By Clive Cookson in San Diego
Published: February 22 2010 01:29 | Last updated: February 22 2010 01:29
Public trust in science as a whole has suffered from recent attacks on climate research, the head of the senior US scientific body admitted at the weekend.
“There is evidence that the corrosion in the public attitude to climate science has spread over to other areas of science,” said Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, citing public opinion surveys in the US and elsewhere.
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, Prof Cicerone and other research leaders said scientists must work to regain public trust by being more open about their findings. “We need to be more transparent and provide more access to our research data,” he said.
In the “climategate” scandal at University of East Anglia in the UK, emails showed researchers at the Climatic Research Unit refusing to release data to sceptics who were critical of their conclusions.
But access requests need to be reasonable, Prof Cicerone said: “Some scientists are receiving requests bordering on harassment.”
Jerry North, a senior climate change scientist at Texas A&M University, agreed. “It seems that vilifying a scientist has become popular entertainment in the US,” he said.
Speakers at the AAAS conference said that neither the allegations of data suppression at UEA nor errors discovered in assessments by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had changed scientists’ minds about global warming.
“For many people who were not close to the science, questions arose about whether the robustness of the underlying science should be called into question,” said James McCarthy of Harvard University, who is chairman of the AAAS.
“Within the scientific community the answer is No,” he said. “If you took all the UEA data out of the package and removed the erroneous IPCC statements, it would not change the underlying science.”
Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration , the federal agency responsible for climate science, said the IPCC “had a wakeup call and is taking steps to address the mistakes that were made and to ensure that they don't happen again.”
“Scientists that are currently working on the next IPCC [assessments] have had very intense, serious discussions about how to improve the process,” she added.
Prof McCarthy was critical of the way the media had joined sceptics in attacking the idea of manmade climate change – as for example when they pointed to this winter’s heavy snow on the US East Coast as evidence that the world was not warming.
In fact the snowfall was consistent with climate change, he said, because global warming meant there was more moisture in the air – and therefore heavier snow – than there would otherwise have been. “What limits snowfall in most parts of the world where it’s cold enough to snow is lack of moisture,” he said.
Prof Cicerone added that cold and snow in one part of the world were balanced by warmth in another – as the current lack of snow for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver is demonstrating.
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