Sixteen years ago, on this day, February 20, 2010,
In an article which appeared in The Sunday Telegraph on 20 February 2010, Christopher Booker purported to correct the misquotation contained in The Real Global Warming Disaster but this article contained yet further inaccuracies.[30] As a result, Houghton referred the matter to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC Reference 101959). Following the PCC’s involvement, The Sunday Telegraph published on 15 August 2010 a letter of correction by Houghton stating his true position.[31] An article supportive of Houghton also appeared in the edition of 21 May 2010 of New Scientist.[32]
The correct quotation was, “If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster. It’s like safety on public transport. The only way humans will act is if there’s been an accident.”[33]
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 390ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that the journalist Christopher Booker (a founder and first editor of Private Eye) had been writing various idiotic denialist screeds for a while. There was an audience for them among a certain kind of person who doesn’t want to admit that all the nice things that we have come with a price tag, and that people who are enjoying more of the nice things than other people are might have a responsibility to cut back and to help those other people, because that would be, well, that would be, in their eyes, an unfair infringement on their “liberty” and so forth and so forth. Also these people are enraged that it turns out that the dirty hippies who they’d been disparaging by this time for 40 years were right.
So the way it works is that some awful book gets published, It doesn’t matter that it’s full of inaccuracies, that it has had no real peer review, it’s a book, and in the eyes of journalists, that makes it newsworthy.
And in the eyes of editors with pages to fill, well, they can get op eds and excerpts out of it, “all the adverts fit to print, all the news printed to fit,” and so on.
And so what you see here is Booker just making shit up and being wrong and back and forth, back and forth, other people like scientist John Houghton having to waste precious time and energy, which Houghton had been having to do since, well, the early 1990s.
The specific context was that Copenhagen had ended in nothing, the “Climategate” bullshit was in full flow and the denialists had the winds at their backs.
What I think we can learn from this is that Christopher Booker may have been a talented journalist early on, but as an assessor of science and as a man of honour, he was a complete failure.
And those who took comfort in his lies, distortions, exaggerations are also frankly, failures.
And of course, the Telegraph has continued to be a failure, as we see from its repeated apologies and quote clarifications in its ongoing, frankly psychotic campaign against net zero and Ed Miliband.
What happened next: The denial never stopped. It never will. These people painted themselves into a corner. To admit that they’d been wrong would destroy them emotionally, cognitively, so they won’t, but then they’ll pivot to, well, it’s too late to do anything about it, regardless of what the cause might be.
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.
Also on this day:
February 20, 1966 – US Senators told about carbon build-up by physicist
February 20, 1970 – South Australian premier sets up an Environment Committee
