Tag Archives: media

Normal Scientific Practice

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Scientists debate each other’s work all the time. In fact, they’re encouraged to do so. The peer-review process was set up so that every misconception, assumption, or source of error in a scientific article could be nailed down and corrected. Scientists look for mistakes. It’s practically in their job description.

Normal scientific practice states that, should a scientist find a mistake in someone else’s work, they approach them about it, either directly or through the journal which published the article. If the criticism is deemed to be valid, the author will make any necessary changes and/or the journal will publish a retraction.

That’s what happened when the “hockey stick graph” attracted some criticism. The graph was sent to the National Academy of Sciences, who had some concerns about the way the graph was used, but generally found it to be legitimate. The IPCC revised its data, and came out with a new graph – a whole hockey team. The criticism lead to revision which led to further advancement of knowledge and data.

Directing concerns to the authors is probably the best way to fix any scientific errors as it leads to superior data. It is accepted and encouraged.

So, then, why do so many climate change skeptics turn to the media or the Internet instead?

It’s hard to watch Fox News, visit the website of a conservative think tank, or browse the blogosphere without finding someone who claims that climate change is false and they can prove it.

If you really can prove it, I’d like to say to these people, tell the scientists about it. Find specific mistakes in their methods and ask them to change them. If they don’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re biased against any data that contradicts their theory. You might just not fully understand climatology and why the scientists use the methods they do – especially if you’re not trained in climate science.

Ranting about the inaccuracies of climatology online or to a journalist isn’t going to fix those inaccuracies. All it’s going to do is confuse the public. If confusing the public is your goal, please stop, because our children’s lives are at stake here. If you really do believe that you can prove that climate change is false, direct it to the people who study this issue. For the betterment of human knowledge, please approach the scientists, not the media.

The Source of the Ice Age Claim

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An all-too-common claim people use to justify ignoring the widespread scientific agreement on climate change is, “The scientists were all predicting an ice age in the 70s, and that didn’t happen.”

Last year, a publishing climatologist, the highest category for an individual on our credibility spectrum, decided to investigate just how valid this claim was.

Dr Andrew Weaver is a Canadian climatology professor at the University of Victoria, the chief editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Climate, a lead author on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th IPCC reports,and the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis. I think we can establish strong credibility for Dr Weaver’s statements.

In a 2008 article in the Ottawa Citizen, Dr Weaver explains how he searched through the enormous ISI Web of Science database for peer-reviewed studies claiming the world was heading into an ice age. He discovered that “there is not a single peer-reviewed original scientific study that argued this to be the case.” Only one paper mentioned the idea at all.

“The only paper that came close was one written by NASA scientists Ichtiaque Rasool and Stephen Schneider in 1971. A throwaway sentence at the end of their abstract noted:  “An increase by only a factor of 4 in global aerosol background concentration may be sufficient to reduce the surface temperature by as much as 3.5° K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.” Of course this statement is riddled with weasel words, assumptions and the hypothetical. Nevertheless, its scientific shelf life was only a few months before the assumptions underpinning the study were shown to be questionable.”

The peer-review process worked. The insufficient study was retracted. The idea of an ice age held hardly any agreement whatsoever in the scientific community, compared to the widespread agreement regarding the current climate change. Read the rest of Dr Weaver’s article if you’re interested in how scientists determined the cause of the slight drop in global temperatures post-WWII, despite the increasing levels of greenhouse gases.

Sadly, sources such as Time magazine, Newsweek, and the Globe and Mail (a major Canadian newspaper) got a hold of the recently discredited study. They liked the idea of controversial, attention-grabbing headlines that would engage their readers and, ultimately, bring money and attention to their writers. They published stories with titles such as, “Does man trigger trouble in the world’s climate cycle?” and “Another Ice Age?”

The public ate it right up. And now, 30 years later, this media-induced theory still persists.

At the same time that climatologists were studying the drop in temperatures, many of them were worried that the positive forcing of greenhouse gases would eventually outweigh the negative forcing of aerosols, volcanoes, and the solar minimum. Sources such as the National Academy of Sciences and science advisory committees to the President of the United States held this opinion. Check out this video by Peter Sinclair to see their exact statements (as well as a great clip from a 1958 Bill Nye-esque science show!). Dr Weaver’s article also mentions a 1975 article in the journal Science by Wally Broecker of the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.

With the ISI search tool, Dr Weaver was able to find one discredited study that mentioned an aerosol-induced ice age. When he searched the phrases “climate change” and “global warming”, he found 30 913 studies from the period 1965-2008. He speculates,

“That’s a lot of science and you can bet that if there were an Achilles heel to the theory of global warming it would have been discovered long ago.”

The 70s theory of an ice age simply cannot be compared to the current theory of anthropogenic warming. Their levels of support are completely opposite. The ice age theory was held by the extreme minority of publishing climatologists; the current climate change theory is held by the extreme majority.

In the 70s, the media misrepresented the science by overstating an almost non-existent theory. Currently, they are misrepresenting the science by suppressing an overwhelming theory and overplaying the opposition to it.

Personally, I’m going to refrain from basing my knowledge of climate change on the popular press. I suggest you do the same.

Why Al Gore Doesn’t Matter

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The first of many reviews planned for ClimateSight!

Climate change skeptics like to imply that Al Gore’s word is all we have going for us. That our faith in the theory is upheld simply because he supports it. That he’s brainwashed us all and we should think for ourselves. If it sounds like I’m exaggerating, go check out some YouTube comments – and even entire videos – dedicated to these concepts.

But the truth is, Al Gore could have never existed and the scientific theory of anthropogenic climate change would be the same as it is today.

Let’s take some time for historical context. The greenhouse effect began to be studied in the late 1800s by Svante Arrhenius. The current theory that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are causing the Earth’s temperature to rise was hypothesized by Guy Callendar in the 1930s. A great historical account of climate science is available to read online here.

The beginnings of the modern-day scientific view were present before Al Gore was even born. The idea that he thought up the whole conspiracy theory quickly falls apart. (But if you’d like a good laugh, check out this April Fool’s article. It made my day.)

Al Gore was educated at Harvard. He was fascinated by courses from Roger Revelle, another climatology pioneer. Before long, though, Gore became interested in politics. He graduated with a BA in government.

Try swaying the minds of every major scientific establishment in the world when the only formal education you have in climatology is a couple of undergraduate courses.

I’m sure Al Gore understands climate change better than most members of the general public. I’m also sure that the folks at national academies of science and organizations such as NASA, all at the top of our credibility spectrum, understand climate change a heck of a lot better than Al Gore. Check out what they’re saying here (thanks to Logical Science, who cited all of the statements so well).

It’s clear that, under our credibility spectrum, Al Gore would fall under the professional. He keeps well up to date with the scientific literature, but is not a scientist himself. He is only slightly more credible than the average person.

And with this context, let’s take a look at An Inconvenient Truth.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) – Review

inconvenient truth

This is definitely not an example of scientific literature. It was not intended to be, and should not be taken as such. This is not to say that Gore’s statements about climate change are wrong. His overall message is greatly supported by the scientific community. However, it’s not the kind of text you’d want to cite in a research paper.

It’s clear that the purpose of this documentary was to increase public awareness, not to imitate a science textbook. Taken in that context, An Inconvenient Truth fulfills its purpose tremendously – almost too well, I’d say, as the first thing that comes to most people’s minds when they hear about the theory of climate change is not the IPCC, national academies of science, or university professors, but Al Gore. A lot of people think it’s Al Gore’s problem, and not much else.

And, sadly, if you wanted to take down the scientific side of Gore’s argument, it wouldn’t be too hard.

Early in the film, Al Gore says that we are adding to the greenhouse effect by “thickening” the atmosphere. This is more than just oversimplification. Burning fossil fuels not only increases CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, it decreases O2 concentrations, by attaching one carbon atom to each molecule of oxygen in the combustion process. Read more about this concept here.

We are not “thickening” the atmosphere at all. But someone who watched An Inconvenient Truth could come away with that impression. That person would be very vulnerable to claims such as “Carbon dioxide only makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere.” The relative abundance of a gas in the atmosphere would seem important for its radiative properties, while basic laws of chemistry indicate that it is not.

Luckily, the major misconceptions ended there. However, Al Gore used anecdotal evidence, rather than citing cumulative studies, almost exclusively. For example, he showed pictures of a dozen or so glaciers across the world that were retreating. It couldn’t be too hard to find the same amount of glaciers that were advancing and present them as proof that Gore was wrong. What would be considered appropriate evidence would be a study that examined every major glacier in the world and determined the percentage that were retreating vs advancing.

Al Gore used similar tactics with evidence such as heat waves, hurricanes, and tornadoes. He referred to specific events and/or regional records rather than looking at the processes on a global scale. However, anecdotal evidence is much more compelling to an audience than a bunch of graphs. For the purpose of his documentary, we can probably forgive Gore for that misstep.

There were points in the documentary where it was unclear whether Gore was using a historical event as evidence or as an example of how bad the future could be. For example, when the film examined Hurricane Katrina, it was hard to tell if Gore’s message was, “This was caused by climate change” – which is almost impossible to determine for a specific event; you can’t really prove that it wouldn’t have happened anyway – or “Look at how devastating hurricanes can be – and they could become more frequent.”

The last scientific complaint I have to make against An Inconvenient Truth is the lack of time scale provided. When Al Gore showed how a sea level rise of 20 feet (~7 m) would affect coastlines across the world, he failed to mention that such an event is not expected for another few centuries. In the IPCC 4th report, a rise of 18 to 59 cm is expected by 2100. If we keep going at our current pace, we’ll eventually hit 7 m, but it won’t be in the next few decades, as he seems to imply. I don’t see what the harm would be in telling the audience when the 7 m rise would happen – if anything, it would increas his credibility. The idea of such a catastrophe being 200 years away doesn’t make it any less scary to me. 

That’s the science stuff out of the way. Now let’s look at the real purpose of the film – the implications for policy. Al Gore is probably one of the most experienced people in the world on climate change legislation. He is, after all, a politician, and spent a great deal of his career trying to pass emission targets. Gore provided an especially good argument as to why we don’t have to choose between the environment and the economy; how environmental action could actually foster economic growth. Of course, he took as many stabs at the Republican party as he could in this part of the film.

I also enjoyed the “frog in boiling water” metaphor, regarding how a slow change can go unnoticed by the human brain until it’s too late. The psychology of fear and how it relates to climate change is fascinating to me. I’d recommend that you all read this editorial, written by psychologist Dr Daniel Gilbert. (Don’t be put off by the title – it makes more sense after you read the article!)

And, of course, as major climate change legislation has yet to be passed in the States, Gore ended on the note of individual action. The things we’ve all heard before – ride your bike, insulate your attic, get a low-flow showerhead. As important actions as these are to take, realistically, they will not be enough. We need major policy changes if we hope to make any difference in our total emissions. As Thomas Homer-Dixon said, “We’re not going to get there by changing our lightbulbs.”

Overall, I think An Inconvenient Truth fulfilled its purpose, which was to increase public awareness and encourage action. We just need to remember that it was never intended to be a solid source of scientific data.

After all, we have much more than Al Gore on our side.

Climate Denial Crock of the Week

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In the popular media, Youtube, and the blogosphere, you get an awful lot of compelling documentaries of why climate change is nonexistent/natural/a global conspiracy. You don’t get as many grassroots projects from the advocates, at least not as many as you’d expect given the scientific distribution on the theory.

I recently came across a fantastic video series by Peter Sinclair, an American journalist. Keep in mind our credibility spectrum – Mr Sinclair is only a professional individual – but it appears that he cites the professional scientific organizations at the top of the spectrum almost exclusively.

Each of his videos deals with a common objection to the mainstream scientific view on climate change. Here’s his most recent, and my favourite, which addresses the all-too-common-claim that “Global warming stopped in 1998.”

If you enjoyed that, here are links to all his videos to date. Watch whichever ones strike your fancy.

“The Antarctic isn’t warming, so the planet, overall, isn’t changing at all.”

“It’s cold. So there’s no climate change.”

“The Arctic ice is growing, not declining.”

“Global warming is caused by the sun.”

“Climate change is a natural, unstoppable, 1500-year cycle.”

“The scientists were all warning of an ice age in the 70s, so why should we trust them now?”

“The urban heat island effect is skewing the data.”

“Every other planet in our solar system is also warming, so we can’t be causing it.”

“But lots of scientists signed the Oregon Petition saying climate change was false!”

“It was warmer during the Medeival Warm Period.”

“Al Gore said the ocean was going to rise more than the IPCC did.”

“Temperature determines carbon dioxide level, not the other way around.”

“Global warming stopped in 1998.”

Have fun and spread it around to your friends.

Making Up Your Own Science

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Why do so many people believe they’re more qualified on the topic of climate change than the climatologists themselves?

Visit Youtube, the editorial page of a newspaper, or even the blogosphere. All over places like these, where opinions can be expressed freely, there are countless people who

1) have little to no scientific training,

2) rely solely on the popular media for information on climate change,

3) are obviously unfamiliar with elementary principles of climatology, such as the Milankovitch cycles, El Nino and La Nina, or the importance of long trend lines in graphical measurements. (Sorry, not all of these sources are that high up on our credibility spectrum, but their citations are great.)

But, most importantly,

4) They seem to believe that their opinion of the forcings and mechanisms of a complex system such as climate, as well as its basis in physics and chemistry, is more noteworthy than the opinions of the professional scientific organizations at the top of our credibility spectrum.

In simpler terms, “It doesn’t matter what the scientists say. I’m smarter than all of them put together.”

Why you need science

Climatology is not as simple as you might expect after watching An Inconvenient Truth. The folks at NASA don’t just look at two graphs that are both going up and automatically assume that they’re correlated.

Climatology is every bit as complicated, thorough, and dry as any other area of science. In fact, it is deeply entrenched in the physical sciences. As an over-eager student who is trying to understand more aspects of climatology than I have the scientific foundation for, I continually run into this entrenchment.

For example, the exact process of how a CO2 or CH4 molecule absorbs infrared energy and thus acts as a greenhouse gas involves quantum chemistry that I haven’t learned yet. I’m still puzzling over the difference between the direct cooling effect of aerosols versus the cloud albedo effect. I hear all the time that climate change is based on the Laws of Thermodynamics, but I have yet to find out what those laws are.

It’s not easy stuff. It’s not something just anyone could grasp entirely in an afternoon. It’s something that requires years of study.

If I told you that parts of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets were thickening, chances are that you’d think, “More ice = cooling, therefore the world is not warming.”

In fact, these thickening ice sheets are a sign of warming. The thickening areas were previously so cold that the air could not hold enough moisture for significant precipitation. With warming, the air has more capacity for humidity, and precipitation falls in the form of snow. But it’s still too cold for that snow to melt, so it builds up and thickens the ice sheet.

It’s not as simple as temperature = climate. You have to look at changes in humidity and precipitation over time. You have to use a lot of maps. You have to factor in wind and ocean currents.

You have to know what you’re doing to make an accurate analysis of climate data. If you haven’t studied physical geography, atmospheric physics, or climate modelling at the post-secondary level, chances are that you hold misconceptions and assumptions that are skewing your interpretation.

I know this is true for me. I don’t pretend to know everything about climate change. I have an awfully long way to go. I’m just a student.

The more I learn about climatology, the more I realize how little I know.

So please, have some humility. Realize that it might be wiser to trust the experts than to try to analyze it all yourself. Don’t automatically assume that NASA, IPCC, the 32 national academies of science that endorsed the IPCC, and every other professional scientific organization on the planet are completely wrong just because somebody said they were.

Chances are, there are satisfactory explanations for whatever objections you may hold to their methods. Yes, they are making sure the sun is not responsible. No, they weren’t all saying an ice age was coming in the 70s. Yes, they are aware carbon dioxide is plant food. These are smart people. Accept that they might know more about climate change than you do. It’s not such a terrible thing.

To conclude, there are many things in life, such as fashion, political beliefs, and spirituality, where all opinions are equal, and nobody is justified to tell anybody what they should believe.

Science isn’t one of them.

Why They Don’t Debate on TV

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I read an interesting article not long ago that claimed that scientists were not debating climate change enough. It said that they were refusing to debate skeptics on television and in the media, as they “knew they would lose”. Examples of “believers” who apparently refused such debates were Al Gore, David Suzuki, and well-known climatologists such as Hansen and Weaver.

Could it be that these advocates are refusing debates not because they “know they will lose”, but because they know that such a media-ravaged spectacle will have no scientific value?

If you look at these people, two – Gore and Suzuki – do not specialize in climatology. They are purely lobbyists and media figures (Suzuki is also a geneticist). For the purpose of determining how much debate goes into creating working conclusions on climate change, we should look at  the top of the credibility spectrum. Let’s exclude An Inconvenient Truth, editorials, films, and narrative non-fiction (such as Keeping Our Cool by Dr Weaver). These have not been peer-reviewed. They are (hopefully) based upon scientific conclusions, but would not be acceptable to cite in a research paper about climate change. They were created purely to reach the general public and to relay a certain political or ethical message.

What we will include are the documents which drive government policy, which have been peer-reviewed (or are peer-reviewed compilations of peer-reviewed science, such as the IPCC reports) and which have been created by sources at the top of our credibility spectrum. NASA is a good source. So is the IPCC. So are the 32 national academies of science that have approved the IPCC. Peer-reviewed scientific journals such as Nature, Science, or EOS are also credible.

This is where it all starts. This is where climate change theory began. It wasn’t cooked up by the government, the media, or someone like Al Gore. These are the people that objectively study details of global warming that you or I can’t even understand.

Back to the debate thing

There would be no point in Al Gore facing down a skeptical journalist in a “scientific debate” on prime-time TV. One of two scenarios would occur:

1) The debate would be of a true scientific nature (which would be surprising as neither of the sources are even climatologists). They would be talking about things like Dansgaard-Oeschger events, Milankovitch cycles, and the solubility of carbonic acid in water as a function of temperature. To the average viewer, it would be really boring. They wouldn’t understand a word of it. Nobody would watch. The television station would declare it a failure.

2) The debate would resort to name-calling and ridiculous claims. The journalist would go on about it all being a liberal conspiracy. Al Gore would go on about ethical responsibilities. The journalist would take advantage of the audience’s lack of scientific knowledge and claim that, as CO2 levels often lag behind temperature, climate change wasn’t real at all. Al Gore would take advantage of the audience’s lack of scientific knowledge and claim that Hurricane Katrina could be directly attributed to a warming planet. Scientists all over the world would shake their heads. The public would get even more confused.

You can have a scientific discussion. You can have a debate that becomes a media spectacle. It’s much harder to do both at once.

Scientists aren’t lawyers. They don’t each try to prove opposing arguments. Scientists aren’t politicians. They don’t try to make their ideas interesting for the general public. Scientists are seekers of truth, or the closest to truth humans can get, regarding the physical world.

Getting closer to that truth requires a lot of second-guessing, a lot of checking and revising and admitting that you’re wrong. It requires looking at every possible outcome and deciding which is the most probable. It requires inspecting new evidence whenever it comes up. It is “debating” in a gentler, more objective, more dry sense of the word.

So yes, scientists do debate in their own way. It’s called peer-review. It involves all that second-guessing, checking, and revising we just mentioned. It involves considering every objection. It involves addressing every objection that is deemed relevant. The sources we listed above – NAS, IPCC, Nature – peer-review all of their publications.

If this skeptical journalist had a new idea about climate change, he or she should get a degree, study their idea meticulously, write it up in the form of an article and submit it to a peer-review institution. That’s the normal scientific practice. Spreading their scientific hypotheses around the media without first passing their work through a peer-review process shows that they’re trying to influence the public, not educate them.

Go do some reading about how claims like “climate change is caused by the sun” or “it’s a natural cycle” have stood up to peer-review. Go see what the qualified, credible, objective scientific theories have found. Go see just how much research the scientific community has done about solar activity or natural cycles.

Yes, scientists do debate about climate change.

They just don’t do it on TV.

The Worrisome Stuff

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I’m not actually interested in changing the minds of climate skeptics.

If they’re stubborn enough that the work of NASA, 32 national academies of science, the IPCC, the World Meterological Society, and every other professional scientific organization on the planet can’t change their minds, the chance of a mere student like me having any influence on them isn’t really worth the time.

What I’m worried about is the average person.

The average person, reading the newspaper, who sees dozens of editorials every year that claim climate change is nonexistent/natural/a hoax. Editorials written by scientists who, in the extreme minority, have a hard time publishing anything peer-reviewed, so they spend their time with the media instead. Scientists who seem credible until you read up a little on their background.

I worry that the average person will get the impression that the existence of anthropogenic climate change is still under scientific debate. I worry that they’ll think the two sides are equal. I worry that, having little to no background in climate science, they’ll buy claims like “temperature drives carbon dioxide, not the other way around” or “the data is skewed by the urban heat island effect” or “global warming is caused by the sun”.

I worry that this discrepancy in the media will begin to change the public opinion. I worry that, eventually, the majority of people will begin to disregard climate change. I worry that this majority will use their voting power to suppress any climate change legislation. I worry that we’ll never be able to act against this problem because most people don’t think it’s a problem at all.

And the consequences of not acting against this problem are so dire that I can’t even let myself worry about them.

I’m not jumping on any kind of green bandwagon. I’m not trying to control people with government taxes and regulation. As far as I know, I’m not part of a global scientific conspiracy.

I’m just worried about my future, and the future of the people I love.

Artificial Balance

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All issues have two (or more) sides. We can probably all agree on that. But are they always two equal sides?

Journalists are trained to always present both sides of an issue with equal weight. This works well for matters of politics. Got the Conservative? Get the Liberal. (That’s Republican and Democrat, respectively, for our American friends.) It works for policy – reporting the pros and cons of building a new bridge vs not building a new bridge. Journalistic balance is appropriate for matters which concern personal opinion, where everyone’s view is as credible as anyone else’s, and you don’t need a PhD to understand the stuff.

But what about matters of science?

Remember high school science class? Did they present both sides of absolutely every topic with equal weight? Did they say to you, “This is the evidence for and against the existence of photosynthesis. You can form your own personal opinion”? Did they do the same with Newton’s Laws, chemical reactions, or the idea of a heliocentric universe? Of course not. It would just confuse you further, and it was unnecessary as the ideas being taught were widely accepted in the scientific community.

So why should climate change be any different?

“Climate change is still being debated,” you might say. “Scientists are split over whether or not it’s happening, and whether or not we’re causing it.”

And that, my friends, is where the media comes back into the story.

Let’s hear what Ross Gelbspan has to say in his book The Heat is On.

“The professional canon of journalistic fairness requires reporters who write about a controversy to present points of view. When the issue is of a political of social nature, fairness – presenting the most compelling arguments of both sides with equal weight – is a fundamental check on biased reporting. But this canon causes problems when it is applied to the issue of science. It seems to demand that journalists present competing points of view on a scientific question as though they had equal weight, when actually they do not.”

We’ve previously discussed how there is wide agreement over the existence of anthropogenic climate change among individual scientists. Among professional scientific organizations, the numbers are even higher. As soon as you tune into the discussions of scientists, instead of only what you hear in the media, it’s clear that climate change was accepted long ago. Right now, they’re debating technicalities such as when the Arctic will be free of summer ice, how quickly feedback mechanisms will work, and how much emission reduction is necessary.

But the media hasn’t caught onto this. The media likes a controversy, and they don’t want to be accused of only presenting one side. So they present the opinions of climate scientists as 50-50, instead of the 97-3 that Doran and Zimmerman determined.

What kind of balance is this, when the fringe opinions are hugely over-represented, and the vast majority are hugely under-represented? Does that not cause more bias than we were trying to avoid?

*Further reading: Misguided “Balance” in Science Journalism by Chris Mooney*

The Importance of Error Statements

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Scientific error is unavoidable. There is a very good chance that whatever measurements we take will be slightly off. There is even a small chance that our conclusions are completely wrong. We accept that we don’t know everything. We live with it. We do the best we can.

Stating error and uncertainty is required in peer-reviewed science. Quite simply, it increases the author’s credibility. When you admit that you might be wrong, people feel more inclined to trust you. You seem like the kind of person that would admit to mistakes, and continually revise your findings to improve them as much as possible.

Something you hear a lot from climate change skeptics is something along the lines of, “We’re not completely sure if humans are changing the climate. Therefore, we shouldn’t waste money on reducing our emissions.” To me, it often seems like the people making these statements are exploiting the natural uncertainty of science, doing everything they can to make the uncertainty of climatology seem unusual. My favourite example of this can be read here.

If you go and read a peer-reviewed scientific report on any topic at all, you’ll see that the uncertainty over anthropogenic climate change isn’t really that unusual. We’re not completely sure about how gravity works. We’re not sure if light is a particle or a wave (or a particle that’s a wave, or a wave that’s a particle, etc). In fact, there are no conclusions in scientific articles that claim to be infallible.

This doesn’t mean there are two equal sides fighting over every topic you can imagine. In a lot of the cases, scientists have pretty much made up their mind. But they must, and always do, remain open to the possibility that they could be completely wrong.

Let’s look at the quantitative explanation of some terms of likelihood used by the IPCC. Extremely unlikely refers to a <5% chance. Virtually certain refers to a >99% chance. The numbers 0% and 100% are non-existent. They never say that something will definitely happen, or definitely not happen.

Check out the claims from the scientific organizations at the top of our credibility spectrum. Read the statements on climate change from the national academies of science of every major industrialized nation. Read what the folks at NASA have to say. Watch for the error measurements, and uncertain words like “evidence for” or “reason to believe”.

The important part

And then, more often than not, a lot of the people who said “Climate change is too uncertain” then turn around and make claims with no acknowledgement that they could be wrong. Let’s find some of the most extreme examples of this phenomenon….anonymous YouTube comments.

“The Earth has been heating up for thousands of years at a steady rate and it has nothing to do with people.”

“If these findings were anywhere near accurate, then I would see changes on at least a weekly basis. But nothing.”

“Nothing is significantly wrong that Mother Nature cannot put right.”

“I don’t think CO2 causes global warming, not at all.”

When I see comments like these – which are, sadly, extremely common – I wish I could say to every one of them, “What if you were wrong?”

I realize I could be wrong. It’s something I came to terms with long ago. I could be totally wrong about all this climate change stuff (in fact, I’d love to be). That’s why I support multi-benefit policies, that will help areas like the economy or health. If climate change turns out to be nonexistent/natural/a global conspiracy, at least our action will have brought us some good.

But what if all these anonymous YouTubers were wrong?

All those people who are so certain that we’re causing no change in the climate.

What if they were wrong? Can you imagine what the consequences could be?

Is this really something worth questioning, when there is so much agreement, and the stakes are so high?

Is this really a gamble worth taking?

The Schneider Quote

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Dr Schneider explaining something.

Dr Schneider explaining something.

Dr Stephen Schneider, of Stanford University, is a well-respected climatologist who is also quite active in the media and politics – chances are you’ve seen him in something like The 11th Hour, read one of his books, or read an interview with him in the newspaper. Chances are, you’ve also seen the following quote attributed to him:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

When I first saw this quote in a YouTube comment, I assumed it was completely fabricated. But then I did a Google search on the exact quote and found thousands of hits. Still, they were all from either blogs or newspaper editorials, which are quite low on our credibility spectrum, so I felt sure there must be more to the story. My guess was that it was taken completely out of context and/or rearranged like one of those “found poems” they make you write in elementary school. I had seen Dr Schneider’s work before and he seemed like much too reasonable a man to say something like this and mean it.

I wrote an email to Dr Schneider, asking if he could quickly explain where the quote came from, even though he’s probably been asked about it countless times. I’ve found that university professors, even those like Dr Schneider who are undoubtedly busy, are quite good about answering email. As long as you’re polite and show a genuine interest in having your question answered, they write back quite promptly with some direction for you.

“You have guessed right,” he wrote. “It is a major misquote….leaving out the last sentence, leaving out the context….it is all explained in the Mediarology section of my website.”

Those who are really interested in this story are welcome to go and read that explanation, but I’ll summarize it quickly here for the rest of us. In a 1988 interview with Discover magazine, Dr Schneider was explaining how the media does not give climatologists a lot of time to explain anything thoroughly. As a scientist, he has an obligation to include all error and uncertainty measurements in statements, like any legitimate scientific report would. But as a human being, he needs to convey his message to the public in the couple of sentences journalists allow him.

This was the original quote:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

With the full quote, it’s easy to see that Dr Schneider was attacking, not supporting, the “sound-bite system”. But an attack editoral from the Detroit News selectively cut out parts of the above quote, publishing the following:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

His message is completely changed.

So what should we learn from the sad story of the Schneider quote?

Whenever you see something particularly outrageous-sounding, don’t just accept it as fact. Find the original source, the original interview. Email the guy if you have to. Figure out what they really meant. Then you have enough information to decide what to believe.