Once in a while, roughly every month or two, Daily Mail journalist David Rose likes to focus his laser-like mind on the twisting swindlers of the so-called scientific community, and write a big exposé of the Great Climate Hoax. He's an expert on hoaxes, and so would never be caught out by one himself. You would think.
In the four-page version published in the Mail on Sunday on 17 March, he calls climate science the "Great Green Con". And, when David writes one of his exposés, Carbon Brief like to expose his errors.
Well, they used to like to do that. These days it’s turning into a bit of a chore. But they keep doing it, so that we don’t have to. Thank Gore for Carbon Brief.
They’re not entirely alone. David Rose’s interviewees sometimes take to the internet to explain that they didn’t say what he said they said, because they’re scientists. And then there are the part-time Rose critics, who think they want to catalogue Rose’s errors, but generally collapse from exhaustion and despair after two or three articles.
However, while it pains me to have to level any criticism at such a noble endeavour, they missed a bit.
Despite an entire publishing empire being dedicated to the mistakes of this one man, including several pieces on this particular article, Carbon Brief and, so far as I’m aware, everyone else missed a particularly shameful, extraordinary insult to journalism from Rose which it is my pleasure and privilege to share with you now. In your face, Carbon Brief.
In the Great Green Con, as with all Mail articles, much of the real creativity has gone into the sidebar, in this case a little bundle of joy entitled: "1977 – the year we were told to fear terror of… global cooling".
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, "Fear terror? Wasn’t that Franklin Delano Roosevelt?" No, that was "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". This is a very different FDR. The DR stands for David Rose, and the F doesn’t stand for Franklin.
The first line of the sidebar reads:
In the Seventies, scientists and policymakers were just as concerned about a looming ‘ice age’ as they have been lately about global warming – as the Time magazine cover pictured here illustrates.
And here’s the Time magazine cover pictured, illustrating away in the middle of the Mail on Sunday:
And here’s a close up of that Time magazine cover, note the date in the top right-hand corner, April 1977:
And here’s Time Magazine’s website where you can search through all of their covers, here showing all four editions from April 1977.
You see any penguins? Me neither. This is most p-p-p-peculiar.
Let’s widen our search a little. Let’s say, every edition published in April during a year ending in the number 7.
By George, I think I’ve found it! Oh no, this one’s different. No wait, it is, no it isn’t. It looks similar, but… well, what do you reckon?
Special double issue, eh? Little did they know...
2007? Global warming? What is going on here? I've tweeted Rose to ask him where his cover came from, but have yet to receive any reply.
Has Rose understood that his line on climate science has no evidential support, and so created a fabrication to try to even things up a bit? Rose doesn’t seem like a man who would voluntarily die for his cause, even if it’s only career suicide, so I think not.
But has Rose, a man who calls himself an investigative journalist and thinks he has an unparalleled ability to spot flaws in high-level science which qualified experts have all missed, really been taken in by a forgery of a Time magazine cover? Just about the easiest document to authenticate one could possibly imagine, and he’s accepted it from some unknown source on the internet and put it straight into the Mail on Sunday without checking?
This is almost unbelievable, but as George Monbiot wrote about the errors in a previous MoS piece by Rose:
Every one of them would have been easy to check and disprove, had he been inclined to do so. But the Mail pays well for this crap, and checking, under these circumstances, is likely to be an expensive pastime.
Shame on you, David Rose. A triple-decker shame sandwich with shame garnish and a side order of extra shame to add to your shame collection.
(Thanks to David Kirtley for the tip.)
For those readers interested in the truth about the great 1970s ice age scare, I’ve posted another blog here.
In summary, the deniers are wrong, the climate scientists were right.
