Cult of Dan Brown: Climate change

Unless you're a climatologist well-versed in the field of climate change and familiar with the extensive body of peer-reviewed research on the subject, as a scientist you should have to agree that your skepticism in this case is the product of ignorance (willful or otherwise).

The debate over climate change these days parallels the debate over the causal link between smoking and lung cancer that raged for decades. Despite mounting evidence that this causal link existed, there were always a few "scientists" happy to take money from the tobacco companies to fund studies that tried to show the opposite. Today it's the oil and petrochemical companies offering to sponsor "scientists" willing to go against the tide of established consensus in the scientific community. What these "scientists" allow their sponsors to achieve in the process is the illusion of a dissenting scientific opinion, which helps sow doubt in the minds of the general public, and encourages inaction.

I'm a scientist myself, but not a climatologist, so I'm no more qualified to pass judgment on the work of researchers who have studied climate change for decades than I am to second-guess the judgment of a neurosurgeon. As a scientist, I have confidence in the peer-review systems that subject extraordinary claims to extraordinary scrutiny. Bad science is exposed on a daily basis this way. As a result, then, when I read that 18 of the most respected names in the field of climatology have achieved agreement about the causal link between man-made carbon dioxide emissions and the exacerbation of the climate change cycle, and that many more will be joining them at the IPCC, I'm inclined to believe them.

And to be clear, what little debate remains is not about climate change itself--there's widespread agreement regarding the historical record of the planet's temperature cycle, from ice age to ice age, and no doubt at all that this is a natural process that predates human activity.

The debate, then, is over the notion that human activity might have done anything to affect the amplitude of that temperature cycle, exaggerating the highs and the lows beyond their cyclical norms. On that front there's quite a lot of available temperature data to use to establish what those cyclical norms have been--everything from tree ring spacings to deep ice core strata lets us establish a baseline going back several ice ages.

What we begin to see in the temperature record, though, is an exaggeration of the normal cycle around the time human beings started large-scale agrarian operations, several thousand years ago. The raising of sheep and cattle in large numbers seems to have been responsible for enough methane production to make a small but significant impact on the temperature cycle [ref]. Certainly as our population grew we only amplified this effect.

But the most striking deviations from the cyclical norms can be found in the late 1800's, coincident with the Industrial Revolution. Since then we've seen the deviations grow ever more steeply, to the point that climatologists worry that the temperature cycle itself may be altered as a result.

Quite apart from this debate about causes, though, is the reality that our climate is changing, and that this is going to have a profound impact on every living creature on the planet. If our activities have been making matters worse, we obviously need to take action to remedy the situation. This is one of those cases where it's far better to be safe than sorry--if we are stressing the planet's climatological stability and we don't take action to halt that process, the consequences are dire for all of us. When the stakes are that high, erring on the side of caution is the only sane course.

In the end, you need to ask yourself about the source of your skepticism, as that will probably be more telling than anything else. It may be a case of "mistrusting the messenger" if you just don't like some of the celebrities that have taken up the message. My advice to a fellow scientist would be to invest your £50 in a subscription to Scientific American, Discover, or any number of more scholarly scientific journals that focus on the field of climatology (e.g. the International Journal of Climatology, the Journal of Climate, the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, etc.). Brush up on the research itself to get your information first-hand, rather than letting an actor or a politician try to sway your opinion with an oversimplified explanation; their hearts are usually in the right place, but in "dumbing down" the details for the masses they invariably leave more detail-oriented thinkers wanting. Fortunately those detail-oriented thinkers have the power to follow the research to the source--it's just a matter of investing the time and effort to do so.

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