Scientists to reclaim lost ground on climate change

By Zhu shanshan

While scientists say there is more evidence to support global warming, public awareness of the threat has not risen accordingly, due to the winter’s cold temperatures and the scandals involving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC, an organization under the UN, is set to launch its fifth assessment report on climate change, but the criticism over its fourth assessment released in 2007 has not faded.

That incident concerned hackers who leaked more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents from servers at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Britain, on the eve of the Copenhagen summit. The event was supposed to be the culmination of years of work by scientists to raise awareness about greenhouse gas emissions.

The director of the CRU, Phil Jones, was accused of hiding data involving accurate air temperature measurements in Siberia. The stolen e-mails published on the Internet gave a boost to those who think the issue of global warming is exaggerated, and the credibility of the scientists has declined since the incident.

“This was an attempt, I think, by skeptics to deliver some kind of knock-out punch against evidence for climate change,” said David Concar, Counselor for Climate Change and Energy at the British embassy in Beijing.

“The e-mails were selectively published online and misrepresented,” said David Viner, Program Leader of Climate Change at the British Council, and one of the authors of the IPCC’s fourth assessment on climate change.

“We have a scientific process which is extremely robust and rigorous. The report came before public scrutiny including governments, industries and NGOs,” Viner added.

But, the email controversy dubbed “climategate” by the media was not the end of the story for the IPCC. It was then accused of using material from the World Wildlife Fund based on remarks made by an Indian scientist predicting Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. These claims had never been published in a scientific peer-reviewed journal.

Last week, the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, admitted that case was due to “human failure”, but said the mistake does not change the fact that glaciers are indeed melting.

And the scientific community agrees that global warming is indeed happening and the man-made affects on climate change could be devastating.

The credibility of science was put under the microscope in the incident, but Concar said he still believes that climate change is real and linked to human behavior, and the evidence is so vast that one or two incidents will not blow away the whole conclusion.

“Governments all over, like the British government and the Chinese government, haven’t dropped policies on low-carbon. They are continuing it because the evidence is so considerable and convincing,” Concar said.

Professor Wang Shaowu, climatology Professor at Peking University, also agreed that there is a consensus among scientists about global warming and climate change.

“There are three prominent organizations in the world that monitor climate change — the Climate Research Unit (CRU), the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and NASA. Over the past 30 years, CRU has been the most conservative among the three in predicting global warming. So, even if it hid some data, the trend is correct and the result of the report will not change,” Wang said.

However, concrete evidence does not always make sense to ordinary people.

“Even though there has been too much media coverage of global warming, readers don’t necessarily feel the impact of the warming, and some even say it does not match their personal experience, as the winter was longer and colder than usual,” said Li Daguang, Professor of Science Communication at the Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Li also said that, according to a survey he has been conducting since 1990, public understanding of science in China has declined over the past two decades, and some believe science is not reliable.

“Science is complex and science reporting in the media should not just list facts from experts. It should be linked to the reality and people’s experiences, and readers should be told why global warming occurs and how severe it will be,” said Li.

Having conducted research on climatology for decades, Wang of Peking University pointed out that, while many organizations like the IPCC emphasize the influence of greenhouse gas emissions, he recognizes that natural activities are a factor that cannot be ignored in analyzing climate change.

According to the latest research, solar activities decreased after 1985, but the average temperature of the earth has gone up during that period, Wang said.

“China has witnessed three snow storms in a row since 2008, which I believe is a sign of natural variation. I am not refuting the impact of global warming, but I think both human activities and natural change affect climate change, and can not be separated when analyzing the problem,” he added.

Viner agreed that explaining extremely complex scientific issues to the wider public is not an easy task, and scientists should learn to communicate more effectively.

“We have to listen and learn all the time, and involve in a manner that meets the needs of society across the world,” Pachauri summarized in the review panel on IPCC’s fourth assessment.