David Rose is a writer for the UK tabloid Mail on Sunday, and is known for his inaccurate and misleading climate change coverage. Rose is particularly fond of cherry picking data to hide the rapid decline in Arctic sea ice. In August 2014, he published a piece focusing on the fact that at the time, there was more sea ice in the Arctic than during the record-breaking summer of 2012. Rose’s misguided focus on noisy short-term data is underscored by the new record low winter Arctic sea ice extent we experienced this year, less than seven months after his piece was published.

Bob Ward, policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science, filed a complaint with the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) about Rose’s piece. Ipso is intended to police the UK print media. It replaced the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) in this assignment after the latter was roundly criticised for failing to take action in the News of the World phone hacking affair. Ipso describes itself as,

the independent regulator of the newspaper and magazine industry. We exist to promote and uphold the highest professional standards of journalism in the UK, and to support members of the public in seeking redress where they believe that the Editors’ Code of Practice has been breached … IPSO is here to serve the public by holding publications to account for their actions.

The first clause in the Editors’ Code of Practice deals with accuracy of the Press and includes the following provision.

i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.

Bob Ward’s complaint alleged that Rose and the Mail had violated this section of the Code on several points, for example by giving the impression that the long-term decline in Arctic sea ice had reversed and by claiming that polar bear populations aren’t declining. On each point, Ward was correct that Rose’s piece is at best misleading, and often factually incorrect. Nevertheless, yesterday Ipso ruled in favor of Rose and the Mail.

On the Arctic sea ice decline, although Rose makes too much of the last two years worth of data, he does acknowledge that ‘the long-term trend still shows a decline’ and states carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for global warming which has in turn caused sea ice to decline.

He also quotes climate scientist Dr Ed Hawkins, one of four scientists he spoke to, warning “against reading too much into ice increase over the past two years on the grounds that 2012 was an ‘extreme low’.”



But he also cites contrarian climate scientist Judith Curry, who allegedly told him,

The Arctic sea ice spiral of death seems to have reversed.

This claim is entirely false, as the data in the following video illustrates.

Arctic sea ice annual minimum volume data, created by Andy Lee Robinson.

Rose also quoted climate scientist Ed Hawkins saying, in understated fashion,

I’m uncomfortable with the idea of people saying the ice has bounced back

So Ipso ruled that by including these comments from two climate scientists, Rose “had made clear that scientific opinions regarding the significance of the most recent data varied.” In this specific case, most of the fault lies with Judith Curry for providing Rose with a misleading and scientifically indefensible quote.

However, on several other points, Rose’s piece was simply factually wrong. For example, it claimed,

Yet even when the ice reached a low point in 2012, there was no scientific evidence that bear numbers were declining

As Ward pointed out in his complaint, the Polar Bear Specialist Group has reported that several polar bear sub-populations are declining. Specifically, in the group’s latest report, they found that three sub-populations are declining, six are stable, one is increasing, and nine lack sufficient data. For example, one recent study found that the number of polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea has declined by approximately 40% over the past decade.

Polar bear survival is strongly tied to the abundance of sea ice, which they rely upon to hunt seals. While Arctic sea ice as a whole is declining rapidly, in some areas it has remained stable, depending upon local geographic conditions. In areas with stable sea ice, polar bear sub-populations have also generally remained stable.



However, sea ice in other regions has declined, and the local polar bear sub-populations along with them. The long-term outlook is bleak for both Arctic sea ice and polar bears, including in most regions where the ice has so far remained stable. Uncurbed global warming will eventually melt the ice, even in currently stable regions.

In any case, there was scientific evidence in 2012 that several polar bear sub-populations had declined. Ipso ruled in Rose’s favour because he wrote,

the main international bear science body, the Polar Bear Specialist Group, admits it has no reliable data from almost half of the Arctic, so cannot say whether numbers are falling or rising.

However, this is different from claiming that there is no scientific evidence that polar bear numbers are declining. The data show that three sub-populations are declining, and some very rapidly. In short, Rose has confused a lack of data from some sub-populations with “no evidence” of population decline. The latter is simply untrue. The available data are very concerning, which is why polar bears are listed as a threatened species.

Rose also took comments by Al Gore out of context, and plotted Arctic sea ice extent data for the period 2004–2014 while claiming the “melt has slowed over 10 years”. Ward raised issue with both points, in the latter case noting that if we consider the long-term data, the Arctic melt has actually accelerated over the past decade (as illustrated in the above video).

In both cases Ipso ruled that because Gore was quoted correctly and the data were plotted correctly, the fact that they were cherry picked and taken out of context did not violate the code. Given that the editor’s code prohibits the publication of misleading and distorted information, this ruling seems incorrect and indefensible.



In short, Rose has cracked the Ipso code. In order to publish misleading articles without repercussions, British tabloids need only to include scientifically indefensible quotes from contrarian scientists, and to accurately represent the information that they’ve misleadingly cherry picked. Sadly, Ipso seems as toothless to curb climate misinformation as the PCC before it.

• This article was amended on 2 April 2015 to include the fact that David Rose had stated that the “long-term trend still shows a decline” and that he had spoken to four scientists in total. In addition we have appended the following response from Rose:

“Like anyone who challenges aspects of the so-called ‘consensus’ over climate change, I’ve grown inured to being called a ‘denier’, as some of the commenters ‘below the line’ claim I am here. It is with some weariness that I must point out, as I did in the article that started this fuss, that I accept that the long-term Arctic ice trend is down, that carbon dioxide of human origin is an important cause of this trend, and that, unchecked, it will lead eventually to ice-free Arctic summers – albeit perhaps not for decades.

“But to be attacked for something I didn’t actually write is unfortunate. The fact remains there are large uncertainties and intense debate among scientists on this and other climate change topics, even if, as has been said, 97 per cent agree that the world is warming and that humans are partly to blame. But that doesn’t take us very far, and there are important differences of opinion. Professor Judith Curry isn’t a ‘contrarian’ but a very distinguished scientist and ice expert with a long record of peer-reviewed publications, though she happens to disagree with Mr Nuccitelli.





“As for the bears, the head of the Polar Bear Specialist Group said last year that the bear totals it issues have only ever been a ‘qualified guess to satisfy public demand’, and that the gaps in the data are so big that ‘the range given for total global population should be viewed with great caution as it cannot be used to assess population trend over the long term’.”