Another pretty poor headline from the Daily Express (and we all know that outrageous headlines sell newspapers), but the majority of the article is OK, until the almost inevitable signs of “balance” by quoting Piers Corbyn and Christopher Booker :-
“…Long-term forecaster and trends analyst Piers Corbyn, of WeatherAction, said: “Global warming is a failed science built on falsified data. It is a sham to say that man has caused it.”…”
Most serendipitously, the Global Warming Science that the genuine research community have been slaving away at for the last, ooo, 25 years, has not been undermined by one freakily cold Northern Hemisphere Winter, or they’d all be out of jobs pretty sharpish.
“…Christopher Booker, author of The Real Global Warming Disaster, said: “It is amazing how this scaremongering from climate change lobbyists keeps arising even though they are constantly being proved wrong. Last year there was snow in Saudia Arabia and still they persist in saying the temperature is going up.”…”
As time goes by, and more evidence is collated and analysed and more theoretical branches are investigated, the more Climate Change Science is shown to be accurate, both in projection and qualitative prediction.
Unfortunately, the temperature on the whole is still going up, so Christopher Booker is on the wrong track with his claim.
Both Piers Corbyn and Christopher Booker should, in my view, not be quoted, when newspapers are discussing Global Warming Science. They do not participate in Global Warming Science, neither do they have any positive collaboration with the Climate Change research community, as I understand it. Their viewpoints are isolated from mainstream science, and I feel that their opinions should be kept out of serious articles about Global Warming.
If the newspapers want to demonstrate debate in Climate Change Science, they should interview researchers who have differences about the level of the Climate Sensitivity of the Earth system, or differences about the exact size of the Carbon Budget we should set for human emissions; differences about how various parts of the Earth system are able to soak up excess Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere as the situation changes; or differences about how much Carbon Dioxide should be allowed to accumulate in the atmosphere as a “safe” level.
These are where the major debates are in Climate Change Science. There is no longer any debate whatsoever that Global Warming is here, it’s caused by us, and it’s getting worse.
For the record, Saudi Arabia has been subject to increasing temperatures and a constant trend of changes in rainfall over a period of decades :-
https://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122294469/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
“Temperature and rainfall variation over Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, (1970-2006)”
https://www.springerlink.com/content/v2p8747p8258100m/
“Estimation of climatic transition in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) in global warming perspectives”
This is an interesting perspective on water in Saudi Arabia :-
https://dlcvm.dlib.indiana.edu/archive/00002987/01/Reproduced.pdf