John Beddington, the UK government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, evidently thinks the key challenge in the global discussion of climate change is that scientists don’t caveat their work extensively enough and that scientists speak too forcefully.
According to reporting in the Guardian,
[Beddington] said the false claim in the IPCC’s report was symptomatic of a wider problem with the way evidence was presented in the field of climate science. “Certain unqualified statements have been unfortunate,” he said. “We have a problem in communicating uncertainty. There’s definitely an issue there. If there wasn’t, there wouldn’t be the level of scepticism. All of these predictions have to be caveated by saying, ‘There’s a level of uncertainty about that’.”
Oh, wow, the problem is solved. There is all the skepticism in the world (and in the US) not because fossil-foolish interests have, for decades, mounted a campaign to confuse on the science nor because anti-science operatives (politicians and otherwise) have sought to whip up anti-science frenzy for political purposes nor because fundamentalist lunatics undermine knowledge/understanding of science … No, evidently John Beddington believes that the fault lies with the scientists not caveating their results and language strongly enough. If scientists would only be more cautious, there wouldn’t be such confusion.
Beddington said scientists should give a caveat to their predictions where there was uncertainty, and release source data “wherever possible” – but added that uncertainty was no excuse for inaction. “I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper scepticism,” he tells the Times newspaper today. “Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can’t be changed.”
A question for John Beddington:
What “proper scepticism” is being “dismissed”?
The issue is not, for those battling disinformation campaigns about climate science and what is happening to the planet, well-documented and thoughtful challenges to some element of the scientific understanding that merits consideration and, perhaps, incorporation into enriching our understanding of the highly complex work of climate science. The real issue is the willingness of far too many to engage in abusive practices from misrepresenting evidence to reintroducing (time and again) items into discussion that have been shown (via peer reviewed process) to not stand up to scrutiny.
Beddington’s comment is one to regret since the true challenge is not that scientists are too aggressively engaging in public dialogue but that scientists and scientific knowledge is too absent from that discussion. The problem is not an absence of caveats but the reality that the nature and style of scientific dialogue creates an impression of uncertainty and confusion to the public in the face of those who are willing to lie with a smiling face.
UPDATE: A comment from a correspondent:
What do the two (the messy wgii case study page & the issue of uncertainty and caveats) even have to do with each other? “He said the false claim in the IPCC’s report was symptomatic of a wider problem with the way evidence was presented in the field of climate science. ” Huh? In what way is it a symptom?
UPDATE: Well, perhaps Beddington wants to go back and read his own speeches, his own discussions.
Significantly, the UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, laid out a similar scenario in a March speech to the government’s Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster. He warned that by 2030, “A ‘perfect storm’ of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions,
Beddington’s speech raises uncertainties but also, certainly, raises the alarm:
You are talking about serious problems in tropical glaciers – the Chinese government has recognised this and has actually announced about 10 days ago that it is going to build 59 new reservoirs to take the glacial melt in the Xinjiang province. 59 reservoirs. It is actually contemplating putting many of them underground. This is a recognition that water, which has hitherto been stored in glaciers, is going to be very scarce. We have to think about water in a major way.
But the climate change agenda is there and we have to think about it, but this is looking to me like it is getting worse.
…
The other area that really worries me in terms of climate change and the potential for positive feedbacks and also for interactions with food is ocean acidification. This graph is again a little complicated… we are around about here. And around about here is as acid as the oceans have been for about 25 million years. Now, this is not a silly prediction by those who are wanting to argue that we’re all doomed. This is actually simple physics and chemistry. Knowing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, knowing the level of interaction that will occur with the ocean with that level of CO2 in the atmosphere, this is what is going to happen. It may be a little bit lower, but certainly by 2030, you are going to look at an ocean system which is enormously problematic in terms of its acidity.
As I say, it’s as acid today as it has been for 25 million years. When this occurred some 25 million years ago, this level of acidification in the ocean, you had major problems with it, problems of extinctions of large numbers of species in the ocean community. The areas which are going to be hit most severely by this are the coral reefs of the world and that is already starting to show. Coral reefs provide significant protein supplies to about a billion people. So it is not just that you can’t go snorkelling and see lots of pretty fish, it is that there are a billion people dependent on coral reefs for a very substantial portion of their high protein diet.
So, this is cheerful stuff, isn’t it? What I have said, which I guess is why I have been talking to the media a bit, is I have coined the point that we have got to deal with increased demand for energy, increased demand for food, increased demand for water, and we’ve got to do that while mitigating and adapting to climate change. And we have but 21 years to do it.