Challenging scientific data needs honest reporting

Author: Bille McKibben

Many thanks to The Middlebury Campus for publishing Michael Jou's essay last week "Think about it, global warming does not exist, March, 3" asserting that the theory of global warming is a hoax; it's extremely important to air these kind of views because they are fairly widespread and need to be addressed if we are to have any chance of dealing with this issue. I assume others will address the direct scientific evidence - suffice it for me to say that almost all of it is out-of-date, specious, or both. However, the novelist Michael Crichton does raise an important question in his novel, which I reviewed for Outside Magazine at the time of its publication. Crichton accuses, as does Jou, environmentalists and environmental scientists of intellectual dishonesty - of suppressing contrary information.

This is a serious charge, and it is wrong. I've covered the issue of climate change pretty much from its earliest public discussions, and can say with certainty that scientists have bent over backwards to disprove the theory that the earth is warming. This is how science works - a hypothesis is proposed, and then other research teams go to work trying to knock it down. The early backers of the idea were castigated and ridiculed, but their data was strong enough to carry the day. In the years between about 1989 and 1995, this process of hypothesis-testing was at its most intense. It culminated in the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) - essentially, all the world's climatologists synthesizing all the peer-reviewed journal articles and climate models.

They determined temperatures were rising, and that humans were the cause. Since then the science has continued to confirm this conclusion - indeed, the data even in the last year has made it clear that warming is proceeding far faster than we thought a decade ago.

This IPCC process is a masterpiece of intellectual honesty - of weighing all the data in a neutral atmosphere and coming to conclusions broad enough for policy-makers to act on. Those who wish to challenge it need to be as intellectually honest - which means not cherry-picking a few pieces of data and then alleging a conspiracy.