Climate Change and Climate Gate - Research Paper Example

Climate change is perhaps the most contentious scientific and political issue of the new millennium. For nearly thirty years now, the international community has been struggling to establish several very basic facts about global climate change. Scientists have been gathering and analyzing a host of data sets to determine if the earth is indeed heating up, as some claim. They are attempting to discover the rate of warming and the effects this warming may have on the macro and microclimatic systems of the earth. Perhaps most significantly, scientists are trying to discover the cause of earth’s changing climate (if indeed it really is changing). This last fact is the real sticking point for many in the scientific and political communities. If global warming is truly caused by anthropogenic activity, then this will lay the cause firmly at the feet of humanity. This will also place the impetus on humans to make the necessary changes that will slow and eventually reverse the warming that has occurred. If on the other hand, the root cause of the warming is a natural variation in earth’s ever-changing climate, then it is the duty of humans to keep on doing what we do while inventing technologies that can cope with the changes caused by a changing climate. There are two realities that make answering these basic questions about climate change very challenging for scientists and politicians. The first reality is that establishing causality in a scientific manner requires experimentation, often in a laboratory setting. The global climate is a strikingly complex system with a vast array of inputs, energy transfers and feedback loops, both positive and negative. It is a wonderfully dynamic system that does not lend itself well to experimentation in the lab. The closest thing climatologists have been able to construct is computer modeling programs that seek to simulate the interaction between all the elements that contribute to the global climate. It is not an easy task. Dependence on climate data and serious programming skills must be brought to bear in order to create the most simple climate simulation models. Nearly all of the predictions about the effects of a warming global environment are derived from these computer models. The second reality that makes answering these questions very difficult is economic. Changing the way we do business, the way we get energy and the way we travel is going to cost someone lots of money. Actually, changing these things is going to cost all of us some money right away. But the biggest losers will certainly be the producers of items that are identified as adding the most to the warming climate. These businesses will surely need to restructure in order to stay viable. Shareholders will see lower dividends and CEO’s might see their bonuses shrink, but probably not. What is sure to happen is a fundamental shift in how our economy operates. But that is only going to happen if someone proves that people are causing the warming. The greatest asset these multinational corporations have going for them at this time is doubt. If they can hire enough scientists to point out that anthropogenic emissions have not been proven to cause global warming, then the public and the politicians that represent them can argue that business as usual is probably the best course of action. Why make painful changes if you don’t have to, right? On the legislative front, politicians flush with campaign money offered by these businesses will surely quash proposed regulation on there benefactors. If it can’t be proven by science, then it must not be true. If anthropogenic global warming doesn’t really exist, then no costly changes are necessary. In a sense, this truly is a modern clash of titans. Science (with a capital S) verses the combined forces of Business and Politics. Little wonder that global climate change is such a contentious issue. The scientific community feels that questioning reality of climate change is akin to questioning other scientific laws or theories such as gravity or evolution. Climate change is real and scientists have the data to prove it. Ice core sampling indicates that fluctuations in the amount of different oxygen isotopes show a changing climate. Paleoclimatologists add to their box of tricks everything from studying dendrochronology (Critchfield 1983) to silt deposits at the mouths of rivers to try to tell how much the earth’s climate has changed over the millennia. And the reality is, they have learned a lot about how climate changes. Scientists can now see that there is some correlation between variations in the axial tilt, precessions and orbital eccentricity of the earth and various paleoclimatic events such as ice ages. These cyclical occurrences are known as the Milankovitch Cycles (Roberts 1995). They are just one idea about why the earth’s climate changes ever so slowly. Solar flairs, cycles of volcanism and the impact of meteorites have also been studies as possible agents of climatic change. What needs to be stressed is the fact that proving any of these theories requires a vast amount of cooperation between professionals in many different scientific fields. Data collection and analysis is at the very heart of the whole endeavor. The body of data collected regarding paleoclimatic change is held up as a standard by which we should compare more recent changes in earth’s climate. It is, in effect, the best baseline we have by which we can compare our current climate fluctuations. Elementary school children call over the world can explain what causes earth’s climate to change. By age twelve, most children can talk a classmate or a longsuffering adult through the rudiments of the carbon cycle. Their explanation might go something like this. We understand that earth’s atmosphere is made-up mostly of nitrogen and oxygen. There are other gasses that are held close to the earth by gravity as well. One of these gasses is carbon dioxide. The atmosphere keeps things alive by providing oxygen for animals and people. But the other gasses are important as well. Carbon dioxide is known as a greenhouse gas. These gasses help to keep the earth warm, just like a greenhouse helps keep blooming flowers warm in the middle of winter. They trap the heat that reaches the earth and tries to bounce back into space. In this way, they act like a blanket covering the earth. The problem with greenhouse gasses is the more that enter the atmosphere, the more heat gets trapped (Watt & Wilson 1992). More heat under the blanket may sound nice on a cold winter night, but it is bad for the earth. The polar ice will melt, sea levels will rise, ocean currents will change and climate patterns will shift. This will affect the flora and fauna on all of the continents, but most especially in the northern hemisphere. Extinctions will occur, disrupting fragile food webs. In essence, climate change caused by putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a very, vary bad thing. But how bad can it be if it has been happening for so long? The Milankovich Cycles work because the aspect of solar energy entering the atmosphere changes slowly over time. They have been happening for million of years and earth is still here. Warmer temperatures may sound great to people living in Moscow. And besides, what can we really do about meteors, volcanoes and Milankovich Cycles anyway? Changing the tilt of the earth’s axis or defending the world against meteors is still pretty futuristic stuff. This is where the real argument surrounding climate change, data collection, scandal and regulation begins. Scientists recognize that all of these agents of climate change are active today and have been active in the past. The difference with today’s climate change, however, is the fact that a new source of greenhouse gas has been introduced that did not exist as little as 150 years ago (quite a short amount of time where paloeclimatology is concerned). That source is us, Homo sapiens. Scientists believe that our current warming trend is caused by anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses such as methane into the atmosphere. They point to the massive amounts of carbon dioxide introduced to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Many human activities, such as farming, have been introducing small amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmospheric mix for many years, but it is the industrial revolution that harnessed the manufacturing potential of coal and crude oil that really started the emissions flowing. Refining crude oil into gasoline and diesel for transportation and the burning of coal to generate electricity introduce vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This, climate scientists are certain, is the source of our changing climate today, not volcanic eruptions, meteorites or Milankovitch Cycles. Data drives these claims. Climate data is gathered at weather stations around the world each day. This vast network of collection points provides information on many meteorological activities such a precipitation amounts and temperature readings. The collection points can be found in urban, suburban and rural settings. Some are located in extreme regions such as the arctic or far out at sea on buoys. These data are the heart and soul of the scientific claim that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and methane are causing earth’s climate to change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988. It was organized under the auspices of the Environmental Program of the United Nation in conjunction with the World Meteorological Organization. The IPCC is a group of scientists that volunteer their time to serve on the panel. They are charged with sorting through the many studies on climate, both those that support anthropogenic induced climate change and those that are skeptical of the claims made by other scientists. After their thorough review of raw data and published journal articles, they author what are referred to as Assessment Reports. These reports are to be published frequently and must have the objective of synthesizing the many studies into one publication that gives a “state-of-the-climate” and a “state of climate research” assessment. The first report was published in 1990, with others following in 1995, 2001 and 2007. The language in each report has become more strident in identifying anthropogenic sources as the cause of most global warming that has occurred over the past 50 years. Some of the claims in the 2007 Assessment Report have been openly challenged by other mainstream academics (Rosenthal 2010), not just the usual host of skeptics that will never have anything reasonable to say about any of the IPCC’s findings. Even before there was any hint of scandal associated with the IPCC, the thoroughness of their peer-review mechanism was brought into question, as was their apparent use of unpublished and non-peer reviewed sources to offer support for their assertions. This increasing emphasis on the surety of anthropogenicaly induced climate change has made the IPCC the target of many skeptical scientists and politicians. This is perhaps unfortunate, because the directives given to the IPCC clearly state that they do not advice or advocate for policy to address climate change. They simply provide a synthesis of the best possible science available so that governments can act as they see fit. It all sounds very neat, sterile and scientific. The IPCC would not wade into the murky waters of politics. The work of the organization would be, “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive (IPCC 2010).” Unfortunately for the IPCC, they would soon be dragged into the cesspool of politics thanks to the efforts of an anonymous hacker. The scandal that has become known as “climategate” begins when e-mails between prominent climatologists Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglica University in Great Britain, and Michael Mann of Penn State University in America. Other prominent individuals studying climate change had their communication with Phil Jones stolen too. While the whole affair with the stolen e-mails is decidedly sordid, none of the individuals involved have disavowed the content of the stolen e-mails (Derbyshire 2010). In them, Phil Jones is apparently involved in some tricky business when it comes to manipulation of data, ethical use of his influence towards opposing colleagues and a general lack of transparency. Phil Jones is caught time and time again referring to ways data can be truncated to eliminate apparent cooling trends or how it can be “tricked” in order to make the data appear to show what he wants it to show. He suggests in one e-mail at professors organize a boycott against a professional journal that had been giving more and more space to scientists with dissenting views about recent warming trends. He suggested they no longer offer to review the work of peers headed towards the journal and that they no longer submit their articles there. Jones and is being investigated by his university for ethical violations. He has also appeared before the British House of Commons to be questioned on the content of the e-mails and the fact that he may have been making misleading statements to the public. Jones has stepped aside as director of the Climate Research Unit until the investigation is over. Mann has been investigated by Penn State and cleared of three of four counts against him. The fourth count, conducting research outside the accepted norms of his scientific specialty, will be addressed later by a group of his peers (Potter 2010). Speaking on November 29th of last year, just days after the hacking incident, the Chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri stated that he felt that even if a few scientists did alter studies, there is no way it could alter the advice given by the IPCC (Randerson 2009)(Kintisch 2010). He suggested that the public would understand the incredible amount of peer-reviewed research that was synthesized to create each Assessment Report. He did not feel that this apparent scandal would alter the credibility of the IPCC. While I understand the assertion made by Mr. Pachauri concerning the preponderance of peer-reviewed, checked and rechecked article writing in the Assessment Report, I can’t help but feel that his response is wonderfully naïve. Data is the heart and soul of the IPCC. The insinuation that data have been manipulated and truncated, not to see what they tell us about climate change but to conform to a presupposed idea is incredibly damaging to the IPCC as an independent body of scientists. The IPCC is currently soliciting authors to begin work on the fifth Assessment Report. In order to reestablish the IPCC’s reputation as an unbiased body of scientists, some damage control will need to take place first. The first thing the IPCC needs to do is to clean up the data. Working with climate data is a messy endeavor. There hasn’t been a universal standard for collection and recording procedures. A working group needs to be formed that will focus solely on data standardization. This will enable the second action to take place, which is greater transparency of data and results of analysis. Perhaps one of the most damaging revelations to come from climategate is the willingness of scientists to apparently disregard, ignore or repress results that did not support their thesis. Transparency protocols and analysis of all results will be a step in the right direction for the IPCC. Climategate will be a tool used for many years to come by climate change skeptics. Until the data are standardized and analyzed in a transparent fashion, the accusation that claims of climate change are nothing more than a huge conspiracy by the scientific community will be given more and more credence. Reference List Critchfield,H., 1983. General climatology. 4th ed. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Derbyshire,D., 2010. News: Head of ‘climategate’ unit admits to sending ‘pretty awful e-mails’ to hide data . Daily Mail Online, [internet] 2 March. Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1254660/Climategate-professor-Phil-Jones-admits-sending-pretty-awful-emails.html [Accessed 12 March 2010]. IPCC. 2010. Intergovernmental panel on climate change: Organization. Online] (Updated 1 Jan 2010) Available at: http://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization.htm [Accessed 5 March 2010]. Kintisch, E. 2010. IPCC/climategate criticism round-up (Science Insider Article). [Online] (Updated 15 February 2010) Available at: http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/02/an-overview-of-ipccclimategate-criticism.html [Accessed 9 March 2010]. Potter,N., 2010. Blog: “Climategate:” Penn State mostly lets researcher Michael Mann off the hook. abcNEWS Online, [internet] 3 February. Available at: http://blogs.abcnews.com/scienceandsociety /2010/02/climategate-penn-state-mostly-lets-researcher-michael-mann-off-the-hook.html [Accessed 9 March 2010]. Randerson,J., 2009. Environment: Leaked e-mails won’t hurt climate body, says chairman. Guardian Online, [internet] 27 November. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009 /nov/29/ipcc-climate-change-leaked-emails [Accessed 10 March 2010]. Roberts,N., 1995. The changing global climate. Cambridge (MA): Blackwell Publishers. Rosenthal,E. 2010. Environment: Skeptics find fault with U.N. climate panel. New York Times Online, [internet] 8 February. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/earth/09climate. html?ref=earth [Accessed 15 March 2010]. Watt,F. & Wilson,F., 1992. Weather and climate. Saffron Hill, London: Usborne Press. Read More