Thread by @dana1981

@sarahknapton You should have dived deeper, because this article is full of inaccuracies.

1) "the warming trend is slower than most climate models have forecast."

False: skepticalscience.com/comparing-glob…

@sarahknapton 2) "In 1990 the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that temperatures would rise by 0.54F (0.3C) per decade."

False: skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-p…

@sarahknapton 3) "Yet, some scientists argue that [CO2] is not capable of producing the extreme temperature rises seen in recent decades."

You can also find "some scientists" who argue the Earth is flat. There's a 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming.
skepticalscience.com/global-warming…

@sarahknapton 4) "the IPCC estimated that human emissions are probably responsible for more than half of the observed increase in global average temperature from 1951 to 2010.

But it means a chunk of the rise is coming from elsewhere."

WTAF? No!!!!

theguardian.com/environment/cl…

@sarahknapton 5) "In the 1920s, the French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier realised that the ‘greenhouse effect’ must exist"

That was the 1820s 🤦‍♂️

@sarahknapton 6) "However, some experts argue that carbon dioxide is only a minor player in this atmospheric hothouse effect."

Again with the "some experts argue [bullshit]".

@sarahknapton 7) "Ice cores from Antarctica show that at the end of recent ice ages, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started to rise only after temperatures began to climb."

Mostly false: skepticalscience.com/skakun-co2-tem…

@sarahknapton 8) "But by far the largest greenhouse gas is water vapour, which makes 95 per cent of the total."

Irrelevant and misleading: skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-gr…

@sarahknapton 9) "Scientists such as Dr Willie Soon, a solar astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have shown that as water vapour rises, so does temperature."

First, Soon has received over $1 million from the fossil fuel industry.
theguardian.com/environment/20…

@sarahknapton Second, he didn't show that. We've known that water vapor is a greenhouse gas for over a century. You detailed the history in this very article!

'Soon has shown that gravity the effect of pulling on objects'.

@sarahknapton 10) "CO2 is not powerful in that sense, the only thing it does in the system is make the planet greener. Carbon Dioxide is playing a minor role in the total greenhouse effect ... Yet other scientists claim this is a red herring”

Yes, "other scientists" who aren't Big Oil hacks🙄

@sarahknapton 11) "Even the BBC has admitted to Ofcom that the corporation is now biased on the matter because it no longer thinks there is a counter-argument."

Yes, the BBC is also "biased" toward accepting that the moon landing really happened.

@sarahknapton 12) "The MWP lasted from about 950 to 1250AD, and temperature records appear to show it was even hotter than today"

Ridiculously false:

https://twitter.com/greatlakespeck/status/1161628247232094208

@sarahknapton 13) "But the period has caused a headache for climate scientists because clearly there was no upswell in carbon dioxide that could account for such swift warming."

A headache? Climate scientists know a variety of factors contributed to this modest warming skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-…

@sarahknapton 14) "Likewise temperatures suddenly plummeted after the MWP, bringing a period of cooling known as the Little Ice Age"

If you call that modest cooling "plummeting," what do you call the current far more rapid warming?

https://twitter.com/greatlakespeck/status/1161628247232094208

@sarahknapton 15) "Jonathan Overpeck - wrote an email to a colleague claiming ‘we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.’"

That's a fabricated quote, and even if it were real, this sort of quote-mining is grossly misleading and unbecoming of journalists. tucson.com/news/science/e…

@sarahknapton 16) "it later emerged that [hockey stick] creator Dr Michael Mann had spliced too datasets together"

No, you're mixing up two different myths about @MichaelEMann's work here, and also misspelling "two" 🤦‍♂️

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 17) "much of the data had been based American bristlecone pines ... The IPCC no longer includes the ‘Hockey stick’ chart in its reports."

There are loads of paleoclimate temperature proxies showing the same thing. And the claim about the IPCC is false: archive.ipcc.ch/publications_a…

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 18) "Some scientists believe that solar activity is more likely to influence today’s climate than carbon dioxide, and Dr Soon..."

Again with the "some scientists" and then specifically naming only one, who happens to have received >$1 million from the fossil fuel industry 🙄

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 19) "Extreme cases of ice melting typically occur once every 250 years"

That's kind of a bizarre and wholly unsubstantiated claim!

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 20) "In one particularly damning email, CRU director Phil Jones said he had used ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ to ‘hide the decline’ in temperatures"

False: skepticalscience.com/Mikes-Nature-t…

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 21) "Contents of the [Climategate] emails suggested scientists had been hiding or manipulating data"

No, people only made such suggestions by quote-mining and distorting the emails' contents. Your whole section on Climategate is nonsense.

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 22) "The IPCC was also not exempt from misleading the public. The panel was forced to retract a statement in its 2007 report saying all Himalayan glaciers could melt entirely by 2035."

Making one error in a thousands-of-pages document is not misleading the public!

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 23) "The figure traditionally cited that suggests 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that global warming is man-made was also found to be flawed."

False: skepticalscience.com/global-warming…

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 24) "A survey which claimed to have questioned 10,257 academics, was found to have winnowed down the sample to just 77."

"Was found to have"? It's in the text of their study! And they didn't "winnow"; that's how many were publishing climate scientists
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.102…

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 25) "A poll of 1854 members of the American Meteorological Society found the number who believe climate change to be man-made to be 52 per cent."

And only 13% of participants in that survey described climate as their field of expertise.
theguardian.com/environment/cl…

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 26) "'The 97 per cent figure is derived from two pieces of pseudoscience that would have embarrassed a homeopath,' said Vicount Ridley in his climate blog."

Oh well if some random nutjob said so on his blog, that's well worth quoting! Great journalism 🙄

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 27) "Climate skeptics also point out that temperature records have been adjusted in recent years to make the past appear cooler and the present warmer."

Which you prove by showing a chart in which ... past adjusted temperatures are *warmer* than the raw data

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 28) "While satellite records showed largely flatlining temperatures"

No, even UAH, whose satellite analysis of lower tropospheric temperatures estimates the least warming, still has a warming trend. skepticalscience.com/trend.php

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 29) "Some believe that the difference is caused by a localised ‘heat island’ effect as many weather stations are cited in built up areas."

Again with the "some believe". Some believe there are aliens at Area 51, too. skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-isl…

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann 30) "Confusion peaked in 2014 when surface temperature readings said the year was the hottest on record ... Met Office dataset ‘HadCRUt’ had been adjusted to show 1998 as cooler."

WTAF? This is garbage. 2014 was well hotter than 1998 data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabled…

@sarahknapton @MichaelEMann Finally reached the end with just 30 falsehoods!

To be fair, there's some good information in there sprinkled amidst the garbage. But waaaaaaay too many myths and misinformation and false balance. It's 2019. Science journalists need to do much, much, much better than this.