Lies, Damned Lies and Climate Science

If, like me, you were wondering where on earth (and atmosphere) we now stood with climate science in the wake of recent events, here's the best discussion I've seen:

Currently, a few errors –and supposed errors– in the last IPCC report (“AR4″) are making the media rounds – together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science. Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: which of these putative errors are real, and which not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?

There then follow several thousand words analysing what exactly the errors were, where they came from, and what they mean, all meticulously referenced so that you can go to the sources in question and make up your own mind.

Here's the concluding paragraph:

Overall then, the IPCC assessment reports reflect the state of scientific knowledge very well. There have been a few isolated errors, and these have been acknowledged and corrected. What is seriously amiss is something else: the public perception of the IPCC, and of climate science in general, has been massively distorted by the recent media storm. All of these various “gates” – Climategate, Amazongate, Seagate, Africagate, etc., do not represent scandals of the IPCC or of climate science. Rather, they are the embarrassing battle-cries of a media scandal, in which a few journalists have misled the public with grossly overblown or entirely fabricated pseudogates, and many others have naively and willingly followed along without seeing through the scam.

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Climate Change Implies Open Access

One of the answers to What Will Change Everything? is - reasonably enough - climate change. But interestingly it focuses on the way that climate change will mean that science itself must adapt and become more interventional:

Climate may well force on us a major change in how science is distilled into major findings. There are many examples of the ponderous nature of big organizations and big projects. While I think that the IPCC deserves every bit of its hemi-Nobel, the emphasis on "certainty" and the time required for a thousand scientists and a hundred countries to reach unanimous agreement probably added up to a considerable delay in public awareness and political action.

Climate will change our ways of doing science, making some areas more like medicine with its combination of science and interventional activism, where delay to resolve uncertainties is often not an option. Few scientists are trained to think this way — and certainly not climate scientists, who are having to improvise as the window of interventional opportunity shrinks.

One consequence of this is that science will have to adopt open access. The pace and seriousness of climate change means that humanity does not have the "luxury" of hiding scientific results for six or twelve months: everything must be out in the open as soon as possible for others to use and build on. Delaying could literally be fatal on a rather large scale....

They Call It A "Non-Polluting Gas"...

This Open Letter would have rather more credibility if this phrase

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis.

didn't sound suspiciously close to this one:

As for carbon dioxide, it isn't smog or smoke, it's what we breathe out, and plants breathe in. Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it life.

Because that, as I wrote some time ago, was an egregious bunch of propaganda for the joys of pollution provided by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), "advancing liberty - from the economy to ecology".

And oh, look: by an amazing coincidence the Open Letter talks about - guess what? - yes, that precious economy:

While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC’s conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity.

Ah, yes, prosperity - so much more important than little things like trees, a healthy, sustainable environmental commons, or survival. No, let's get our priorities right:

Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems

which are, of course, how to make the rich even richer by exploiting the environmental commons as quickly as possible, before the world is burnt to a crisp.

A Climate of Desperation

Of course, the situation is serious, but at least we're not as desperate as this lot:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

What a good idea: Rent-a-Scientist. (Via Digg.)