The results of a Gallup poll released this month reveal a conspicuous shift in the US public’s attitude toward global warming, with a greater number of people believing that the seriousness of the issue has been exaggerated. The percentage of respondents who said there are exaggerations went up from 30 percent in 2006 to 41 percent last year and 48 percent this year. This is a cause for concern.
There are many reasons for the shift. In the past, the resistance to the carbon reductions movement came predominantly from two sources. The first were the traditional coal or petroleum-based industries that felt threatened by the movement. The other was poor nations unhappy with the idea that Western countries got rich by pumping out carbon dioxide for a good 100 years, which still remains in the atmosphere to produce warming today, and then try to stifle the poor countries’ development when they also want to come out of poverty.
The public mindset has been swayed by both the recent global recession and the failure to reach an agreement in Copenhagen because of disagreements between the wealthy and poor countries. A more serious problem, however, is the hysteria stirred up by some scientists who have exaggerated the warming issue with unproven or even far-fetched claims. This has proved to be counterproductive, as it hands their opponents firepower to discredit the movement, muddying the waters of the debate.
Several claims in the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth are contentious, but the most problematic was the strong implication of a link between Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which caused such devastating flooding, and global warming. Former US vice president Al Gore was not necessarily to blame for this, because at the time a paper had been published claiming that the hurricanes of that year were 8 percent stronger as a result of global warming.
He did, after all, stop talking about hurricanes after experts of different views brought in by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reached the consensus that there is as of yet no evidence that global warming has any effect on hurricanes. In the run-up to the climate summit in Copenhagen, however, he made a claim that a study conducted by Wieslaw Maslowski, a professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School, predicted that the Arctic sea ice would have almost completely melted by 2014, prompting Maslowski to issue a denial.
Shortly afterwards, several mistakes were discovered in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. For instance, it included a statement that the Himalayan glaciers would melt completely by 2035, which the IPCC had to retract when it was challenged. Even more damning, though, was last year’s “climategate” controversy, the shock waves of which are still rippling to this day. Some of the leaked e-mails were taken out of context to give people the erroneous impression that the scientists involved were tampering with the evidence.
However, the e-mails do show that some were trying to interfere with the scientific peer review process to prevent opposing theories from seeing the light of day.
Global warming activists have been linking warming with changes in land use caused by human activity. This has attracted environmental groups to join the fray, despite the fact that the two issues are not necessarily the same.
US President Barack Obama has identified nuclear power as an effective energy source that can help to implement an immediate reduction in carbon emissions, which has obviously raised the hackles of the anti-nuclear lobby.
Another suggestion has been to develop solar energy in California’s Mojave Desert, but this plan met with opposition by environmental activists as it would mean building power grids through wildlife conservation areas in order to supply coastal cities.
Rising temperatures and sea levels caused by large-scale carbon dioxide emissions pose a real threat to humanity. The actual degree of the threat, and when it will actually become serious, may remain a matter of debate, but it is something that we have to deal with and we must come up with ways to reduce the risks. As with buying insurance, most people are reluctant to cough up the premium before disaster strikes, so it is very important for the risk assessors to gain the public’s trust.
To get the public behind them, scientists have a duty to follow the principle of seeking the truth and say only what they truly know, not just blindly copy what they hear or see, such as linking typhoon floods in Taiwan with global warming. If they don’t, they will lose their credibility and be playing into the hands of the global warming naysayers.
Chang Chih-pei is a distinguished professor of meteorology at the US Naval Postgraduate School and a visiting research chair professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at National Taiwan University. He is also a member of the WMO Working Group on Tropical Meteorology Research and chair of the WMO Monsoon Panel.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
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