Post 3. A Whole Load of Hot Air

Climate Change. Is it something to worry about?

This article is about the report ran in 2007 by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Apparently, 3 years after its release, someone, somewhere has decided that there's some dodgy or incorrectly cited information stating that by 2035, the Himalayan glaciers will have completely melted away. Now this topic has really got me going.

There are two clear cut, completely separate issues here, and I think they have both been mixed up by every journalist, news reporter and his dog. So allow me to clarify the situation for you as I see it.

As stated above, the IPCC issued a 3000 page report threatening some alarming consequences to our current lifestyles. The pro-Earth lot are all saying the end is nigh, we must all act now. Whereas the skeptics have found somewhere within this massive report some dodgily sourced data to back up some pretty extreme eventualities and have challenged the reliability of the data.

Like I said above, there are two different aspects to this and they both seem to have been confused somewhere along the line:

• 1. Good scientific practice and research,

• 2. All established ideas on climate change.

Firstly, let me acquaint you with the way the scientific community works and builds up their understanding of everything. 

• You start with what you already know

The convention is that every bit of knowledge and understanding we have is built upon knowledge we already had. Any scientific work has to be examined by the relevant community (ie. the Geological Society), they then either accept this work and buy into your hypothesis. This then turns into a theory. Theories are widely accepted as a possible cause for something and can then be used as a basis for more research, to which more hypotheses become theories. It's sort of like a tree, you start from one point and you branch out until you understand everything. That make sense?

•  Any assumptions you make must come from previous work

What happens when you're doing any research is you're either testing existing theories against your own data or testing your data to see if it fits the theory. Any models you use must come from existing theory. For example, there is an accepted paper stating "all dry valleys with no evidence of river action are glacial". If you then find an exception to this, you have disproved the theory. Or you could collect loads of data and find that actually, this model is correct, in which case, you have clarified the process which created your particular valley. Do you still follow?


As for the report by the IPCC, it seems that somewhere along the line there has been some second hand data that they've used which was not published or recognized. The result is that the skeptics have picked up on this, using it to bring the IPCC into disrepute. What the media have done is confused this small piece of bad science with the wider issue of whether climate change is actually happening. We need to bare in mind that all previous studies (and for that matter, the majority of the IPCC report) have been based on well grounded, unbiased science and been conducted in the appropriate manner.


So according to all the accepted research, global warming is happening. Just because someone took a careless shortcut in one report doesn't falsify everything that came before it and shouldn't change the public's opinion on the issue.


The hypocrisy of it all is what gets me. When was the last time you saw a newspaper correctly cite and reference every "fact" they published? How often do we just take what is written or said in the media as fact? Let's face it, the newspapers will drag up any old rubbish (accepted or not) if it will make a story to sell newspapers.

The issue here isn't whether climate change is happening, because science is telling us that it is. The issue is that the media (who never tell you where they get their facts from, anyway), tells us they don't quite believe the science. I know who I'd rather believe!


That makes me feel far better. Thanks for reading my first article on a really hot topic!