Nineteen years ago, on this day, March 17th, 2013,
In the four-page version published in the Mail on Sunday on 17 March, he calls climate science the “Great Green Con”. And, when David writes one of his exposés, Carbon Brief like to expose his errors.
https://storage.googleapis.com/gpuk-archive/blog/climate/mail-fake-cover.html
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 400ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that the Daily Mail has been mostly but not entirely, hostile to the idea of carbon dioxide build up. There was this article from 1979 based on a book, World without Trees.
But on the whole, the Daily Mail mostly has derided hippies and anti-capitalists and grant grubbing-scientists. Every so often, they’ll run a story or an editorial to show that they’re somehow “balanced”, but they’re not really fooling anyone
The specific context was that their journalist, if you want to call him that, David Rose, was a reliable repeater of the latest denialist memes and talking points and bullshit to come out of the United States. (and, self-confessedly at the time of the Iraq war, security services disinformation). And so it came to pass here, in 2013 after the Copenhagen failure and ahead of David Cameron saying “cut the green crap.”
In 2013, Media Matters named Rose’s publication, the Daily Mail “2013 Climate Change Misinformer of the Year” for its stirring up of “faux controversies about climate science.” In 2014, Greenpeace made an official release noting that David Rose is “not a credible source.”12 13
What I think we can learn from this is that there is a conveyor belt of ass-hollering, where denial, half truths and outright lies get washed into newspapers, and then some of it ends up in people’s heads. I am not proposing a hypodermic model; it is more of an air mist than a hypodermic.
What happened next The Mail has kept on being awful on climate, alongside the Express, the Sun, the Times and the Telegraph, as per Carbon Brief.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
References
Xxx
Also on this day:
March 17, 1976 – UK Weather boss dismisses climate change as “grossly exaggerated”
March 17, 2006 – Rio Tinto says “CCS is key to cutting greenhouse gases.” Oops, then…
March 17, 2007 – Edinburgh #climate action gathering says ‘Now’ the time to act