In a recent letter to the Independent (Dec 7, Jay Nauss), the writer identified a Climate Commissioner, Professor Lesley Hughes, as a prophet of a secular religious group: Global Warming. I need to respond to such personal attacks on scientific researchers who carry out important work on the impacts of climate change and decide to share their expertise with the wider community.
This assumption that the human-induced climate change is being made up by computer generated models with no justification is quite misleading. Climate change is one of the few issues that has scientific consensus by the researchers who are studying it: there is about 98 per cent consensus by researchers that climate change is happening. This consensus was actually reached decades ago. The 2 per cent deniers are the ones that many shock jocks and outspoken critics rely upon to feed their arguments (whilst they ignore the majority of scientists who work in the research area). It should be noted that the 2 per cent denier researchers are not leaders in the field – in fact far from it. Denialist rarely publish relevant research, if they do publish it’s in low-quality journals, and usually poorer-quality “junk” datasets, if they have any data at all.
Expert credibility in climate change is important. Professor Hughes does have this credibility, recently winning the Australian Ecological Society’s “2011 Australian Ecology Research Award’ which recognises excellence in research in Australian ecology, for a specific body of recent work by a mid-career researcher. Professor Hughes also has at least 39 peer-reviewed publications since 2000. Many of these articles focus on the impacts of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems, an area for which she is an internationally-recognised expert.
Also this idea that models predicting climate change are to be accepted without question is also extremely misleading. The author does not understand how scientific models are developed, utilised or tested. Sophisticated computer-generated weather models are the most used, trusted, and reliable models that humans have developed. These relate to climate models (developed by the same research groups who develop weather models) which are used to predict changes in temperature and rainfall over the coming century. Weather and climate are fundamentally different, but are linked. We all know that there is natural variability in the climate, but increases in carbon dioxide (among other greenhouse gases) are having major changes on this natural variability – increasing average temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and increasing the number of, and length of, extreme events. Sure these types of events have occurred in our geological history, but not over such a short time period (a generation), and not when humans were the dominant species on earth relying on food products from agricultural systems (that have been developed over the last 10,000 years) and complex societies (over the last 250 years) in a relatively stable climatic period.
Will the specifics of the predictions made by models change? – sure! As more data is added, and better ways of producing models are developed, some of the specific predictions will change, but the general idea that major changes will occur above and beyond recent-historical climate variability still stand. In fact the predictive models developed 10 years ago are being shown to be too conservative: climate change is happening faster than what these models predicted. So they are now being refined and more accurate.
Scientists are inherently sceptical people and we are always questioning the science -we conduct experiments to assess our expectations (one of the basic tenets of experimental design) and if a result was found that changed the current paradigm we would be publishing it in the highest ranking international journal and promoting it to the world. Skeptical scientists read and conduct research, and then come up with an informed opinion. Deniers keep to their views, no matter what evidence is put in front of them. The fact that smart scientists are agreeing and reaching consensus, and the top international Academies of Science are also concerned with the impacts human induced climate change, should make the general public sit up and listen, and start acting.
We are living in a changing climate now – the changes are being seen, recoded and assessed. If you do not agree with the current consensus of the experts in the field of climate change research- you are entitled to your opinion of denial. But attempting to discredit or demean such experts’ without actually attempting to understand the science leaves you open to becoming an oxymoron yourself.
Nigel Andrew
