Friday Interview: Digging Beneath the Headlines on Climate Change

The Weather Channel trumpeted the headline “2012: Warmest year on record for U.S.” But neither that channel nor any other mainstream media outlet devoted much attention to a contradictory piece of global warming news that surfaced at about the same time. Roy Cordato, John Locke Foundation vice president for research and resident scholar, discussed the issue with Donna Martinez for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

Martinez: You say The Weather Channel headline about the U.S. was really the least important climate news recently. But yet it was a huge headline. Tell us why it was the least important.

Cordato: Well, because there was other news out that did not generate headlines, but probably should have. The fact is we’re talking about global warming, not warming for a particular country. And other news that came out right around the same time, which wasn’t picked up, really by anyone, was that, globally, 2012 was only the ninth-warmest year since 1979. And that is from satellite data. The reason why it’s from 1979 is because that’s when they started using satellite data to measure global temperatures. So that is not such a scary headline, and it’s probably why it didn’t get picked up anywhere. But the fact is that, globally, we’re certainly not looking at the warmest year on record.

Martinez: Big difference between those two headlines, when you look at the entire planet.

Cordato: That’s right.

Martinez: And just the United States of America.

Cordato: Yes. And you can always pick a point. You can always pick a place where it’s the warmest or the coldest. I mean, they could have picked maybe some other country where it might have been the coldest on record. I don’t know that that’s the case, but it wouldn’t surprise me. You can always pick a local data point and tell a scare story around it.

Martinez: Is that what you think was going on here? You just used the phrase “scare story.”

Cordato: Well, I mean, I think the media often just likes to run with scare stories. I mean, it’s not news if you say, “Well, this is a ho-hum year in terms of global warming.” But it is news if you can say “the warmest year on record” — by the way, just in the United States.

Martinez: Because it fits into a narrative.

Cordato: And I think it probably does fit into a narrative that they want to accept. And I’m not so sure that headline ever got on their radar screen. You have to actually be a news person and search out a story like that because it’s not being pushed by environmental groups or other people that they look to for this kind of news.

Martinez: Now you, Roy, are not a news person, but you are an analyst, and you are an economist. That’s the reason you follow climate science and global warming and that whole issue. I know you have said there were a number of different headlines and different sources of information you follow that you felt were important headlines. You write about one called the Met Office. Tell us about that.

Cordato: The Met Office stands for Meteorological Office. It’s in the U.K. It’s the U.K. Met Office. It’s a government-run agency, and it tends to be this sort of go-to place for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the IPCC — which is the United Nations organization devoted to looking at climate change issues. They typically go to the Met Office and use their data and their data predictions for their work. And another interesting headline that nobody saw, all around the same time, just around the first of the year, is that the Met Office has updated [its] projections for the next five years. And the projection for the next five years is no global warming at all — basically a flat line.

Martinez: Worldwide?

Cordato: Worldwide. And that went completely — again — under the radar. No one picked up on that. And if you combine that five years, the next five years, with the last 15 — if you look at their data, the last 15 years, there has been no warming, basically a flat trend line — add that five years, that is a total of 20 years with no warming globally. That is, I think, a very important story. But, again, it’s not a story that generates fear. It is, in fact, quite the contrary.

It’s also not a story that will get people behind an agenda to stifle energy growth and CO2 emissions and a lot of what the [Environmental Protection Agency] is trying to do. So, again, important story about global warming — I would argue more important than the fact that 2012 for the United States was the warmest year since 1895, or whatever, since they started keeping ground-level temperature records. I think that’s a more important story. But, again, no one picked up on it.

Martinez: You and I have talked about this subject a number of times here on Carolina Journal Radio. And over the past several years, it seemed like there was a point where there were alarmist stories all the time. I mean, there were headlines wherever you looked. And then it seemed to go a little bit more dormant for a while. Now, however, we have recently heard President Obama speaking about the need to address global climate change. So where does the movement stand?

Cordato: Let’s get something straight. The policies being proposed will likely do almost nothing about climate change. What he’s going to address is the growth in CO2 emissions, carbon dioxide emissions. But the fact is, none of that will have any impact on global warming. And they tend to acknowledge it if you really press them. In our lifetimes, or in the lifetimes of anyone currently on the planet, really, or probably the children of anyone currently on the planet, even if you accept their scenarios for the future, it will not alter those scenarios.

Martinez: What is the point of those policies then?

Cordato: That calls [for] speculation on my part. But I think it’s really to promote an agenda of slow growth and I think … wealth [re]distribution. But, again, I’m willing to take them at their word and say, “OK, well, they just are not being accurate.”

Martinez: Will the president’s comments — and presumably some policy proposals that would come out of those comments — will that serve to get the whole alarmist movement churning again, so to speak?

Cordato: I think if he starts to really push it and try to set up Congress to do something —which they have refused to do in the past over and over and over again, going back to the late 1990s and not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, to more recently voting down cap and trade — I think he can gin up his base, definitely, and there will be more of these kinds of stories. But what we have to do, not only at the John Locke Foundation, but as the electorate, is to go behind these stories, to ask serious questions about what these stories are actually telling us.