05 February 2010 - International
— Since December there has been a glut of
stories challenging the science of climate
change as represented by the IPCC. Should
we be concerned? Only about
climate change.
Lately there’s been
a rash of stories all ending with the word
“gate” and all questioning the work of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
– the IPCC. Here’s our handy guide to the
truth behind the gates, but first – why
are they all called ‘gate’ anyway?
The "Watergate"
scandal of the early 1970s brought down
US President Nixon, and was so named because
it began with a break-in at the Watergate
Hotel, Washington DC. After Nixon’s resignation
the conservative columnist and former Nixon
speechwriter William Safire began attaching
the word ‘’gate’’ to all kinds of subjects.
The tactic worked, and pretty soon you could
make anything sound like a scandal by adding
the word "gate". Why did he do
it? Partly to make his former boss's crimes
look less serious and partly to make the
small stories he was writing about look
bigger than they were.
That is exactly what’s
been going on in the last two months. The
recipe is simple. Take a small story, add
the word "gate", a dash of alarmism,
and pinch of exaggeration and voila, instant
scandal. Oh, and repeat as frequently as
you can!
Here’s the breakdown
on what’s been happening.
Hackergate
Hackergate began with
the release onto the internet of around
one thousand e-mails and three thousand
documents from the Climate Research Unit
of the University of East Anglia, home to
some well respected climate scientists.
With a thousand e-mails to choose from,
a handful of sentences were selected to
try and make the case that something dodgy
was going on.
Himalayagate
Hackergate was followed
by Himalayagate. In its Fourth Assessment
Report, published in 2007, the IPCC reported
that Himalayan Glaciers could be gone as
soon as 2035. That claim turned out to be
incorrect, and not to have been based on
a scientific study. The IPCC subsequently
withdrew the claim, it was an error, not
a lie.
This doesn’t mean the
glaciers aren’t retreating, just that the
rate of retreat isn’t as high as the IPCC
stated. On the graph below from the World
Glacier Monitoring Service the red bars
are years where, on average, the world’s
glaciers shrank, blue are years where they
grew. Are the world’s glaciers in trouble?
It’s an easy question. Is there more red
or blue on the graph below?
Amazongate
Following Himalayagate
we had Amazongate. Here the charge was that
the footnote to the claim that 40% of the
Amazon could die off was wrong. Not that
the claim was wrong, just that the footnote
was wrong. And it was. The report the footnote
pointed to didn’t back up the claim directly
itself. But another scientific paper did
[1]. Since then two more papers [2, 3] have
confirmed the case. That’s bad footnoting,
but it’s not bad science, and that’s all
there was to it.
The Mini Ice Age Story
If you live in Northern
Europe, or North East America you’ve had
a cold start to 2010. And since that’s where
a lot of journalists live several of them
have taken the opportunity to join up the
collection of ‘gates’ with the cold weather
to claim that there’s a mini ice age coming.
If that sounds a little hysterical to you,
well, you’d be right.
The story didn’t really
run in Australia though, because they’re
suffering from near record high summer temperatures.
The West coast of Canada didn’t pick it
up either, because things are so warm that
they’re having to move snow by hand to make
sure the Winter Olympics can go ahead as
planned. Meanwhile in the high Arctic the
weather seems warmer than usual. Indeed,
it’s the warm Arctic that’s causing the
current cold weather in Europe.
Most newspapers provide
their journalists with access to the internet.
Why so few of them used it when compiling
their ‘mini ice age’ stories is something
we may never know.
So what drives this
debate?
From reading the mainstream
media, you might think there's a battle
of opinion going on in the scientific community.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The scientific consensus represented by
the IPCC's reports is robust. Scientists
who are sceptical about 'anthropogenic global
warming' (AGW) are so thin on the ground,
for instance, that the BBC's environmental
analyst, Roger Harrabin, e-mailed a climate-denier
blog on 3 February, for help in finding
one! He wrote, "I am trying to talk
to UK scientists in current academic posts
who are sceptical about AGW. I’m struggling
to find anyone..."
Another inaccurate claim
recently going around was that the IPCC's
conclusion that coral reef degradation is
linked to climate change was solely based
on a report by Greenpeace. In fact, the
IPCC's findings are solidly underpinned
by peer-reviewed science.
This is a recurring
story over the past 20 years of the IPCC.
Attacks against the IPCC have originated
from hired guns of the fossil fuel industry
or disgruntled individuals.
What this means for
the IPCC
The IPCC scientific
assessment is a rigorous and robust process,
probably the biggest ever organised scientific
endeavour, with thousands of scientists
in many different research institutes around
the world, backed up with masses of data.
It is also a human endeavour and therefore
not perfect. The assessment report in question
is 3,000 pages long, and so far two years
of effort by the world’s denialists and
journalists have found, well, one bad footnote.
The story about the Himalayas was pointed
out by a scientist – just the way it was
supposed to be, and since we, like many
others, relied on the IPCC report and repeated
it we’re now correcting it across our websites.
If you spot any examples we’ve missed, let
us know.
Greenpeace has, and
continues to have confidence in the IPCC.
There is no more reliable guide to the world’s
climate science than the IPCC reports.
It has been reported
in the Times that the Executive Director
of Greenpeace UK, John Sauven, has called
for the resignation of the IPCC chair, Dr
Rejendra Pachauri. His comments were taken
from a much longer conversation with the
Times journalist at a reception and do not
reflect the full conversation. Greenpeace
is not calling for Pachuari to resign.
The science is clear,
climate change is real, is happening now,
and is caused by people. The solution is
still in our hands, with clean energy, smart
use of our power, and forest protection.
If you want to be part of that solution,
become a climate defender today.
[1] Cox, P. M., Betts,
R. A., Jones, C. D., Spall, S. A. &
Totterdell, I. J. 2000 Acceleration of global
warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in
a coupled climate model. Nature 408, 184–187
[2] Towards quantifying
uncertainty in predictions of Amazon ‘dieback’
Chris Huntingford et al Phil. Trans. R.
Soc. B 2008 363, 1857-1864
[3] Drought Sensitivity
of the Amazon Rainforest Oliver L. Phillips
et al Science 323, 1344 (2009);