Times's climate change coverage 'distorted' and 'poor quality'

The Times newspaper has been criticised for “poor quality” and “distorted coverage” of global warming by a group including some of the UK’s most eminent scientists, the chair of the government’s official advisers on climate change and a former chair of oil giant Shell.

“If you lose trust, you lose everything; and on this issue, you are losing trust,” said the group, in a letter to the Times editor, John Witherow, seen by the Guardian.

The group says the Times’s coverage: “appears designed systematically to undermine the credibility of climate science and the institutions that carry it out, and the validity of programmes aimed at reducing emissions.”

“Climate science has proven remarkably robust to repeated scrutiny, and multiple lines of evidence indicate that climate change and ocean acidification pose serious and increasing risks for the future,” the group says. “There is abundant evidence also that decarbonised energy systems can provide energy security at reasonable cost if they are properly planned.”

The group say they find two aspects of the Times’s coverage “particularly concerning”.

According to the signatories: “The first is that neither the quality bar that broadsheet newspapers regularly apply to scientific evidence, nor the simple concept of balance, appear to exist in all of your paper’s reporting on climate change. The second concern is that many of the sub-standard news stories and opinion pieces appear to concern, in some way, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).”

The GWPF is a thinktank led by former chancellor and climate sceptic Lord Lawson, and regular Times columnist Viscount Matt Ridley is a member of its academic advisory council. “It would be deeply perturbing to find that a paper as eminent as the Times could allow a small NGO, particularly one whose sources of financing are unknown, a high degree of influence,” says the letter to Witherow.

The signatories of the letter, all members of the House of Lords, include Lord Deben, current chair of the government’s official advisers on global warming, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), as well as Lord Krebs, who chairs the CCC’s adaptation committee and is a former president of the British Science Association.

Seven of the signatories are Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS), the UK’s elite science academy, including two past presidents, Lord Rees and Lord May. The latter is a former government chief scientific adviser. Among the other FRS are Lord Hunt, former head of the Met Office, Lord Oxburgh, former chair of Shell UK, and Lord Stern, author of a landmark analysis of the economics of climate change and a former chief economist at the World Bank. Lord Turner, a former chair of the CCC, and the Bishop of London, also signed the letter.

The letter to Witherow, dated 20 April, takes issue with some of the paper’s recent coverage and cites two recent examples of what the peers consider “poor quality and/or distorted coverage”.

The writers first single out an article headlined: Planet is not overheating, says professor, in which the Times reported on a study which concluded the global average temperature is likely to remain unchanged by the end of the century.

“That a paper of the Times’ standing chose to report on this study at all is astonishing, given its poor quality,” the group writes. “Since your article appeared, scientists have commented, for example, that the method used involves ignoring everything that science has discovered about atmospheric physics since the discovery of greenhouse warming by John Tyndall more than 150 years ago … [The study] was not peer-reviewed, and was commissioned and paid for by the GWPF. On social media it has, literally, been a laughing stock.”

The second article was headlined Scientists ‘are exaggerating carbon threat to marine life. The peers write that “the researcher on whose work it was based, Dr Howard Browman, has criticised [the Times] article using terms such as ‘cherry-picking’, ‘sensational’ and ‘disappointing’.”

“Please do not mistake our comments as an attack on press freedom,” the peers tell Witherow. “Nothing could be further from the truth. A healthy, vibrant, inquisitive press is a vital component of a mature democracy, and neither science nor ‘green’ business should be exempt from proper scrutiny. But trust is also essential for any newspaper, particularly one as distinguished as The Times. If you lose trust, you lose everything; and on this issue, you are losing trust.”

The peers said not all Times articles on climate change lacked balance: “Your coverage at the close of the Paris climate summit was both balanced and comprehensive.”

A Times spokeswoman said: “The Times regularly reports on energy and climate change from across the scientific spectrum of debate and, as the peers’ letter acknowledges, our coverage at the close of the Paris climate summit was ‘both balanced and comprehensive’.”

Dr Benny Peiser, director of the GWPF said: “We note that in the Lords this week Lord Krebs was rightly arguing against suppression of scientists giving dissenting advice to government so we are surprised to see him writing to the editor of the Times demanding that it censors its balanced reporting of climate issues. GWPF is an independent thinktank which does not accept any funding from the energy industry, and publishes work by distinguished academics and others, so there is no reason the Times should not cite its work.”