Quality | 2010.02.10
Climate consensus under strain | Round table
We ask a range of experts: what damage has been done by recent criticisms of climate science credibility?
Tremendous damage is done
These scandals have done tremendous damage. This is not because they threaten the canon of climate science – that would require similar exposés of tens of thousands of scientific papers – but because they create an atmosphere of opacity and evasion. Rajendra Pachauri\'s initial dismissal of questions over the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change\'s Himalayan glacier date suggests a failure to listen, which is inimical to scientific discourse. I am also amazed to learn that the IPCC doesn\'t pay its chairman, obliging him to work elsewhere, which has caused the other scandal in which he\'s embroiled. Anyone would think that running the organisation was a full-time job. This isn\'t a task for amateurs.
Throughout the hacked emails scandal, the University of East Anglia has failed to engage with public concerns or to offer convincing explanations. Its latest statement fails to address any of the major points made in the Guardian\'s report . The attempts by Phil Jones to block or delete material subject to a freedom of information request are indefensible: if your data isn\'t public and contestable, it\'s not scientific. Science cannot be allowed to proceed like some kind of masonic conspiracy. It is part of the common treasury of humankind and should belong to everyone from conception to publication. All data, and the statistical tools used to analyse them, should be produced at the time of publication, and I hope that one of the outcomes of this scandal is that this becomes routine. Never again should people have to use FoI requests to find out what scientists have been up to, let alone have them refused.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Vicky Pope
The essential science is robust
For Britain\'s climate science community the last few months have been a time of immense frustration. All the attention on a few ill-advised emails and a small number of errors in the IPCC report are distorting the debate on climate change. None of the mistakes call into question the fundamental science. The UEA temperature record is one of three independent records that all show clearly that global-average temperature has increased over the past century and that warming has been particularly rapid since the 1970s. Mistakes identified in the IPCC report have been investigated and publicly corrected if appropriate. These mistakes have all been about the impacts of climate change – perhaps one of the most difficult areas of research and one which is evolving rapidly. The key finding that "warming is unequivocal and very likely due to man\'s activities" remains robust. The basic physics tells us that increasing greenhouse gases cause global warming – and we are likely to pay a heavy price if we keep emitting them.
I know that I speak for my colleagues in the Met Office, and I hope for other scientists, when I say that all this attention makes us even more determined to be rigorous and open in our approach to the science. The principles of peer review are essential, as is appropriate open access to methods and data. We also welcome rational public debate.
Vicky Pope is the head of climate change advice at the Met Office
Mike Hulme
Science cannot dictate policy
There is no doubt that the events of the last three months are leading people to ask questions about the status of scientific knowledge about human-induced climate change. Can the science reported by the IPCC be trusted? Are the processes used by the IPCC to assess knowledge trustworthy? Over the years the IPCC, and its various statements, have been endowed with ever greater authority – by governments, by media commentators and by various interest groups (including the Nobel Prize Committee). Sometimes the IPCC itself has actively claimed such an authoritative position – "speaking for science". It is therefore incumbent on the IPCC to ensure that it earns this trust and status that it has gained.
Advocates of various climate policy prescriptions – including those who advocate no policy – also should learn from this moment. The scientific process offers a wonderful method for probing, critical and fearless inquiry into the way the physical world works. But scientific knowledge can never determine policy. Policy emerges through political processes, where interpretations, judgments and compromises are made by individuals and groups of individuals as they weigh uncertain and changing scientific knowledge against normative criteria. It is foolish to state "the science demands" anything. It is people who demand things, not science. We need more honesty about what climate science can offer society – and what it can\'t.
Mike Hulme is professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia
Mark Lynas
Beware the misinformation
Anyone who believes that climate scientists at the UEA and elsewhere have been conspiring to fake global warming data should take some time to read the hacked emails – preferably in their entirety. The picture they reveal is fascinating, and should quickly lay to rest any half-baked sceptical conspiracy theories. (This might be a forlorn hope: last time I checked in to www.eastangliaemails.com the most popular search terms included "hoax", "lying" and "world government".) The picture they reveal is a revealing insight into the everyday business of professional science – the jockeying for status, the to-ing and fro-ing over obscure statistical methodologies, the sniping and the gossip, and the constant battle to get the latest work past the reviewers and into the various learned journals. But the UEA emails also reveal something else: this was a group of academics who felt under siege from, as Mike Mann (of "Hockey stick" fame) put it in June 2008, sceptics who were "not interested in the truth... [but] just looking for another way to try to undermine confidence in our science".
This siege mentality led to corners being cut, and the development of a paranoid them-and-us mentality which worked to the detriment of good science. This was unfortunate – but perhaps unavoidable, given the bitter nature of the sceptics v science battle. Public confidence will need to be restored, but this will be very difficult in the context of an ongoing misinformation campaign by dedicated and highly politicised global warming denialists.
Mark Lynas is an environment writer
Roger Pielke Jr
IPCC credibility is eroding fast
A human influence on the climate system is very real. Climate policy is important. So too is advice from experts to inform climate policy deliberations. Consequently it is of utmost importance that leading institutions of climate science – including of course impacts, adaptation and economics – have processes and procedures in place to sustain credibility and trust in their work. Regrettably, the IPCC has not met these high standards. The solution is obvious – to bring the archaic policies and procedures that govern the IPCC into the 21st century. To date the IPCC has been far too ad hoc and unaccountable. We would not accept this from scientific advisory processes that inform decision-making on pharmaceuticals, vaccines for children or military intelligence. As we look for ways to improve the scientific advisory processes related to climate, lessons from these other contexts will provide a useful guide. Meantime, the IPCC would best serve the interests of climate science and policy by moving beyond the denial of a problem before its credibility erodes even further.
Roger Pielke Jr is a professor at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences
Roger Highfield
Give the panel a makeover
It makes me cringe to see public confidence in climate science shaken so badly after such a long, hard haul. When global warming became an issue in the 1980s, scientists were careful not to say it was caused by human activity, only that there was a suggestive link. The IPCC deserved the Nobel prize in 2007 for its heroic work to conclude – with very high confidence – that humankind has warmed the planet. Good science thrives on scepticism and this consensus crystallised after much argument and deliberation by thousands of scientists. Alas the consensus view has given the public the false impression that the IPCC is a priesthood, handing down tablets of wisdom. The unfolding drama of email-gate suggests that researchers are secretive and that they used dodgy data, as reported this week in the Guardian by the New Scientist\'s environment consultant. Nor did it help that an IPCC "fact" was based on a non-peer-reviewed source: a report in New Scientist. The IPCC needs a makeover. The panel must embrace the wider availability and review of data made possible by the web to make the scientific process transparent and foster confidence. As we wrote in a recent editorial, climate science is useless if no one trusts it.
Roger Highfield edits the New Scientist
Richard Tol
The IPCC bureau should resign
Only Working Group 1 (science) of the IPCC adheres to the strictest scientific standards. Working Groups 2 (impacts) and 3 (policy) are sloppy and biased in parts. The media have revealed only some of the errors in the impact report, and have yet to focus on the policy report, which also contains errors. These errors are well known within the academic community but ignored by the IPCC leadership. IPCC leaders have communicated badly. One error was admitted, the rest flatly denied. This is partly because of arrogance and laziness, but lies were told as well. The IPCC chairperson openly admits to being an advocate rather than an academic, and has clear conflicts of interest.
The reputation of the IPCC has been severely damaged, but not yet irreparably so. The IPCC bureau should resign as they have failed to remove Dr Pachauri before it was too late. The rigorous standards of Working Group 1 should be applied to Working Groups 2 and 3. IPCC authors should be selected by the national academies strictly on academic standards, disregarding political colour. The International Union of Academies should acquire an oversight role.
The IPCC should take dramatic action soon so that climate policy can proceed.
Richard Tol is with the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin and the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam
Bryony Worthington
Don\'t defend the indefensible
Recent revelations about unsubstantiated claims in IPPC reports and seemingly dodgy practices at the UEA are bound to have an impact on public confidence in the science supporting man-made climate change. It is already very difficult to engage the public as the impacts of our actions occur over long time scales and in such a diffuse way. Our day-to-day experience of weather also serves to confuse. The fact that "global warming" could deliver colder winters or wetter summers is already a hard argument to sell.
Climate science is contentious and there are powerful vested interests seeking to prove that change is not man-made. High levels of scrutiny are to be expected. These relatively minor squabbles over a small number of indiscretions are a deliberate diversion. No major climate conspiracy has been uncovered and the vast body of evidence still suggests the same thing: our actions are causing change and we should act swiftly to minimise the risks we are exposing ourselves to. A healthy perspective on this issue needs to be maintained but that is no reason for inaction. Reports of one or two rotten apples do not mean the whole barrel should be jettisoned, but it would clearly be better if the bad apples were weeded out. Mistakes have been made, changes should follow as a result. Any attempt to defend the indefensible will only make matters worse.
Bryony Worthington founded the Sandbag Climate Campaign
Myles Allen
Pathetic efforts to discredit
Over 15 years ago, I co-authored a paper on global change detection with John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Back in 1994, John was firmly convinced that trends estimated from the satellite temperature record were accurate to well under one hundredth of a degree per decade. This mattered, because if the satellite data were as accurate as John claimed, then both the surface record and the climate models had to be wrong. It turns out that John\'s early confidence was mistaken: once various errors were corrected or accounted for in the analysis of the satellite data, the discrepancy disappeared, at least at the global level (there are still some niggling questions about the tropics). Am I now saying John should retract or resign? Of course not. This is not to say the satellite data was not a big deal. It was a huge deal: one of the key obstacles to our drawing stronger conclusions about human influence on climate in the IPCC Third Assessment in 2001. But it has been resolved, and science has moved on.
Contrast this with the breathless revelations emerging from the UEA email affair. To date, as far as actual numbers are concerned, they have revealed ... what, exactly? A problem with the treatment of average climate in some Australian data which makes no difference to estimated trends (and is nothing to do with UEA or Phil Jones), and now an excuse to resurrect a two-year-old story about poor record-keeping on Chinese weather stations. By stating "The IPCC\'s 2007 report used the study to justify the claim that \'any urban-related trend\' in global temperatures was small," Fred Pearce cunningly implies that the IPCC\'s conclusion somehow depended on those Chinese stations. What he fails to mention is that China was one of three regions studied in that 1990 paper, which was corroborating an earlier study of US data, and scores of other papers since then have also concluded that the "urban heat island" effect is small.
John Christy took a lot of heat over the satellite data, but nothing remotely like what is being turned on Phil Jones. It would have been romantic if John\'s error had been uncovered by journalists combing through stolen emails, or members of the public issuing freedom of information requests. But it wasn\'t. It was found by the US government funding a painstaking independent analysis of the satellite record, with John\'s co-operation, just as Phil has said he would be happy to co-operate with an impartial and scientific re-analysis of the surface temperature record, if anyone wants to fund such a thing. No doubt Fred Pearce in the Guardian, Newsnight and others are hoping against hope to turn up something similarly important: a genuine error which fundamentally alters conclusions based on the surface temperature record. But they haven\'t, and their efforts are starting to look rather desperate (complaining about procedures, picking holes in irrelevant software).
The most effective people at finding errors in scientific research are scientists: it was professional glaciologists, after all, who exposed the error in the IPCC 2007 case study of Himalayan glaciers. Of course, the bloggers will argue we are all in this conspiracy together, just as the moon landings were actually enacted in a car park in Nevada. In the meantime, the spectacle of journalists acting out their fantasies at the expense of both Phil Jones and their readers is looking increasingly pathetic.
Myles Allen heads the Climate Dynamics group at Oxford University
Jim al-Khalili
Scientists must up their game
There will always be those who deny the evidence no matter how overwhelming it is, but a wider public backlash against the harsh realities of climate change is both dangerous and foolish. Even if the truth of climate change really were in the balance, doing nothing would still be too big a gamble. When I hear a moon-landing denier or an evolution theory sceptic, or just a homeopathy advocate, I smile, take a deep breath and try to explain to them how science works. If I cannot convince them, then so be it. But with climate change deniers, there is no smile – the matter is too serious for that.
As for the latest controversies surrounding the inadequacies of a scientific paper published 20 years ago, or an exaggerated claim in an international report, or accusations of suppression or manipulation of data in emails of course this is a major cause for concern, but it does not negate the mountain of accumulating data on how we are changing our planet, and the catastrophic consequences this could lead to. The government chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, is right: scientists have to make their case with more honesty and clarity, and acknowledge that our understanding of how the earth\'s climate is changing is bigger than science.
Jim Al-Khalili is a physicist, author and broadcaster
Fiona Fox
Time for an amnesty on doubt
It\'s hard to argue that public trust in science has not been damaged by recent events but scientists have learned valuable lessons from being at the heart of a media storm before. One lesson should be that the benefits of being open in the media about scientific uncertainty always outweigh the risks. Gavin Schmidt, a leading climate modeller, last week admitted to Nature that the "insane" culture of suspicion that climate researchers are working in is "drowning our ability to soberly communicate gaps in our science". But failing to be open about these gaps has only played into the sceptics\' hands and undermined public trust.
We need an "amnesty on uncertainty" where scientists tell us what they do know, admit to what they don\'t know and come clean on the areas of disagreement. In return, the sceptics could agree to stop bombarding respected researchers with FOIs and seizing on every error as proof that scientists are lying to us; the media could agree to go easy on the climate porn with all the "tipping points","countdowns" and "points of no return" and start to convey the nuances and uncertainties in this especially complex area of science; and politicians could agree to stop demanding a level of certainty on environmental impacts that computer models can never provide. In a week where we have finally drawn a line under the MMR scare after 12 years, maybe all concerned could use this crisis to reflect on how to do this science story better.
Fiona Fox heads the Science Media Centre
Ben Pile
Hear climate\'s hollow politics
Things just keep getting worse for the chair of the IPCC. Even the UK government – who have in recent years become greener-than-green – don\'t seem to be backing him. The institutions that have been created by climate politics have suffered successive blows to their credibility in recent months. Climategate, the failure of Copenhagen, the apparent failure of IPCC to ensure the quality of its reports, and his own incautious remarks have created a difficult climate for Rajendra Pachauri.
If climate change is, as has been claimed, "the biggest challenge facing mankind", then the IPCC is by inference mankind\'s most important institution. Those standing behind the green agenda will doubtlessly want to protect its credibility from the ascendant climate sceptics, who, smelling blood, seem to be going after the head of the beast. But is Pachauri really responsible for the IPCC\'s oversight, and will the climate change agenda really be saved by personalising the debate, and making a public sacrifice?
In fact, the case for political action on climate change has rarely depended on the credibility that it has with the public. Nobody ever voted for climate change legislation, because no party has ever stood against it. Climate change politics and its institutions have been established "above" democratic politics. Governments – particularly those such as the UK\'s – have suffered a lack of credibility all by themselves, and so have sought authority and legitimacy in these supra-national planet-saving institutions. But as long as the establishment are all agreed that the world is about to end, then it matters not a jot what the public thinks. Pachauri\'s exit will simply demonstrate to the public what they already knew: that climate change politics is merely a symptom of today\'s hollow politics, same as any other.
Ben Pile co-edits Climate-resistance.org
Ed Miliband
More rigour, but no retreat
Two things should guide us as we consider the science of climate change: maximum openness and rigour in our approach and a focus on the overall picture that the science paints. Correcting the error over glacier melting and investigating the issues arising from the UEA emails demand the willingness to learn lessons and make any reforms that are required. Those who believe that climate change is real and man-made have nothing to fear and everything to gain from maximum transparency.
But just as we must address these issues, we must not let them undermine the overwhelming scientific case for action. The vast majority of climate scientists are clear about the threat climate change poses. Some people will tell us there is an easy way out and we can wish the problem away. This would be profoundly irresponsible and we should say so.
Those who believe in the case for action do need to do a better job of explaining the risks of failing to act and also of communicating the benefits of action. Over the coming decades, a shift to low carbon can create high-quality jobs in new industries, ensure we live in better insulated, more comfortable homes and take us towards a fairer society. That is the case we must make and the argument we must win.
Ed Miliband is the secretary of state for energy and climate change
Bjorn Lomborg
Halt alarmism on all sides
East Anglia University\'s leaked emails and revelations about the IPCC\'s lack of scientific rigour have been disturbing and disappointing. The evidence remains overwhelming that global warming is real and man-made, but these events accentuate the point that some of the more spectacular alarmism is not well-founded.
At a time when opinion polls reveal rising public scepticism about climate change, attempts to replace scientific rigour with spin are unhelpful. The UEA emails show some of the world\'s most influential climatologists trying to disguise flaws in their work, blocking scrutiny, and plotting together to enforce what amounts to a party line on climate change.
The IPCC\'s unsubstantiated claim about the Himalayan glaciers is all the more troubling for being accompanied by a string of further problems, including the baseless assertion that 40% of the Amazon rainforest is at imminent risk of disappearing and the false claim that the cost of weather disasters has been rising because of climate change. To maintain credibility, the IPCC must be more than an echo chamber for those who think the best way to make public policy is to scare people.
There have long been polarising and bitter clashes between climate change deniers and alarmists. The truth is that exaggeration in either direction is unhelpful in informing us how best to respond to climate change. We require level heads and honesty from climatologists and the IPCC.
Bjorn Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist
Yang Ailun
I have witnessed the reality
In 2007, Greenpeace led an expedition team to the Himalaya to document the impacts of global warming on glacier retreating. We went there, with a picture of the Himalayan glacier taken in 1968, to take a comparison picture from exact the same angle. But it was not possible any more because the glacier on which the photographer stood when taking the 1968 image had already gone. The same glacier in front of us was hardly recognisable – standing at 5,800 metres above most of the human world, we were shocked by the consequences of human activities.
Thanks to my job, I\'ve travelled to many places in China to witness the impacts of climate change. I\'ve seen farmers who have lost their livelihoods because there was no water to irrigate their lands; I\'ve seen villages forced to move after houses were destroyed by landslides caused by increasing number of storms; I\'ve seen the same fishing village hit by severe typhoons two times in three years.
In China, the equivalent to climate scepticism is the belief that "climate change is a western conspiracy to hinder China\'s development". I wish to send both the sceptics and the conspirators to where climate impacts could already be so badly felt, so that they could see with their own eyes what is happening.
Yang Ailun is head of climate and energy, Greenpeace China
James Garvey
Is it all about psychology?
Public confidence is on the wane, and recent news stories have something to do with it – but they can\'t have everything to do with it. What really follows from these stories? On one hand you have virtually the entire scientific community backing the IPCC\'s report that there\'s a 90% chance that human beings are driving climate change, and on the other questionable emails and a mistake about glaciers. Can anyone really believe that a dark plot orchestrated in East Anglia has hoodwinked the world\'s scientific community? Is the glacier business actually on a par with a cover up like Watergate? If reasonable people base their beliefs on evidence, why do we latch on to a few news stories when the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming? Maybe we\'re not entirely reasonable. Psychologists go on about denial as a defence mechanism. When facts are difficult for us we are good at looking elsewhere, inflating an inconsequential claim at the expense of a painful truth. Maybe the public\'s perception of settled scientific opinion on the basic facts of climate change will always be blurry. News stories can make things worse, but we might always struggle to get around natural psychological barriers to clear thinking about climate change.
James Garvey is author of The Ethics of Climate Change
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]climate-consensus-under-strain
