[image courtesy of Daniel Bos]
One of the delights of the internet is that no matter how obscure your interests, you’re likely to find somebody out there with the same interests as you. Whether river dancing, Eastern European gangster movies or plate spinning floats your boat, you’ll have no problem finding someone else out there who’s into it, too. It’s just one of the reasons the internet is so great.
Of course it also means that those with more controversial views can find others with the same beliefs. A view that they may have seemed ludicrous to them when it first popped into their heads suddenly gains extra weight once they find other people with views in line with their own, no matter how extraordinary. Their views are reinforced and soon a mass of ‘believers’ form.
And I can’t help feel that this is what has happened with a lot of climate sceptics. After a couple of experts backtracked on predictions made many years ago about the effects of climate change, many have been quick to call conspiracy.
For instance, this month the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change retracted a claim that the Himalayas’ glaciers will all have melted by 2035. While yesterday New Scientist said the IPCC needs to become more open to criticism because “its closed world of peer review is no longer possible, let alone desirable”.
The sceptics now have their ammunition, and now we have a whole faction hell bent on completely dismissing the idea of human-assisted climate change, despite it being a very real possibility, if not a probability.
Now the responsibility lies with the experts to make sure they don’t make the same mistakes again. They’ll no doubt be eager to make sure they get their facts straight before they release what will now always be heavily scrutinised information.
As the Government’s chief-scientific adviser Professor John Beddington said this week, scientists must be more open with their data and he admitted that recent unreliable statements about climate change have been “unfortunate.”
The key, I believe, for both theorists and sceptics alike is to keep an open mind. Nobody can yet be sure about the true effect human behaviour has on climate change and only assessing new scientific evidence both sensibly and methodically will ensure we really find out the truth in the future.
