complaint, the newspaper cited a study by Jon Keeley and Alexandra Syphard, published in 2017, as the source of Mr Rose’s claim that Cal Fire had recorded an approximate halving in the number of wildfires over the past three decades. While this was true, Mr Rose neglected to mention the following statements from the study: “In the last four decades there has been an increase in burning on all USFS [United States Forestry Service] lands in California and in other western USA forests. In contrast, this has not generally been observed on the largely non-forested lower elevation Cal Fire lands, and this is true of some other non-forested landscapes in the western USA.”

Mr Rose completely ignored as well an official report published just nine days before his article appeared which had been commissioned by the State’s Governor, Gavin Newsom. It summarised the scientific evidence and concluded: “Climate change has created a new wildfire reality for California. The state’s fire season is now almost year round…Wildfires are not only more frequent but far more devastating.”

But, incredibly, IPSO decided that none of Mr Rose’s statements breached the Editors’ Code of Practice, noting that “newspapers can publish opinions and views on contentious issues, such as climate change”. While acknowledging the existence of the 2018 IPCC report and the 2015 paper’s conclusions, the Complaints Committee ruled that “the columnist was entitled to rely on the 2014 report, and made clear that he was using this as his source”. It also bizarrely concluded that “the article accurately reported the study’s finding that the number of wildfires in California had almost halved since the 1970s; it did not make any claim as to the area affected by wildfires, and the fact that the film showed Montanan wildfires did not make the article’s reporting of the research inaccurate”.

“An email from a complaints officer at IPSO defended Mr Lawson’s selective and misleading quotation”

Some complaints about inaccurate and misleading articles are filtered out by IPSO’s staff and do not proceed to mediation with the publication or consideration by the Complaints Committee. I submitted a complaint about an article by Dominic Lawson which was published in the ‘Daily Mail’ on 7 October 2019, under the headline ‘Why a horseshoe bat in Kent exposes the sheer folly of today’s mass eco-protests’. It contained several misleading claims about the significance of the discovery of a greater horseshoe bat in Kent for the first time in 115 years.

For example, Mr Lawson asked in his article “what about our friends in the animal kingdom?”, and “Are they truly at imminent threat of global wipe-out as a result of the CO2 we emit?” The article added: “In terms of the future, having modelled the effect of anticipated global increases in CO2 emissions from rapidly growing economies of the most populous nations, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] states: ‘There is low agreement concerning the fraction of species at increased risk…and the timeframe over which extinctions could occur.’”

But Mr Lawson cherrypicked this quote from the Fifth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2014, and neglected to mention that it also stated: “Recent syntheses indicate that model-based estimates of the fraction of species at substantially increased risk of extinction due to 21st-century climate change range from below 1% to above 50% of species in the groups that have been studied”.

 The article also asserted that “increased temperatures might save tens of thousands of lives a year in Northern Europe, where cold bears off so many mostly elderly people in winter”. While the rise in mean temperature in northern Europe does mean fewer days of extreme cold, it is also resulting in an increase in the frequency and intensity of heatwaves which kill several hundred people in England every summer. A heatwave in August 2003 caused about 40,000 deaths across Europe, and was calculated to have been made twice as likely because of climate change.

However, IPSO’s executive staff decided that my complaint did not “raise a possible breach of the Editors’ Code”. An email from a complaints officer at IPSO defended Mr Lawson’s selective and misleading quotation from the IPCC report “We noted that the use of this quote simply inferred that there is disagreement regarding CO2 emissions [sic] link to extinction of animals. We found that as this is disputed, reporting that there is a disagreement could not amount to a breach under Clause 1.” On the failure to mention increased deaths due to heatwaves, the IPSO complaints officer wrote: “The article reported the writer’s view that climate change could be positive”.

The email summarised IPSO’s justification for refusing to proceed with the complaint: “We recognised that you disagreed with the opinions and views which were published; however, this did not in itself mean that the article was misleading to report them”.

“Riddled with distortions”

I am not the only complainant who has been disappointed by bad decisions by IPSO. Professor Terry Sloan, an emeritus professor of physics at Lancaster University, complained about another article by Christopher Booker, published in ‘The Sunday Telegraph’ on 25 January 2015 under the headline “How we are STILL being tricked with flawed data on global warming”.

The article was riddled with distortions and was based largely on a blog by a retired accountant. It stated: “But still more worrying has been the evidence that even this data has then been subjected to continual ‘adjustments’, invariably in only one direction. Earlier temperatures are adjusted downwards, more recent temperatures upwards, thus giving the impression that they have risen much more sharply than was shown by the original data.”

Mr Booker concluded by linking his conspiracy theory to his ideological opposition to policies designed to phase out the use of fossil fuels: “In reality, the implications of such distortions of the data go much further than just representing one of the most bizarre aberrations in the history of science. The fact that our politicians have fallen for all this scary chicanery has given Britain the most suicidally crazy energy policy (useless windmills and all) of any country in the world.”

This very serious allegation of a global conspiracy to misrepresent temperature records was utterly untrue. Meteorological services around the world correct the raw data measured by weather stations to create accurate records of temperature over time, taking into account factors such as changes in the time of day when measurements take place, or differences in calibrations when equipment is upgraded. These corrections are carefully documented and described in scientific papers which show that temperatures throughout the record can be adjusted either up or down, rather than “invariably in only one direction”. A major paper, published in 2011 but completely ignored by Mr Booker, described the most significant corrections to the records and pointed out that “conclusions regarding the rate of warming in global land surface temperature are largely unchanged”.

Professor Sloan’s complaint to IPSO about the misleading claims in Mr Booker’s article was not upheld. The ruling by the Complaints Committee stated: “The article was an opinion piece in which the columnist sought to challenge established scientific views on global warming. There is still dispute about the interpretation of historical temperature data, and the columnist was entitled to select evidence to support his position. The Committee emphasised that its role was to evaluate the complaint under the Editors’ Code and not to attempt to reach a position on matters best left to public debate.”

On the specific claim that temperature records had been adjusted “invariably in only one direction”, the Committee accepted that the newspaper had not been able to substantiate the allegation, but excused it anyway on the grounds that “there was an element of hyperbole in the suggestion, and as such it was not significantly misleading such that a correction was required”.

Similarly, ‘The Spectator’ magazine published an article on 30 April 2016 by James Delingpole under the headline “Acid trip: A paper review suggests many studies are flawed, and the effect may not be negative even if it’s real”. It stated: “Ocean acidification — the evidence increasingly suggests — is a trivial, misleadingly named, and not remotely worrying phenomenon which has been hyped up beyond all measure for political, ideological and financial reasons”. Mr Delingpole added: “I like to call it the alarmists’ Siegfried Line — their last redoubt should it prove, as looks increasingly to be the case, that the man-made global warming theory is a busted flush.”

Mr Delingpole attempted to justify his claim by citing an editorial by Howard Browman in the ‘ICES Journal of Marine Science’, which accompanied the publication of 44 scientific articles about ocean acidification. Mr Delingpole wrote that Professor Browman “has published a review…of all the papers published on the subject”.

He added: “His verdict could hardly be more damning. The methodology used by the studies was often flawed; contrary studies suggesting that ocean acidification wasn’t a threat had sometimes had difficulty finding a publisher. There was, he said, an ‘inherent bias’ in scientific journals which predisposed them to publish ‘doom and gloom stories’.”

In fact, Professor Browman’s article does not include the phrases “inherent bias” or “doom and gloom stories”. Furthermore, Mr Delingpole omitted any reference to the following conclusion from Professor Browman: “Although I call for a more sceptical scrutiny and balanced interpretation of the body of research on OA [ocean acidification], it must be emphasized that OA is happening and it will have effects on some marine organisms and ecosystem processes”.

Dr Phillip Williamson, an associate fellow at the University of East Anglia and science coordinator of the UK ocean acidification research programme between 2010 and 2016, submitted a complaint to IPSO about Mr Delingpole’s article. But the Complaints Committee ruled that there had not been any breach of the Editors’ Code of Practice. Its ruling stated: “The article was clearly a comment piece, in which the author was expressing sceptical views on ocean acidification, and describing sceptical views expressed by others, that were contrary to the academic consensus. The Committee’s role is not to make findings of fact or to resolve conflicting evidence in relation to matters under debate.” It also stated: “The Committee noted the complainant’s position that the evidence did not “increasingly suggest”, that ocean acidification was “trivial”. The article went on to make clear what this evidence was, which the author was entitled to select in support of his position.”

 Specifically, on Mr Delingpole’s misleading portrayal of Professor Browman’s editorial, the Complaints Committee concluded: “The manner in which the article presented the author’s interpretation of the paper was not significantly misleading”. And it found that “the article’s claim that it looked ‘increasingly to be the case’ that global warming theory was a ‘busted flush’…were matters of comment, and were clearly presented as the author’s opinion”.

This analysis shows the extent of IPSO’s failures to remedy inaccurate climate change coverage – allowing fringe theories and downright falsities to be presented as fact.

But what happens when science denialism spreads to coverage of a deadly illness, in the midst of a pandemic?

 

NEXT WEEK: Bob Ward exposes press falsehoods and IPSO failures in respect of COVID reporting, before giving his final verdict on how unaccountable newspapers are damaging the fight against some of humanity’s greatest challenges.

About Bob Ward

Bob Ward is a scientist currently based at the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics, where he directs the organisation’s policy and communications work. 

Mr Ward is also a member of the Executive Board of the Association of British Science Writers, and Deputy Chair of the London Climate Change Partnership.

Mr Ward is a fellow of the Geological Society, of the Royal Geographical Society, and of the Energy Institute.