Nice summary of how science works. The problem is a vast majority of folk wouldn’t understand your article or indeed the layman’s version. Hence they go with popular media which is full of bias, opinion and misinformation. Using the scientific consensus to fight against such is always going to be an uphill battle.
But science marches on, with growing amounts of data and evidence, particularly in the climate field, which helps us adjust and refine our understanding. The good news is, most of the world is responding, albeit slower than we really need.
Great post, Andrew. One thing worth adding: the timescales work in our favor for the predictions you describe — the stratosphere/troposphere prediction made in 1967, verified 20 years later. The Arctic-warming-faster prediction from the 1970s, confirmed within a few decades. Most of science gets to operate this way. Theory, experiment, verification, refinement, all within a working scientist’s career.
The harder communication problem is that the most consequential predictions about climate operate on timescales much longer than a scientist’s career — or any policy horizon. The CO₂ we add this decade is still warming the planet a thousand years from now. The sea level commitment from the warming we have already locked in will play out over centuries to millennia. These are physical predictions as solid as the ones you describe, but they will not be confirmed within any living scientist’s career, and they will not be confirmed within any voter’s political horizon. That is the experiment we are running, and it is the part of the science that the public conversation has the hardest time holding onto.
You note one example of how the scientific conclusions in the ARs have changed from one AR to the next. The good news is that climate science is making rapid progress. In fact it is changing so rapidly that the IPCC has to produce a new AR every 7 years or so to keep up with the changes. That means a lot of climate science is not settled - it is a work in progress.
If you read through the IPCC reports, what you'll see is not that our understanding of climate change that has changed over the years but rather that our confidence in what we think has increased over the years. As the attribution example shows, we went from "maybe humans are warming the climate but we're not sure" to "humans are definitely warming the climate".
Nice summary of how science works. The problem is a vast majority of folk wouldn’t understand your article or indeed the layman’s version. Hence they go with popular media which is full of bias, opinion and misinformation. Using the scientific consensus to fight against such is always going to be an uphill battle.
But science marches on, with growing amounts of data and evidence, particularly in the climate field, which helps us adjust and refine our understanding. The good news is, most of the world is responding, albeit slower than we really need.
Great post, Andrew. One thing worth adding: the timescales work in our favor for the predictions you describe — the stratosphere/troposphere prediction made in 1967, verified 20 years later. The Arctic-warming-faster prediction from the 1970s, confirmed within a few decades. Most of science gets to operate this way. Theory, experiment, verification, refinement, all within a working scientist’s career.
The harder communication problem is that the most consequential predictions about climate operate on timescales much longer than a scientist’s career — or any policy horizon. The CO₂ we add this decade is still warming the planet a thousand years from now. The sea level commitment from the warming we have already locked in will play out over centuries to millennia. These are physical predictions as solid as the ones you describe, but they will not be confirmed within any living scientist’s career, and they will not be confirmed within any voter’s political horizon. That is the experiment we are running, and it is the part of the science that the public conversation has the hardest time holding onto.
You note one example of how the scientific conclusions in the ARs have changed from one AR to the next. The good news is that climate science is making rapid progress. In fact it is changing so rapidly that the IPCC has to produce a new AR every 7 years or so to keep up with the changes. That means a lot of climate science is not settled - it is a work in progress.
If you read through the IPCC reports, what you'll see is not that our understanding of climate change that has changed over the years but rather that our confidence in what we think has increased over the years. As the attribution example shows, we went from "maybe humans are warming the climate but we're not sure" to "humans are definitely warming the climate".