Climate science in the spotlight may not be such a bad thing

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/feb/12/climate-science-spotlight

Climate science in the spotlight may not be such a bad thing

The recent scandals demonstrate a wide misunderstanding of climate science, and of science more generally

Dave Stainforth
guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 February 2010 09.52 GMT

So climate change is in the news. But now the media is discussing stolen emails, hacking, the shifting Chinese weather stations, how to extract and draw graphs of temperatures from tree ring studies, and how, how on earth, you get hundreds of authors to agree on almost 3,000 pages of reports.

Climate science in the spotlight may not be a bad thing. Though as a climate scientist, the lights seem pretty bright and rather dazzling. I'm relieved they've not yet been on me. So what on earth possessed me to write this piece?

...

Perhaps people's perception of science originates from what they were taught at school. This "school science" is the source of solid facts and reliable understanding. Some of that science may be wrong, in the sense that it doesn't give the whole picture. Newton's laws of motion and gravity fit into that category; Einstein explained situations in which they fail. Yet even in such cases there is another sense in which they are right, or at least sufficiently accurate, because they help us understand and predict the particular thing we are studying. They are known to be "fit for purpose".

Such school science is very different to "research science". The former is about communicating what we already understand, the latter about developing and expanding our understanding. In research science new results and interpretations are continually developed. Disagreements and debate are common. Indeed they should be encouraged. And over time there is a shift of science from one to the other.

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[theoldman]

1. Before we started talking about climate change we knew nothing about tree rings.

We also did not know anything about ice cores. Unfortunately we are still stupid about these things. How many people do you know who have the slightest idea about tree rings and ice cores?

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. Actually, I think many people knew about tree rings

The patterns in their widths have been used for dating archaeological digs for years. (See "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology">Dendrochronology.")