The science of uncertainty

Sara Parkin, March 2nd 2010, Climate change, Forum founders

What are we to make of the furore around climate science? There are implications for environmental campaigners, government and businesses currently agonising over the implementation of low carbon strategies, as well as for scientists - climate scientists in particular - and the whole scientific community in general.

To start with thee and me. Most of us won’t have a degree in science, and may not even have a GCSE in one of the natural sciences. So we tend to trust what the scientists say without considering too closely what they mean. Consequently, we are rubbish at understanding the uncertainty that is intrinsic in all scientific inquiry. Climate science is no different. A hypothesis was made: that the most recent warming is mainly due to greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere by human activity. This hypothesis developed from the fact that we’ve known since the 19th century certain gases warm the climate, and that humans now generate a lot more of these gases. Despite a lot of effort over the last 40 years, this hypothesis has not been disproved.

As a consequence, climate scientists consider the likelihood that human emissions of greenhouse gases are contributing to a warming climate to be very likely – i.e. 90% certain. The figures below gives the degrees of certainty the IPCC gives to its conclusions. The big step between labelling something likely or very likely means the latter appellation is not given lightly.

Source: IPCC Report (2007) Summary for Policy Makers p53

Nothing in the ‘climategate’ scandals undermines this conclusion. Where thee and me need to get sharper is in comprehending the various levels of uncertainty attached to the projected consequences. In policy and decision-making terms uncertainty translates into risk management strategies – and something with a 90% chance of being true would surely top the risk register. As David Mackay, DECC Chief Scientific Advisor puts it: “since 1750 we have burnt ½ trillion tonnes of carbon, and are on track to burn the second 1/2 trillion in less than 40 years.  The cumulative consequences of that first 500 billion tonnes suggest the next 500 billion (and the rest) ought to stay underground.” (Mackay, 2009)

It would be astonishing if that scale of intervention in the natural cycles of the earth would be without adverse consequence. 

So, ‘climategate’ does not let any of us off the hook of responsibility for serious action – by governments, organisations and individuals. 

And no more excuses for us becoming anything but much more intelligent consumers of science. Promoting selected conclusions of climate science as irrefutable facts has long been the vice of media, but environmental organisations really ought to know better. Now, bereft of a trusted interlocutor to help them understand the science, the public is unsurprisingly withdrawing ‘belief’ that climate change is actually happening. Both climate scientists and campaigning organisations have a lot to do to rekindle that trust. As do governments. Even though we may (rightly) whinge at their muddled prevarication, governments have not (yet) faltered in their risk analysis that there is enough certainty around climate change to justify action. Businesses that have reached the same conclusion need to ramp up the evidence that they too are of serious intent. Mutuality of benefit in the business-government-public triangle of climate change action depends on the thread of trust not being broken.

So what about the climate scientists? As I suggested in my last blog on climate science there are only very small reasons to question the methodology of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that right now is soliciting evidence for its fifth report.  When IPCC chief, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, he returns from his Communications 101 course, he will be making sure his organisation’s perfectly good methodologies are rigorously implemented. Paradoxically, trust in climate science could be enhanced by the whole sorry tale.  

One positive outcome should be more discipline and aptitude for communication amongst senior climate scientists. The few who became caught up in the excitement of it all and sacrificed dispassionate presentation of evidence to campaigning fervour have risked the reputation of all science. Science funders know it must not happen again.

Bob May, one time government Chief Scientist points out that science progresses through organised scepticism – continual challenging of research outcomes to both extend knowledge and improve certainty. He’s really cross that the word ‘sceptic’ has been recruited, not by genuine challengers of research outcomes (and methodologies) but by what I have dubbed the malicious naysayers. Very different from those who deny something out of fear or misunderstanding, these naysayers are driven by knowingly wrong motives, and are often paid by organistions with the most to lose should low-carbon policies be implementated with any seriousness.

Separating the useful sceptics and contrarians from the malicious naysayers is vital. They need to be challenged head on. And the best way to do that - something all science needs to take on board - is transparency and far more involvement of the public in science – upstream where research projects are designed as well as downstream where the outcomes are debated. 

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Time to press the panic button?

Jonathon Porritt, February 5th 2010, Climate change, Forum founders

I’m still reeling from the surreal sight of Lord Whacko Monckton (the climate contrarians’ eccentric of choice), captured on Newsnight last night doing an imitation of Al Gore at a public meeting in Australia. Frightening stuff.

Whenever I see Monckton at work, it reminds me just how desperate people must be to have their doubts and prejudices about climate change affirmed by some public figure – indeed, by any public figure at this stage of the debate.

The politics of climate change in Australia are even worse that they are here in the UK. That may well be, paradoxically, because changes in their own micro-climates over the last 10 years have been so much more visible. And painful. And this has polarised the debate about whether these changes are primarily a consequence of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, or primarily natural climate variability. The end result is that the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, might have to call a general election to break the impasse on his proposals for a carbon-trading scheme.

Could it get that bad here in the UK? Very improbably, but the whole tenor of the debate has deteriorated so badly, so rapidly, that it's now a serious political headache, rather than a minor irritant.

The combination of the ‘climate gate’ fiasco at the University of East Anglia and the growing concerns about the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), broader concerns of the whole peer review process (the so-called ‘Gold Standard’ of scientific research), and the utter failure of Copenhagen has transformed the climate debate here in the UK.

Where they were once thought as contrarian outliers, both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express are now thought to be closely aligned with public opinion. Ed Miliband (the Secretary of State in the Dept of Energy and Climate Change) must be in despair.

So should we be pressing the panic button? I think we should. The damage done to the credibility not just of climate science but also of the UK’s entire approach to climate change is already serious – and getting worse. This could be extremely problematic in the run up to the general election.

So if I was Gordon Brown, I would be asking David Cameron and Nick Clegg to issue a joint invitation to Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society, asking him to convene a high-level Scientific Panel to comment on ‘the state of the science’ two years from the publication of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report at the end of 2007.

Does it still stack up? What should people make of all these recent revelations? Is the Climate Change Act (to which all three political parties have signed up) still based on robust scientific foundations? Can people still have confidence in the way climate science drives climate policy?

Martin Rees would be asked to recruit three or four top scientists (reflecting different shades of opinion), a couple of business people (like James Dyson or Richard Lambert of the CBI), and a couple of scientifically-literate ‘pillars of the community’ in whom the general public has absolute trust. No NGOs, let alone campaigners!

Give them two months. Bang out a short, sharp report written for lay people, not for scientists. Blitz the media. Run a full-page ad in the Mail and Express for weeks on end – instead of today’s highly questionable ‘Act on CO2 ‘ ads.

Overkill? Possibly. It seems ludicrous that what is still by any standards a rock-solid scientific consensus should have to be shored up by such extreme measures. But if we don’t, might we be looking at an Aussie-style meltdown in public opinion in the near term?

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If climate change didn’t exist, would we have to invent it?

Martin Wright, February 4th 2010, Climate change

This mischievous thought occurred to me as I was wading through the latest sclerotic surge of climate scepticism – which is fast becoming the press’s default position on the issue. (If the mainstream media really is engaged in a mass conspiracy to boost ‘warmism’, as James Delingpole and his like insist, then it’s doing a pretty lousy job of it...)

In December, it was Climategate and the embarrassing farce that was Copenhagen. Last month we had Glaciergate: the revelation that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had managed to include in one of its reports the wildly unfounded claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt to nothing in the next 25 years.

Proof that climate science is all a wild exaggeration, as some claimed? Actually, no, it was just proof that the most august international bodies can make a complete prat of themselves along with the rest of us.

But next month you can bet there’ll be another shock exposé, as the hounds of scepticism scent blood on the lumbering tracks of the climate consensus, and the media, having decided that global warming is sooo last century, daahlings, cheer them on to the kill.

In practice, of course, the same boring old science which has welded that consensus together hasn’t changed one bit. The global temperature is rising rapidly, and there’s no plausible explanation for it other than greenhouse gases. We can’t say for sure what the effects might be, but since it appears to be on track to take us right out of the comfort zone in which human civilisation has evolved and flourished, then, on balance, we probably ought to do everything we can to cool things down.

And, er, that’s it. Very boring. Go back to your homes, nothing to see here.

Except, what if we’re wrong? What if somehow, against all the weight of accumulated evidence, climate change does indeed prove to be a myth?

Well then, we’d be mad to waste our money and effort on... what, exactly?

Renewable energy? Not such a waste in the light of peak oil and politically vulnerable gas supplies, though, is it?

Energy efficiency? Ditto, with bells on.

Forest conservation? Pretty essential if we’re to stem the crash in biodiversity and reduce floods and soil erosion.

A shift to electric cars, alongside more walking and cycling? Enjoy cleaner, quieter streets, a healthier populace, and reduced pressure on health service budgets...

Technology transfer to the developing world? Managed properly, it could be one of the most effective ways of lifting people out of poverty – not to mention boosting emerging economies.

And so on, and so forth...

Almost all the stuff we need to do to slow global warming is stuff we probably want – and eventually, will need – to do anyway. We might do it a little earlier than otherwise, but if we plan for it, and stick to those plans, we can make the transition that much smoother, and more cost-effective.

So what’s not to like?

Yes, I am being a bit simplistic. Without climate change, we wouldn’t spend billions on unproven technologies like carbon capture and sequestration, and we might pause before rushing into biofuels with quite such forest-felling abandon. But overall, the ‘co benefits’ of robust action to tackle climate change have been vastly understated.

It was neatly summed up by a cartoon doing the rounds at Copenhagen. It shows a climate sceptic pointing in horror at a flipchart listing all the positives of a low-carbon economy:

Copyright 2009 Joel Pett.  Posted by permission.

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Overdoing the eco-pragmatism

Peter Madden, January 19th 2010, Climate change

I went with anticipation to a ‘Bristol Festival of Ideas’ talk earlier this week, where Stewart Brand, chaired by Brian Eno, was talking about his new book Whole Earth Discipline. I left feeling rather dispirited.

For those of you who don’t know Brand, he is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a grand old man of the US environmental movement.

His central message was that the problems facing the world are so great that we have to do “whatever works” in order to tackle them. That means concentrating people in cities, and embracing GM, nuclear power and geo-engineering. We are changing the earth so profoundly anyway, he argued, that we might as well do more of it.

I am a big technological optimist myself and am certainly on the eco-pragmatist side of the movement. But I found Brand’s recipe – at least as he dished it out in Bristol - unfulfilling.

His was a totally technocratic version of the world, encouraging us to “focus on the numbers” and “just do what works”. There was no room for vision or values, just a managerial approach to engineering the status quo.

Brand told us to “put aside ideology” and ridiculed most environmentalists as luddites who “would have opposed the wheel”.

While I liked Brand’s willingness to slaughter sacred cows, I was troubled by what he didn’t say. Surely we need both technological answers and changed values? Surely the environment movement shouldn’t be shorn of all sense of vision? Is more of the same, just better managed, really enough?

Read more about Whole Earth Discipline (publishers website)

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Erosion: the dilemma of the decade

Anna Simpson, January 15th 2010, Climate change, General, Travel and tourism

It was the sort of mud that seems intent on dragging you down, slurping up your ankles and slipping under your soles. But the view redeemed all seven miles of undignified tumbles and slides as I walked from Lyme Regis to Seaton on the UK’s Jurassic Coast. Sparse vegetation skidded down the exposed bones of the cliffs, irate waves clawing at them like wildcats. I got back to the B&B to find a lively discussion under way about huge boulders tumbling down to the sea on an almost daily basis – while heedless tourists fumble around for fossils below…

Ever since ten-year-old Mary Anning found a complete ichthyosaurus some 200 years ago, Lyme Regis has been a hub for fossil hunters. It’s all thanks to giant mudslides – the largest in Europe – that expose new rocks and leave Jurassic remains scattered across the beaches.

For geologists, this ongoing erosion makes the site a whole lot more interesting – but
rising sea levels and freak storms are changing the shape of coastlines around the world at a violent rate. Defences like jetties and marinas can keep the waves at bay – but they also stop coastal habitats and systems from responding to the changes in their own way. This can detract from the fossil-strewn appeal of beaches: not great for local economies dependent on tourism.

The question is, how to find the right balance between preserving towns like Lyme Regis and its surroundings for visitors – on the one hand – and protecting the natural life and geological interest of the coast, a World Heritage Site, on the other.

It’s a small case in point, but as the climate teeters, knowing when to interfere – and just how far to go – could be the dilemma of the decade.

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The empathy gap

Helen Clarkson, January 5th 2010, Climate change, General

As I read this weekend’s papers and made my way through lists of things to make me a better person this year, one piece of wisdom stood out from the usual litany of drink less, exercise more, go to bed earlier - a call for us to be more empathetic.

Roman Krznaric’s suggestion, in The Observer, sounded more interesting than all of the others (though of course I’ll be giving those a shot too), so I duly looked at his blog: www.outrospection.org where, amongst other thoughts, he has a very interesting piece on empathy and climate change.  There’s also a full article here.

Krznaric’s argument is that empathy is a powerful emotional tool that can be mobilised to create social change.  He offers the historical example of the rise of the social movement that challenged slavery, which created an outpouring of empathy from the public, and quotes historian Adam Hochschild as saying “The abolitionists placed their hope not in sacred texts, but in human empathy”.

We need that scale of empathetic response, he says, to deal with climate change, and to close the gap between knowledge and action.

He points to two types of empathetic response that we need – through time (to future generations) and across space (to people living now in developing countries).  This is familiar territory to anyone who’s thought long and hard about sustainable development which has right at its heart the ideas of inter- and intra-generational justice, i.e. that we should develop in a way that allows others now and in the future to meet their needs.

The problem has been how to take the idea that we all have the same entitlement to meeting our needs, put this into practice and articulate it at a policy level.  Krznaric is suggesting that empathy provides a way of bridging the gap, where political and economic arguments fail.

Empathy has definitely started moving up the agenda in recent years, particularly as it’s a topic which Barack Obama has talked so much about, referring often to what he calls the ‘empathy deficit’: “When those of us in comfort can’t look at a child in poverty and say ‘they’re just like my kid, they’re as special as mine’”.

Examples of the use of empathy in public policy can also be found with the success of movements such as that for Restorative Justice, which brings together the victims of crimes with their perpetrators. It has been shown to be beneficial for both, and to reduce re-offending rates.  By putting themselves in the place of the other, both sides it seems have much to gain.

I spent some time last year wondering if we wouldn’t be doing better on climate change if we had more women leaders?  It feels like there’s still a lot of belief in the macho-techno solution that is going to come from somewhere at some point and sort this out, without the need for behaviour change. 

However, I’ve decided this isn’t to do with male versus female, but the sort of leaders we tend to go for.  A year into office and Obama is already accused of not ‘doing’ enough.  It seems people don’t want leaders who think, or empathise, they want people who (appear to) act: reflective types need not apply.

But I think Krznaric is right.  We’re going to need a huge dose of empathy to sort this out, at every level.  It’s a nice thought experiment to wonder how Obama would find running China for a week, and vice versa with Wen Jiabao.  I don’t think we’ll persuade them to do it.  But if we teach ourselves to empathise more with others, maybe we’ll learn to press our politicians for the right sort of solutions.  We may also choose different politicians, and look for different characteristics in our leaders.  I wonder how differently Copenhagen would have turned out with a bit more empathy?

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Copenhagen flop means business must take a stand

Ben Tuxworth, December 22nd 2009, Business, Climate change, General, International

As Copenhagen diminishes in the rear-view mirror, we must still do whatever we can to stop it also sinking beneath the waves.
 
What should organisations make of the Copenhagen Accord (or if you find accord just too challenging, ‘letter of intent’)? With its questionable traction, action-free plan to keep temperature rises under two degrees, vague suggestions about using the markets, technology and forests er…somehow, and unappealing invitation to all nations to record whatever voluntary commitments they’d like to make in a special register, it doesn’t exactly help you believe in Santa again. As China distances itself even from this weedy document, leaving no clear path to something more binding next year, it would be perfectly reasonable to find the whole thing pretty depressing.
 
Whether you blame Denmark, China, or the UN itself, organisations – particularly businesses - hoping that Copenhagen would bring some clarity on the carbon regime they should be planning for, will have to wait. With no clear shared targets, timetable, or approach to markets, the temptation to wait and see before making investments – and then pile into countries with weaker carbon regimes – will be hard to resist. Some companies are already making it clear that if governments were expecting them to make the big investments in the low-carbon transition, they have utterly failed to create the environment required.
 
It would be easy to throw our hands up in despair. But as with all such crises, of course, this is exactly when leadership has to stand up. As Ronan Dunne, CEO of Telefonica O2 pointed out at a recent Forum for the Future event, decisions where you can analyse the numbers for an answer don’t need leaders. Ditto moments when everyone knows what to do. It’s time to decide what you really think about it all, and take a stand.
 
But in the face of uncertainty about carbon, what’s the right leadership stance to adopt? Before COP 15 we had five arguments for action. One was that a future regulatory environment on carbon constituted a risk too potentially expensive to ignore. That one may be on hold. But the others – the arrival of peak oil; the fact that most of what you would do to decarbonise makes social and economic sense anyway; the lesson of history that responding to a constraint can drive game-changing innovation; and the awful truth that there are plenty of other, much less debatable environmental challenges already at the gate – all still stand. Now’s the time to make the most of them.
 
So the post-Copenhagen world means pushing on with pretty much all those things that made business sense at the end of November. And ultimately it means remembering that, somewhere out there in the darkness, climate change itself grinds on, indifferent to our hopes, fears and failed conferences, and still the greatest challenge facing humanity.
 
Merry Christmas!

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Selling a low-carbon life just got harder

Jonathon Porritt, December 21st 2009, Climate change, Forum founders, General, International

From Hopenhagen to Fiascohagen in 12 dire days. Though there are now as many brave faces out there as after defeat in a general election, to bill the Copenhagen accord as anything other than a failure is simply dishonest.

Of course it matters that China, India and the United States have, for the first time, formally recognised the need for “deep cuts” in emissions of CO2. Of course it’s a good thing that rich-world countries have committed “to a goal of mobilising $100 billion a year by 2020” to help the poor world to cope with climate change. And of course it’s critical that the science underpinning these two commitments has been strongly reconfirmed.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, may well be right in claiming that “there is a danger of too much negativity”, but we have to be realistic about what did and didn’t happen in Copenhagen. The accord itself has no formal standing, and there are no firm figures in it regarding either the scale or urgency of the cuts required, even though many countries are already signed-up to such cuts. There are no details as to how the $100 billion will be raised. Worst of all, there is no commitment to move from this desperately inadequate accord to a legally binding treaty over the next year.

Paradoxically, the greatest cause for hope lies in the depth of that failure. Before Copenhagen, many campaigners had argued that no agreement would be better than a weak agreement. And in effect, that’s exactly what has happened.

The shock of this is only just beginning to sink in — as is the realisation that there is still all to play for before the next conference in Mexico in a year’s time. By that time Barack Obama should have done his deal with the Senate, China should have got used to its new responsibilities as a global climate player and the EU should have recovered sufficiently from the recession to play a more influential leadership role.

It is intriguing to speculate that it might be David Cameron supporting the EU in that role rather than Gordon Brown. In an election year, the domestic fallout from Copenhagen will be intense. And who knows how individual citizens will react to such a confusing scene?

For Gordon Brown, the failure of Copenhagen will be a deep disappointment. He has worked tirelessly over the past 18 months to help to broker a real deal. British embassies around the world (and particularly in China and India) have put climate diplomacy right at the top of their agenda. Mr Miliband has become the most effective member of Mr Brown’s Cabinet, and he personally played a hugely significant role in Copenhagen. Credit where credit is due: on the international stage, no Government has done more to get a legally binding deal on climate change than the UK’s.

However, the Prime Minister will not now be able to lay claim to some Copenhagen breakthrough. The UK’s unforgiving media will give him little slack in that regard. There is no reassuring “global deal” to provide cover for some of the more controversial and unpopular policies that the Government is now bringing forward — on air passenger duty, for instance, or zero-carbon housing. Peter Mandelson’s new-found enthusiasm for a “green industrial revolution” might just slip down that old fixer’s list of things that really matter in a pre-election period.

But there’s no political upside in any of that for David Cameron. Indeed, I suspect that the fallout will prove to be more problematic for Mr Cameron than for Mr Brown. It will give succour to that weird bunch of “grandees” (David Davis, Peter Lilley, Lord Lawson of Blaby et al) who have become increasingly critical of Mr Cameron’s intelligent leadership on climate change.

It will provide new ammunition for the out-and-out “contrarians” scattered through the UK media who remain unpersuaded by the overwhelming consensus on the science of climate change, and who do so much to reinforce people’s uncertainty and confusion.

Though I have no doubt that Mr Cameron will see off the Lawson brigade, he has a much tougher challenge on his hands with local Conservatives. Many of them do not share his enthusiasm for a low-carbon economy, do not want to sign up to the targets in the Climate Change Act, and continue to treat wind farms as if they were invading aliens from another planet. This is not just “a “generation thing”; some of the most vociferous critics of Mr Cameron’s blue-green politics are young thrusters for whom concern for the environment is seen as an ideological aberration.

All of which, I fear, will make it even harder to persuade individuals to play their small but still crucial part in addressing climate change. That feeling of disempowerment (“what difference can we make when China is single-handedly trashing the climate anyway?”) will be reinforced. Politicians will have to get even smarter in making the case — for improved energy efficiency in the home (saving you a lot of money), reduced car use (less congestion, healthier lifestyles), less waste and even more recycling (saving even more money), and more holidays at home rather than abroad (less hassle, good for the economy).

The fact that low-carbon lifestyles are both healthier and cheaper gives politicians plenty to work with. But the past two weeks in Copenhagen have not made that task any easier.

This article was originally printed in The Times, 21 December 2009

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Ethopia’s take on carbon tax funding might win in Copenhagen

Jonathon Porritt, December 16th 2009, Climate change, Finance, International, Leadership

Everyone but everyone out there in Copenhagen today agrees that a precondition of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases is to ‘get a realistic price on every tonne of CO2 just as soon as possible’.

Nick Stern’s report on the Economics of Climate Change rammed home this point so effectively that some misguided economists would now have us believe that’s all we need to do. Not so.

But it’s true that nothing much will happen without it.

Listen to Jonathon's phonecast of this blog

Many people (including most EU Heads of State) still think the fastest route to getting a realistic price for CO2 is to create a global trading scheme – like the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme, scaled-up, or the proposed ‘Cap-and-Trade’ scheme in the US.

But more and more people are now losing confidence in the trading route. Those with long memories recall that it was only included in the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 as a way of keeping the Americans on board, with most EU countries actually feeling very queasy about it at the time. Ironically, when the Americans subsequently pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, the EU was left holding the trading baby! Twelve years on, it still looks like a pretty sick little baby.

Many economists have long been of the opinion that it would make a lot more sense to tax carbon, levying a charge on the carbon content of all energy sources upstream at the point where they enter the supply chain. And more and more business leaders are coming to that same conclusion – on the grounds that they would then know what the cost of carbon would be over time, ratcheting up from a low base line to ‘a realistic’ level (i.e. behaviour-changing and innovation-driving!). This would be brought forward as soon as economies could cope.

Such tax would simultaneously generate a shed load of revenue, some of which could then be used to provide the funding required for developing countries.

In that regard, we know one thing for sure: in the current economic crisis, rich world countries are not going to be able to find big enough sums to provide the poor world with what they now need. As the EU Summit on Funding so clearly demonstrated last week – the funds just aren’t there.

So we need some new sources of funding. The current favourite in Copenhagen, being advanced by Ethiopia (on behalf of African nations) and warmly supported by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, is a mixture of taxes on aviation, shipping and financial transactions (the so-called Tobin Tax) – “get the bloody banks to pay for dealing with climate change”, as the populists put it!

Forgive the pun, but this one could just fly! If Gordon’s on board (as a man who refused to countenance any discussion about the Tobin Tax over the last 12 years) then anything could happen. And the truth of it is that there isn’t any alternative anyway, so we might as well bite the bullet and get on with it.

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The media and climate change contrarians

Jonathon Porritt, December 15th 2009, Climate change, General

Here we are, four days away from (all being well!) a new global agreement on man-made climate change, and the front page of the Daily Express carries the following headline: “100 Reasons Why Global Warming is Natural”.

This is getting beyond a joke.  I have always argued that it is critical to carry on giving airtime to dissenting scientists who find themselves completely or to some extent out of sympathy with the consensus position brokered by the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change.  I am obviously talking here about serious scientists, carrying out their work in good faith, and publishing in properly peer-reviewed journals.  That, after all, is how the scientific method works: any scientific hypothesis is only as good as the rigour with which it is put to the test on the basis of potentially conflicting or inconsistent data.

Listen to Jonathon's phonecast for this blog

But there are two problems with this, and both relate to the inability of the media to understand the nature of the scientific process, and to act responsibly within that understanding.

First, so much of the dissenting stuff does not emanate from scientists of that kind.  Much of it is based on speculation, exaggeration and manipulation of other people’s data.  It’s never been published in proper journals, never been subjected to proper peer-review, and completely fails to meet any of the basic tests for “sound science”.  Much of it lives and breathes through the blogosphere.   And almost all of it is arrant nonsense.

Second, when the science moves on, the contrarians (and the scientifically-illiterate media that love to front those contrarians) refuse to move on at the same time.  So yesterday, for instance, The Independent’s Science Editor, Steve Connor, did a brilliant two-page spread demonstrating how the all-time favourite thesis of the contrarians (that climate change is not in any way man-made but is a consequence of variations in solar activity - particularly sunspots) has been comprehensively dismantled since the two principal scientists involved in this theory (Svensmark and Friis-Christensen) first published their findings.  And those two have been completely unable to refute the dismantling that has been done.

Without that critical contrarian prop in place, much else falls.  But we wouldn’t expect the Daily Express to follow the science that closely, would we?

Which makes it really difficult to go on being “inclusive” about these contrarian views, or indeed tolerant of the malign media forces that sustain them.

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