The Conversation - Michael Grubb
 |
rawpixel.com / shutterstock
|
Science is slow. It rests on painstaking research with accumulating
evidence. This makes for an inherently uneasy relationship with the
modern media age, especially once issues are politicised. The
interaction between politics and media can be toxic for science, and
climate change is a prominent example.
Take the recent “deep freeze” along the US east coast. To scientists,
it was one more piece of a larger jigsaw of climate change disrupting
weather systems and circulation patterns. This includes dramatic changes
seen in Arctic sea ice and the
knock-on effect on temperatures elsewhere in northern latitudes – both warming and relative cooling. To President Donald Trump the cold snap was a chance to
mock climate change, and some sceptics suddenly talked about an impending ice age.
Colleagues and I experienced similar frustrations in late 2017, after we published a paper in the scientific journal
Nature Geoscience,
in which we concluded that there was more headroom than many had
assumed before we breach the goals of the Paris Agreement. We found
ourselves not only on the front page of the main British newspapers, but
globally, as far-right website
Breitbart
ran with a story that a small band of buccaneering scientists had
finally admitted that the models were all wrong – a fiction rapidly
picked up by the
more rabid elements in the media.
The essence of good science is to continually update, challenge,
improve and refine, using as much evidence as possible. Single events
rarely make for good science. And if every painstaking evaluation,
updating work from years ago, may be portrayed as demolishing everything
that went before – particularly at the whim of non-scientific agendas –
then we have a major dilemma. The edifice of science is built with
small bricks and this research was no exception.
We emphatically did not show that climate change was “
less bad” or “
happening slower”
than previously thought. Our work built on the many previous scientific
studies that had looked at the risks of unchecked emissions and the
prospects for limiting warming to 2℃ above pre-industrial levels. The
Paris Agreement went further, aiming to “pursue efforts” towards a more
ambitious goal of just 1.5℃. Given we’re already at
around 1℃ of warming, that’s a relatively short-term goal. Greater ambition therefore requires greater precision.
 |
|
Ten more years of this? Or 20?
kamilpetran / shutterstock |
Our study took a microscope to that question. Where
previous estimates
were drawn from a range of mostly long-run models that looked at
century-long changes, we instead focused on a precise definition and
current starting point, and other factors which matter far less in the
long term, but a lot if the goal is much closer.
Some of the earlier estimates seemed to imply a “headroom to 1.5℃” of
less than a decade of current emissions – clearly unachievable given
the long timespans and huge inertia. We estimated about 20 years –
equivalent to global CO₂ emissions falling steadily from now until
hitting zero in around 40 years – and made it plain that it still looks,
to put it mildly, a formidable ambition.
Other studies have since come to similar conclusions.
A (non-)story of revolution
The more detailed reporting by those correspondents who attended the scientific briefing was accurate enough (
even if some of their headlines and lead-ins weren’t),
but that was soon lost in the misrepresentations that followed.
Doubtless we could have done more to explain how our conclusions arose
from what were actually quite minor scientific developments. Some
instead turned it into a story of revolution in climate science.
Scientists are also human, and these sceptic reactions reinforced a
natural initial inclination among other researchers to defend their
previous numbers. Some
took to Twitter to do so, but themselves seemed to confuse the media headlines with our actual conclusions.
Some challenges could yet be proved right. There could, for example,
be more pent-up warming currently being masked by other pollutants or
already lurking in the oceans. When the goal is close, other
heat-trapping emissions (like methane) also matter a lot more. Our study
– like earlier work – had its share of caveats and uncertainties.
 |
|
There may be even more heat lurking in the oceans.
Maksimilian/shutterstock |
Unfortunately, while good science embraces uncertainty, politics
abhors it and the media seems confounded by it. That in turn pressures
researchers to simplify their message, and treat existing estimates –
often, from a range – like a position to be defended. It is a risky trap
for scientists, however eminent and well-intentioned, to wield
overnight reactions to parry months of painstaking peer review and
refinement that lie behind analyses published in leading journals.
Science against spin
So how should science respond? The climate policy implications are
easy: nothing significant has changed. We have but one planet, and both
the physical and economic processes that are driving climate change have
enormous inertia. If a big ocean liner were steaming into dense fog in
polar seas, only a fool would maintain full speed on the basis that the
technicians were still discussing the distance to the first big iceberg.
One underlying challenge is indeed around the communication of
uncertainty. This is a well-worn track, but it bears repeating. The job
of science is not just to narrow uncertainties, but to educate about the
risks that flow logically from it. Like a medical prognosis from
smoking, the fact that things might turn out better or worse than the
average is not a good reason to keep puffing. You won’t know until it is
too late whether the damage has been slight, or terminal.
But science also needs to embrace and embed another obvious feature
of medical practice: a doctor would never look at just your temperature
to diagnose your condition. So part of the problem stems from using a
single indicator for complex processes. Too much debate treats
temperature (and especially the most recent global average) as the sole
indicator, whereas many other factors are at play including sea levels,
ocean acidity, ice sheets, ecosystem trends, and many more.
These other trends need to be reported in context, just as economics
news reports not only GDP but debt, employment, inflation, productivity
and a host of other indicators. And scientists themselves need to
improve the art of communication in a world where research can be spun,
within hours, into a story of past failure, rather than the reality of
continuous improvement.
Links
