Climate change denial is being exposed in the media

The BBC came under serious fire from the science community recently after it invited former chancellor Lord Lawson onto Radio 4 to discuss climate change.

Lawson, who is a prominent climate change sceptic, was invited on to the Today programme to discuss his views about the subject, which invited significant backlash for the broadcaster.

Lawson described Al Gore's worries about climate change as "clap trap" and said world leaders should be focussing on "real issues". He also argued that Britain should not subsidise renewable energy, describing climate change as a "non-issue" and saying it "drives up energy prices", pointing out "we do have in this country one of the highest energy costs in the world which is very hard on the poor".

Presumably ignoring the poor people in Florida, Texas and the British Virgin Islands who watched their homes literally lift into the sky, Lawson believes that storm weather which has broken all records for ferocity and frequency is ‘just one of those things’.

Returning to the subject of former Presidential candidate Gore, Lawson continued "It's the same old clap-trap. He's the sort of bloke who goes around saying the end of the world is nigh!

"We should be concentrating on real problems like North Korea and disease.

"To divert resources and energy to non-problems is really ridiculous."

It’s not clear whether Lawson classes near total submergence under rising sea levels as a ‘real problem’ but it’s hard to envisage a scenario worthy of nuclear war if everybody has already been killed by a category 5 hurricane.

Professor Brian Cox, who hosts television shows on the BBC, tweeted: "Irresponsible and highly misleading to give the impression that there is a meaningful debate about the science." Admittedly, that’s pretty difficult to argue with.

After some ludicrous comments (apologies if that insinuates he espouses anything other than) from President Trump regarding climate change, the subject is finding its way back into the headlines after the tragic destruction of entire communities across the Caribbean, Florida and Texas.

Now, the Mail on Sunday have been badly exposed over an article published by David Rose, which sought to assert that “world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data.”

The article was published in February, but has come under scrutiny after The UK press regulator; the Independent Press Standards Organization (Ipso) has now upheld a complaint submitted by Bob Ward of the London School of Economics. In a damning verdict from the regulator, it said that the Mail had “failed to take care over the accuracy of the article” and “had then failed to correct these significantly misleading statements,” Hilariously, the Mail on Sunday was required to publish the Ipso adjudication.

As reported by The Guardian, Bates had registered his displeasure at the way the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) climate scientists had been archiving their research and data. What was, according to Bates, a very minor complaint was seized upon by the paper as evidence that the organisation was somehow making things up or seeking to supress evidence that climate change wasn’t real.

As covered in The Guardian piece, the article included a grossly misleading chart that Nasa Goddard director Gavin Schmidt described as a “hilarious screw up”, which confused headline and baseline data. Once adjusted correctly the chart vindicated the research entirely. In fact, the Noaa data and paper in question had already been independently verified by other researchers, and are in close agreement with global temperature data from other scientific groups.

Of course, further to this rigorous testing the paper has also undergone significant peer-review, meaning that the author’s claims of some kind of cover up were not just entirely untrue but downright mendacious.

They can’t argue the science, about which there’s a 97% expert consensus, so they instead attack the scientists themselves.

It’s becoming a very murky world indeed in right wing conservative press circles, desperate to discredit work which has said the same thing for nearly 50 years now. Every single reputable scientist on the planet is fully aware, to varying extents, that human created climate change is real and it is a danger to the survival of the human race.

Sadly, there seem to be journalists (loosely used) who would seek to undermine the important and vital work that these scientists undertake.