Early this year, a British tabloid ran a hyperbolic article on climate change, claiming that world leaders had been "duped" by climate data that had been manipulated. It wasn't unusual for the outlet or the article's author to make badly misleading claims about climate research, and our own investigation into the underlying disagreement showed that the piece actually boiled down to a dispute about how best to archive data. These sorts of misrepresentations happen dozens of times a year.

But something unusual did eventually happen as a response to the article in the Mail on Sunday: a UK press watchdog determined that the article breached the Editor's Code of Conduct. Mail on Sunday was subsequently ordered to prominently display the inaccuracies above the article itself.

IPSO facto

The judgement was handed down by IPSO, the UK's Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO). It maintains an Editor's Code of Conduct, which sets standards for handling a variety of issues; the one relevant here is the section on accuracy. The Mail on Sunday belongs to IPSO and agrees to be bound by its rulings.

(The Mail on Sunday is an editorially independent sister publication to the higher-profile Daily Mail. While they don't share staff, their outlook is substantially similar, and no distinction is made between the two when articles are posted on the Daily Mail website.)

The article in question was published back in February. It focuses on a paper by NOAA scientists that revised the agency's climate history to reflect updated work on sea surface temperatures. The result was a slight change to the upward trend over the most recent decades. This had the effect of eliminating the statistical significance of an apparent slowdown in the rate of warming around the start of this century.

For those invested in the idea that warming had slowed down, this scientific finding was extraordinarily inconvenient. The list of people who refused to accept the result includes the head of the House Science Committee, Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who responded by subpoenaing NOAA scientists and their e-mails and accusing them of fraud. So the scientific results were already the subject of some political controversy.

This is when the Mail on Sunday's David Rose waded in. Rose has published some truly awful articles on climate change in the past, and he has even claimed that the world is heading into an ice age as temperatures continue to rise. Even his Wikipedia entry has multiple citations for criticisms of his "over-reliance on unsound and unscientific sources, cherry-picking, and manufactured data." When defending the article about NOAA, Rose lived down to these criticisms, claiming he was shown "irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, 'unverified' data" and that it had been timed to "dupe" world leaders into pushing forward with a climate treaty.

Again, this sort of misleading article gets published multiple times each year (we know, because readers often write in to demand we cover them). But this one did turn out to be unusual in that someone complained to IPSO about the article, and the organization decided to act.

A reluctant correction

The person who supposedly showed Rose the evidence was a former NOAA employee who had disagreed over the best way to archive the data behind the scientific results. But IPSO determined that Rose had misled his readers by suggesting that archiving issues raised questions about the reliability of the underlying data. Rose's article took "criticisms of the data collection process" and turned them into "assertions of fact that the data had been demonstrated conclusively to be wrong." IPSO also took issue with Rose's assertion that NOAA's "results can never be verified" when, in reality, the data was publicly available.

IPSO also noted that, in the article's attempt to show how the more recent analysis had changed temperature records, it mangled the graph. The watchdog also pointed out that there is no indication any world leaders paid attention to the NOAA publication, much less that they were duped by it.

As a result of this decision, visitors to the original article on the Daily Mail's website will now see the full text of the IPSO ruling appearing ahead of the body of the article. That article, however, remains in its original form, as the Mail has not seen fit to correct any of the errors.

In fact, there's no indication that anything is likely to change on the Mail's side. The Guardian talked with a spokesperson for the publication about the ruling, and the spokesperson repeated the standard canards of false balance, suggesting there were two equally valid sides of an ongoing debate about the rate of climate change and that the issue was largely a matter of the publication deciding to "challenge some widely held opinions." Accurately reporting facts, apparently, did not seem to be of great importance to the spokesperson.