News and Comment

Comment: The value of climate science

17 October 2011

On 11th October Lord Young of Graffham  wrote a comment piece in The Times suggesting that ‘our climate change precautions could cripple us economically’.

Professor Paul Hardaker, Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, wrote a letter to The Times published on 17th October in response to this piece. An extended version of the letter can be found below.

Sir,

Lord Young’s comment piece of 11 October suggested that because our scientific understanding changes over time or that on rare occasions a scientist might overturn our consensus thinking, then science has nothing useful to offer us.  Just because science does not always present us with 100% certainty he must surely agree the value that science has to offer to society and to informing important public policy work.

He particularly talks about the science behind climate change.  Yes, climate has always changed through natural causes, that is why we have a climate.  And what we have undoubtedly observed over the last century is a warming of the globe.  He challenges the data that shows this, pointing to ‘climategate’, but there were no findings from the inquiry to suggest that the global temperature dataset was anything other than robust, and we have two other internationally recognised datasets of temperature that use slightly different observation sites and methods and they are all in agreement.

The science is also telling us, in the language of the Intergovernmental panel for Climate Change (IPCC), that there is a background natural warming and cooling cycle, but the sharp increase we have seen over what is climatologically a very short time period is ‘very likely’ the result of human emissions of greenhouse gases.  So it is a combination of the two, with warming over recent decades being dominated by human emissions.  We know greenhouse gases warm our atmosphere.  Naturally occurring greenhouse gases mean that our planet is some 33 degrees C warmer than it would be without them, and so we know there is a strong, well-understood mechanism that means increasing these artificially will have an impact on the temperature of our planet.  When the IPCC say it is ‘very likely’ down to humans they mean they are 90% certain – that seems pretty certain to me.  If crossing a particular road had a 90% certainty of being knocked down, I think I would find another place to cross.

Addressing climate change has some challenging economic and social policy issues;  it is not like the relative ease with which we were able to tackle the ozone hole problem.  But just because Lord Young does not like the implications of the difficult policy choices it does not mean he can avoid addressing these difficulties by trying to undermine over a century and a half of scientific understanding and knowledge about our climate and its relationship to greenhouse gases, and the work of many thousands of our world’s most respected scientists.

Professor Paul Hardaker,  FRMetS, CMet, CEnv

Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society

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