Trying to simplify scientific data for “policy makers” who often don’t know their burro from a burrow*, has got to be a gargantuan task. Further, no scientist worth her salt is ever going to say “I know X.” The best they can do is say, “The data strongly suggests X.”
This Wall Street Journal article describes the recent brouhaha over the IPCC and the pressure scientists felt to simplify the information for non-scientists, and also what the IPCC is doing to make sure that oversight is tightened and that they stay true to their mission: to describe their findings as best they can and leave the policy prescriptions to others. That’s got to be a hard line to toe, but it is the key to scientific inquiry.
Even some who agree with the IPCC conclusion that humans are significantly contributing to climate change say the IPCC has morphed from a scientific analyst to a political actor. “It’s very much an advocacy organization that’s couched in the role of advice,” says Roger Pielke, a University of Colorado political scientist. He says many IPCC participants want “to compel action” instead of “just summarizing science.”
To restore its credibility, the IPCC will focus on enforcing rules already on the books, IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri and other officials said in interviews. Scientific claims must be checked with several experts before being published. IPCC reports must reflect disagreements when consensus can’t be reached. And people who write reports must refrain from advocating specific environmental actions—a political line the IPCC isn’t supposed to cross.
However…
Taken together, the organization’s troubles raise questions about its quality control in summarizing science. But many scientists say the crisis doesn’t undermine independent research demonstrating man’s influence on the climate.
“There is a very broad and deep consensus that I buy into that we’re producing too much CO2 and it’s going to cause problems eventually,” said John H. Marburger III, former science adviser to President George W. Bush. Many details remain uncertain, he said, but “I think it’s unequivocal that there is a human component.”
Tree Rings – This part is really interesting. Making predictions is part of science, so when the data doesn’t match the prediction, one needs to rethink one’s prediction or model.
Scientists use tree rings and other proxies to assess temperatures thousands of years ago, before thermometers existed. Wider rings indicate greater growth, generally suggesting warmer temperatures, or higher precipitation, or both. Mr. Briffa pioneered the technique.
[...]
The problem: Using Mr. Briffa’s tree-ring techniques, researchers in the ’90s built charts suggesting temperatures in the late 20th century were the highest in a millennium. The charts were dubbed “hockey sticks” because they showed temperatures relatively flat for centuries, then angling higher recently.
But Mr. Briffa fretted about a potential issue. Thermometers show temperatures have risen since the ’60s, but tree-ring data don’t move in tandem, and sometimes show the opposite. (Average annual temperatures reached the highest on record in 2005, according to U.S. government data. They fell the next three years, and rose in 2009. All those years remain among the warmest on record.)
In his same 1999 email, Mr. Briffa said tree-ring data overall did show “unusually warm” conditions in recent decades. But, he added, “I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”
In other words, maybe the chart shouldn’t resemble a hockey stick.
However, this isn’t an example of a vast Global Warming conspiracy.
Complicating matters, a simplified version of the hockey-stick chart appeared prominently in the 2001 report’s “summary for policy makers”—a 34-page distillation of the full report. Thomas Stocker, a climate scientist at the University of Bern and member of the team that wrote the summary, said the team wrestled with how to make the summary “faithful to the full report and yet still comprehensible” to policy makers.
The hockey-stick chart is “the textbook example” of “how difficult the job really is” to summarize the full report, said Mr. Stocker, one of the top scientists overseeing the IPCC’s next report, due in 2013 and 2014.
In retrospect, he said, the simplified version should have had more detail. It could suggest a clearer conclusion than the actual chart appearing deeper in the full report. “I think that was part of the problem—that we simplified it,” he said. “It’s not suppressing information, but it’s making it harder for the rapid reader to have the full picture.”
So how does one show the nuance and yet make it palatable for the general public and policy makers? I don’t know. In a world of 24-hour news cycles, sound bites, and attention spans the length of a flea, I just don’t know.
Some researchers continued to feel pressure to boil down science as work began on the IPCC’s fourth major report, published in 2007. Things that are “very difficult to quantify must be quantified to keep the policy makers happy,” Mr. Alley, the geoscientist, who teaches at Penn State, said in an interview. “It’s a very frustrating thing.”
Mr. Alley walked that tightrope in helping write the chapter covering his specialty: the degree to which massive Greenland and antarctic ice sheets might melt, raising sea levels. The problem, he said: “Ice-sheet models are not very good.”
Many conversations with policy makers—including Mr. Gore, the senators in Greenland and Christian Gaudin, a French senator—left the clear impression that “we scientists had better get better numbers,” said Mr. Alley, adding that he understands their desire for detail.
So the scientists put numbers into the 2007 study, along with a big caveat—what Mr. Alley calls a “punt.” The study took into account things like glacier melt in most of the world, but it noted that it excluded what’s happening in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which “we can’t predict,” Mr. Alley said.
Inevitably, Mr. Alley said, some people have cited the numbers without that caveat.
When political battle lines are drawn in something that should not be considered a battle (the quest for knowledge) and each side is ready to stomp the other for any misstep or asserting that any expression of nuance is a glaring error in the hypothesis, the average person is going to just mistrust all of it. And that is everyone’s loss, because we need to know. Are we killing our planet? And if we are, can we reverse or mitigate what we’re doing? But we also must be willing to allow our scientists to say “I don’t know, but the current data leads us to believe that X is happening and that Y is a contributing factor.”
(*thank you, Mark Crislip)
The language of statistics is very foreign to most people. However the UN’s IPCC really entered politics when they used nonexistent Himalayan glacier data to come up with a probability statement. The statement predicted that there was a 90% chance that the Himalayan Glaciers would melt by 2035. Several experts in the field noted the error — but anyone who any errors in that report was labeled a Voodoo Scientist –so that shut down further review.
Then the University East Anglia and that email (hacked by unknowns) mess.
There is plenty of accessible research which does show that yes humans have had an impact on the climate — and the biggest change came with the internal combustion engines (fossil fuels).
Why sex up the data and hide data?? Seems like some of the hot shot scientists are shooting themselves in the foot and creating Scare Science.
There is this attitude of a few scientists that they don’t need to “explain” what they are doing — that we all should believe them. Very often these guys do have something to hide — which is that they make the hypothesis but forget the rest of the demands of the Scientific Method.
Also very often the news reporters don’t have a science background — or even an understanding of what they are reporting. And some reporters just make stuff up — too willing to go after the Tabloid loving customers.
If I can I try to go to the original article — or read the Abstract by the scientist — if I’m interested in the research. Thankfully I was trained how to read scientific journals and how to do scientific research by a demanding professor.
There are still many unknown variables — and the climate modeling is based on hypothesis — and then there are the stupid politicians who are owned by the very corporations who contribute to Climate Change/Global Warming.
Right now I’ll have to stick to the middle ground — namely that humans have impacted the climate and we need to change our behavior for future generations. But we still cannot accurately predict the future. Scientists don’t have a Sylvia Browne working on their team (snark-grin).
Sort of like the Tsunami — I grew up in Hawaii — and was watching live video feed from Hawaii yesterday. There was a lot of predictive science — based on past Tsunami behavior. Thankfully there was no major damage. And yes the Tsunami museum in Hilo is worth the visit. The modeling couldn’t predict with any accuracy — too many unknown variables.
I wouldn’t say that the modeling was that off with regards to the tsunami, and the scientists (if the media actually listened to them) were saying all along that they could not predict the size of the tsunami but were making educated guesses based on previous tsunamis generated by earthquakes of that magnitude. Their time was off by about 30 minutes and that seems pretty accurate to me, given the distance it had to travel. It just wasn’t as big as it could have been. Still it was fascinating to watch Hilo Bay as the waves passed through…drawing out the water and exposing the reef, then coming back in. Pretty cool, I thought, and I’m exceedingly glad they erred on the side of caution. Knowing the locals as I do, the party atmosphere was funny.
Like you, I right in agreement with you on climate change. We do need to change our behavior, and besides, what harm can it do to lessen our dependence on oil, which is running out anyway?