The So Called "Trick" Of Global Warming

I'm going to admit straight out, we scientists are rubbish with media relations. We spend our lives studying the minutiae of the world, almost obsessively collecting details to create a complete picture. This often isolates us. We work with scientists, spend our free time with scientists, fanatically read the work of other scientists; we're a pretty insular bunch. Think woodlice in a nice, comfortable damp hole.

In the past this didn't matter; scientists got their message out when they needed to. Communication was by phone (or probably some kind of scrying mirror if you go back a bit further), files were safe, papers were published and there was no internet to instantly globalise every little faux pas.

However, the relatively recent rise of electronic communication has flipped the nice comfortable stone from over our heads, and left us squirming in the light of some serious media scrutiny. Unlike a phone call, an email lasts forever and can be broadcast to an unbelievably large audience. Have you heard the old adage that "a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on"? Thanks to the internet the truth is still in bed desperately flailing at the alarm clock's snooze button.

Scientists need to assume that everything they do is under scrutiny, especially for a subject as politicised as climate change. As we've seen from this latest misunderstanding, the so called "climate-gate", even a personal email can have a devastating effect. In short, it's time for us to come out of our hole and ensure people understand what science is all about.

In particular this latest debacle has shown us how important our use of language can be. Ignoring the fact these emails were obtained illegally, largely taken out of context and publishing them is, to say the least, ethically questionable; you've got to admit, the following sentence from Dr. Phil Jones does sound somewhat damning.

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Amongst us sciencey sorts, a trick normally refers to a clever idea. A new way of thinking about a problem. It's very rarely a euphemism for a global conspiracy to secure scientific funding, raise taxes and all at the expense of the world's poor; but I've been wrong before.

It is, however, easy to see how this misinterpretation arose. There's no way we can expect people to understand the idiosyncrasies of the scientific dialect and until something changes these misunderstandings will just keep happening. For example, physicists often take "God" out of its supernatural context to describe the totality of nature but, as you can imagine, this has caused endless confusion. In addition, the word "theory" is normally taken to mean a wild guess. In science speak it's any concept, often with quite a lot of evidence behind it, that explains another phenomenon. We have germ theory, cell theory, atomic theory; all of which are pretty certain, even if the details are still controversial. Unfortunately this confusion has resulted in an 'intelligent' design nonsense that smugly points out evolution is "only" a theory (although strangely you never hear them decrying the "theory of plate tectonics" after an earthquake) and no amount of exasperated explanation seems to improve matters. But who's to blame for this? If people don't understand the peculiar quirks of our scientific dialect it's because we haven't explained it properly.

This aside, the "clever idea" in question seems to be a way of solving the long standing "divergence problem"⁽¹⁾. Basically, their tree ring data (already notoriously unreliable) goes a bit haywire in the second half of the 20th century and diverges from the real record. Dr. Jones plotted the real recorded temperature data (common scientific practise for the particular climate construction they were using) alongside the diverging tree ring data to clarify the situation. Nothing was truly hidden, all the data was still there, they just wanted to make recent warming as obvious as possible. This is nicely summed up on the RealClimate website which seems to be inexorably caught up in the whole situation.

I feel sorry for the scientists exposed in this leak. Yes they may have said inexcusably unpleasant things about the so called 'climate-change deniers', yes their emails were badly phrased, but how could they possibly know they'd be illegally published by unscrupulous people with a political agenda. However, perhaps some good will come from this farcical situation simply by highlighting how important the public understanding of science can be.

As always, check out the IPCC assessment reports for more information on climate change. They represent what the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are thinking, are meticulously peer reviewed and there are plenty of summaries to help ease you into the ridiculous scientific dialect.

1) Mann. M.E, Zhang, Hughes. M.K, Bradley. R.S, Miller. S.K, Rutherford, S & Ni. F. (2008). Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia. PNAS 2008 : 0805721105v1-0. (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/02/0805721105.full.pdf+html)

Published - Mon 30th Nov 2009 10:32:44