Greenpeace activists led by Aurora, a giant polar bear puppet, through Westminster. Photo: Getty

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20 August 2014

When climate change denial is promoted in mainstream news

Including articles and comments from figures such as Matthew Ridley and Nigel Lawson without balance misleads the British public.

On 12 August, the Times newspaper published a long article by Matthew Ridley under the headline “The world's gone to Hell, but trust me, it is getting much better”.

Ridley argued that a number of indicators showed that the quality of life has been improving across the globe.

However, he provided an inaccurate and misleadingly rose-tinted picture of environmental degradation. For instance, Ridley claimed that “forest cover is increasing in many countries”. This gave a false impression of reality. The most recent study of the issue, published last year in the journal Science, found that 0.8m square kilometres of new forest were added between 2000 and 2012, but 2.3m square kilometres, roughly the same size as Portugal, were lost during the same period.

Similarly, Ridley's article suggested that “there is no global increase in floods”, and “there has been a decline in the severity of droughts”. Both statements were grossly misleading. Climate change is increasing global average temperature, but its impact on extreme weather differs across the world. Some regions are becoming wetter while others are becoming drier.

The most authoritative assessment of the evidence was presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year. It concluded that “there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale”. However, the report also highlighted that it “assesses floods in regional detail accounting for the fact that trends in floods are strongly influenced by changes in river management”.

It stated: “Although the most evident flood trends appear to be in northern high latitudes, where observed warming trends have been largest, in some regions no evidence of a trend in extreme flooding has been found”. The assessment also found that “it is likely that the frequency and intensity of drought has increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa and decreased in central North America and north-west Australia since 1950”.

I wrote a short letter to the newspaper to correct the mistakes in the article, but it refused to publish anything that indicated Ridley had made errors. It is not the first time The Times has published inaccurate statements by Ridley and censored any attempts to fix them.

Although Ridley has no qualifications in climate science (his PhD thesis was on “The Mating System of the Pheasant ”), he is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of renowned climate change sceptic and former chancellor Lord Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation. This organisation has been labelled by the Independent as “the UK's most prominent source of climate-change denial”.

Earlier this year, the same newspaper featured another article in which he disputed any link between the flooding caused by record rainfall in the UK last winter, again citing a lack of global trend as his justification. I wrote to The Times to point out he had ignored the IPCC's findings about regional increases in flooding, but the newspaper would not agree to publish any letters that drew attention to Ridley’s mistakes.

Is it a coincidence that these articles, which clearly dispute the findings of mainstream climate science, began when John Witherow became the newspaper's editor last year? In his previous role as editor of The Sunday Times, he was implicated, as George Monbiot discovered, in a controversy over an article that severely misrepresented the views of a researcher, Dr Simon Lewis, about the impacts of climate change on the Amazon. The senior editorial team of The Sunday Times apparently used a blog by a climate change sceptic to re-write a report by its environment editor, and reportedly introduced a number of errors and distortions. Dr Lewis complained, and the newspaper was eventually forced to print a humiliating apology, although it did not address claims about the role its editors played in the fiasco.

Many of the UK's national daily newspapers now seem to be attempting to undermine their readers’ understanding of the scientific evidence on climate change. It should be no surprise then that there are still significant numbers of the public who are being misled by the UK media into wrongly believing that there is no scientific consensus about the causes and consequences of climate change.

Bob Ward is a Fellow of the Geological Society and policy and communications director at the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Bob Ward is policy and communications director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science.

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The Staggers

19 November 2016

Can International Men's Day ever be a force for good?

Those worried about toxic masculinity try to distinguish themselves from anti-feminists.

Saturday 19 November is International Men’s Day. Its organisers claim their aims are to promote men’s physical and mental wellbeing, as well as work to improving gender relations. However, the idea of a day concentrating on men has proven divisive, with many of its supporters using it as an opportunity to fight feminism. Some victims of sexism joke that every day is International Men's Day.

So is the concept fundamentally misguided, or is it a question of interpretation? Journalist, writer, and activist, Ally Fogg, is part of the organising committee for UK International Men’s Day. We spoke over the phone on 9 November, the day, as it would turn out, Americans voted for a man who boasted about groping women to become their next President.

One problem with a lack of debate, Fogg argued, is that International Men’s Day is about more than just raising awareness of individual issues. “You can’t talk about men’s suicide rates, without talking about the higher rates of alcoholism," he said. "Without talking about men being more reluctant to seek help from the NHS." None of this exists in isolation of a culture of violence, which is exacerbated by the criminal justice system.

He is keen to stress that International Men’s Day isn't purely about celebrating men. “We live in a patriarchal society that systematically empowers men over women. But what happens to men who fall through the cracks?” he asked. “How do we address the fact that the majority of victims of sexual violence are women without ignoring that many victims are men?”

To illustrate his argument, he gave the example of a friend, who reported being a victim of child sexual abuse to the authorities, and was offered support. However, the independent adviser couldn’t use her own office, as it was a women-only space. Instead, Fogg’s friend was expected to recount his trauma in a public coffee shop.

To Fogg, this was not to suggest women-only spaces should be removed, but to illustrate the gaps in support.

Nevertheless, talking about men as victims seems impossible without also acknowledging that men commit most violent crimes. Fogg said: “If we can do something about making men less violent, the number one beneficiaries of that are men and boys”. His believes that curing men of toxic masculinity is a worthwhile end in itself.

International Men’s Day UK also focuses on the intersection of gender with race, sexuality, and poverty. “Look at the appalling coverage of the migrant crisis in Calais," Fogg said. He believes newspapers played on the fact many in Calais were male, Muslim, and had dark skin. Had they been Muslim women or white, Christian men, it would have been harder to portray them as menacing. “We are now seeing the same thing with Donald Trump and Mexicans," he added.

But while focusing on a particular demography always brings new perspectives, International Men's Day is not just about refugees in Calais. One of the most prominent political backers is the Conservative MP for Shipley, Philip Davies, a man who has voted against equality legislation, attacked what he called "militant feminists" and bombarded the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission with questions such as "why is it so offensive to black up your face?" He once said disabled people don't need to earn the minimum wage.

With Davies leading the debate, it sends a message that men’s issues matter, but not if the man is disabled, gay, Muslim, BAME, or trans. This is vitally important because these are the groups of men who suffer from the highest rates of suicide, violence, and discrimination – with the least support available.

I pressed Fogg to name someone he’d prefer, who hasn’t offended just about every minority and at-risk community. He avoided an answer, but suggested there there has been a growth in conversations about masculinity itself. “Grayson Perry’s work has great for this," he said. "More and more people are asking how to be a man in the 21st century, but what they don’t do is acknowledge that these are political issues. We can’t just say we want more boys to read and go to university. Men and boys can’t reinvent ourselves without policy being involved”. The cycle of toxic masculinity won’t end itself.