Climate bet; Africa Cup of Nations
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to bbcworldservice.com slash podcasts. Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford. In this programme, we'll be using a sophisticated statistical computer model to try to predict the results of the Africa Cup of Nations. But first, climate change. Almost everyone agrees that in the past hundred years, the globe has warmed by about three quarters of a degree. But that's not really what has provoked concern about global warming. Rather, it was a more dramatic increase in the past few decades, especially the 1980s and 1990s. According to data from the UK's Meteorological Office, the record for average global temperature was broken in 1983, 1988, 1990, 1995 and, most recently, in 1998.
But then over ten years went by without a record. Some people think this is telling us something about the planet. It warmed and then it stopped. Others strongly disagree. David Whitehouse is an astrophysicist and former BBC science editor. And James Annan is a climate scientist based in Japan. And they made this bet on more or less four years ago.
I think probably by about 2011 we should see a new record, if not before.
So would you put money on that?
Yes, certainly, yes.
Are you willing to take the other side of that bet? Certainly am. Should we say £100? That sounds fine to me. Now the latest figures giving the average global temperature are out. In a moment, we'll reveal who won. But first, how do we calculate global average temperature? To find out, I went to a weather station perched on the roof of the BBC in London, tended by weather forecaster Peter Cockcroft.
This funny black funnel with a sort of white accordion thing at the bottom, that's our weather station. Not very big.
It's about the size of a modestly sized bucket.
Yeah, I mean, modern automatic weather stations are quite compact. Is this the same thing as we have in the weather stations all around the world? Very similar devices. Some meteorological services still have the traditional wooden screen with slats in and the observer would go out every day, every hour in fact, and open up the box, have a look inside, look at the thermometer and write down the temperature.
Peter's weather station gave us the temperature about six storeys above the streets of central London. But how do we move from that sort of reading to a global average? Here's Dr Peter Stott of the Meteorological Office.
Well, to calculate a global temperature, you need to take many, many temperature records from around the world, both on the land and over the oceans. How many? Well, there are about 2,200 stations over the land. And then over the oceans, it's a combination of about 4,000 ships which are reporting the temperature coming into the engine intakes, and then there's about 1,300 buoys that measure the surface temperature of the ocean.
Now for the results of the bet. It was agreed that it would be based on data from the UK's meteorological office's Hadley Centre. The figure for 2011 has just come out, and we can reveal it was not a record year.
How did the presenters introduce the global warming record and its significance?
David Whitehouse and James Annan are back. David, congratulations, you've won the bet.
What does this tell you? Thank you very much. I think it shows that we did enter a warm spell 30 years ago, and I think it shows that the rate of warming of that spell is not constant. The 80s and the 90s it was warming, but I think that it is structure in this data that shows for the past 10 years the temperatures remain constant.
And you think that goes beyond just looking at record years? Because I think we could agree that's not the only way to look at temperature data, right?
Oh, yes, that's by far not the only way to look at temperature data. We live in the warmest decade of the instrumental era. The noughties were warmer than the nineties, which were warmer than the... the 80s but that's not to say that you should only look at this just over a long time period say 30 years.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:33
2
How did the presenters introduce the global warming record and its significance?
3:33–6:20
3
What was the four‑year climate bet between David Whitehouse and James Annan about?
6:20–8:30
4
How is the global average temperature actually calculated by meteorologists?
8:30–9:51