I'm writing as a scientist who researches flood response to past climate and land use changes; I regularly attend international conferences where climate change is debated (indeed I saw Mann give a talk last year) but I'm not part of IPCC. I have contributed to a recent Spanish government report, co-authoring a chapter on climate change and floods in Spain.
I'm not going to go through the scientific arguments of climate change – I think Merrick has already done a good job. What I wanted to say were a couple of things from my perspective, not about the science of climate change but about the nature of the scientific community and the current process of doing research, which may help explain where there might be mistakes, or indeed why some scientists may exaggerate results!
The fundamental factor driving climate change research is that theoretically governments (most anyway!) want predictions of future climate for long-term planning. Prediction is a fundamental goal of applied science but is incredibly complex, especially with respect to the environment and of course global climate. There will always be uncertainties, refinements, rejection of previous ideas - that IS science. The IPCC is really doing an impossible job – it is trying to reach a consensus (within the scientific community and between scientists and politicians) so by definition it will be having to ‘ignore’ or downplay some evidence. But that works both ways, at opposite ends of the spectrum. There are many climate scientists who argue that the last IPCC report doesn’t go far enough in its predictions of warming over the next century. It doesn’t include Bill Ruddiman’s hypothesis of anthropogenic warming and increased GHG emissions from around 6000 years ago. The overall consensus of the IPCC however is that current global warming is anthropogenic in origin, despite the natural climatic variability.
Most individual countries, and indeed the EC etc, designate a budget for scientific research, a proportion of which will be allocated for climate change research. Scientists then need to compete for a slice of this money by writing detailed research proposals. I recently had a proposal rejected, it didn't even make the 50% cut to go to the next stage - from the 3 reviewer comments there were a couple of things I could improve but essentially the science was fine, ultimately it wasn't making a big enough step forward in the scientific agenda i.e. the UK has a limited (and reducing!) research budget and for the UK's competitiveness in the international research community only exciting new ideas and methodologies will be funded, probably at the expense of other research that isn't yet complete but is no longer sufficiently new. Essentially this is why we will imminently have a serious shortage of soil scientists in the UK – soil research is no longer funded, it’s not exciting enough but we still need soil scientists to work in the agricultural sector! I fear some of the scientific building blocks for our improved understanding could be by-passed. Darwin would never have got funded under the current system!!
All researchers in UK universities are "audited" typically over a 5-7 year cycle. Whilst in the past this has clearly had a positive impact on the quality of research in the UK it really puts pressure on individual researchers to perform – this being monitored by grant income, quality (and interest!) of research papers and societal contribution (e.g. membership of the IPCC). And most of us are full time lecturers – I barely have enough time in the year for me to do the necessary research and associated scientific activities to achieve expected targets, whilst maintaining integrity in my teaching (oh and doing university admin – next year I will be in charge of our department’s exam process, not an insignificant job). It’s actually impossible for me to read all the papers relevant to my field that are published in a year!
The point of this is to show that there will be mistakes, there will be people in the scientific community who exaggerate results, make false claims etc – I’m afraid it’s human nature and like the rest of society there are some unpleasant and ultra-competitive people in the business, and it doesn’t surprise me to see results exaggerated. I have first hand experience of this – I was a co-author on a synthesis/review paper published a few years ago. I was actually opposed to the main conclusion of the paper (an exaggerated opinion of what the data was showing) and said so during the writing – the lead author didn’t send me the manuscript again until it had been accepted by the publishers and was in press. Ironically that paper is now my most cited, and I totally disagree with it – I have just submitted a new paper criticising it, so my personal research output will improve as a consequence of poor science!
What amazes me is why climate sceptics leap on some mistakes or manipulated data to expose anthropogenic climate change as some great fraud whilst not questioning the research of climate sceptics (which in the past has been funded by oil companies, no independent impartiality there then). This can only reflect what the individual wants to believe. Ultimately, climate change is just one of many inter-related issues (e.g. increasing population, soil degradation, resource depletion) that will have disastrous consequences. The main approaches to mitigating climate change will actually help tackle other issues as well – so let’s please stick with the current scientific consensus!
|
