Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
22 November.
A week before the UN Climate Change Conference in
Durban, several thousand hacked emails withheld in 2009 are released
without authorisation, almost certainly by the climate change sceptics
who instigated 'Climate-gate'.
The fallout of 'Climate-gate' and 'Glacier-gate' was immediate and sig-
nificant. They made headline news worldwide and cast a dark shadow
over the Copenhagen Kyoto Protocol parties meeting. Through newslet-
ters, email lists, websites, blogs and so on, climate change sceptics used the
scandals to rekindle public doubt that global warming is either occurring,
anthropogenic or significant. In response, the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Meteorological Society
and the Union of Concerned Scientists released statements supporting the
scientific consensus that the Earth's mean surface temperature had been ris-
ing for many decades. No fewer than six official inquiries were launched
into the two scandals on both sides of the Atlantic in order to ascertain if
wrongdoing had occurred and how to prevent it happening again. A series
of public opinion surveys nonetheless revealed, as late as mid-2011, that
significant sections of the British and American publics (1) distrusted cli-
mate scientists, and (2) believed anthropogenic climate change was not
happening.
In short, the scientific consensus about climate change suffered a sig-
nificant crisis of public credibility - even though only an extremely small
number of climate scientists were implicated in the two scandals. At the time
of writing, the many official inquiries into both affairs have largely absolved
the scientists of any wrongdoing (see
Box 8.1)
. In the wider climate science
community, the claims of sceptics like Sally Baliunas and Stephen McIntyre
are still not considered sufficiently convincing to challenge the consensus
view that global warming is real, anthropogenic and likely to be significant
looking ahead. It will probably take some time before public trust in cli-
mate science reaches, let alone exceeds, the levels evident just before the
two scandals became headline news. When scientific knowledge travels into
the public realm, it typically fails to 'perform' if serious questions arise as to
its trustworthiness. Unlike other discourses, that of scientists exerts power
only to the extent that people are assured it accurately represents 'reality'. In
this way, its 'power over' is conditional.
Does this matter?
Ye s
, it most certainly does. If Kevin Anderson and
Alice Bows's predictions are right (see
p. 234
of this topic) - and
many
cli-
mate scientists believe they
are
- then continued public scepticism about
the causes and consequences of global warming will prove very costly in
the long term (in all conceivable senses of the word). Given the profound
economic, demographic and ecological implications of global warming pre-
dictions, however, it may be equally costly to accept - and act on - the word
of scientists uncritically. What, then, are we to do?
