Question Time last week was a car crash for the corporation, with chairman Fiona Bruce interrupting Richard Tice, the Reform Party MP, to contradict his contention that only 4% of carbon dioxide emissions are manmade. Thirty percent was the correct figure, she boldly asserted. Unfortunately, Tice was right, and she was wrong, so the Corporation’s gophers got to work and quietly edited the recording to remove her gaffe. Unfortunately someone noticed, and sceptics had a field day. A few days later, when Nick Robinson had Tice on his Political Thinking podcast. They decided, somewhat surprisingly, to take up cudgels on exactly the same subject, namely the human influence on climate.
Once again, Tice expained that human emissions were dwarfed by natural ones, and there was no attempt to probe this argument more deeply. Afterwards Robinson tweeted a clip from the interview with the comment:
"He’s denying the scientific consensus that climate change is partly man made & can be slowed or halted.”
Tice’s words clearly implied that he thought mankind affected the climate, but only marginally.
Fiona Bruce was correct. The percentage of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels that are attributable to man's activities is slightly more than 33%. The preindustrial level of atmospheric CO2 was around 280 ppm. Current atmospheric CO2 level is around 424 ppm, which represents a 50% increase over naturally-based CO2 and approx. 33% of current atmospheric CO2 concentration.
ReplyDeleteIf Fiona Bruce was correct then why would the BBC need to edit out her intervention? I think you will find that Richard Tice was referring to annual emissions of CO2 and so was correct. The 30% figure refers to the cumulative total which is a different statistic.
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