Inconvenient
truths, swindles & conspiracies - where science and
politics don't mix!
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Saturday 28th April 2007
"It is, therefore, the task of
the scientific community to get its findings out more
clearly to the public, directly and in a more forthright
manner in order to prevent the non-science gaining a hold
on both sides of the argument."
I thought I'd add in a non-photographic entry
this weekend, a weekend that has seen two
interesting news items regarding the natural
environment here in the UK. Firstly, in terms of
the Central England Temperature (CET)
measuring-stick, April 2007 has been the warmest
since detailed record-keeping began in 1659. OK,
so there are still a couple of days to go, but if
anything these could push the provisional CET
figure of 11.1C upwards! Secondly, a notable
earthquake of magnitude 4.3 shook parts of SE
England at 0818 on Saturday morning.
Are these two things by any chance related?
One would think not, but think again. After the
2004 tsunami that devastated some areas adjacent
to the Indian Ocean, by some strange mechanism
tsunamis began to find their way into global
warming stories in some sections of the media.
Will the Kent Earthquake manage to do the same?
Time (and the media) will tell!
Recent months have seen no let-up in the
energetic nature of the climate debate, something
I have seen plenty of in my voluntary position of
moderator in the popular and lively UK
Weatherworld Climatology Forum. It's been
interesting to observe how people on both sides
of this debate approach the issues. A very common
"attacking" position is to post a link
to a media site - such as BBC news or various UK
newspapers - where a climate science story is
being aired - and to pull it to bits, thereby
shooting the messenger well and truly.
This is quite easy to do in some cases and for
this situation to have arisen, the media and the
scientific community both have themselves to
blame. I'll try to explain the background to my
point of view.
What's a peer-reviewed
journal?
Developments in any science are published in
peer-reviewed journals before finding its way
into the general media. There are many such
journals, each covering different branches of the
sciences. I have had a number of papers published
myself - not in climate but in geology and
mineralogy. The peer-review procedure is pretty
much the same in all disciplines of science and
is worthy of description, because non-scientists
do not encounter it. Let's just run through how
it works, using my experience in mineralogy as an
example.
Suppose you are out there doing fieldwork. You
find some rocks that are of particular interest.
Samples are collected, clearly labelled and
bagged. Later, perhaps during the following
winter, the samples are cleaned, sectioned,
polished and studied under microscopes. Maybe one
or two fellow researchers join in with this work.
Over a year or two (depending on availability of
equipment time), minerals are fully identified
and analysed and their textural relationships
noted and photographed. By now you know you have
something new, a description of which is worthy
of publication (you think).
From the notes you have made and the data you
have obtained, a rough draft is put together. You
then sit with your team-mates and get it honed to
a fine degree and submit the draft plus
diagrams/images to the journal you hope will
publish it.
Some time later you get a letter from that
journal stating that your manuscript has gone out
to two independent reviewers. You haven't a clue
who they are and you waste many hours trying to
guess who they might be.
A few months later, you get the reviews back. One
reviewer likes it but has made a few suggestions
regarding layout and clarity of diagrams. The
other has ripped it to bits, saying that it
cannot be published without major revision
because of blah, blah and blah. You still don't
know who these guys are, normally, but heck you'd
like to find out! Usually, the more knowledgeable
the reviewer the more revision you'll need to do
on your manuscript....
The revisions are done - there is no choice - at
least it hasn't been rejected out of hand - and
six months later your paper appears in print.
Looking at it, you realise it is now much more
concise than that first draft. Facts are now
strictly facts and uncertainties are firmly
stated to be just that. The review process has
worked properly and you have a nice paper in
publication. From start to finish you have been
working on that one paper intermittently over
four years.
That's how it often is. I've had papers accepted
with no revision, had to revise others and have
had outright rejection. The latter really hurts
but it tends to make you more careful in the
future! I've myself passed papers, suggested
major revision and rejected others. Makes you
feel a bastard to do so, but it is science's
quality-control process and to do otherwise for
the wrong reasons (e.g. you happen to know one of
the authors personally) would be grossly
irresponsible, not only to science but to the
author in question who needs to know that his
skills need honing-up.
The process is not perfect, for sure, and things
to get through sometimes that shouldn't, but
overall it is a very effective filter. Imagine
science without this filter!
Who reads the papers that we
write?
The scientific papers that we write are intended
to be easily understood by our fellow workers and
are produced primarily for that purpose. They are
for the common good of our branch of science. A
lay person would generally find large parts of
them difficult to follow. Even in geology, which
is a broad church, if I wrote a paper on a
complex hydrothermal mineral assemblage, it is
unlikely that a life-long palaeontologist would
grasp much of it; conversely I would struggle
with a paper on brachiopod evolution in the late
Cambrian! That's one reason why each paper
normally begins with an abstract - a concise
summary of the findings minus all the detailed
descriptions and number-crunchings that appear in
the body of the paper. It should be written so
that a knowledgeable non-specialist in that field
can still figure out the key findings.
So, where does the trouble
start?
Much of what we do goes on behind the scenes.
However, certain aspects of the Earth Sciences -
especially climatology - are more mainstream
because the findings have the potential to affect
people's lives. This is where many scientists run
into problems! Getting that honed-down hard
science into everyday speak is not easy - there
are certain things for which, strictly speaking,
only technical words will suffice, for example.
If the results of your work are notable, then
your University will quite rightly want the
publicity that such things generate. So yes, you
will have to find a way of getting that
honed-down hard science into everyday speak - a
press-release. It'll be like writing your
abstract but harder!
Once that press-release is issued to the wide
world out there, get ready to duck! Imagine each
news editor and sub-editor as a filter which your
work passes through. As it does so it gradually
becomes less recognisable, depending on the
subject material and the ability of the media
person dealing with it. Best case is that it
appears pretty much as you said it, a bit
over-simplified but that's something you can live
with. Worst case is distortion or exaggeration in
either an agenda-driven or sensationalist way.
This can reflect badly on you even though it is
not you who's done the distorting!
The basic principles make
sense....
As somebody who works in and respects the
peer-reviewed scientific environment, I am
satisfied that the scientific understanding of
our climate, as published in scientific journals,
is sound. There exists a warming trend in global
temperature. None of the well-understood natural
cycles in the Earth's climate are capable of
explaining the warming. Greenhouse gases, and
especially carbon dioxide, have increased
significantly over recent decades. The physics of
the so-called Greenhouse Effect - whereby carbon
dioxide absorbs infra-red (heat) radiation given
off by the surface of the Earth (as a response to
solar radiation) is well understood. Increase
carbon dioxide and more IR radiation is absorbed
instead of it being lost into space. Result -
warming.
So we are warming and the process will affect
everyone to differing degrees. There will be
benefits to some areas and adverse effects in
others. For example, it's great if your Spring is
warm and sunny with the winter blues banished
away quickly. But it's no good if your water
supplies, that relied on a glacier as an icy
reservoir, have dried up because that glacier has
disappeared! Glaciers will disappear if the rate
at which they are melting exceeds the rate at
which they are being "topped-up" by
seasonal snowfall. And in many cases, that is the
scenario that is underway. Continued warming will
increase that melt-rate, so that, in the absence
of a radical increase in wintry precipitation,
the process will accelarate.
Climatology is all about trying to understand
what makes things like this tick. It looks at
past climatic cycles in terms of their duration,
characteristics and rate of change from one to
another. One argument often posed by people who
disagree with the notion of human-induced climate
change is to say words to the effect of
"there have been many far more radical
changes in the past. We've had ice-ages, times
warmer than now, etc etc". This is palpable
nonsense in the context of the present situation.
For large parts of the Earth's existence there
were no polar ice-caps at all - so what, one
might well ask, given that there were no humans
around either!
Benign times....
We have been living in a relatively benign phase
of Earth's climate history. During that time, we
have developed an extraordinarily sophisticated
infrastructure, upon which many of us are heavily
or totally dependant. This has been possible
because the natural world has permitted it by and
large. That infrastructure is, however, fragile
with respect to environmental change.
If the environment changes, it is often not the
change itself that can cause problems, but the
rate of that change. A rapid change in climate
affects not only global ecosystems but human
civilisation, by damaging that sophisticated
infrastructure. Crops in one area might fail due
to drought. Another area, heavily populated and
low-lying, may lose out due to sea-level rise
caused by accelarated polar ice-melt. This may
take many decades, but the damage is done
nevertheless. Serious stuff, indeed, then - and
something that certainly justifies our attention,
for the problems arising in future decades will
be as much geopolitical as anything else.
The problem in Climatology
The problem in the everyday media treatment of
climatology can be summed up in one short
sentence:
Everything is blamed on global warming.
Climatologists know that you cannot blame every
hurricane, every tornado, on global warming. Such
adverse events have always occurred. It is
important to remember that, and also to
understand that regional weather patterns are
complex things to forecast ordinarily, even
without the warming factor. A good example is to
be had in the case of hurricanes.
The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was pretty
extreme in terms of numbers of storms generated:
2006 in comparison was quiet, despite being
forecast to be severe. What happened was that an
El Nino rather suddenly developed - El Nino years
are not major hurricane years, because the
synoptic patterns that result create too much
wind-shear aloft in the Caribbean and Atlantic,
that in turn discouraging tropical disturbances
from forming into full-blown hurricanes.
Global warming sceptics leapt joyously on the
lack of hurricanes in 2006, citing it as
"proof" that they were right after all.
This is often the base level at which the public
debate operates, based not on good science but on
a set of prejudices, politicical leanings and a
few "facts" gleaned from various
sections of the media. It
is, therefore, the task of the scientific
community to get its findings out more clearly to
the public, directly and in a more forthright
manner in order to prevent the non-science
gaining a hold on both sides of the argument.
In the case of hurricanes, warming will increase
sea surface temperatures and the higher these
temperature are, the more "fuel" will
be available to the organised thunderstorm
clusters that drift out in the Atlantic from
western Africa on a regular basis during the
season. So long as a low-shear environment is
available, more frequent and stronger hurricanes
may be expected, with El Nino years punctuating
developments periodically. That's put
simplistically but it's essentially correct,
whilst not blaming every adverse weather event on
global warming, something which the media is
rather good at, to our danger.
Why danger? Because the evidence I am seeing is
that people are getting fed up of having global
warming rammed down their throats. It's serious,
but let's discuss it rationally for heaven's
sake, and let's have the scientists themselves
being heard, instead of seeing their
press-releases being converted into some
third-hand sensationalist copy. Once people reach
saturation-point they switch off, and to allow
that to happen would be grossly irresponsible. A
lot of the problems likely to be experienced as a
result of climate change can be coped with
positively providing a commonsense approach is
taken from an early stage. What's the
alternative?
The alternative is that we continue to
sensationalise the debate. We are driven,
according to our opinions, by mainstream material
such as productions like "An Inconvenient
Truth" and "The Great Global Warming
Swindle". In my view, if you will accept it,
neither have done much more than further polarise
the debate, leading to people stating we're all
doomed or that it's all a global conspiracy in
order to raise more taxes depending on which pole
they occupy, neither of which are in the remotest
bit realistic!
This is why one may encounter media stories on
climate change that manage to bring in tsunamis,
and it's high time some realism was brought back
into this topic. The scientific community must
take a stronger lead on this, before increasing
numbers of people DO become switched-off to it
all, for that really could prove disastrous.
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