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With all the buzz around the "climate-gate" controversy, the last several months have been rough for climate scientists and their work. It seems like such a long time ago that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was celebrated for its Nobel Prize-winning work. These same scientists that were heralded for their groundbreaking study are now seeing their most fundamental conclusions questioned.
The truth is, no one with any shred of scientific credibility disputes the fundamental theory of the greenhouse effect; that CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat, warming the planet. And we know that burning fossil fuel is responsible for the spike in CO2 concentrations of CO2 that are now higher than at any time in human history. In broad terms, the correlation between this rise in greenhouse gas concentrations and increasing temperatures is sound science. Where there is less agreement among the scientific community is not around whether or not climate change is real, or whether fossil fuel use it to blame, but around what the impacts of climate change will be and when we will see those impacts.
In this way, climate science is analogous to the study of cancer. We know that cancer is bad, we know many of the things that are likely to cause it, but doctors and scientists cannot fully predict who will get cancer and when. For example, the correlation between smoking and lung cancer is proven, but no one can predict how many cigarettes it takes to cause the disease. Similarly, the inability to confidently predict exactly how climate change will impact our planet does not undermine the fundamental scientific consensus that our planet's climate is indeed warming dangerously, and left unchecked it will fundamentally alter the planet as we know it. Climate skeptics try to exploit the nature of science by questioning small pieces of a much larger body of work in the hopes that they will convince citizens to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and to some degree they have been successful.
The most recent example of this strategy has centered on a peer-reviewed study that predicted sea-level rise over next 100 years. The study predicted a rise in average sea levels of between 7cm and 82cm by 2100. After the study was published, scientists discovered errors with the calculations used to predicted sea-level rise. Those errors were reported to the authors, who concurred with the new findings, and the journal that published the article retracted it. The fact that there were flaws in a model meant to predict the amount of sea-level rise 100 years from now does not impugn the broader consensus that sea levels are rising, it just illustrates how difficult it is to predict with a high degree of certainty the number of centimeters the sea will rise by 2100 based on projected models of a warming planet. But the skeptics would have you believe that if we can't predict sea level rise in 2100, that global warming is a hoax. That's like saying that because doctors can't tell you how many years of smoking will kill you, that lung cancer doesn't exist.
Climate change skeptics hope that if they focus on areas of climate science where there is less certainty, the public and policy makers will question the things we do know with a high degree of certainty; that temperatures are rising, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are approaching dangerous levels, the source of rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is from burning of fossil fuels, and that smoking causes cancer.
To learn more about the science of climate change, check out www.realclimate.org Real science in plain english.
