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Doomsday Reports on Climate Change - Reliable?
June 20, 2005
Heard too many doomsday reports on climate change lately?
You know, the sort of headlines that the media often reports. Things like."carbon dioxide levels are reaching dangerously high levels", and "global temperatures will rise by 11 degrees in the next ten years".
Certainly, these reports should be taken seriously. Climate change will continue to be a critical issue in the years to come.
However, sometimes these reports may not tell the whole story. This is because climate science is a complex subject. A standard 1000-words newspaper article may not be able to give you an accurate account of a new scientific finding in climate change.
This inadequacy in media coverage thus prompted a group of climate scientists to set up the Real Climate website. One of its founders, Mr Gavin Schmidt tells us more.
GS: We felt that for many of the new studies that come out, related to climate, to global warming, they didn't have any context. So we felt that there was a place for scientists to actually inject a little bit more background, for people who were kind of interested, or journalists who were interested but who really didn't have time to reseach the primary literature or go through the journals or try to really understand what was going on. One of the things that we felt particularly keen to do was to provide a forum where people could point out very quickly when the mainstream media had kind of gotten it wrong; or they jumped to a conclusion; or they've taken a new study and made it seem much more important than it really should be.
Mr Schmidt gave one instance of what he thinks was an unreliable media source.
GS: Its not that the reports themselves are inaccurate. Its that the context and understanding (of) really how important they are, that's missing. There's a new book by Michael Crichton, an extremely well-read author. Michael Crichton has just written a book that is purportedly about the science of global warming. But many of the examples that he's taken are factually inaccurate. And they're just there to confuse and to mislead rather than to inform. And so one of the first things that we had on the site was a critique of the science in that book, which you know, other people have since referred to and said, "Oh yea, that was good. It was good that that came out quickly before the more misleading ideas gain traction in public discussions about climate science.
So has response always been this good so far?
GS: Mostly it has been very positive. We've had a lot of emails and contacts from other scientists in the field, who both offered support and help to do it and have thought, "Yea, this is really something that there was a need for. We've had a lot of good response from the public who said "finally, you know, somebody who's a professional who's willing to discuss these issues on a level that normal people, who are interested in the subject, can understand. This is a wide platform, so I can write something and it will be read by thousands of people. And that's much more efficient than me trying to explain it to everybody i know at a party. There are some people who've been a little more negative but its mainly the people that we've criticised, for not really giving the full story or for cherry-picking their data in order to push a political viewpoint which is kind of divorced from the actual climate science.
And that was Mr Gavin Schmidt, one of the founders of the RealClimate Website, and a scientist from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
- Written and produced by Daphne Koh
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