A balanced view does not reflect the scientific consensus on climate change.
Credit: iStockphoto
MELBOURNE: Airing the views of climate change sceptics in the media may only be serving to keep the global warming controversy boiling, argue scientists.
Leading climate change experts have warned the World Conference of Science Journalists in Melbourne, Australia, that a balanced view does not always reflect the consensus of the research community.
Kevin Hennessy, a lead scientist with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said yesterday that media attention on "the view of a handful of climate change sceptics" amplifies their opinions and "implies that there is little agreement about the basic facts of global warming".
Hennessy is also with the marine and atmospheric division of Australian government research body, CSIRO.
Speaking in a session about climate change reporting, he said editors and journalists have a duty to ensure that facts are presented in context. Balanced reporting, he said, "perpetuates the public's perception that scientists are in disarray, which is misleading in the case of climate change".
Geoff Love, secretary of the IPCC and former deputy director of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, said that IPCC assessment reports from 1990 through to this year are strong evidence of "the coming together of the scientific community."
Emphasis on the sceptic view does not help public understanding of climate change, said Love.
Media coverage has not always reflected the consensus of the majority of the scientific community, said Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation a non-profit environment group. "That only makes the public and political discussion more difficult," he said.
The problem is compounded by a lack of reporting on climate change, according to Chris Mooney, a U.S.-based science journalist attending the conference. Although the 2006 hurricane season attracted a lot of media attention, Mooney presented statistics from the United States showing that climate change has never been a priority in the media.
The situation is similar in Africa, said Ochieng' Ogodoa a Kenyan correspondent for London, U.K.-based news web site SciDev.Net. Articles about deaths caused by floods or other natural disasters, and political scandals related to climate change tend to get precedence, he said.
Learn your physics 101
Skeptics are only skeptic with everything they don't believe in. They consider their talks like the absolute truth. Though, i've read so much technical stupidities in the thread that i would like to remind the casual and open minded reader a few points.
Temperature increase rate is currently a never-seen situation.
CO2 levels are nearly the highest level known.
The extra CO2 is clearly from human activities.
CO2 (or methane or any greenhouse effect gases) does not create warmth.
Greenhouse gases work like a greenhouse. They just work as a mirror for the infrared light bounced back by the Earth. This infrared light should go away in space, but with the "blanket" of gases, these IR are sent back to Earth to heat up. Warmth is not stored in the gas.
These basic facts just say that we are making the blanket thicker, with the obvious (though hardly predictable) effect of storing more energy in the atmosphere/ocean/rock masses system. You don't need an increase in solar output, and if you have one, it's just worse.
This energy will participate in temperature, winds, air humidity, sea currents and certainly many other effects.
Nothing is certain and climatology is a recently very-well-funded science. So don't expect perfection.
When you sum up :
an incredible absence of basic knowledge,
an automatic rejection of any official work while adhering to any contradictory theory,
a curious way of mixing Trotsky and CO2,
you end up with a paranoid, sour vision of the problem with, evidently, no reason to be taken seriously.
You may be right. All this fuss may be way too exagerated. CO2 may not be the biggest culprit. But the way you mix "politics", anti-everything feelings and science just make you look like the ones who thinks US never sent anyone to the Moon... or that Iraq had some WMD.
Climate change
Controversies need to be kept on the boil!
Regarding the IPCC reports.....since when has science been a democratic process? You don't determine the charge on the electron by a show of hands!