One of the UK's leading climate research groups has appealed for a more cautious approach in reporting climate change. Scientists and journalists have been too quick to write apocalyptic headlines, according to the Met Office Hadley Centre.
"News headlines vie for attention and it is easy for scientists to grab this attention by linking climate change to the latest extreme weather event or apocalyptic prediction" says Met Office Head of Climate Change, Dr Vicky Pope. "But in doing so, the public perception of climate change can be distorted."
One dangerous misconception is the confusion between climate change and weather. Global weather patterns operate on cycles. When combined with the overall trend of hotter temperatures, there can be periods of accelerated temperatures, and periods of slower growth. By over-hyping events which are in fact weather phenomenon, the climate change movement risks scoring a rather spectacular own goal.
For example, the Arctic has featured highly in the press in the last year, with reports that summer ice may disappear altogether within five years. The winter has seen a substantial re-freeze. If climate campaigners sought to capitalize on the summer's record thaw, the re-freeze is a little embarrassing. Worse, public confidence in climate science may be undermined.
In truth, says Vicky Pope, "the record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather, with summer sea ice increasing again over the next few years. This diverts attention from the real, longer-term issues."
Met Office research shows "a detectable human impact in the long-term decline in sea ice over the past 30 years", but this fact has been overtaken by much less certain scientific theories. Faster melting makes better headlines.
Ice isn't the only climate change indicator that has been hyped and then found wanting. "In the 1990s, global temperatures increased more quickly than in earlier decades, leading to claims that global warming had accelerated" says Vicky. This served the environmental movement well, but a little caution would have been advised. "In the past 10 years the temperature rise has slowed, leading to opposing claims. Again, neither claim is true, since natural variations always occur on this timescale."
All of this makes the work of the Hadley Centre very difficult, leading to the publication of an open letter to journalists and scientists this week. "For climate scientists, having to continually rein in extraordinary claims that the latest extreme is all due to climate change is, at best, hugely frustrating and, at worst, enormously distracting."
In a harsh rebuke to campaigners, Pope compares hasty worst case scenarios to climate skeptics, both mis-using science for their own agenda: "Overplaying natural variations in the weather as climate change is just as much a distortion of the science as underplaying them to claim that climate change has stopped or is not happening. Both undermine the basic facts that the implications of climate change are profound and will be severe if greenhouse gas emissions are not cut drastically and swiftly over the coming decades."
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ChicagoEye via flickr
