WHAT is it like being a climate scientist at the moment? Not much fun. It鈥檚 a bit like your next-door neighbour being accused of a crime and everyone in the city you live in, including yourself, being told they are under suspicion as well. Accusations about lack of integrity, deceit and bias are flying thick and fast.
To most climate scientists, these accusations seem deeply unfair: mistakes may have been made, but it is wrong to condemn the whole of climate science as incompetent, corrupt or worse.
Do climate scientists have a cause, or a battle to win, as some of our critics seem to imply? I don鈥檛 think so. I am not an environmentalist but rather an environmental scientist. The distinction is crucial: science is about the accumulation of knowledge, not fighting causes.
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Journalists often say that scientists should go on the offensive to win the battle on climate change, but I disagree. The only battle that scientists should try to win is for airtime, to be able to present and debate our knowledge with society at large. We must ensure that this knowledge is available for others 鈥� policy-makers and the public 鈥� to decide what actions to take, but it is not the climate scientists鈥� role to comment on what policy decisions should be taken.
The scientific method is also being questioned. Some say the funders of climate research only support work that sets out to prove that global warming is caused by humans. And peer review, as a means of quality control for proposals and findings, has been criticised as merely a way of giving the nod to those in the clique and keeping out those who are not.
But take a look at the facts. Competition for research funding is fierce. For example, my organisation, the UK鈥檚 Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), supports less than a quarter of proposals submitted to it. And science by its nature is questioning and sceptical. These factors are reflected in the highly critical way in which scientists review each other鈥檚 research proposals, probing and vigorously challenging assumptions. To minimise the potential for group-think or bias among reviewers, we cast the net as widely as possible. Our decision-making panels do not have fixed membership but vary from year to year.
Peer review of research findings is similarly rigorous and sceptical. The system is not perfect, but it鈥檚 the best one we have.
What of the research itself? One way to think of climate science is as an attempt to test the hypothesis that the warming we have observed over the past 50 years and more is caused mainly by greenhouse gases dumped into the atmosphere by humans. This hypothesis was formulated because is has been known since the 19th century that certain gases in the atmosphere warm the climate, and that humans have been adding more of these gases into the atmosphere.
Climate scientists have been trying to find evidence that would disprove this hypothesis for the past 40 years or more. So far they have failed.
We still do not discount the possibility that the hypothesis is wrong. There are other ways in which the climate can warm over such a period of time. This is why scientists are trying to assess the significance of all the ways in which the observed global warming could be occurring. I cannot stress enough that scepticism and challenge of this kind are fundamental aspects of the way that climate science is carried out.
It is incumbent on those who claim that the science is flawed to bring forward a body of peer-reviewed evidence that shows the hypothesis is false. So far they have failed to do so. I don鈥檛 think that it exists.
Of course, our understanding of climate change still has many uncertainties in it, but we鈥檙e not covering them up. 杏吧原创s have made huge advances developing rigorous ways to not only predict how that climate will change, but also to estimate the size of the uncertainty in that prediction. It is not easy to communicate why the uncertainty is there and how big it is, and we have to get much better at that. But research continues to reduce uncertainty, including new NERC programmes on glaciers, ocean circulation and acidification, the water cycle and the role of the biosphere.
Perhaps the most astonishing allegation we face is that climate science is a grand conspiracy of thousands of scientists in many countries. I am absolutely convinced that it is not. I don鈥檛 think you could organise one on this scale amongst scientists, even if you wanted to.
鈥淚 don鈥檛 think you could organise a conspiracy on such a scale, even if you wanted to鈥�
Like it or not, the weight of evidence is such that we must conclude that human activity is almost certainly the cause of the recent global warming. It would be perverse to conclude otherwise.
Climate science will go on. No doubt mistakes will be made along the way; scientists are human beings with failings like anyone else. But society is surely able to factor this into its assessment of climate science without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
