If climate-change researchers sound alarmist, it's only because they're alarmed

Gerald Butts
Globe and Mail
Wednesday, Feb. 10,

In the Hollywood version of how science influences policy, the brilliant scientist has a eureka moment in the lab and calls the president, who promptly dispatches a square-jawed hero to save the day. In the real world, both science and politics are enormously more complicated.

It is in this real-world context that we must place the imbroglio surrounding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's research. Breathless media claims that the scientific consensus supporting the reality of climate change and its causes has collapsed are simply untrue.

At its heart, the debate centres on the role and process of science in creating a platform for human progress. If anything has been “revealed,†it is the challenge of communicating complex science to a media world that requires scientists to reduce their research to a sound bite.

Let's start with what we know.

Yes, some scientists showed poor judgment in private e-mail exchanges later hacked and made public. Yes, some errors in fact and incomplete citations have been found in the IPCC's 1,000-page reports. That said, even scientists who have criticized the IPCC agree that anthropogenic climate change is both a fact and an urgent threat to the planet.

All independent reviews undertaken so far (by The Associated Press, the University of Michigan and The Economist, for example) agree that none of the stolen e-mails or errors bring into question the science supporting climate change. To conclude otherwise is to misunderstand the process and power of science, and to dismiss the need to draw on the best available evidence and consensus to guide national policies.

Science is not a cold body of facts, but an organized system of inquiry, discovery, evaluation and learning. Science not only welcomes the correction of errors, its key attribute is that it is self-correcting over time. As new research arises, old hypotheses gain or lose support. While this process never stops, generally accepted conclusions do accumulate, based on the overwhelming weight of evidence. The fact and threat of anthropogenic climate change are clearly among those conclusions.

Leading up to the Copenhagen conference, 850 scientists in Canada and 12 professional science societies wrote to Parliament with one voice. Climate-change impact is real, it's appearing faster than forecast and our commitments to avert it are less than we need to succeed. The official national science societies of each G8 country, plus South Africa, Brazil, India, China and Mexico, drew a similar consensus in an open letter to their heads of government.

We pride ourselves at the World Wildlife Fund in being a science-based conservation organization. We have 50 years of global field work behind us and a proven track record of research, policy development and responsible advocacy. Core to our mission is giving voice to threats to biodiversity and the world's natural systems that are brought to light by science. Calling us an “environmental pressure group,†as Margaret Wente recently did, is like calling The Globe and Mail an online political blog. Without such advocacy, science that is vital to our species' long-term prosperity but perhaps counter to our short-term material interest would remain unheard. If the scientists involved sound alarmist, it is only because they are alarmed.

In the process of developing science-based climate-change policy, we should welcome criticism. We will have better science and better policy as a result. For this to be effective, the media should submit criticisms and counterclaims to the same level of scrutiny and scientific rigour to which IPCC scientists are being held – something that has been frankly and deplorably absent.

In the end, this controversy is illuminating not because of what it reveals about the IPCC's research but what it tells us about ourselves. Yale University and Nature magazine recently published a finding that people react to scientific studies based on their own personal values and predispositions rather than on the scientific soundness of the study in question. More simply, we see the world as we want to see it, not as it is. Human-caused climate change challenges us to move beyond this self-centredness in order to make progress for ourselves and the generations that will follow us. It is not how any of us wish to see the world, but it is the nearest thing to a fact that science can provide.

Since we don't have a square-jawed hero to appeal to, you may want to ask your nearest scientist.

Gerald Butts is president and CEO of WWF-Canada.