Conflicting Claims About Environmental Problems: A Primer For Non-Scientists – Part 1
August 20, 2008
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine. This is part 1 of 2. Part 1 appeared here.
Recently in an adult Sunday school class at my church, when asked what barriers they experience to being better stewards, parishioners expressed frustration that environmental problems are driven by media hype. They were concerned that they were unable to discern hype from truth. Here I’ll describe how you can “read the landscape” of an environmental claim without necessarily understanding the science. I will use global warming as an example and compare it to other contentious environmental issues from the recent past. This article will be limited to how you can know what most scientists think, even when one side claims general consensus and the other claims dissension. I will also provide some general advice on understanding science in the media.
Reading the Landscape
In my observation, most scientists are convinced that . . .
A) global climate change is real
B) that it is at least significantly human-caused,
C) that it will result in significant negative consequences for much of the globe.
However, some people in the scientific community are still skeptical of global warming. The names of these science skeptics come up repeatedly on the Internet and in the media. In spite of these dissenters, you can understand the general opinion of scientists by listening to premier scientific groups, reading key documents by professional and scientific groups, and considering the trajectory of the discussion.
Premier ScientificGroups
The evidence for global warming is best summarized in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2001a,b,c,d, 2007). The IPCC
represents the research of thousands of scientists around the world. They concluded that other, natural factors like solar cycles, volcanoes, and changes in the
earth’s orbit do affect climate, but are not likely to fully account for the variability we are currently seeing.
In the United States, The National Academy of Sciences represents the top scientists in the country. In the last 15 years the NAS has had panels of experts (called National Research Council panels) produce at least fifteen reports on global climate change, many trying to solve some of the scientific questions raised by climate skeptics, and to reconcile different analyses of scientific data in order to detect a trend or anticipate the results of climate change. In the earliest studies, the NAS/NRC reports (NAS 1975) concluded that we did not know enough to conclude anything. Later reports have revised our certainty upward as climate models have gotten better and as we have gotten more data. Now, in spite of some limited dissension, the majority of these top scientists believe that the evidence for human-induced climate change is compelling. The conclusions of these top scientists are that global warming is real and that a significant amount of it is human-caused (NAS 2001a). National Research Council Reports are available on the web and are written for an educated layperson, not a scientist in a particular field.
Key Documents
On June 7, 2005, The National Academies of eleven countries (the G8 countries as well as Brazil, China, and India) issued a joint statement that climate change
is real and human-caused, and that it should be the subject of efforts at a solution (NAS 2005). Most recently, in Europe on Feb 2, 2007, the IPCC released its newest report on climate change (IPCC 2007). It was the executive summary of a longer, more detailed report that came out in stages throughout the rest of the year. It states the current scientific consensus: that global warming is more than 90% likely to be happening and to be human-caused.
Other scientific groups, including the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, have also issued statements arguing that human-caused global climate change is real. These statements have to be voted on by their organizations’ membership, and consequently represent the opinions of large groups of scientists.
These scientists recognize that there are other, natural factors that may account for some amount of climate change. Nonetheless, the human-induced effects are added on top of natural forces, and may increase the rate of adaptation required by natural systems.
The Trajectory of the Discussion
Dissenting voices—such as that of Richard Lindzen, a scientist at MIT and member of the National Academy of Sciences (Lindzen 2006)—exist even among the premier IPCC working groups. However in the last several decades, as more work has been done, the data has become more, not less, clear. More scientists have
become convinced of human-made global climate change, and fewer remain skeptics. This is what you expect to happen with new scientific information. While mistaken or even bogus science (like cold fusion) can sometimes be published, the peer-review process causes such science to be heavily criticized. In the case of global warming, there is increasing certainty in climate reports, an increasing number of lines of evidence, and a decreasing number of people who disagree.
For example, a recent paper in Science (Rahmstorf et al 2007) suggested that the climate models used to make projections are more accurate than skeptics claimed and in fact have underestimated climate change. The paper revealed new findings that temperatures are rising more rapidly and sea level changes are more rapid than climate models had predicted, laying to rest criticisms that earlier IPCC models had overblown risks.
How doesthiscompare?
Compare this to other environmental controversies. If you hear, for example, that global warming seems unlikely because scientists in the 1970s thought an ice age was coming and they were wrong, this is a misrepresentation of history. There were two main papers in which scientists either a) predicted an ice age in 20,000 years (Hays et al 1976) or b) discussed the impact of aerosols and carbon dioxide on climate change without making a prediction about the future climate (Rasool and Schneider 1975). There were only a few other papers on cooling in the scientific literature, but several predicting anthropogenic warming (Connelly 2005). A popular book was published on the subject (Ponte 1975), and the topic was picked up by the media. But the authors of the scientific papers did not make claims of imminent global change, and in 1975 a National Research Council report said there was not enough information to conclude anything on the future of the world’s climate (NRC 1975). The 1970s ice age scare was a short-term phenomenon in the popular press, hyped by non-scientists, that went away quickly and did not involve the majority opinion of climate scientists.
In contrast, the global warming discussion has had a similar trajectory to the discussions over three significant environmental problems of the past: the dangers of tobacco smoke, the pollution of lakes resulting from phosphates, and the depletion of the ozone layer by CFC pollution (Masters 2007). In each case, we had a vigorous scientific and public debate. In each case there was increasing evidence of a problem, early media hype that exaggerated the known science, skeptics who reacted against that hype, new science, a gradual agreement in the scientific community, strong business pressure not to find a problem, and hold-out skeptics. But in each case eventually nearly everyone agreed that the problem was real and warranted action.
Seeing the trajectory of the discussion and key documents from scientific groups and premier statements gives us an idea of how to “read” this new environmental problem.
The big environmental problems—acid rain, lead and mercury, PCBs, dioxin pollution, ozone depletion, and tobacco smoke—have staying power and have remained concerns for decades. Global warming is in this group.
This is part 1 of 2. Part 1 appeared here.
Dr. Dorothy Boorse is an aquatic ecologist and Biology Department faculty member at Gordon College in Wenham, MA. She is one voice in the christian environmental stewardship movement and lives with her husband and two sons in Beverly, MA.
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[...] This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine. This is part 2 of 2. Part 1 appears here. [...]
This is a great article. I write a lot about environmental issues on my blog (I go to GCTS by the way) as a follower of Christ but I have always steered clear of the climate change debate. I’m increasingly convinced that it is real and this article helps to clarify that reality. However, since it is still ambiguous in many people’s minds, I simply choose to focus on those things that I can do to create a better environment even if global warming wasn’t caused by humans. I think it’s important to let people know all the reasons to make better choices IN ADDITION to the scientific reasons. Even if global warming wasn’t happening, there are still reasons to invest in cleaner fuel alternatives and “reduce, reuse, recycle” etc. While a lot of people have their heads in the sand about global warming, I’m trying to blog about becoming more environmentally responsible for all the other reasons. That said, posts like yours are extremely helpful in getting people to be aware of the action that needs to be taken for our future. Thanks a lot.