It’s OK everybody. Panic over.

I’ll bet I’m not the only one to be feeling all tickety-boo at the news that human-caused climate change probably isn’t anything to get worked up about and that we can all go back to worrying about deforestation, rampant over-consumption of the world’s natural resources, the collapsing ocean ecosystem and whether or not Donald Trump’s hair might be real.

How fortuitous, too, that the news comes as more than 190 governments from around the world are preparing to head to Paris next month to agree a new global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

In case you hadn’t read the big news, it was brought to us by famous climate change journalist Miranda Devine (not an actual climate change journalist) reporting on the latest theory of climate change expert David Evans (not an actual expert and not an actual theory).

Under the headline “Perth electrical engineer’s discovery will change climate change debate”, News Corp Australia columnist Devine wrote that “if” climate science denialist blogger Evans was correct “then he has proven the theory on carbon dioxide wrong and blown a hole in climate alarmism”.

Wow. A Nobel prize in the offing for Evans for disproving more than a century of science without ever having published a single paper on climate change in any peer reviewed journal? Devine will surely be in line for a Walkley (the Aussie Pulitzer).

OK. Enough of the sarcasm.

Evans is a climate science denier who has been claiming for years that the science linking carbon dioxide emissions to dangerous global warming is largely a scam, perhaps, as he once wrote, linked to international bankers, or something.

Evans has been writing a series of posts (we’re up to 11 so far) on the blog of his wife, JoNova, where he claims to have found fundamental problems with climate models meaning that CO2 isn’t the key culprit in warming the planet. Another supportive News Corp Australia climate science denialist, Andrew Bolt, has provided a summary of Evans’ claims.

Devine was so confident in Evans’ Galileo-like abilities, that she didn’t feel the need to check them with an actual climate scientist.

Neither did the New Daily, which lifted the story from Devine’s column for the headline “Perth Engineer Claims Huge Climate Change Discovery”.

Prof Matt England, of the University of New South Wales climate change research centre, had this to say:

David Evans has a superb track record of dodgy claims and bizarre climate change theories. He has zero credibility in the field and it’s staggering that any credible journalist could fall for this rubbish.

Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth System Science at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told me:

I’ve been working in climate science for 25 years now, and every few months someone (often they are engineers) comes up with a supposed bombshell refutation of human-caused global warming - none of this has ever stood up to scientific scrutiny. Dr Evans rolls out a number of well-worn false assertions often heard from those outside science who try to discredit climate science. Global warming is not pausing: it’s a measured fact that the globally hottest years on record are 2014, 2010 and 2005. 2015 is already so much warmer than 2014 that it is almost certain to be yet another record year. Models reproduce (and have in fact predicted) the warming of the past forty years well. I am surprised that some journalists are still gullible enough to present such a non-story, based merely on wild claims in a blog.

Climate modeller William Connelly has a more detailed and, if it’s possible, even more dismissive analysis on his Stoat blog.



If Evans’ posts on his wife’s blog don’t fill you with confidence that the whole climate change cathedral of science is crumbling into a pit of wrongness, then how about the latest from UK climate science denier James Delingpole, editor of the rightwing website Breitbart London?

“Global cooling discovery may scupper Paris climate talks,” read the headline.

Delingpole was writing about research published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology finding that the oceans were emitting a gas known as isoprene, which can help clouds to form. Delingpole wrote:

This discovery presents further proof that the skeptics are right: the reason that all that predicted “global warming” has failed to materialize is that it has been countered by the planet’s natural cooling effects. … The news could scarcely have come at a worse time for the global climate alarmist community which has been ramping up the scaremongering message in the run up to the latest round of UN climate talks in Paris this December.

The authors of the study told Carbon Brief that Delingpole’s interpretation of their work was wrong and their finding “definitely does not question climate change”. Delingpole responded with abuse.

Fellow Guardian blogger Dana Nuccitelli notes how Delingpole did not seek help from the authors of the study, but instead chose to interpret the results himself with the help of climate change contrarian lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

The GWPF was forced to restructure last year after the UK’s Charity Commission found it “difficult not to form the conclusion” the group “promoted a particular position on global warming”.

The commission said: “In areas of controversy, education requires balance and neutrality with sufficient weight given to competing arguments. The promotion of a particular view or position would not equate to education.”

In the Australian a few weeks ago, we had the headline “Southern Ocean ‘sink’ turns the tide on climate change alarm” – another story where the journalist decided to head to the GWPF for slanted comment.



The newspaper’s environment editor, Graham Lloyd, was reporting on a study in the journal Science about the ability of the Southern Ocean to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The Southern Ocean is an important carbon “sink”. The world’s oceans have taken up about a quarter of our emissions of carbon dioxide. The Southern Ocean has accounted for about 40% of all that sequestered CO2.

A previous study, also in Science, found that for a period between about 1981 and 2004, the Southern Ocean sink weakened. This was linked to changing wind patterns, probably caused by rising CO2 levels.

Now this new study found that from 2002 to 2012, the ocean went through a recovery, also driven by changing winds.

Lloyd wrote that “the findings have invigorated debate about how well scientists understand the natural variations in the earth’s climate,” before going on to quote not one, but two GWPF spokespeople.

Both tried to claim the new study showed how previous studies were wrong and that this was “another alarmist claim removed by science”. The future was uncertain, they said.

I asked the authors of the latest Science study about the coverage in the Australian. Lead author Dr Peter Landschützer, of ETH Zürich university, told me:

I think the Australian misunderstood our attempt to illustrate that our statistical model (the one we used to interpolate the data) is not able to predict the future, simply because we do not have future observations.

Dr Landschützer said the study had also confirmed the previous weakening of the sink but showed that the Southern Ocean likely had a larger variability than previously understood.

But he said that “since we cannot predict the future with our model” it was possible that the Southern Ocean could swing back again.

So does the Southern Ocean’s newfound strength as a carbon sink really “turn the tide on climate change alarm” as the Australian’s headline suggested?

Well, in 2002 the Southern Ocean was taking up about 2.2bn tonnes of CO2 and by 2011, this had risen to 4.4bn tonnes. But over the same period, human emissions went up from about 25.6 billion tonnes CO2-e a year to 34.87 CO2-e per year. Landschützer said:

So it is good news that the Southern Ocean is working again to take up additional carbon that we emit and thereby slows down global warming. But as you can see from the plain numbers, this will by far not solve our man made climate change problem.

Co-author of the study, Prof Nicolas Gruber, also of ETH Zürich, told me the findings had gained global coverage in many news outlets, but “the Australian was the only one that made an attempt to twist the story into supporting the climate’ deniers line of arguments.”

We’re probably going to get a fair bit more of this kind of news coverage as we head towards those critical United Nations climate change talks in Paris.

Before the previous major talks in Copenhagen, climate science deniers latched onto the illegally hacked emails of scientists to try and confuse the public about climate change.

This time around, it seems they are relying on a mix of fake experts, dodgy journalism and hubris.

Not even Donald Trump’s fringe can cover up their desperation.