The Pause In 2017 - Part 5-ish: Nigel Lawson

As everyone has already mentioned, ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer and chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, was on the BBC Radio 4 Today program. He made a number of claims, none of which were questioned by the interviewer, and none of them particularly true. Carbon Brief have a transcript and fact check on the interview.

The part I'm most interested in is where he claimed there had been a pause (without using the term) for the last ten years:

And as for the temperature itself, it is striking, he [Al Gore] made his previous film 10 years ago, and according – again – to the official figures, during this past 10 years, if anything, mean global temperature, average world temperature, has slightly declined.

The interviewer, Justin Webb, was quick to ask him to justify this patently absurd claim,

Yeah, well, which is an argument on both sides ...

Which sums up the whole false-equivalence issue. No matter how poor, or lacking in evidence, a claim is, it can be used to give the impression that there are two sides to every argument.

Anyway, I've no idea where Lord Lawson got the idea from that temperatures have slightly declined over the last 10 years. He's probably just half remembering something he read on a blog years ago - which wouldn't matter if he wasn't being presented as an expert. To see the truth behind the official figures you can go to the Skeptical Science - Trend Calculator, or any similar site, and see that from 2006 to mid-2017 all figures show not just raising temperatures, but rising at a faster rate than the long term trend. (Not that any credence should be put on a short ten year period.) All the main data sets, including the satellite data, show a warming rate between 2.7°C and 3.1°C per century.

But the real irony is that Lawson only had to look at his own GWPF site to see that its header shows a graph of temperatures, clearly warming over the last ten years.

Clearly the official figures do not show temperatures slightly declining over the last 10 years.

Update

The hole gets deeper. The BBC have defended the Lawson interview. Regarding the slight cooling over last 10 years claim, they sort of defend Lawson, whilst admitting that NASA say 2016 was the warmest year on record, they say:

Data from the UK Met Office Hadley Centre suggests there has been a slight cooling of surface temperatures since 2003, although there is some dispute over whether this gives the full picture.

This is plainly wrong as the GWPF's own graph of Met Office temperature shows.

Even more bizarrely the BBC new article links to a New Scientist article to justify this claim.

According to the dataset of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre (see figure), 1998 was the warmest year by far since records began, but since 2003 there has been slight cooling.

New Scientist - Climate myths: Global warming stopped in 1998

The only problem here being that the New Scientist article was written in 2008 - only two years after the start of the period Lawson was talking about. If Lawson is pointing the BBC to this article, it confirms my suggestion that he is partially remembering something he read 9 years ago.