Given that they occupy a position on the scientific credibility spectrum that could charitably be characterised as ‘fringe’, it is no surprise that those who deny climate change have to take their victories where they find them.

Hence the glee following the BBC’s recent story ‘What happened to global warming?’

The BBC quotes Piers Corbyn from weather forecasting company Weatheraction and Don Easterbrook of Western Washington University. Both cast doubt on the widely held consensus view that human activity is driving changes in climate.

Corbyn and Easterbrook are both global warming deniers / sceptics and both have been publicising their doubts for some time (see the references on their Wikipedia entries for more). Without commenting on the merits of their arguments, it is clear that it is slightly disingenuous to use the views of these two men to claim as the BBC does that “It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.”

Nevertheless, the anti-global warming movement is celebrating. Leading the charge is the Daily Telegraph which has a news story and an opinion piece from Damian Thompson which says:

I think the BBC wanted to slip this one out quietly, but a Matt Drudge link put paid to that. The climate change correspondent of BBC News has admitted that global warming stopped in 1998 – and he reports that leading scientists believe that the earth’s cooling-off may last for decades.

Many in the blog-world have followed up with similar items.

To summarise then: two scientists who have previously said they didn’t believe in global warming still don’t believe in global warming.

The main scientific point of the BBC article – that “for the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures” – is discussed in detail on this blog post at Real Climate.

If you don’t wish to follow the link here are a couple of extracts:

Even under conditions of anthropogenic global warming (which would contribute a temperature rise of about 0.2 ºC over this period) a flat period or even cooling trend over such a short time span is nothing special and has happened repeatedly before (see 1987-1996).

…

It is highly questionable whether this “pause” is even real.

UPDATE – See also, ‘Nature’ attacks the BBC for its U-turn over climate change, Daily Telegraph, 12 October.