Letter to SMH/The Age editors on McLean’s Op-ed

Readers of the Australian press over the holiday period would have seen the spray from Maurice Newman the chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council in The Australian on December 31 where he claimed Australia’s climate policies were being driven by scientific delusion. That was followed by an article by David Karoly in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald on January 1 correcting Newman’s take on the science. Then on January 3, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald printed a response to Karoly and Newman from John McLean. Following is a letter I have sent to the editors of both papers.

Dear Sirs,

I am writing to express my great disappointment at The Age and Sydney Morning Herald’s decision to publish John McLean’s opinion piece Lack of accountability clouds the climate change debate on Friday January 3. After the recent statement by SMH letters editors Julie Lewis and Marc McEvoy that (October 13, 2013) “climate change deniers or skeptics are free to express opinions and political views on our page but not to misrepresent facts”, we in the scientific community were hopeful this would be the case. Alas, it is not.

The catalyst for John McLean’s article was an opinion piece by Maurice Newman in The Australian on December 31 where he claimed Australian climate policies were being driven by scientific delusion and that when necessary, the IPCC resorts to dishonesty and deceit. This was reported as news by Graham Lloyd in the same edition, using Newman’s position as the chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council.

This is News Limited’s modus operandi on spreading disinformation on climate change – promote a public figure misrepresenting fact as opinion, then report it as news. This phenomenon of publicly-expressed doubt in climate science is largely confined to the English-speaking world and has been promoted by a coalition of the willing incorporating business interests, politically conservative think tanks and culture warriors. The remainder of the conventional media, including Fairfax and the ABC, have been complicit in this process over several years. Controversies over climate science are clearly politically and culturally motivated and should be treated as such.

Professor David Karoly responded to Newman’s charges of scientific deceit in The Age and SMH on January 1 and McLean’s piece is a follow up on that. Except it isn’t. It is a rehash of an article published on Quadrant Online on March 12, 2013 that makes a number of incorrect claims about the role and charter of the IPCC. These claims amount to straightforward factual misrepresentation. They include:

• The IPCC has no mandate to examine causes of climate change other than human influences.
  • This is incorrect. Understanding the scientific basis of the risk of human-induced climate change involves examining all drivers of climate. Consequently, the IPCC has chapters on palaeoclimate, stretching well before pre-industrial times, and comprehensively assesses natural influences on climate past and present.
• Claims are based on the output of climate models that the IPCC admits are seriously flawed.
  • This is incorrect. The examination of models is open and transparent and as such they are assessed to provide acceptable conclusions for a wide range of phenomena (global temperature and rainfall change) and not on others (ice sheet dynamics, tornado behaviour).
• Climategate – a clique of scientists sought to control the material cited in these reports.
  • Indeed they did. They discussed how to keep pseudoscience out of the reports; inappropriately, as it happened – the suggestion for censorship coming from one inexperienced author only. This was later admitted to and apologised for by that person. Subsequent enquiries showed that the proper protocols were maintained in the development of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. Indeed, another Climategate email exchange that I was involved in showed exactly how this process is run but such normal exchanges have not been reported widely because they show how these matters are routinely discussed and negotiated.
• The Summaries for Policymakers become a political instrument because they are written by a select group of authors, then negotiated by government representatives.
  • This is untrue. The negotiations are to increase the policy relevance of such documents but all statements are traceable within the reports and supported by original research findings. Both governments and scientists support these findings as science and not politics. Stephen Schneider describes in his book Climate Change as a Contact Sport how in 2007, for the first time ever in a plenary negotiation, I drew widespread applause defending science from political manipulation (scientific vandalism was the term used). That applause came from both government representatives and scientists.
• At its inaugural meeting in 1992 the UNFCCC declared that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 were causing significant and dangerous climate change.
  • They did not. The centrepiece of the UNFCCC treaty is the avoidance of dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.
• It was the IPCC’s role to determine if this was correct. The IPCC hasn’t produced credible evidence to support the above claim.
  • The IPCC has never declared that that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are causing significant and dangerous climate change. They do say it is possible and produce widespread evidence to support that claim.
• The UNFCCC deceit continues … falsely implying that the IPCC’s investigative scope extends are beyond its mandate.
  • Except that McLean’s initial claim is false – the IPCC investigates climate change in all its forms in order to assess the risk of human-induced climate change. This false claim invalidates all subsequent claims that McLean makes.

The claim that a political institution cannot set up a scientific investigative body is risible. If that was the case, no government could govern and no assessment aiming to inform policy could ever be trusted.

The thought that an article such as this, even an opinion piece, can be published in a newspaper that claims to be independent. Always. Is deeply disappointing.

Yours Sincerely,

Roger Jones