Loftlagsbreytingar - Vísindamenn hér og vísindamenn þar

Það er ekki ólíklegt að mannkyninu stafi merí hætta af loftslagsbreytingum heldur en hryðjuverkamönnum.  Eiginlega getur annað varla verið. Í fyrsta lagi eru margir sem halda því fram að hættan af hryðjuverkamönnum sé alls ekki mikil og í öðru lagi er erfitt fyrir þá að hafa áhrif jafn víða, jafn sífellt og loftslag getur.

En auðvitað ruglar það "boli" eins og mig í ríminu hvað fréttir af loftslagsbreytingum eru misvísandi.  Sumir tala eins og "katastrófan" búi handan við hornið, aðrir segja að ekkert sé að, hlýindi og ísaldir hafi skipst á um aldanna raðir og svo verði áfram, oft hafi verið hlýrra en nú og mikil hlýskeið hafi komið án þess að rekja megi það til áhrifa mannanna.

En fyrir stuttu síðan fékk ég tölvupóst þar sem mér var bent á greinar þar sem "þriðja leiðin", "miðjan" í loftslagsmálum er rædd.  Hvort þetta er eins og "miðjan" í stjórnmálum, þar sem allir eru að reyna að þoka sér inn á þessa dagana get ég ekki dæmt um, en sjónarmiðin sem þarna koma fram eru vissulega þess verð að þeim séu gefin gaumur.

Fyrri greinina er að finna á vef BBC.

Þar má lesa t.d. þetta:

"As activists organised by the group Stop Climate Chaos gather in London to demand action, one of Britain's top climate scientists says the language of chaos and catastrophe has got out of hand.

Climate change is a reality, and science confirms that human activities are heavily implicated in this change.

But over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed in this country - the phenomenon of "catastrophic" climate change.

It seems that mere "climate change" was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be "catastrophic" to be worthy of attention.

The increasing use of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers "chaotic", "irreversible", "rapid" - has altered the public discourse around climate change.

This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as "climate change is worse than we thought", that we are approaching "irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate", and that we are "at the point of no return".

I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric.

It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns."

"Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science's predictions?

James Lovelock's book The Revenge of Gaia takes this discourse to its logical endpoint - the end of human civilisation itself.

What has pushed the debate between climate change scientists and climate sceptics to now being between climate change scientists and climate alarmists?

I believe there are three factors now at work.

First, the discourse of catastrophe is a campaigning device being mobilised in the context of failing UK and Kyoto Protocol targets to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.

The signatories to this UN protocol will not deliver on their obligations. This bursting of the campaigning bubble requires a determined reaction to raise the stakes - the language of climate catastrophe nicely fits the bill.

Hence we now have the militancy of the Stop Climate Chaos activists and the megaphone journalism of the Independent newspaper, with supporting rhetoric from the prime minister and senior government scientists.

Others suggest that the sleeping giants of the Gaian Earth system are being roused from their millennia of slumber to wreck havoc on humanity.

 Second, the discourse of catastrophe is a political and rhetorical device to change the frame of reference for the emerging negotiations around what happens when the Kyoto Protocol runs out after 2012.

The Exeter conference of February 2005 on "Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change" served the government's purposes of softening-up the G8 Gleneagles summit through a frenzied week of "climate change is worse than we thought" news reporting and group-think.

By stage-managing the new language of catastrophe, the conference itself became a tipping point in the way that climate change is discussed in public.

Third, the discourse of catastrophe allows some space for the retrenchment of science budgets.

It is a short step from claiming these catastrophic risks have physical reality, saliency and are imminent, to implying that one more "big push" of funding will allow science to quantify them objectively.

We need to take a deep breath and pause."

" The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. It will not be visible in next year's global assessment from the world authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

To state that climate change will be "catastrophic" hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science.

Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe?

The language of fear and terror operates as an ever-weakening vehicle for effective communication or inducement for behavioural change. "

"The IPCC scenarios of future climate change - warming somewhere between 1.4 and 5.8 Celsius by 2100 - are significant enough without invoking catastrophe and chaos as unguided weapons with which forlornly to threaten society into behavioural change.

I believe climate change is real, must be faced and action taken. But the discourse of catastrophe is in danger of tipping society onto a negative, depressive and reactionary trajectory."

Höfundur: Mike Hulme is Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

Greinina í held má finna hér.

Hin greinin birtist á vef NYT um áramótin, en þar sem hún er ekki lengur aðgengileg þar, nema gegn greiðslu, vísa ég annað á hana, en í henni mátti lesa t.d. þetta:

"Amid the shouting lately about whether global warming is a human-caused catastrophe or a hoax, some usually staid climate scientists in the usually invisible middle are speaking up.

The discourse over the issue has been feverish since Hurricane Katrina. Seizing the moment, many environmental campaigners, former Vice President Al Gore and some scientists have portrayed the growing human influence on the climate as an unfolding disaster that is already measurably strengthening hurricanes, spreading diseases and amplifying recent droughts and deluges.

Conservative politicians and a few scientists, many with ties to energy companies, have variously countered that human-driven warming is inconsequential, unproved or a manufactured crisis.

A third stance is now emerging, espoused by many experts who challenge both poles of the debate.

They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging.

“Climate change presents a very real risk,” said Carl Wunsch, a climate and oceans expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It seems worth a very large premium to insure ourselves against the most catastrophic scenarios. Denying the risk seems utterly stupid. Claiming we can calculate the probabilities with any degree of skill seems equally stupid.”

Many in this camp seek a policy of reducing vulnerability to all climate extremes while building public support for a sustained shift to nonpolluting energy sources.

They have made their voices heard in Web logs, news media interviews and at least one statement from a large scientific group, the World Meteorological Organization. In early December, that group posted a statement written by a committee consisting of most of the climatologists assessing whether warming seas have affected hurricanes. "

"These experts see a clear need for the public to engage now, but not to panic. They worry that portrayals of the issue like that in “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary focused on the views of Mr. Gore, may push too hard.

Many in this group also see a need to portray clearly that the response would require far more than switching to fluorescent light bulbs and to hybrid cars.

“This is a mega-ethical challenge,” said Jerry D. Mahlman, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who has studied global warming for more than three decades. “In space, it’s the size of a planet, and in time, it has scales far broader than what we go-go Homo sapiens are accustomed to dealing with.”

Dr. Mahlman and others say that the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases cannot be quickly reversed with existing technologies. And even if every engine on earth were shut down today, they add, there would be no measurable impact on the warming rate for many years, given the buildup of heat already banked in the seas.

Because of the scale and time lag, a better strategy, Dr. Mahlman and others say, is to treat human-caused warming more as a risk to be reduced than a problem to be solved.

These experts also say efforts to attribute recent weather extremes to the climate trend, though they may generate headlines in the short run, distract from the real reasons to act, which relate more to the long-term relationship of people and the planet.

“Global warming is real, it’s serious, but it’s just one of many global challenges that we’re facing,” said John M. Wallace, a climatologist at the University of Washington. “I portray it as part of a broader problem of environmental stewardship — preserving a livable planet with abundant resources for future generations.”

Some experts, though, argue that moderation in a message is likely to be misread as satisfaction with the pace of change.

John P. Holdren, an energy and environment expert at Harvard and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, defended the more strident calls for limits on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.

“I am one of those who believes that any reasonably comprehensive and up-to-date look at the evidence makes clear that civilization has already generated dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system,” Dr. Holdren said. “What keeps me going is my belief that there is still a chance of avoiding catastrophe.”"

Greinina í heild má finna hér.

Allar feitletranir eru blogghöfundar.

 

Hawking: Loftslagsbreytingar hættulegri mannkyninu en hryðjuverk