Coming to terms with climate change
(Photo: Shutterstock)Only very occasionally do scientific discoveries evoke such a dramatic – and emotive – public and political response as that elicited by the last decades’ research documenting global climate change and identifying human activities as its likely primary cause. Probably the last time such a debate occurred was when Darwin published The Origin of Species.
By Katherine Richardson Christensen
There is an important similarity between the presentation of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the discovery of human influence on climate change: Both advancements in scientific understanding challenge the contemporary human ‘self-identity’. In the case of evolution, the reluctance of society to embrace Darwin’s work had its roots in an unwillingness to accept the idea that humans were ‘just another species’. In the case of climate change, many people find it hard to accept that our species really is powerful enough to alter the course of something as mighty as the planet Earth.
A recent study in the United States actually indicated that a smaller percentage of Americans believe that humans have a role in climate change than was the case a few years ago. One of the reasons for this may be that 2008 was a relatively cold year and newspaper headlines have abounded in 2009 suggesting that 2008 temperatures may signal a global ‘cooling’ or, at the very least, can be taken as evidence that climate scientists present a very uncertain case for global warming.
Such headlines merely underscore the fact that few non-specialists understand what the climate system is and how it works. Humans experience climate through the part of the atmosphere that touches the Earth’s surface. Therefore, we (wrongly) assume that changes in surface atmosphere temperature reflect changes in the climate system as a whole.
In fact, the climate we experience is a function of the amount of energy stored as heat and the redistribution of this heat on the planet. Only a very small amount (less than 5 percent) of the heat stored on Earth is found in the surface atmosphere. In contrast, about 85% of it is stored in the ocean. Thus, temperature changes in the ocean are a more robust indicator of change in the climate system than changes in air temperature. One of the more worrying scientific results that has emerged since the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report is that temperatures in the upper ocean (700m) are increasing about 50 percent faster than was previously thought and an increasing trend in ocean temperature has been recorded since the mid-1970s. Thus, the fact that global air temperature was lower in 2008 than in the immediately preceding years does not give climate scientists reason to doubt their understanding of the climate system or global warming!
It is, of course, true that not all scientists agree on the role of human activities in causing climate change. However, 100 percent agreement among scientists is almost never achieved. Doubt is an indication of a healthy scientific process: Science only advances as long as we continue to ask questions. Most studies show that well over 90 percent of scientists from relevant disciplines find the scientific facts convincing and believe that human activities are influencing the global climate. The chances that this vast majority of climate scientists is wrong are very small indeed.
Katherine Richardson Christensen is a Vice Dean at the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen and a professor in biological oceanography. She was chairman of a large scientific congress “Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions” held as a part of the preparations for the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen from 10-12 March 2009.
The article is from The Courier of UNESCO number 2009-10, edited by the Danish journalist Niels Boel.
Perhaps you should consider “Luminiferous Ether” of the 19th century. Scientist working on wave theory of light took for granted that there had to be a medium for propagation of lightwaves.
My point is that “A lot of very smart people, can be wrong”.
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AGW has been sold to us like a house lot in a swamp, instead of simply doing the science and proving it with antagonistic peer review.
It fails the smell test; it looks like propaganda, it’s presented like propaganda, it’s supported by protests, sneers, denigration and group-think like propaganda. That’s why thinking people are leery of the theory, not because of what the silly newspapers say.
Do the work, submit the work to public review, and I mean all comers, especially the people you don’t like, and we’ll see then.
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