Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Such a scenario plays right into the hands of vested interests. If one's agenda is, for example, to
impede efforts to combat the climate change threat, it is not necessary to convince the public that the
science of climate change is wrong, simply that it is grossly uncertain. It is hardly coincidental, then,
that climate change contrarians have increasingly focused on manufacturing controversy where there
essentially is none among those expert in the field (the overwhelming majority of practicing climate
scientists concur that human activity is warming the planet and changing our climate
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), rather than
engaging in good-faith debate over the actual remaining uncertainties in the science or what
implications they might have for public policy.
This is not to say that the media in some monolithic way are acting as willing accomplices to the
climate change denial campaign. Nonetheless, emphasizing controversy over substance, and retreating
all too often to the rather uncritical notion of “journalistic balance” when covering “debates” between
legitimate scientists and antiscientific advocates, play unwittingly to that agenda.
The IPCC and the Path of Science
An essential means of evaluating science's path in a given area is not to emphasize individual papers,
but instead to focus on the larger-scale evolution of scientific thinking over time. Such is the role of
so-called scientific assessments, which involve extensive reviews of the available science in a
particular research area by a group of leading scientists in the field. Scientific assessments are
conducted at the national level in the United States, for example, by the National Academy of
Sciences (NAS), an organization established by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to “investigate, examine,
experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art” for the purpose of informing governmental
policy.
At the international level, there are no assessments in the world of climate science as important
as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which in 2007 was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made
climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such
change.” The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and
the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and was tasked with assessing the evolving state
of scientific understanding of climate change. Every five to seven years beginning in 1990, the IPCC
has published a weighty three-volume set of reports addressing the basic science of climate change
(working group 1), the projected impacts (working group 2), and the potential for mitigation of
climate change (working group 3).
The report of each of the three working groups consists of detailed individual chapters assessing
developments in the various relevant subdisciplines of climate science. Each IPCC report chapter is
fifty to one hundred pages long, written by about a dozen scientific experts in that subdiscipline who
serve as lead authors (I was one in the 2001 Third Assessment). Along with fifty or more additional
contributing authors for each chapter, they collectively review the developments detailed in hundreds
of peer reviewed research articles relevant to the topic at hand. Each of the three working groups also
produces a summary for policy makers, which provides a brief synopsis of the working group's key
findings written in language accessible to a lay audience and policy makers.
The IPCC review process remains the most rigorous, comprehensive, and transparent of any
