My suggestion that Leo didn’t write the title is based IIRC on him telling me that.

Re the hed, it’s on a blog post rather than an article so I would suggest there’s a good chance Leo did write it. He definitely waxed similarly over-enthusiastic in a few places, e.g.:

“i’d never heard this arresting claim before. If that rate of temperature rise continued over, say, a century, then those parts of Africa would see a deathly rise of 17.5C?! Could that claim really be true?”

Or if it were half of 3.5C. a more plausible figure, continued over two centuries we’d reach that same deathly 17.5C? Well yes we would, Leo. What was your point again?

And this:

“But the Nasa link also puzzled me. It is titled: “Science Briefs: Warming Climate is Changing Life on Global Scale. By Cynthia Rosenzweig — December 2008″ Again, why was the BBC relying on a somewhat obscure Nasa article published as long ago as 2008? Why not just draw upon the very latest scientific data?”

“Obscure” turns out to mean published in Nature. By NASA. And it’s one of those big multi-author studies pulling together mounds of research. Yes, it’s four years old, but why is that such an issue when we’re discussing decadal trends? In any case, Leo didn’t point us to any more recent similar study (probably because there isn’t one), instead he solicited a *non-peer-reviewed* comment from Tim Osborn. Wait a minute, don’t people like the Africa series staff get flack when they don’t use peer-reviewed sources? Aren’t they supposed to use the most recent such?

This style of exposition is straight out of the Grauniad’s scandal model, which we saw demonstrated so thoroughly with “Climategate.” It’s interesting how easily non-scandals can be made to appear to be scandals, isn’t it?

But worst was this bizarre statement, coming as it does from someone who has covered climate for years:
:
“And what of the source report’s strange reliance on the term “maximum temperatures” rather than the more normal (and comprehensible) “average temperatures”?”

Here’s the very first sentence in the press release for the IPCC SREX (special report on extremes) that came out just last March:

“Evidence suggests that climate change has led to changes in climate extremes such as heat waves, record high temperatures and, in many regions, heavy precipitation in the past half century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said today.”

The first two of the three items listed relate to heat extremes, and of course that’s because there’s an extensive literature backing on the subject. But having satisfied himself that high temps couldn’t possibly be a specific concern, Leo proceeds to focus on average temps, including in his inquiry to Tim Osborn. So in the end, we learned literally nothing about the veracity of the original claim.

All of that said, from what I know the claim of a 3.5C increase in high temps over a 20-year period for somewhere in Africa is *probably* wrong. It would just have been nice to come out of this with some idea as to the real figures.

And did you notice all the kudos Leo got from fellow journalists, none of whom seemed to be very concerned as to whether the story was correct? If it were possible for me to become more cynical about journalism, this episode would do it, but probably it isn’t.

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