Politics
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After snow blanketed Washington for several days last month, political opponents of efforts to address climate change pointed to the blustery weather as evidence that global warming is a hoax.
Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, sent his grandchildren out to build an igloo next to the U.S. Capitol, with a sign calling it " Al Gore's New Home."
Doubts about climate change have been repeated and amplified by cable channels, talk radio and the blogosphere. In raising such doubts, Inhofe and others also have cited e-mails hacked from a British climate lab as well as mistakes in the 3,000-page compilation of research put together in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations panel that along with Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize that year.
Meanwhile, some of those who want climate change to be a front-burner issue have issued increasingly dire predictions in recent years. After Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, for instance, environmental groups insisted the science was settled, the debate over and the need for action more urgent than ever.
All of this back and forth can be confusing, some would say deliberately so. But many scientists say the Washington blizzard and Katrina are examples of short-term weather conditions, not long-term climate trends, and don't undermine or support decades of peer-reviewed science about climate change.
Nor have the stolen e-mails or IPCC errors revealed much beyond the intemperate language some climate scientists used to describe their critics, and the human fallibility of others.
The debate reflects how politicians and activists tend to speak in black and white, while most scientists speak in shades of gray and temper their complex findings in degrees of uncertainty.
"There have been some mistakes by scientists, but they have been blown completely out of proportion," said John Cook, an Australian physicist who writes the popular blog and iPhone application Skeptical Science, which catalogues peer-reviewed climate change studies. "Skeptic arguments typically are based on one small part of the puzzle, rather than the broader picture." Lost amid the ruckus is the widespread agreement, even among many skeptics, that greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, are driving up global temperatures. That remains one of the core conclusions from the IPCC's landmark report, and was echoed repeatedly by the Bush administration even as it was criticized for failing to do anything about it.
But the IPCC report said most of the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. Isn't that false? Yes, two sentences in a section of the report erroneously stated that 80 percent of the Himalayan glaciers would soon be gone due to climate change. The conclusion is attributed to an environmental group's report, but isn't backed up by the peer-reviewed science.
The IPCC acknowledged that the statement, buried in the group's 3,000-page report, slipped through procedures intended to ensure that only valid research is cited. Peer review helps provide that check by requiring scientific papers to be vetted by other scientists before publication.
Still, the IPCC says the broader conclusion hasn't changed: Many glaciers already have melted significantly, which could affect the water supply for more than one-sixth of the world's population. Though some glaciers have grown, the rate of melting has accelerated worldwide since the 1970s, according to multiple independent studies.
Did the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration misplace weather stations and exaggerate warming? Anthony Watts, a weather forecaster whose Web sites, Watts Up With That and surfacestations.org, have become focal points for climate skeptics, enlisted volunteers across the country to photograph weather stations. Citing NOAA's own criteria, Watts concluded last year that hundreds of the stations were in poorly located sites, next to parking lots or heating vents or other areas that could inflate temperatures.
"The U.S. temperature record is unreliable," Watts concluded. "And since the U.S. record is thought to be the best in the world, it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable." A new peer-reviewed study by scientists at the National Climatic Data Center, the federal office that tracks climate trends, agrees that problems with the locations of many weather stations are real.
But the temperature records from the poorly located stations cited by Watts actually have a slightly cool bias, not a warm one, according to the review, scheduled to be published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres.
"Fortunately, the sites with good exposure, though small in number, are reasonably well distributed across the country," the researchers concluded, adding that the "good" or better stations cited by Watts show warming over time similar to NOAA's overall data.
There also are multiple other surface and satellite measurements of global temperatures, all of which show a warming trend.