Exposé of the misquoting and distortion of David King’s “Antarctica” comment
Article written by Dave Rado on March 17, 2007
On 02 May 2004, The Independent newspaper in the UK published an article entitled: “ Why Antarctica will soon be the only place to live – literally,” in which the newspaper claimed that the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor Professor Sir David King (whom they incorrectly referred to as “the Government’s chief scientist”) – had stated that: “Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked.”
Global warming contrarians have made much of this article ever since – see here. They have used the David King “quote” in order to paint everyone who sees global warming as a problem (for instance, just about every climatologist in the world) as being “alarmists.”
The Great Global Warming Swindle, a Channel 4 film, took the quote a stage further, by ending the programme with Dr Frederick Singer saying: “There will still be people who believe that this is the end of the world – particularly when you have, for example, the chief scientist of the UK telling people that by the end of the century, the only inhabitable place on the earth will be the Antarctic; and it may, humanity may survive, thanks to some breeding couples who moved to the Antarctic – I mean this is hilarious. It would be hilarious, actually, if it weren’t so sad.”
I saw some of the blog posts and watched the Channel 4 programme; and realising that Sir David King would never have said any such thing, I investigated.
In fact, The Independent article twisted what Sir David said and took it out of context. What he actually said, and its context, is at http://tinyurl.com/2j2yt7 [British Parliament website, Publications and Records].
He was not predicting that we’d all have to move to Antarctica; what he actually said – and not to the press but to a House of Commons Select Committee, – was: “Fifty-five million years ago was a time when there was no ice on the earth; the Antarctic was the most habitable place for mammals, because it was the coolest place, and the rest of the earth was rather inhabitable because it was so hot. It is estimated that it was roughly 1,000 parts per million then, and the important thing is that if we carry on business as usual we will hit 1,000 parts per million around the end of this century.”
Now, even this statement could be seen as overstating the scale of the problem. In particular:
1.
| Fifty-five million years ago South America and Australia were much closer to Antarctica (see: http://tinyurl.com/2kr638), so that the Southern Ocean was not yet open. This meant that the ocean current around Antarctica (see: http://tinyurl.com/ynk3mt [Wikipedia]), which today isolates it from warmer waters further north, had not formed; and hence temperatures there were higher.
| 2.
| When Sir David made his statement in 2004, the most authoritative available projections of what CO2 levels might result in 2100 if we chose to do nothing at all to reduce carbon emissions (which is what he meant by “if we carry on business as usual”), were given by the IPCC's Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES). A range of different scenarios were included in that report, based on different assumed figures for drivers such as population growth, economic growth, technology improvements and so on. These different scenarios were not forecasts, they were simply a way of saying “if we assume for the sake of argument, x, y and z, in terms of population growth, etc. what would be the likely future outcomes of that in terms of atmospheric levels of CO2?”
The important point here is that out of the 4 main (marker) SRES scenarios, none of them reached 1000ppm CO2 before 2100, only one had atmospheric CO2 levels reaching 1,000 ppm before 2150; and only one other had CO2 concentrations reaching 1000ppm ever. So Sir David’s statement that “if we carry on business as usual we will hit 1,000 parts per million around the end of this century” actually describes a highly unlikely scenario. See data from Schlesinger and Malyshev 2001 for a comparison of the concentration pathways of the SRES marker scenarios.
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Nevertheless, there is all the difference in the world between stating that something has happened in the past and that therefore there is a potential risk that it might happen again, which is what Sir David did; and forecasting that it will happen, which Sir David did not do.
And stating that “the rest of the earth was rather inhabitable because it was so hot” is very far from being the same as saying that “the rest of the world was completely uninhabitable” (still less, that it will become so again).
Pointing out what “worst case scenario” risks there may be is a very important aspect of all public policy decision-making processes. All sensible businesses, governments and individuals insure against small but potentially very serious risks – if we didn’t, no-one would take out fire insurance policies. Policy makers need to know what the worst case risks are, however unlikely; and scientific advisors must provide them with that information. Stating what potential risks there are to a House of Commons Select Committee is very different indeed from making a forecast, to the press.
The Independent should have known better. Their twisting of what Sir David actually said, and their failure to mention the full context, was highly irresponsible. But even more irresponsible was for Dr Singer – who wants the world to believe he is a credible scientist – to show such an extraordinary contempt for the facts as to claim that Sir David had said that “humanity may survive, thanks to some breeding couples who moved to the Antarctic”. Dr Singer’s statement has the odour of mendacity; and it besmirches the good name of science far more than Sir David’s does.
daverado.mvps.org |
