Environmental Group Hits Back at Climate Skeptics

Earlier this week, recognizing that climate science has lost considerable perceptive momentum, New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman called for a time-out. Stop everything, he told the science community, step back, and collect your thoughts. Then, top climate scientists should come together to write a single and concise paper entitled “Here’s What We Know.” At the same time, he suggests, “they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics—and where they get their funding.”

Not a bad idea in order to stop the bleeding. Climate researchers have been wounded with several scandals of late, but they’ve also been the victim of hefty and unabashed hyperbole from their critics, who have argued disingenuously that the recent errors that don’t actually change the fundamental research have in fact been a “game changer.”

So who to take on the task of explaining climate science (or reexplaining, depending on what circles you run in)? As the world’s top scientists assemble themselves, Dan Lashof and Bob Deans at the National Resources Defense Council are out with a primer of what scientists know and, perhaps the more scurrilous question, how they know it. Here are a couple of their bullet points:

• The past decade was the hottest on record. For the years 2000–09, the average global temperature was 57.9 degrees Fahrenheit, about one degree higher than the 20th-century average, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported in January.

• A third of the perennial sea ice has vanished in just 30 years. We've lost an area of sea ice equal to the entire United States east of the Mississippi, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
  

A facty primer, no doubt (and you can read the whole thing here). But none of that gets at the question du jour, which is how big a role humans are playing. Until later on. Lashof and Deans say it’s a big one, and their source for saying so is a government report compiled by the nation’s top science, defense, and diplomatic agencies—NOAA, NASA, the Pentagon, the National Science Foundation, the Department of State (none of which have been marred in scandal)—over the course of two decades, through four presidential administrations. The report, released last summer, found that “global warming over the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases” and that “these emissions come mainly from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) with important contributions from the clearing of forests, agricultural practices, and other activities.”

Pointing out the nonpartisan way at which those claims were arrived at is an effort to play offense again, and hopefully win back credibility for a bruised landscape of scientists accused of bias. None of the data is new, mind you, but the environmentalists are banking that a simple presentation might be the best strategy to finally make it stick.