Royal Institution Lecture on Climate Change
By Paul Homewood
The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures have been held every year since 1825, with the exception of 1939-42. The very first was given by Michael Faraday, and each lecture presents a scientific subject in an informative and entertaining manner, mainly nowadays to younger people.
Over the years, serious topics have been explained in bite sized, easy to understand ways, usually with the help of clever visual aids.
Sadly however, this years series, Planet Earth- A User’s Guide, has little to do with science, and is little more than an exercise in indoctrination and political messaging, on the evidence of the first episode at least.
It is presented by a geologist, Chris Jackson.
We get a clue as to what follows by his introductory comment:
How can we live sustainably on Planet Earth?
Jackson starts by presenting a potted history of the planet in a rather dumbed down way. But his central point is to show this graph of the Earth’s temperature record over hundreds of millions of years.
He then asks why these changes should have occurred. He dismisses out of hand factors such as the sun and oceanic changes, and with the help of climate scientist, Tamsin Edwards, introduces the audience to the concept of greenhouse gases, via the John Tyndall experiment in 1861, which has since been thoroughly debunked. (Interestingly, Tyndall declared that water vapour was by far the most powerful GHG, yet Jackson dismisses this out of hand, naturally declaring that CO2 is the only one that matters).
He then overlays the white CO2 graph on top of the temperature record, and does not hesitate in claiming CO2 has caused the temperature rise.
Amazingly he does not bother to tell his audience that the geological records consistently show that temperature rise predates the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere.
Nor does he think it relevant to explain a very basic scientific fact, that warmer seas can store less CO2, which is thus released into the atmosphere.
And the times when high concentrations of CO2 accompanied low temperatures? He dismisses these as irrelevant, probably due to the sun or something!
He moves on to discuss mass extinction events, which he claims without any evidence were due to rising global temperatures.
Moving forward in time, he even links the last ice age to low levels of CO2. His geological colleagues would be astounded that he has turned the truth on its head, and failed to report that it was the ice age which caused CO2 levels to drop!
Towards the end, he zooms in on the last 10,000 years, with a classic Mannian hockey stick:
His fake graph of course conveniently ignores widespread evidence that the early Holocene was much warmer than present, as were the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods.
There is abundant evidence for this, for instance Greenland ice cores below, but also from worldwide studies of glaciers, tree lines, speleothems and many other sources.
Figure 6. Alley (2000) temperature reconstruction of the GISP2 Greenland ice core for the last 10,000 years. (Plotted from data in Alley, 2000)
https://kaltesonne.de/temperatures-over-the-past-10000-years/
Jackson also conveniently ignores the fact that the Little Ice Age was probably the coldest period since the Ice Age, and that temperatures began their rise since then long before man made emissions of CO2 could have had any effect.
Any pretence that this was any sort of science lecture were surely dispelled at the end.
First he points out that the last time CO2 emissions into the atmosphere was as high as now was 65 million years ago, a time of mass extinction (hint, hint!)
Then, in his own words:
Looking at mass extinctions in the past, these big changes in CO2 and temperature have huge consequences for life on earth, and therefore could have such consequences for us.
And we’ve seen the effect of climate change all around us – we’re seeing rising seas, we’re seeing floods, we’re seeing drought, we’re seeing increased storminess on the planet.
And he ends by asking – “Can we change our ways to limit the consequences, and adapt fast enough to what is becoming a new hot house Earth?”
Utterly shameful.
His illustrious predecessors must be turning in their graves to see the reputation of the Christmas Lecture trashed in this fashion.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Professor Chris Jackson………he must be right. He is Equinor professor of basin analysis at Imperial College, Equinor are in the oil business, so maybe some vested interest. I was shouting at the TV when it was on, the Mann hockey stick was the last straw. Another 2 to go……
Ah, another ‘professor’ from the Imperial Community College. Just like ‘half a million covid deaths by June’ Prof Ferguson, this one also has no knowledge of the Scientific method and thus is not a scientist.
Sorry guys. I just could not watch it. I know it was wrong of me and I even denied myself a beer last night because of it!
Ahhh a perfect BBC box ticking melanin enriched icon in the making! I am surprised the audience were not all required to take the knee…..at the start.
ZooOil (Equi Nor, once upon a time called Statoil) gain nothing from promoting this bunkum, quite the contrary actually.
I was working for Hydro in the Sandsli office in Bergen in 2002 and I do not remember him at all. Perhaps he was in the Research Centre. There was a saying in the office, …”them that can do…do, them that pontificate, work in the Research Centre”. I did have one complete buffoon inflicted on me from the Research Centre who funnily enough also “earned” his PhD interpreting ruddy normal faults in Egypt! A more useless waste of earth resources it has not been my misfortune to meet. Being a complete waste of space however did not seem to form an impediment to his career either!
As for Dr Jackson, a geologist, he seems to be getting his information from the pages of activist pamphlets. His presentation of temperature data is unacceptable and as a scientist quite unforgivable by not displaying a scale on either axis…This is absolutely fundamental when discussing this critical issue. I wondered why and then we have it when the CO2 proxy data is overlaid…..and this guy has a PhD…well he did his PhD and works in Basis analysis which is the lalaland of fudge and imprecision.
A geologist who loves to interpret 3D seismic data! I used to have a hobby destroying basin analysis presentations from people with his background because invariably they did not understand the fundamentals of the seismic method and used the seismic data as a blank canvas to impose what they have been taught upon it. Worse they then compound the error using some terrible software which agrees with their 2D interpretation of 3D structure! Every fault would be shown as listric and normal and down to the basin, all mysteriously soleing out on the migration smiles at the bottom of the seismic data with all basin development shown as parallel and extensional which is geometrically impossible when describing movement on the surface of a sphere. Basin modelling is definitely a Black Art pretending to be a science!
Also great to hear a Basis Analysis “expert” dismissing the impact of the Sun after all…he must know!
What is the time period he is displaying in his surface temperature/CO2 plot? One week, One year, The whole of geological history?
I ask because I have never ever seen a correlation between curves for temperature reconstruction and CO2 over the whole of Geological Time published anywhere so which fiction factory made that one for him?
The CO2 curve kind of looks like the one published by Berner but the temperature reconstruction looks like nothing I have ever seen before, certainly looks nothing like that presented by Scotese which is similar to the one used by that paragon of virtue, the IPCC in 2007.
The mode of global surface temperature throughout the whole of Geological History was ~22degC EVEN WHEN in the Cambrian atmospheric CO2 peaked at around 7000ppm.
The whole point is that the claimed instability by the IPCC in temperature feedback patently does not and has never existed so WHY IS THIS CLOWN PRETENDING THAT IT DOES?
The theoretical physics around the unproven greenhouse effect shows that Water Vapour and NOT CO2 will be the main absorber of Infra Red wavelengths so why is this supposed scientist dismissing this empirical data based fact?
There exists NO correlation whatsoever between global surface temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration over geological time so what ever this con artist is displaying is anyone’s guess.
There exists no statistically significant empirical data supporting the claim that CO2 is a driver and controller of surface temperature over geological time. There exists no statistically significant empirical data which supports the claim that a tiny amount of the total annual flux in atmospheric CO2 contributed by man controls temperature.
It does not exist so what are children being shown here?
I would so enjoy being at a presentation by this “expert” geologist 3D seismic interpreter. That is an oxymoron if ever there is one!
It is also interesting that from his wiki reference he contributed to a lecture series on Salt tectonics. In my “short 37 year career I have seen plenty of halokenisis but never have seen halotectonics although I have seen a lot of halokenisis misrepresented as halotectonics. Salt follows, it does not lead as indeed is our friend Dr Jackson, a definite follower of the cause and NOT a leader in the pursuit of truth which is what the scientific method was established by our forebears to help discover.
“The theoretical physics around the unproven greenhouse effect shows that Water Vapour and NOT CO2 will be the main absorber of Infra Red wavelengths…” – pardonmeforbreathing
And yet, water vapor still provides for negative, not positive, feedback.
The best post I have read in years.
Thank you.
Any comments on this? Gratefully received.
Informed Consumer! I bow to your ( and yonason’s) posting “expertise”. I wanted to include a similar version of this showing the work of Berner and Scotese but I never worked out how. How on earth does one insert an image? Cheers JonnyS
Informed Consumer. The herd of elephants in the room can be seen if you look at the curve you cleverly inserted in your post for atmospheric CO2 from Late Jurassic till the present day. See that linear decline? There is a reason for that and far from there being too much CO2 in the atmosphere today, the Carbon Cycle is in a crisis.
160 million years ago marine organisms evolved which sequestrate CO2 to combine with calcium to make hard shells. Their supreme efficiency at do this is made testament to today by the huge volumes of organic carbonaceous shelly limestones present in the world.
You will never have heard it on the BBC or from any of the other pseudo science pushers promoting climatageddon but CO2 is actually contained in three media; Rock ( by many orders of magnitude the largest representing CO2 removed and locked away from the Carbon Cycle) and the Oceans and the Atmosphere which are part of the Carbon Cycle.
That linear decline in atmospheric CO2 has only temporarily been halted by you and I driving our SUV’s and shortly the inexorable 160 million year old decline will resume to a point where photosynthesis is compromised when atmospheric CO2 levels fall to 160ppm.
During the first part of the current Ice Age (We are in an interglacial), atmospheric CO2 levels fell to around 180ppm or put another way, 20ppm above the death of plants and consequently all life as we know it on Earth. If you take an expanded view of the last 800K years often touted by the climate priests as proof of CO2 controlling temperature (a deliberate misreading of the curves and their actual relationship) You will see that Planet Earth has been toying with an extinction event for quite some time.
You will be asking how come this is not talked about? A very good question, maybe because reality does not suit the agenda which like all agendas is inflexible? The mouthpiece Jackson MUST know this. I have known about it for at least 20 years as a geoscientist.
I have already written to the BBC to ask if Jackson wrote the script or was he just parroting words handed down to him by his BBC political commissar. I ticked the box requesting a reply to my question but regardless of me doing that they have been rather poor at replying for some time now for some reason or other.
JohnnyS
Sorry to have taken so long to get back to you. I hope you get this.
I didn’t ‘insert’ an image, I simply copied and pasted it’s URL into my text and WordPress displays the image itself and not the address.
So, for the geological graph I posted simply go to the location h-t-t-p://w-w-w.biocab.org/Geological_Timescale.jpg (Copy and paste this into your browser address bar and remove the hyphens to be taken straight there. Don’t remove the underscore between ‘Geological’ and ‘Timescale’).
Many images within a page of text are able to be enlarged. Hover your cursor over an image and if a hand appears you should be able to click it and it will appear with its own address. Just copy that address and the graphic appears when you post it here rather than the entire article. Not all work that way though as some images are embedded in the text and don’t have a separate address.
Hope it helps.
@PMFS (JonnyS)
Mine isn’t an image, it’s a video. But with many URL’s it’s just automatic on this website, which is pretty neat, I think. Not talent required, fortunately for me.
Also, thanks for you geology expertise. It’s quite helpful.
Thanks for the facts, Paul. I cringed throughout the whole programme. I wondered if I was missing something or misunderstanding the infantile format (I’m a physicist by university education). An absolute travesty of (faux) science and another blistering example of why the BBC Licence Fee should be abolished. I shall be reading a proper science book when the remaining Lectures are scheduled.
Please may I plug my own blog too: https://moraymint.com/2020/11/25/covid-19-a-very-british-tyranny/
Nice website you have. Well worth the visit.
Very good critique Paul. It would be good if the GWPF academic advisory council could produce such a critique collectively.
Hear, hear!
It was embarrassing to watch such anti-science propaganda allowed by the Royal Constitution.
I particularly noted down the three following things:
1 It started off with 200degC being four times as hot as 50degC! You couldn’t make it up.
2 We then had water described as an unimportant greenhouse gas because a lot of it is solid or liquid! You couldn’t make it up.
3 To cap it all off, we had the hockey stick on display! You couldn’t make it up.
How they managed to get away with such nonsense at the Royal Institution defies imagination – except it was the BBC.
The reason why Professor Michael Kelly and 42(?) other members wrote to the RS to object to their approach to climate science.
Suitably ignored of course.
We are witnessing the end of the Enlightenment ……
A little animated social commentary from the past, for us to ponder as the lights go dim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Jackson_(geologist)
Jackson has no scientific background that would lead someone to believe him on climate and long-term weather. Just another scientist dressed up as a political climatologist warning us to change our ways…or else! His non-scientific background precludes criticism?
Broadlands, actually as a geologist he IS placed perfectly to understand this in its correct context which is on a geological time scale. His presentation however is a shocker and contains what at best I can describe as falsehoods. No doubt we will see him replacing the other useful idiot Brian Cox who regularly turns the laws of physics on their head. He should be presented as a juggler or a magician!
I must confess to not watching this lecture in the interest of protecting our TV. Paul’s summary is more than enough to show how low the “Scientific elite” have fallen.
Tragically, this junk-science will not be exposed by the mighty-media: is there even one reporter with any integrity now?
I also deliberately didnt watch, expecting it was going to be propaganda and lies; which you have now confirmed.
The amateurishness of this “lecture” was embarrassing but I was especially surprised to see them piping methane into an air-filled tube with a naked candle flame at the other end. It could have led to an interesting and possibly useful catastrophic event.
The same thought occured to me, I wonder why he did not use CO2, after all that was what the lecture was all about.
These lectures changed a few years ago, the audience used to be mainly middle class children, probably from families with an involvement in science, but this was probably regarded as a diversity crisis. So they bused in groups from local schools, and the lectures were simplified.
This example of topicality is now rife in school education. For example, you can get a GCSE in geography knowing little about mountains and rivers, as long as you have swallowed the topical guff about climate change and colonialism.
The worst aspect of the lecture was the magnification of the last flat part of the temperature graph and the sudden spike over the last hundred years, putting it on a par with the previous high peaks and telling the children that this all started with the increase in man made CO2. No wonder they are becoming terrified that the world is about to burn up.
My wife is a scientist in the medical area and watched taking everything in and pointing out that Jackson works at Imperial. She said that she had not realised that there had been previous high and low temperatures. This amazed me because I did not realise that anyone could have been so specialised that this had escaped them. So I looked on my phone and found a graph showing the last 10,000 years with the various warm and cold periods of historical extremes marked over. I tried to show how they had picked a small part of the graph to emphasise the recent rise and that it was comparable to the other rises with the little ice age an unusual low. Needless to say, my lack of scientific qualifications was mentioned. Looking up the expertise of Professor Jackson, he is a specialist in the rock strata of sedimentary basins and has been climbing dangerous mountains and volcanoes while making tv programmes. I also noticed that he was wearing very tight trousers and had problems with anything about the atmosphere. What a long way from Faraday.
Michael Faraday will be turning in his grave
“Michael Faraday will be turning in his grave”
Has he got a lathe ???
Exactly. His six lectures for ‘juveniles’ on ‘The Chemical History of a Candle’ can be downloaded here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14474
Faraday doesn’t patronise his young audience. He aims to instill a sense of wonder at something so simple, and leads them through the scientific processes, encouraging them to think and question and to experiment at home.
“Has he got a lathe ??” – @saveenergy
What else would you expect from an accomplished experimentalist? 🙂
There is more next week……… On Monday 4th January there is a whole week on Radio 4 at 13.45 – 1400 every day Monday to Friday. 39 Ways to Save the Planet. Included in the preview on Radio 4 yesterday, apparently reducing “even more” the cost of Wind power…..
encouraging “Bison to roam the permafrost to reduce CO2” ….. No doubt you heard on the Lunchtime Radio News Bulletins the little add on statement “windpower on Boxing Day supplied 37% of UK Energy….” BBC Radio Four Schedule listing here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qwt1 This includes “making houses out of wood rather than concrete”, (I didn’t think there was much left after Drax had taken their weekly thousands of tons of wood chips. “Planting Super Rice” and Planting Seagrass around the UK to help us get to Zero Carbon, etc etc.
Having avoided the programme I note the following from his “graphs”.
Neither axis has any scale so one has to guess at the period he is using, but it is presumably chosen to support his hypothesis.
In that case the charts do a peculiarly poor job of demonstrating his case.
There are 25 data points for temperature. The current upturn has apparently reached a point such that, of those 25, four are now lower including the most recent that we are apparently now recovering from, one is approximately equal, and twenty were higher, many of them substantially so.
There are around 25 CO2 points, presumably showing estimates of the atmospheric concentration. Of these four are lower and 21 higher than the current level.
Anyone approaching the subject for the first time with a clear mind would make the following preliminary observations from this chart:
If the two variables can be shown to be linked in any causal way then we are fortunate to be coming gradually out of a potentially catastrophic cold period rarely experienced in this timeframe (whatever that may be);
The concentration of CO2 should not be allowed to fall back to its previous low level in case it does have a significant effect on global temperature and precipitates a further long-term cooling.
Hopefully the more intelligent of the young viewers will have drawn similar conclusions.
So far as I am aware, the Royal Institution has no obligation to conform to normal standards of scientific integrity in its educational output for children: it is not subject to regulation. That is not the case with the BBC who have, by broadcasting the lecture, assumed responsibility for the content if it is misleading and not impartial. Therefor a complaint should succeed, in the unlikely event of it getting a fair hearing from either the BBC or OFCOM.
As it is presenting to children it HAS a moral duty to TELL THE TRUTH as we know it supported by empirical data only.
A geologist, eh? Bob Carter must be spinning…(bless his memory).
The hockey stick diagram Jackson shows looks like the low frequency from Marcott 2013.
Steve M dissected Marcott – of course the grafted temps are not in the original thesis for PhD (2011), only in the subsequent published paper. After the following admission on the RealClimate website the Met Office took down their web page.
The BBC still shows it on their web site, but makes it worse by overlaying the modern temp record, ignoring the change in resolution. I formally complained to the BBC in 2013, but the page is still up.
The modern temp record is only about 150 years long. Marcott has no temp variability preserved at less than 300 yr temporal resolution. A comparison could be made (by upscaling the modern record ie plot it as a single average point) but then the “drama” that Jackson shows would be lost of course and the modern period would not look at all unusual – just colder than most of the Holocene.
For anyone wanting to read (some of) the back story:
Broadlands,
Please let’s keep our attacks on him to the salient point – i.e. that his presentation was biased nonsense, packed with simple errors and misunderstandings.
Much as it astonishes me to write this (given the standard of the lecture), we can’t dispute his academic qualifications in Earth sciences. It is my conjecture (OK I am biased in this due to my own background) but such is the breadth of the science relating to “climate change” that I cannot think of a background academic discipline that could prepare you better to move on to study the totality and history of “climate science” than Earth Sciences. Of course, it doesn’t matter what disciplines you study if you subsequently prepare error-strewn work as we can see in this presentation. In his vaunted academic position, this lecturer really, really shown have known better.
“…we can’t dispute his academic qualifications in Earth sciences.
It seems to me that if what Broadlands writes about his assertions is correct, then his academic qualifications are indeed fair game.
Oops. I mistook what Phil Bratby wrote to be by Broadlands. Still, I think you’re being too hard on Broadlands, given what PB and others have written about Jackson’s lack of insight, given that his “academic qualifications in Earth sciences” don’t seem to be at all in evidence there.
Waking early, I put the radio on to hear the BBC World Service this morning which had a half-hour on ‘Climate Meltdown’ which sounded like a disaster movie. A real panic-fest. The only things missing were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3csz9fm
No doubt we will be inundated with programmes like this in the run-up to COP 26 in November.
The Today programme which followed with Margaret Atwood as guest editor was almost as bad. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000qlwd
I have no doubt that the commissioning editors at the BBC have their scientific knowledge gleaned from the back of a breakfast cereal packet whilst they read for their degrees in the Arts and Media Studies, not in the physical sciences. Scientific study in our schools and university has degenerated or been increasingly ignored in the past 30 years or so, the best current scientific brains appear by their names to come from the developing third world countries.
There is always a market for bullsh*t, it has always been that way.
150 years ago the Royal Institution would have been lecturing us on how the world came into existence by being created by a supernatural being.
@COOKERS52
Just because today they have abrogated their charter, doesn’t give you license to slander their founders.
The Royal Society was founded on the principle of “‘Nullius in verba’, [which] is taken to mean ‘take nobody’s word for it’. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.”
https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/
I saw about 80 seconds of the propaganda before switching off in disgust.
My wife started listening to the today show this morning and heard that they were discussing climate change. She quickly turned it off on seeing visible signs of my soaring blood pressure. Some time later she turned the radio on again. This time I could have sworn I heard what sounded like Greta the BBC climate idol, but my wife managed to turn it off after about three seconds.The radio remained firmly off after that.
The BBC is driving away audience at an impressive rate. All it needs now is for government to to catch up with the conclusion that the public reached long ago. The BBC is no longer fit for purpose and should be shut down. But this will never happen, so we shall just have to let the Corporation wither away under voluntary subscription funding.
Once Upon A Time…
A Royal Society Christmas Lecture worth watching
I note that Eric Laithwaite commented that the maths of gyroscopes and inertia isn’t that difficult, and mentioned A level. Which it was in my day. But no longer. Here’s Feynman
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_20.html
Here’s something I just found on it.
Click to access Feynman%20gyroscope%20article%20in%20TPT.pdf
I put that video up to illustrate that the Royal Society lectures are a place for demonstrations, not propagandizing. While I’d like to have seen more theory, that wasn’t appropriate for his audience.
Thanks for the Feynman lecture. Very thorough.
Laithwaite did include the homily about the civil servant who wrote saying he date not expose his experimental findings for fear of loss of promotion, and pointed how that was at odds with the ideals of the Society.
Great irony, just now on an ad for Attenborough’s Planet series. He overdubs the stunning pics of stormy seas, great sunsets and huge animals in the trailer with the claim (paraphrase) that the planet, with all its huge forces manages to keep them all in ‘perfect balance’. Balance, eh?
Perfect, eh?
LOL – Yes.
How Attenborough ever keeps his hyperbole in such a comparable “perfect balance” is anybody’s guess.
Harry Passfield – I used to love these great nature programmes with the stunning photography and magical creatures. I don’t watch them now because the BBC contaminates them with climate garbage.and I would rather miss them altogether than have them poisoned.
This has provoked a lively debate on Twitter, with Prof. Jackson and many other academics:
May I recommend, perhaps particularly for Steve, “Inconvenient Facts – The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know” by Gregory Wrightstone. Excellent Graphs, clearly written and academically sound but written for the intelligent layman. I refer back to it frequently.
(I have no financial interest in sales of this book.)
Just watched the 2nd child indoctrination program;
absolutely appalled at all the misinformation, she even managed to muddle the difference between carbon & CO2, a disgrace to science
saveenergy hit it right on 12/29/2020 at 11:27 PM
Dodgy data, dodgy theories, dodgy ethics, dodgy “scientists” and the dodgy politicians who support and rely on them. Their “green” scam isn’t built on a house of cards. It’s built on quicksand in a swamp.