Accepting Scepticism - Contextualising the Climate Change Debate

After reading the comments below a Guardian article yesterday concerning the hugely contentious issue of climategate and the controversy over the UEA Climate Research Unit scientist Dr Briffa and a Canadian climate sceptic called Steve McIntyre, I found a huge amount of vitriol and anger directed towards the author of the article, Fred Pearce. Whilst I feel that we need to move away from the swingeing denouncement of all forms of scepticism over this debate and engage in a more healthy dialogue, I cannot help but suspect that the Guardian's comment sections are becoming a disproportionate battlefield upon which sceptics are attacking a paper they see as only on one side of the debate; the wrong side. Clearly the sceptics barrage is now in overdrive in the wake of all this.

When a Guardian writer called James Randerson eventually appeared to claim the paper's editorial line was that "global warming is happening and caused by human actions, but that does not mean we are blind to contradictory evidence" he was chastised by the sceptics as if he and his paper were being unobjective and somehow politicising this debate (something that sceptics would know all about anyway).

This is absolute horseshit in an age where the Sun can pump Tory Blue smoke from their chimneys over their offices and the Express can print article upon article about climate change being a big conspiracy (let's not even go there). I am not mindlessly dismissing some of the extremely intelligent and powerful arguments as it once seemed quite fashionable to do, whilst at the same time lumping them all as the puppets of big business or right wing thinking. Scepticism has become a dirty word and we should never forget that challenging the orthodoxy is what pushes science forward.

But let's get this straight: There are huge areas of uncertainty and debate and incongruency in the vast swathes of data when you look at the climate science. There's bound to be in an area of science as holistic as this. But taken as a whole, the evidence overwhelmingly supports the thesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Period!

It is said that to explain even the bones of how the science works to a layman would take about two solid days. Now I can totally understand that the public would be sceptical of the science given the recent controversies and the media coverage given them but I would applaud the Guardian as one of the few publication's that has stuck to its guns and reported these latest controversies in the context they should be taken in and against a backdrop of the huge consensus of scientists over AGW. Far from politicising this debate, the Guardian are following the scientific line and not the conspiracy theorists one (which after all sells more papers - see the Daily Mail and/or the Express for more details).

The IPCC and by definition the bodies, such as the UEA's Climate Research Unit, that contribute to it's Working Group's reports by supplying it with vast amounts of data are now inevitably becoming politicised. Any body that is tasked with reporting to the world's politicians and statesmen a series of hugely inconvenient truths is bound to become politicised quickly especially when those inconvenient truths have to be effectively communicated by politicians to a naturally sceptical electorate.

It's a fact that human brains have evolved to not see the danger posed by long term threats because in a natural environment these are not evolutionary traits that have contributed to our ancestors survival. Therefore we are an inherently sceptical set of monkey's by our very nature. Combine this natural evolutionary disadvantage with the economic and political sacrifices that have to be made just to give this issue momentum on the world stage, whilst simultaneously trying to educate a largely unscientific population and you begin to see the scale of the problem.

The science on this issue is huge and pulls together disciplines that have historically never worked together and even thrown off totally new symbioses of disciplines as a result. Trying to understand it all is simply not a realistic expectation for most people (including me I might add) but understanding the fundamentals that underpin this vast field can be instrumental in educating people and allowing them to contextualise the inevitable controversies that will spring forth from time to time. Scientists need to be engaging at this level with the public and not shying away from the challenge. More than ever we need to be popularising science and I have always taken my hat off to the Guardian for doing that more than the competition.

Scientists are a proud headstrong bunch of people who put an incredible amount of intellectual capital into their reputations as well as their work. On occasion their pride and hubris gets the better of them especially when they come under such scathing and consistent derision from sceptics as they have. But when the issue is as big and as controversial as this, the damage that can be done to public credulity by secrecy and collusion is devastating.

I will not deny that I think the debate has moved backwards significantly in the last few months, ever since climategate began to gather speed on the eve of the Copenhagen Summit (timing in this case was crucial for the sceptics). Since then it has been one PR home goal after another for the UEA Climate research Unit and the IPCC. They just don't seem to be doing themselves any favours. The scientific community needs transparency now more than ever over this debate. It cannot afford to make these kind of mistakes again.

There will always be data that seems to go against the trend when assembling powerful climate models and this will always be picked up by the sceptics and denialists and exaggerated and overinflated to discredit and destabilise the whole scientific edifice. Scientists need to trust the public to make informed decisions as much as the public need to trust the scientists to be open if we are going to allow science to inform policy effectively and in time to mitigate global warming.

Burying inconvenient data is far more damaging than admitting the anomalies but it still does not detract from the overwhelming scientific consensus. The need to communicate that fact coherently and intelligently has never been more pressing and I think the Guardian should be applauded for recognising that over and above the immediacy of traditional journalistic sensationalism.