Dealing with climate change deniers is a soul-destroying business, but while doing it we need to make sure we quote accurate information. That’s why I’d always recommend that anyone actually serious about understanding what’s going on checks the IPCC’s website before going off into battle.

Sadly, that’s not what Giles Coren did before writing his latest editorial for The Times. He’s quite right, dealing with comedians’ jokes of “global warming? what about this snow” is about as much fun as watching ‘The Invention of Lying’ with a directors’ commentary of Ricky Gervais explaining how immensely clever he is, but sadly his science isn’t quite up to scratch.

Can you get it into your thick skulls? If global warming turns out to be true, Britain [sic] weather will go bonkers. It will snow all the time. Weather might be like this more often, not less. Those unseasonably sunny early springs are exactly what there will be fewer of, not more. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
Giles Coren, The Times

Around the late 90s, plenty of people (including the BBC’s Blue Planet if my memory serves) were concerned that a shut-down of the Gulf Stream would leave Britain the same temperature as other countries in its latitude, like Canada. However, the IPCC has always been quite reticent on the issue, and have never really gone beyond saying there is incconclusive evidence that it may happen in over a century’s time. Indeed, a quick skim through the IPCC’s 2007 synthesis report tells us that temperatures are actually predicted to increase in Britain over the next century. A better explanation would have involved explaining the difference between ‘weather’ and ‘climate’, whereby long-term trends (over thirty years) can change without necessarily being obvious in every single weather event.

Why am I drivelling on about this? Not just because I think it’s important to refer to sound science when talking about a scientific issue, but because I found myself actually agreeing with a right-wing anti-climate change idiot whose article was linked to at the side of Giles’ article.

Steve Dorling, of the University of East Anglia’s school of environmental sciences — yes, the UEA of “climategate” email fame — warns that it is “wrong to focus on single events, which are the product of natural variability”.

Quite so; but it would be easier to accept the point that a particular episode of extreme and unexpected cold was entirely due to “natural variations” if the UEA’s chaps had not been so adept at publicising every recent drought or heatwave as possible evidence of “man’s impact”, and if David Viner (then a senior climate scientist at UEA) had not made a headline in The Independent a decade ago by warning that in a few years “British children just aren’t going to know what snow is”.
Dominic Lawon, The Times

And he’s quite right. Climate change is a scientific theory, and as such it doesn’t need anyone making things up to make it sound more valid. Doing this weakens the case for climate change, and makes it that much harder for the rest of us, who know what we’re talking about, to get the message across.