Chris Packham Packs on the Pseudoscience to Promote Climate Collapse “Terror”

By the final programme of his five-part Earth series, broadcast last year by the BBC, Chris Packham had perfected the art of taking imprecise proxy data from the geological record and comparing it to more accurate modern measurements to draw dubious conclusions about imminent climate collapse. One sudden spike in temperatures about 56 million years ago over “just a few thousand years” is said to be “incredible but sobering”. Scientists, he says, regard this as “analogous” to what is happening today. Some might, but a lot of others are more circumspect about relying on geological data that has a resolution of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and comparing it with today’s measurements.

Packham draws conclusions from events in the PETM, or Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a warming period that began sometime around 56.3 million to 55.9 million years ago. Briefly, it appears global temperatures shot up to around 25 or 26°C, compared with about 14.5°C today. In a published essay, science writer Andy May studied the evidence around the PETM and noted the proxy temperature measurements with lengthy resolutions “are not comparable to today’s monthly averages”.

But this lack of temporal precision does not stop Packham waxing lyrically about the PETM. “Violent storms ravaged the planet with flash floods and protracted drought,” he says. “What is scary is how it happened – each event triggering the next until it pushed the Earth past some serious tipping points,” he claims.

The ‘tipping point’ trope is the go-to climate-modelled message for today’s Armageddonists. Alas, there doesn’t appear to have been time in the programme to state what these ancient tipping points were, but in case the viewer doesn’t pick up on this current fashionable scare, Packham claims “and that is our nightmare”. Towards the end of the programme, he doubles down on his own claimed scientific precision and states: “Today, climate is changing faster than at any time in the last 66 million years.” This might what Packham understands ‘the science’ to say, but there is no way that anyone can know this, let alone prove it. He later told the Guardian that he hoped the “terror factor” generated by the series would “spur us to do something about the environment crisis”.

So what caused this spike in temperatures in the PETM? Since this is a propaganda film aimed at persuading the viewer that burning hydrocarbons and releasing ‘greenhouse’ gases like carbon dioxide into the air is potentially catastrophic, the answer Packham provides is simple. In this case methane, which he says started venting from deep within the Atlantic ocean. Again, the lack of precision around dates is a problem when it comes to attributing a rise in temperature over an imprecise period to a gas that has warming properties but stays in the atmosphere as briefly as 84 months. Marine geophysicist Professor Tim Minshull is less sure that methane release was the main cause of the global warming at this time. In a study published in 2016, he suggested methane release was slower and more modest than some researchers have hypothesised.

About 40 million years ago, ‘hothouse’ Earth, when alligators basked under palm trees in the Arctic, started to cool, a process that Packham attributes to falling levels of CO₂. The rocks in newly-formed mountain ranges started to weather and react with the air to remove the gas from the atmosphere – or something. There are a number of problems with this hypothesis, not least the fact that CO₂ levels had already been falling steadily for 150 million years from the end of the Jurassic, while temperatures remained as high as they had ever been in the geological record going back 600 million years. As the graph below shows, temperatures remained high, while CO₂ levels began their long descent to the low, near denudation, levels seen today.

Meanwhile, scientists dispute the notion that rock weathering only acts as a carbon sink, suggesting that the process also releases amounts of CO₂ to rival volcanoes. In a paper published last year, a group of Oxford University scientists led by Dr. Jesse Zondervan said their work on the carbon release had important implications for modelling climate scenarios. At the moment, the CO₂ released from rock weathering is not included in the modelled work. Neither it seems are such inconvenient findings included in the Net Zero promotional work of Chris Packham.

The Earth presenter is a green activist and naturalist who holds the view that eight billion humans are wrecking the natural world in their attempts to sustain life on a difficult, dangerous planet. Some of his efforts to draw attention to the fragility of natural habitats are laudable. But as we have seen, he uses something called ‘the Science’ to promote the view that humans should stop industrial progress and return to a mythical natural state. The fact that the unexploited natural world could not sustain anything like eight billion souls is just one of the many reasons why his fantasies will never be adopted. His science starts with a pre-determined narrative, unlike the scientific process which draws conclusions after a ruthless examination of all the available evidence. Mainstream media such as the BBC have largely given up on the scientific process when it comes to climate change, and simply promote political messaging around the Net Zero project. In doing so, they ignore large swaths of scientific knowledge that are likely to trouble the ‘settled’ opinion. But then, this knowledge lacks the “terror factor” so beloved by Packham.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor