A Climate of Staged Angst
Hans Von Storch and Nico Stehr published this essay 24 January 2005 in Der Speigel. Prometheus has made available this English translation. I kept their title, which I believe is a direct translation from the original German.
Von Storch et al may be known to you in relation to last year’s Re-constructing Past Climate from Noisy Data (Science Express, Sept. 30, 2004) where they published one of the refutations of the Mann et all 1998 "hockey stick" 1000-year proxy temperature reconstruction. This paper should have been routine science: "written in pencil" as mistakes are found, superior theories offered, or prior work confirmed. Because of the extreme politicization of climate science, Von Storch and colleagues have been the target of the "righteous defenders" of the "good cause". This essay attempts extract useful lessons from that experience.
This is worthy of full read - it’s only a bit over 2000 words of acute observations from working climate scientists seeking a way out of the paralysis caused by the previous "spiral of exaggeration" of the "climate catastrophe" (as the topic is known in Germany, Austria). Extracts, with emphasis added:
One example of this is the discussion of the so-called "hockey stick," a temperature curve that allegedly depicts the development over the last 1000 years, and whose shape resembles that of a hockey stick. In 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the committee of climate researchers appointed by UNO, rashly institutionalized this curve as the iconic symbol for anthropogenic climate change: At the end of a centuries-long period of stable temperatures, the upward-bent blade of the hockey stick represents the human influence.
In October 2004, we were able to demonstrate in the specialist journal "Science" that the methodological bases that led to this hockey-stick curve are mistaken. We wanted to reverse the spiral of exaggeration somewhat, without also relativizing the central message - that climate change caused by human activity does indeed exist. Prominent representatives of climate research, however, did not respond by taking issue with the facts. Instead, they worried that the noble cause of protecting the climate might have been done harm.
Other scientists lapse into a zeal reminiscent of nothing so much as the McCarthy era. For them, methodological criticism is the spawn of "conservative think tanks and propagandists for the oil and coal lobby," which they believe they must expose; dramatizing climate change, on the other hand, is defended as a sensible means of educating society.
What is true for other sciences should also hold for climate research: Dissent is the motor of further development, Differences of opinion are not an unpleasant family affair. The concealment of dissent and uncertainty in favor of a politically good cause takes its toll on credibility, for the public is more intelligent than is usually assumed. In the long term, these allegedly so helpful dramatizations achieve the opposite of that which they wish to achieve.
The Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (home of Prometheus blog) is an excellent resource regarding the coupling of science and politics through policy.
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