On Friday, the BBC's in-house climate correspondent, Paul Hudson, wrote an utter failure of an article about global warming. Sadly, the right has picked it up; having BBC attached to such uninformed denialism allows the ignorant, anti-science crowd crow that the left is losing on global warming (science, again, with its political leanings).

So, a takedown of the BBC's article is below (x-posted at this forum):

What happened to good journalism? The BBC should be embarrassed to have published this article. Let's go through it line by line.

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

So far, so good. Nothing wrong there. (Although it's not a surprise that 1998 was the warmest year on record--it was the strongest El Nino year of the 20th century [link below].) Oh, and the headline is not a surprise: news organizations benefit from consumer attention.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

Whoops! Already inaccurate. While it's true that no year has been as hot as 98, that's because 98 was an outlier, well above the trend line. But there has been, in fact, a continued warming trend. AGW does not claim that every year will be hotter than the previous year; on the contrary, it argues that, over time, the global trend will continue to increase in correlation with accelerated amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

Just a wretched sentence. "Our climate models did not forecast it." What does that "it" refer to? Just go back and check--there's not a clear antecedent in the previous sentence. (Of course, the temperature trend has continued upward, just as models predicted, even though the climate models have actually underpredicted the temperature rise.)

Also, what an oddly constructed phrase: "man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet." That "thought to be" blurs the issue. How about a rewrite: "man-made carbon dioxide, the gas argued to be responsible for warming the planet by hundreds of thousands of scholarly articles and that no peer-reviewed scientific work has refuted in any meaningful way." And if you'd like to mention Benny Peiser's response that claims there's plenty of scientific debate, you should read this first.

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

Also, flat earth theorists continue to "passionately and consistently argue" that the earth is flat. Young earth creationists continue to "passionately and consistently argue" that the fossil record is utterly meaningless for determining the age of the planet. They don't have science on their side, but they sure do have tenacity!

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.

Just to note here, remember it for later: AGW acknowledges solar activity in global temperatures.

The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature. And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.

Who is Piers Corbyn? What is Weatheraction? Guess what? He makes predictions about the weather, predictions that are sometimes accurate and sometimes inaccurate, and he doesn't make public his method. Why, he must be a reliable source on a scientific issue!

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures. He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.

Ah, he has a claim. Has he released any evidence? Nope. What will his evidence consist of? No one knows. Is this newsworthy? Yes. Why? Because Piers Corbyn is "so excited" about the claim he making, which the author of the BBC article has seen none of the evidence for.

If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

If I dropped an apple, yet gravity did not pull the apple to the ground, that could revolutionize the whole subject. And you know what else is possible? Someone systematically refuting hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed articles worth of research that argues for global warming (and, just to reiterate, almost no peer-reviewed scientific articles refuting it). Sure, it could happen. Why not? Also, it could rain frogs tomorrow.

What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth's great heat stores. . . . . For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too. But in the last few years it [the ocean] has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

Do news organizations have fact checkers anymore? Has the ocean been losing its warmth and been starting to cool down? Check the link.

But those scientists who are equally passionate about man's influence on global warming argue that their science is solid.

This seems like it would be a good place in the BBC article to mention that the scientists who are passionate about their science being solid actually have science on their side. (If you're scoring at home, that's hundreds of thousands of articles to one.

The UK Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, says it incorporates solar variation and ocean cycles into its climate models, and that they are nothing new. In fact, the centre says they are just two of the whole host of known factors that influence global temperatures - all of which are accounted for by its models. In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling. What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.

I find it interesting how the article treats the evidenceless claim by Piers Corbyn and the UK Met Office, which relies on constantly updated scientific data, as equal claims.

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Actually, this doesn't "confuse the issue even further." To clear up the confusion, you just have to read a couple of paragraphs down:

But [Latif] makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

So, to sum up: Mojib Latif sees a brief period of cooling coming, which he "believes" will be followed by warming. Interesting that he just "believes" this. On what is his belief based? Oh, if only the article could tell us. But, for some reason, it chooses not to. Journamalism at its finest!

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

Oh, a couple other things are for sure. One, the "debate" over global warming is only taking place outside of where scientists publish their research findings. Two, that "some would say it is hotting up" is, sadly, the sentence Mr. Hudson clearly put the most work into.