by Simon Donner

Media coverage of the latest Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has followed the usual Goldilocks and the Three Bears pattern. The report, which focuses on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, is either too soft (too conservative), too hard (overstating impacts, veering into advocacy) or just right.

Which is it? One problem is that every scientist or journalist you ask will have a different answer on the “right” IPCC message and the right next steps for the world. The answer depends a bit on the values of the person making the judgement. If the answer comes from a scientist – a profession with respect in society – the judgement will be seen as objective. Scientists, however, are also human beings! So, like the rest of humanity, our judgements can be influenced by our values.

The question of how scientists can choose their place on this continuum between science and advocacy is the subject of my new essay in Climatic Change.  The concept is straight-forward:

Scientists may be best served viewing science and advocacy as different ends of an approximate continuum. On the science-dominant end, judgements are more objective in nature. As scientists proceed towards the advocacy side of the continuum, personal worldview tends to have a greater influence on those judgements. The scientific uncertainty embedded in those judgements tends to increase, as scientists must draw upon additional models or decision-making processes each of which contain some uncertainty. The professional risk of judgements also increases along the continuum due to the cultural norms of science and the public perception of science as objective.

From there, I write about how scientists can be “scientific” about public engagement — make choices based on the available research on communications, advocacy, perception of scientists, and leakage of “normative” judgements into scientific decisions. My hope is that scientists will think carefully about their personal comfort level, whom they represent (in their eyes, and in the audience’s eyes), and the effectiveness of their chosen position:

The only “wrong” position on the continuum is one assigned by others or chosen without careful reflection.

What about the IPCC? Despite what you may read, the IPCC panels themselves are extremely thoughtful about providing an objective reading of the findings, often spending hours, even days, debating about how individual words will be perceived. This is reflected in the careful language the latest IPCC report uses surrounding the definition of “dangerous” climate change:

Human influence on the climate system is clear. Yet determining whether such influence constitutes “dangerous anthropogenic interference” in the words of Article 2 of the UNFCCC involves both risk assessment and value judgments.

Conservative? Alarmist? You be the judge. That’s the whole point.

“Since the start of the industrial revolution, mankind has been burning fossil fuel (coal, oil, etc.) and adding its carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. In 50 years or so this process, says Director Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, may have a violent effect on the earth’s climate…

Dr. Revelle has not reached the stage of warning against this catastrophe, but he and other geophysicists intend to keep watching and recording. During the International Geophysical Year (1957-58), teams of scientists will take inventory of the earth’s CO2 and observe how it shifts between air and sea. They will try to find out whether the CO2 blanket has been growing thicker, and what the effect has been. When all their data have been studied, they may be able to predict whether man’s factory chimneys and auto exhausts will eventually cause salt water to flow in the streets of New York and London.”

– “One Big Greenhouse“, Time Magazine, May 28, 1956

As part of the International Geophysical year, Revelle’s post-doctoral associate David Keeling established the CO2 monitoring station atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii (photos taken by an embarrassingly excited S. Donner). The now famous Keeling Curve is the longest continuous record of atmospheric CO2 measurements.

Funding for the regular measurements at Mauna Loa has long been an issue. You can now donate directly through a crowd-sourcing program to maintain this incredible record of planetary change.

High tide in Caqelai, Fiji reaches an old table (S. Donner)

by Simon Donner

We have been thinking a lot here about sea level rise, from the effect on tides to the UNESCO heritage sites at risk. If you search the media for the most recent IPCC sea level rise predictions, you’ll read that the 2013 report concluded that sea level was “likely” to increase by 45-82 cm by the “end of the century”. These numbers are misleading for two reasons, as was explained very well in a December letter to Science magazine by the very authors of the IPCC sea level rise chapter. The nuances may be important when making adaptation decisions.

First, what people present as “end of century” from the IPCC is, technically, an average of model-projected values for the year 2081 through the year 2100. Since sea level is expected to be rising rapidly at the end of the century – 8-16 mm/year, up to five times today’s rate – the difference between an average for those last twenty years and the value for actual end of the century is meaningful. The “likely” range for 2100 is actually 52 – 98 cm, not 45-82 cm. Continue reading →

by Simon Donner

“And then also it’s important to remember that the necessary conditions of our lives—those things that seem to us unavoidably to be the case—are not only debated by physicists and philosophers but exist, irrationally, in the minds of the rest of us, beneath contempt intellectually, perhaps, but we still experience them as permanent facts. The climate was one of those facts. We did not think it could change. That is, we always knew we could do a great deal of damage to this planet, but even the most hubristic among us had not imagined we would ever be able to fundamentally change its rhythms and character, just as a child who has screamed all day at her father still does not expect to see him lie down on the kitchen floor and weep. Now, do you think that’ll get me off the hook with my (slightly tiresome and judgmental) future granddaughter? I worry.”

The only problem with Zadie Smith’s beautiful New York Review of Books essay Elegy for a Country’s Seasons is choosing just one passage to quote.  Read the whole thing.