Here's version two, I've incorporated the suggestions and tried to make the language more utilitarian to avoid emotional responses. As for format, I take that on board, and will be advised of improvements, but please remember the format you see here isn't the format in Word. When we get to it I'll send my version (967?) by email to those who want to participate. Please check for accuracy, as I've emphasised the BBC will spend hours arguing with me that the sea level rise is 4mm and not deal with the other nine points. If any one point is inaccurate that's what they'll focus on.

Justin Webb, BBC: Is there a link, Sir Brian, between the rain we have seen falling in recent days and global warming?

Sir Brian Hoskins: There’s no simple link – we can’t say yes or no this is climate change. However, there’s a number of reasons to think that such events are now more likely. One of those is that a warmer atmosphere that we have can contain more water vapour and so a storm can bring that water vapour out of the atmosphere and we’re seeing more heavy rainfall events around the world. We’ve certainly seen those here.

Sir Brian said there’s no “simple” link, and then went on to say there is a link because the excess water vapour caused by warming would give heavy rainfall events around the world.

Here’s what Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. an AGW believer and expert in storms and the damage they cause has to say:

"There were no major hurricanes in the North Atlantic Basin for the first time since 1994. And the number of hurricanes this year was the lowest since 1982.

In fact the number and intensity of tropical cyclones has dropped over the last ten years, or so. The last Category 3 (or higher) hurricane to hit the US land mass was Hurricane Wilma in 2005, the longest period since 1906.”

Justin Webb: So it’s the heavy rainfall; it’s the severity of the event that points us in this direction?

Sir Brian Hoskins: Well, in this event we’ve had severe rainfall but we’ve also had persistence, and that’s where I say we just don’t know whether the persistence of this event is due to climate change or not. Another aspect is sea level rise – the sea level has risen about 20cm over the 20th Century and is continuing to rise as the system warms, and that, of course, makes damage in the coastal region that much greater when we get some event there.

This whole statement is untrue with the exception of “…we just don’t know whether the persistence of this event is due to climate change or not.”

The Accumulated Cyclone Energy (a measure of storm severity) globally is 88% of the norm in 2014 and it was 70% of the norm in 2013 according to Dr. Ryan Maue of WeatherBell Analytics.

Sea level has been rising at around 3mm/annum since around 1800, Sir Brian only mentioned the 20th century, it is well known that the sea level rises started long before humans put CO2 in the atmosphere, as did the atmospheric temperature.

Justin Webb: But can a reasonable person – possessed of the evidence as it is known to us at the moment – say look at the rain we’ve had recently and say “I do not believe that the evidence exists that links that rain to global warming?”

Sir Brian Hoskins: I think the reasonable person should look at this event – they should look at extremes around the world: the general rise in temperature that’s well recorded, the reduction in Arctic sea ice, the rise in sea level, the number of extreme rainfall events around the world, the number of extreme events that we’ve had – we’ve had persistent droughts, we’ve had floods, we’ve had cold spells and very warm spells. The number of records being broken is just that much greater.

The IPCC SREX report states categorically that no connection can be made between individual weather events and climate. Also Sir Brian mentions the Arctic sea ice as evidence of global warming but doesn’t mention the record sea ice extent in the Antarctic.

Severe (not extreme and not unprecedented) weather events in the UK are reminiscent of the 1940s (1947 winter) and the 1950s (east coast storm surge/Linton & Lynmouth flooding). They were not attributed to "climate change" and it is unscientific to draw such a conclusion with regard to last winter's floods.

Justin Webb: Lord Lawson, it’s joining the dots isn’t it?

Lord Lawson: No, I think that Sir Brian is right on a number of points. He’s right, first of all, that nobody knows. Certainly it is not the case, of course, that this rainfall is due to global warming – the question is whether global warming has marginally exacerbated it. Nobody knows that. He’s right too to say that you have to look at the global picture, and contrary to what he may have implied, people have done studies to show that globally there has been no increase in extreme weather events. For example, tropical storms – perhaps the most dramatic form of weather event – the past year has been unusually quiet year for tropical storms. And again going back to the “nobody knows,” only a couple of months ago the Met Office were forecasting that this would be an unusually dry winter.

All true and backed up by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, USA) and IPCC reports.

Justin Webb: Do you accept that, Sir Brian, just on that important point about the global picture – do you accept that we haven’t seen the extreme conditions that we might have expected?

Sir Brian Hoskins: I think we have seen these heavy rainfall events around the world. We’ve seen a number of places breaking records – Australia with the temperatures going to new levels.

The IPCC clearly stated that individual weather events cannot be linked to climate change in the IPCC SREX report, and hot weather in Australia - which broadly has a desert climate - does not provide evidence of anthropogenic global warming.

Justin Webb: The trouble is we report those, and we’re interested in them, but there is an effect that is possibly an obfuscatory effect on the real picture, and you accept that that might be the case?

Sir Brian Hoskins: Absolutely, and we have to be very careful to not say “oh there’s records everywhere therefore climate is changing.” But we are very sure that the temperature has risen by about 0.8 degrees, the arctic sea ice has reached a minimum level in the summer which hasn’t been seen for a very, very long time, the Greenland ice sheet and the west Antarctic ice sheet have been measured to be decreasing. There are all the signs that we are changing this climate system. Now as we do this – as the system warms – it doesn’t just warm uniformly, the temperature changes by different amounts in different regions. That means that the weather that feeds off those temperature contrasts is changing and will change. It’s not just a smooth change – it’s a change in the weather. It’s a change in the regional climate we can expect.

Sir Brian, says “the Arctic sea ice has reached a minimum level in the summer which hasn’t been seen for a very, very long time…” In fact we’ve only been able to monitor the Arctic sea ice since 1979, so no one knows for certain how the sea ice waxed and waned before that. There are indications that there was much less sea ice than there is now in the recent past when Amundsen navigated the North West Passage in 1903 to 1906 (several attempts to emulate Amundsen have been made over the last few years, all have ended in failure because of too much sea ice), or in 1922 when this report was sent from the Arctic:

“The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.”

Washington Post, November 1922

It is apparent that we can say nothing about the Arctic sea ice with relation to global warming because we don’t have sufficient data to be conclusive.

Sir Brian also forgot to mention that global sea ice is actually at record levels, surely your listeners should have all the relevant information made available to them? In fact while the Arctic sea ice has fluctuated since the satellite records began the Antarctic sea ice has increased steadily throughout the period.

On the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets a paper, “Limits in detecting acceleration of ice sheet mass loss due to climate variability” Wouters et al 2013 was published in Nature Geosciences. Here is the abstract from that paper:

“The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been reported to be losing mass at accelerating rates1, 2. If sustained, this accelerating mass loss will result in a global mean sea-level rise by the year 2100 that is approximately 43 cm greater than if a linear trend is assumed2. However, at present there is no scientific consensus on whether these reported accelerations result from variability inherent to the ice-sheet–climate system, or reflect long-term changes and thus permit extrapolation to the future3. Here we compare mass loss trends and accelerations in satellite data collected between January 2003 and September 2012 from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment to long-term mass balance time series from a regional surface mass balance model forced by re-analysis data. We find that the record length of spaceborne gravity observations is too short at present to meaningfully separate long-term accelerations from short-term ice sheet variability. We also find that the detection threshold of mass loss acceleration depends on record length: to detect an acceleration at an accuracy within ±10 Gt yr−2, a period of 10 years or more of observations is required for Antarctica and about 20 years for Greenland. Therefore, climate variability adds uncertainty to extrapolations of future mass loss and sea-level rise, underscoring the need for continuous long-term satellite monitoring.”

So Sir Brian is clearly not up with the latest research when he says the science is telling us that the changes in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are a sign of global warming. The latest scientific papers say the time periods are too short to come to any definitive conclusions as to why the ice is melting.

Justin Webb: Lord Lawson?

Lord Lawson: I think we want to focus not on this extremely speculative and uncertain area – I don’t blame the climate scientists for not knowing. Climate and weather is quite extraordinarily complex and this is a very new form of science. All I blame them for is pretending they know when they don’t. Anyhow, what we ought to focus on is what we’re going to do. I think this is a wake-up call. We need to abandon this crazy and costly policy of spending untold millions on littering the countryside with useless wind turbines and solar panels, and moving from a sensible energy policy of having cheap and reliable forms of energy to a policy of having unreliable and costly energy. Give up that. What we want to focus on – it’s very important – is making sure this country is really resilient and robust to whatever nature throws at us, whether there’s a climate element or not. Flood defences, sea defences – that’s what we want to focus on.

Notice Lord Lawson tries to take the conversation from the science to the policies which is the GWPF's proper role. Lawson does not challenge the underlying science but questions whether the policy decisions arising from the IPCC reports and the Summary for Policymakers are the correct ones. On this topic he is the one with the expertise and Sir Brian is not, which makes it the more reprehensible that the BBC should act on the complaint of a paid climate activist to decide that Lawson (or any other spokesman for the GWPF) should only be allowed to appear if the audience is told — in effect — that he is not speaking the truth.

Justin Webb: Can I just put this to you? If there is a chance – and some people would say there is a strong chance that man-made global warming exists and is having an impact on us; doesn’t it make sense whether or not you believe that’s a 95% chance or a 50% chance or whatever, does it not make sense to take care to try to avoid the kind of emissions that may be contributing to it? What could be wrong with that?

Lord Lawson: Everything. First of all, even if there is warming – and there’s been no recorded warming over the past 15, 16, 17 years.

Absolutely true.

Justin Webb: Well, there is a lot of controversy about that.

No there is not. There was when the Met Office was denying there had been a pause in warming, but after 17 years they have finally admitted it.

Lord Lawson: No there’s not, that’s a fact. That is accepted even by the IPCC.

Again, absolutely true. Moreover the presenter clearly doesn’t believe Lord Lawson. (This isn’t a criticism of Justin Webb, who did a good job interviewing, both men, it’s highlighting the fact that a reporter, for the BBC, is still unaware that there has been no significant warming, indeed some slight cooling over the last 17 years, or so, such is the tight grip on the information channels maintained by the environmentalists).

Justin Webb: There’s no measured warming?

Lord Lawson: Can I continue my sentence?

Justin Webb: Well alright, we’ll get back to that.

Lord Lawson: No measured warming, exactly. Well that measurement is not unimportant. But even if there is some problem, it is not going to affect any of the dangers except marginally. What we want to do is focus with the problems there are with climate – drought, floods and so on. These have happened in the past – they’re not new. As for emissions, this country is responsible for less than 2% of global emissions. Even if we cut our emissions to 0 – which would put us back to the pre-industrial revolution and the poverty that that gave – even if we did that, it would be outweighed by China’s increase in emissions in a single year. So it is absolutely crazy this policy. It cannot make sense at all.

Nothing untrue there either, and back to policy. Should the people of the UK be kept in the dark about the fact that the sacrifices demanded of them will result in no gain whatsoever? Lord Lawson isn’t challenging the science he’s saying the policies are futile.

Justin Webb: Sir Brian?

Sir Brian Hoskins: I think we have to learn two lessons from this. The first one is that by increasing the greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide, to levels not seen for millions of years on this planet, we are performing a very risky experiment. We’re pretty confident that that means if we go on like we are the temperatures are going to rise somewhere between 3-5 degrees by the end of this Century, sea levels up to half to 1 metre rise.

There is no “confidence”, that I know of, that the temperatures will rise by between 3 and 5 degrees. The IPCC latest report made the following forecast for the end of the century temperatures:

“Global surface temperature change for the end of the 21st century is projected to be likely to exceed 1.5°C relative to 1850 to 1900 in all but the lowest scenario considered, and likely to exceed 2°C for the two high scenarios…”

What is Sir Brian doing? He must know what’s in the IPCC report, yet here he’s saying that scientists are “pretty confident” that there will be a 3-5C rise in temperature by the end of the century.

Current sea level rise shows no sign of acceleration and is continuing to rise at 3mm/annum as it has done steadily since 1800 (Jevrejeva et al, 2014, Global Mean Sea Level Reconstruction), it’s on course for around quarter of a metre by the end of the century. Again, Sir Brian either isn’t up with, or is exaggerating, the accepted science.

Justin Webb: Lord Lawson was saying there that there had been a pause – which you hear a lot about – a pause of 10 / 15 years in measured rising of temperature. That is the case isn’t it?

Sir Brian Hoskins: It hasn’t risen very much over the last 10-15 years. If you measure the climate from the globally averaged surface temperature, during that time the excess energy has still been absorbed by the climate system and is being absorbed by the oceans.

Actually it hasn’t risen at all in the last 10 – 15 years.

“…the excess energy has still been absorbed by the climate system and is being absorbed by the oceans.”

This, as Lord Lawson said, is speculation. And one which should have demanded the question, “Why has the atmosphere stopped warming?

Justin Webb: So it’s there somewhere?

Sir Brian Hoskins: Oh yes, it’s there in the oceans.

There is no proof that this is true anywhere in the scientific literature.

Lord Lawson: That is pure speculation.

Lord Lawson is correct it is a speculation.

Sir Brian Hoskins: No, it’s a measurement.

This is not true. Firstly because the heat is purported to be deep in the oceans and is therefore unmeasurable. Sir Brian may be confusing this with the Levitus et al 2013 paper which found the heat in the top 2000 metres of the ocean to have increased by around 0.1C between 1955 and 2014. At this level at least it is clear in the data that although the oceans are heating at around 0.02C/decade there has been no increased acceleration of heating in the early part of this century. The heat increase Sir Brian is talking about can’t be, and hasn’t been, measured. Scientists who put together the Earth’s radiation budget are convinced that the Earth has an imbalance of between 0.6 and 0.9 watts/m^2 and therefore the heat must be there somewhere. It is, of course, entirely plausible that they have the radiation budget calculations wrong and there is no retained heat. Guessing the heat got into the deep oceans without detection is not science, it’s speculation as Lord Lawson says.

Lord Lawson: No, it’s not. It’s speculation.

There is no proof that this is true anywhere in the scientific literature and no known method in physics that could have caused this heat to suddenly disappear into the deep oceans. If it is true the heat has escaped the notice of the Argo buoys (which measure ocean temperature down to 2000 metres) on its way down. No climate scientist has even attempted an explanation for how this would be possible, and Sir Brian should be aware of that.

Justin Webb: Well, it’s a combination of the two isn’t it? As this whole discussion is…. Lord Lawson and Sir Brian Hoskins, thank you very much

To sum up, Sir Brian said:

1. That weather events such as tropical storms were increasing in numbers and intensity. They’re not;

2. That increasing intensity of storms is a sign of anthropogenic global warming. The IPCC say individual weather events can’t be attributed to global warming;

3. “…the Arctic sea ice has reached a minimum level in the summer which hasn’t been seen for a very, very long time…” When he must be aware that the Arctic sea ice has only been monitored since 1979;

4. Failed to inform your listeners that global sea ice extent is at record levels;

5. That the Greenland and Western Antarctic ice shelves were melting because of global warming, when the best science is saying it’s too short a period to come to a definitive conclusion;

6. That there is confidence that temperatures will rise between 3-5C by the end of the century, while the IPCC AR5 report is 1.5 possibly more than 2C;

7. That sea levels will rise by 0.5 to 1 metre when the measured sea level rise is, and has been for two centuries at 3mm/annum putting us on course for a 0.2-0.25 metre rise;

8. That, without any scientific proof, the heat missing from the atmosphere has taken itself to the deep oceans by unknown physical means;

9. That this ocean heat content as a result of the missing heat has been measured when it most certainly hasn’t;

10. Implied that sea level rise had only occurred in the 20th century when it has been happening for the last 8000 years and has been rising at around 3mm/annum since 1800 with no acceleration whatsoever.
And the BBC internal inquiry said: “The ruling found a false balance was created in that the item implied Lord Lawson’s views on climate science were on the same footing as Sir Brian Hoskins.”
Too right their not, Lord Lawson seems to accept more of the consensus science than Sir Brian Hoskins.