Jane Bradley: Let facts of climate change shine out

Published on Wednesday 1 September 2010 15:01

WHEN Dr Rajendra Pachauri stepped on to the stage beside Al Gore to collect the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he was lauded as one of the world's leading environmental lobbyists.

Now, just two years later, the Indian-born railway engineer is in the process of being edged out of his prestigious role as head of the IPCC, amid claims that the catalogue of errors written into one of the world's most comprehensive studies into the state of the environment has helped to discredit the entire theory of climate change.

There is no doubt that this week's furore surrounding the InterAcademy Council's (IAC) investigation into the IPCC report, coupled with "climategate" - the debacle of the e-mails leaked last year from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia - has poured fuel on the fire of climate change sceptics worldwide.

Global warming was, until recently, an increasingly accepted inevitability. Those who did not subscribe wholeheartedly to the concept that our planet is gradually heating up were branded with the moniker "climate change deniers" and regularly left off dinner party invitation lists.

Now, the tide has turned and a trickle of scepticism has emerged over, if not the actual existence of global warming, then the process behind climate change research. Doubt has crept into the minds of all but the most staunch believers.

Reviews and investigations launched into the recent problems in climate change science have concluded that mistakes have been made - and processes must be improved - but most still agree that the overall conclusions reached by scientists that the earth is warming, changing weather conditions and putting species of plants and animals at risk, still stands.

But for many, this is not enough.

Any body, or group, which is repeatedly forced to admit that it has made mistakes - and in the case of the IPCC report, glaringly factual errors - has to understand that it is losing credibility in the eyes of the public.

Few, even staunch sceptics such as the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPC) - the environmental body founded by former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson to question action taken to combat climate change - dispute the factual existence of global warming.

Multiple investigations, including the well-repected 2009 State of the Climate report published last month by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have proved that if carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, the Earth is warmed.The issue on which they are divided is by how much the Earth's temperature actually increases.

GWPC director Dr Benny Peiser, whose organisation branded the climategate inquiry a "whitewash", believes that the string of scandals to hit climate science in recent months demonstrates that researchers have "overegged" their discoveries.

"Over the last ten years, we have heard one alarm after another and that undermines the image of climate change science if they are found out," said Dr Peiser, adding that he welcomed what he described as a "more balanced and less biased" IPCC investigation, compared to the probe into the East Anglia scandal led by Scot Sir Muir Russell,

It is this erosion of the credibility of climate science which worries environmental organisations.

Ian Jardine, chief executive of Scottish Natural Heritage, warned that continued discreditation of the science around global warming could divert focus away from what he regards as the unquestionable fact of global warming, urging that scientists need to "check and double-check" their publications.

"It doesn't change the fact that the evidence that there is climate change and that a lot of the drivers are man-made is absolutely overwhelming," he said.

"But the fact that there is a question mark in the minds of the public over the reliability of some of the science is really unhelpful because it provides an excuse for people who don't want to face up to those facts a reason that they don't have to."

Juliet Swann, head of projects and campaigns for Friends of the Earth Scotland, agreed, arguing that the communication of climate science is of "utmost importance".

Others have called for clearer communication from the climate scientists - amid claims in both the inquiries into the IPCC report and the East Anglian e-mail furore of a failure to answer public queries over global warming.

E-mails hacked at the University of East Anglia and published online a year ago claimed that researchers at the institution's Climatic Research Unit were subverting the scientific peer review process to ensure papers they disagreed with were not published.

The independent review into climategate ruled that the scientists were not at fault as far as their "rigour and honesty" was concerned - but that they should be more open in terms of answering Freedom of Information Requests

Speaking at the publication of the report, Sir Muir, chairman of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland and a former University of Glasgow principal, hit the nail on the head. "Climate science is a matter of such global importance that the highest standards of honesty, rigour and openness are needed in its conduct," he said.

But the recent IAC review of the processes and procedures of the IPCC went a step further. It recommended a sweeping change of its management structure.External representatives would be placed on the IPCC panel, according to the IAC's guidelines - and Dr Pachauri replaced.

While Dr Harold Shapiro, the Princeton University academic who led the inquiry, claimed he was not launching a personal attack on Dr Pachauri, his comments were thinly veiled. The report recommended a "fresh approach" be introduced by cutting the term of office of the top post from 12 years to six.

The mistakes made in the report were black and white. A warning that the Himalayan glaciers would vanish within 25 years was later admitted to be exaggerated. A claim that 55 per cent of the Netherlands is below sea level was found to be plain wrong - the actual figure is 26 per cent. Neither claim had any substance or evidence to back it up. In fact, questions over the Himalayan glacier issue were raised multiple times by reviewers of the report, it emerged - but the panel did not take them seriously enough.

In July, however, a separate inquiry into the report by the Dutch government said it found "no errors that would undermine the main conclusions" on probable impacts of global warming. However, it did warn that the IPCC should be more transparent in its workings, adding that the summaries tended to emphasise "worst-case scenarios".

It is clear that public confidence into climate science is at a low ebb. The question is what the impact of this is?

Some experts, including Dr Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics Group at the University Of Oxford, have claimed that a focus on preventing what they believe are essentially minor factual errors could force scientists into a world of bureaucracy and red tape which could seriously hinder their research.

Dr Allen, who will be a reviewer on the next assessment by the IPCC, due out in 2014, has suggested that the new report should be cut from 3,000 pages to just a few hundred and focus on the science rather than time-consuming and complicated case studies from different countries.

"This is a very long report with hundreds of pages," Richard Dixon, director of WWF Scotland told The Scotsman. "It is not surprising that at the end of the day, there are a few errors in what they quote."

If climate scientists are to get their point across, they could do worse than to follow the recommendations laid out by the IAC's investigation.

But an improved communications process, greater transparency and an eye for factual detail should be the very essence of a scientific research paper making drastic environmental claims. Only with these measures consistently in place would the climate change lobby be able to legitimately silence sceptics with their heads held high.