Daily Express lies about Climate Change (again)

Please ignored (if you can) the picture of Charlotte Church in a bikini, this is serious.

The beleaguered Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia is once again on the front pages, this time being trotted out by the Daily Express as a climate change denier.


This is what Prof Jones actually said

Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

C - Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?
No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.

So the Proffessor has said it's getting warmer, not colder, but then said that as he wasn't 95% sure it was getting warmer he'd say nowt. He was also only referring to the data of his own department, not the more complete records of bodies such as the GISS which the IPCC use. So much though for the denier allegation that the CRU aren't suitably rigorous in their predictions.

Now I know "5% Chance Climate Change Isn't Happening" is not going to be a great headline for a paper, and I don't expect the same level of peer review in science writing for the Express as for, say, in Nature, but you'd at least hope they wouldn't publish lies that are too blatant.

Are the rightwing rags so in league with the deniers they'll print any old bollocks to get readers?

Or are they all edited by the type of Arts/Classics/Humanities graduates who regard all scientists as Geeky swots and who wouldn't understand a Baysian probability calculation if it was tattooed on Charlotte Church's bare midrife?

Answers on a postcard please.