What do you get when cross a game of Chinese whispers, an ideologically-driven section of the press, a failure to check facts and the absence of a time machine?

You get the latest shambles in climate change reporting that has unnecessarily left people confused and misled about the true state of climate change science and the risks of pumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere.

Let's dive in.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned The Australian, the country's only national newspaper (besides the business-focused Australian Financial Review), reported in the introduction to a page one story earlier this week that "over the past 60 years the world has in fact been warming at half the rate claimed in the previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2007."

Written by the newspaper's environment correspondent Graham Lloyd, the story did not cite a respected scientist for this central claim, nor did it cite the IPCC itself or a leaked document. Instead, it chose a dubious story in the British conservative tabloid The Daily Mail as its main source.

UK-based Carbon Brief has spoken to several scientists heavily critical of the original Daily Mail story, which had other newspapers first re-reporting and then hastily correcting their stories.

The Daily Mail had made two central claims in its original story (which it has now changed - but more on that in a second). The first was that the IPCC's 2007 report (known as AR4) had said that the "the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2C every decade". The second claim was that a leaked copy of the upcoming AR5 put the warming since 1951 at only "0.12C per decade".

We can check both of these claims.

Firstly, here's what the 2007 AR4 said about warming since 1951, my emphasis added:

Eleven of the last twelve years (1995–2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850). The updated 100-year linear trend (1906 to 2005) of 0.74°C [0.56°C to 0.92°C] is therefore larger than the corresponding trend for 1901 to 2000 given in the Third Assessment Report of 0.6°C [0.4°C to 0.8°C]. The linear warming trend over the last 50 years (0.13°C [0.10°C to 0.16°C] per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years. The total temperature increase from 1850–1899 to 2001–2005 is 0.76°C [0.57°C to 0.95°C].



So The Daily Mail's first claim was wrong - 0.13C is not 0.2C. How about the second claim? As this was based on a leaked draft of a summary of the IPCC's next report, which is not due out until the end of September, this is harder for people to check. But I have a copy, dated June this year.

Here's what it says about warming land surface temperatures - bearing in mind that this from a draft copy (apologies to the IPCC for breaking their protocols, but needs must).

Global mean surface temperature trends exhibit substantial decadal variability, despite the robust multi-decadal warming since 1901. The rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998−2012; 0.05 [−0.05 to +0.15] °C per decade) is smaller than the trend since 1951 (1951−2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade).



So when comparing apples with apples, the difference in the warming trend over the last 50 years between the two IPCC reports referred to by The Daily Mail is actually just 0.01C. Bad, bad IPCC.

The Daily Mail also wrote that a finding in the 2007 IPCC report that "hurricanes would become more intense" had "simply been dropped, without mention" in the new report. This is also questionable.

A table from my copy of the upcoming summary report (again, I stress this is a draft dated June so this might have changed) does discuss hurricane activity, saying it was "more likely than not" that there would be more intense cyclones in the latter half of the 21st century, but this wouldn't happen everywhere. It was "virtually certain" that the North Atlantic had seen increases in intense cyclones since 1970, the report says.

But back to The Australian's coverage, which states that the IPCC was "forced to deny it was locked in crisis talks" when in fact, the meeting in question had been scheduled for months. There never were any crisis talks.

Like a faulty game of Chinese whispers where the first sentence uttered into the ear didn't make sense in the first place, The Australian's stablemate, Sydney's The Daily Telegraph, then followed-up this awful mish-mash by repeating The Daily Mail's claim in a story that read "the world has been warming at only just over half the rate [the UN] had claimed in 2007".

Rather than listening to one of Australia's many respected climate change scientists, instead The Daily Telegraph went to Dr Bob Carter for a quote.

Dr Carter, a geologist without any university affiliation, has a wafer-thin publishing record on atmospheric climate change in the respected peer-reviewed literature. He is a fellow at the climate sceptic conservative "think tank" the Institute of Public Affairs, which does not reveal its funders, and a dozen or so other climate sceptic groups around the world.

Experts ignored

But I can reveal that there was an attempt by one Daily Telegraph reporter to find a more reliable source for the paper's story.

The Australian Research Council-funded Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science supplied The Daily Telegraph with quotes from two climate scientists, including one who is a chapter author of the upcoming report. Background information was also supplied, demonstrating how the claim about the rate of global warming was wrong. For some editors, this information may well have killed the story dead.

However, Alvin Stone, the centre's media and communications officer, described what eventually appeared in The Daily Telegraph as "beyond an embarrassment" telling me by email that "it included none of the background information, none of the quotes, none of the links that showed the IPCC estimate on decadal warming was very close to the mark and then added quotes from denier politicians and pseudo experts".

Since The Australian and The Daily Telegraph published their original stories, The Daily Mail has issued a "clarification" and is now claiming that global warming is just a "quarter" of the IPCC projections. Yet to make this claim, The Daily Mail would need a time machine.

The Daily Mail now claims that in 2007 the IPCC had said that observed warming from 1990 to 2005 was at a rate of 0.2C per decade. This is correct. But The Daily Mail claims the IPCC had predicted this would continue for another 20 years based on climate models, which would get us to the year 2025. So we'll only really know how close those projections were in 15 years or so (surely The Daily Mail's possession of a time machine is a bigger story - but I digress).

Back in Sydney, The Daily Telegraph also published an opinion column by Dr Carter - who was incorrectly given the more impressive sounding title 'Professor'. He isn't one.

Dr Carter wrote that annual emissions of "industrial carbon dioxide" were a "rather small 7 billion tonnes". The actual figure, according to the International Energy Agency, is more than 30 billion tonnes - a figure closely matching findings from the Global Carbon Project, which has the figure at 34.7 billion tonnes for 2011.

Dr Carter also claimed while some scientists "worry" that rising CO2 will cause between 3 and 6C of global warming, other scientists who are "independent" claim the number is between 0.3 and 1.2C.

Here, Dr Carter is likely comparing apples with bicycle frames by using two entirely different measures of how the world's temperature reacts to increases in carbon dioxide. I explain more about these two methods - known as Transient Climate Response and Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity - here.

But in short, the larger number which Dr Carter uses likely refers to ECS - that is, the eventual global warming you would expect from a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere if you waited several centuries.

The smaller number Dr Carter uses is likely referring to TCR - the warming you get in only 50 years when you reach the point when CO2 in the atmosphere is double what it was at the start of the industrial revolution.

Dr Carter then goes on to spruik a project known as the Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which he claims is an alternative review of climate science by a team of "independent scientists".

Dr Carter does not mention that the NIPCC is led by the US free-market "think tank" the Heartland Institute, and that internal documents from Heartland have shown that Dr Carter was to be paid $1667 a month for his work on this project.

The Heartland Institute is probably best known for losing millions of dollars from expected donors after running a billboard campaign equating "belief" in climate change to the ideals of terrorist and murderer Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski.

Nor does Dr Carter mention that the Heartland Institute has accepted millions of dollars in funding from fossil-fuel vested interests and more than $10 million via a secretive slush-fund set up especially for conservative-leaning philanthropists.

Suggesting that the ideologically-driven Heartland Institute is an "independent" source on climate change should be seen as an insult, as should the way some Australian newspapers have "reported" on climate change this week.