Has the BBC broken faith with the General Public?
“As an influential blogger on climate change, among other subjects, I’d really like Paul to meet you and chat to you about your views – how you see your role and that more generally the influence of the internet in changing the debate; your views on climate-gate and how that was handled by the media; the failings or otherwise of scientists in communicating the science.”
– BBC Producer to James Delingpole
James said that he had looked forward to this opportunity to discuss and present sceptical issues in the apparent spirit of the invitation.
The ‘trick’ and ‘hide the decline’
The BBC described the ‘trick’ and ‘hide the decline’ as at the crux of the climategate email scandal. Why would they not at least allow a sceptic to voice to the public the sceptical viewpoint on this issue.
Paul Nurse (voice over): Tree rings have been shown to be a good way of measuring ancient temperatures, and they’ve mostly matched instrumental measurements since the advent of thermometers.
However, after about 1960, some tree ring data stopped fitting real temperatures so well. The cause of this isn’t known. When Dr Jones was asked by the World Meteorological Organisation to prepare a graph of how temperatures had changed over the last 1000 years, he had to decide how to deal with this divergence between the datasets.
He decided to use the direct measurements of temperature change from thermometers and instruments rather than indirect data from the tree rings, to cover the period from 1960. It was this data splicing, and his e-mail referring to it as a “trick” that formed the crux of Climategate.
Phil Jones: The Organisation wanted a relatively simple diagram for their particular audience. What we started off doing was the three series, with the instrumental temperatures on the end, clearly differentiated from the tree ring series. But they thought that was too complicated to explain to their audience.
So what we did was just to add them on, and bring them up to the present. And as I say, this was a World Meteorological Organisation statement. It had hardly any coverage in the media at the time, and had virtually no coverage for the next ten years, until the release of the e-mails. (transcript)