September 29, 2010

expert reaction to Royal Society Guide to Climate Science

The Royal Society published a new and comprehensive guide to the science of climate change.

The guide is available to download here.

Prof Alan Thorpe, Chief Executive, Natural Environment Research Council, said:

“The scientific evidence that our climate is changing is widely accepted but there is a real public thirst for more knowledge about this topic. It’s a difficult concept to communicate in ways that are easy to understand but we do need to keep talking to people and make the science accessible, so this summary will be a great help in doing that. It is important to fuel public debate with accurate information about what we do and do not know. And we need to keep investing in the science now to ensure that we are able to deal with the uncertainties of the future.”

Bob Ward, Policy and Communications Director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science, said:

“This excellent new guide from the Royal Society, like its previous documents on climate change, offers an authoritative summary of the current state of knowledge. It is very clear that the weight of evidence indicates that human activities are responsible for much of the warming of the Earth over the past few decades, and that continued climate change poses potentially large and significant risks.

“This document embodies the core mission of the Royal Society, namely the advancement of knowledge through scientific evidence and reasoning. The key question is whether the Fellows of the Royal Society who contributed to this document believe that they can reconcile this core mission with membership of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, which campaigns against climate researchers and promotes inaccurate and misleading information about climate change. For instance, the Foundation displays prominently on its website a graph purporting to show past global temperatures, as recorded by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Yet the graph omits all temperatures prior to 2001, thus hiding the fact that 9 of the ten warmest years since records began in the 19th century have all occurred in the last decade. Furthermore, the graph falsely shows 2009 as less warm than 2006 and 2007.

“At a time when the public and policy-makers deserve robust and reliable information about global warming to help them make sensible decisions, it is essential that Fellows stand up for Royal Society’s core mission and speak out against those who misrepresent the science of climate change for their own political aims.”