The BBC has a really excellent half-hour program on the overselling of climate science. A short news story accompanies the program, but it is really worth listening to the program in full, and it is available here. The program makes a compelling case that climate science has, in many instances, been oversold. A central focus on the program is the path between scientific publication, official press release, and media reporting. The BBC program finds fault at all three stops. I have a few thoughts on the program after the jump.


First, the BBC critiques a number of areas of arguably exaggerated climate science and a card-carrying climate skeptic is nowhere to be found. This is smart and responsible reporting, given the intense politicization of the climate issue. In a comment posted at the Climate Audit weblog the producer of the piece explains (in response to an earlier comment about the program’s conclusion that it should give skeptics little comfort — a conclusion that the earlier commenter called a “rider”),

I produced the documentary. I think what you describe as the rider was important because we wanted to move beyond the sceptics v believers argument. I think the programme was better for not featuring sceptics, that the true believers could just dismiss.

Climate science needs to be put under the same degree of public scrutiny as politics, business and other scientific fields. This can’t happen if you have to choose to be either a partisan sceptic or an uncritical believer.

It would be oh-so-easy for someone to simply dismiss the BBC story had they not carefully chosen who they interviewed. On numerous occasions the program clearly described that the people that they were interviewing actually believe that climate change is real and a problem. As the news story accompanying the program notes,

All of the climate scientists we spoke to fervently believe global warming is being caused by human activity. Many agree there’s also a major problem with alarmism. As one scientist said: “If we cry wolf too loudly or too often, no-one will believe us when the beast actually comes for dinner.”

Second, the program interviews Hans von Storch and Steve Rayner, two extremely thoughtful observers of and participants in climate science. In January, 2005 we highlighted this passage from a paper that von Storch had written with Nico Stehr and Dennis Bray:

We need to respond openly to the agenda-driven advocates, not only skeptics but also alarmists, who misuse their standing as scientists to pursue their private value-driven agendas. This is a tragedy of the commons, namely that the short term gains (in terms of public attention; success of specific political agendas; possible funding) of a few are paid for on the long term by the scientific credibility of the whole discipline. Instead, sustainability requires that the discipline of climate science to provide the public with options of policy responses to the challenge of climate change, and not to prescriptively focus on only one such option (i.e., maximum reduction of GHG emissions).

von Storch and Stehr also teamed up on an essay which appeared in January 2005 in Der Spiegel in which they wrote,

Sadly, the mechanisms for correction within science itself have failed. Within the sciences, openly expressed doubts about the current evidence for climatic catastrophe are often seen as inconvenient, because they damage the “good cause,” particularly since they could be “misused by skeptics.” The incremental dramatization comes to be accepted, while any correction of the exaggeration is regarded as dangerous, because it is politically inopportune. Doubts are not made public; rather, people are led to believe in a solid edifice of knowledge that needs only to be completed at the outer edges.

The result of this self-censorship in scientists’ minds is a deaf ear for new and surprising ideas that compete with or even contradict conventional patterns of explanation; science degenerates into being a repair shop for popular, politically opportune claims to knowledge. Thus it not only becomes sterile; it also loses its ability to advise the public objectively.

Steve Rayner from Oxford whose perspectives were highlighted here just last month warned of the “danger of using bad arguments for good causes.”

Third, that exaggerated climate science via press release is often used as a tool of stealth (or even overt) political advocacy has been well documented in, of all places, the peer reviewed literature. Consider the following two articles:

Henderson-Seller, A., 1998. Climate whispers: Media communication about climate change. Climatic Change 40:421-456. (link, subscription required)

Ladle, R. J., P. Jepson, and R. J. Whittaker, 2005. Scientists and the media: the struggle for legitimacy in climate change and conservation science, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 30: 231-240. (PDF)

These articles indicate that scientific community has at its disposal solid information based on practical experience and academic knowledge of communication on how to avoid misrepresentations of climate science, whether willful or by accident.

The BBC program is a breath of fresh air because it breaks out of the stale skeptic vs., believer (to use their words) framing of almost all discussions of climate change. Such efforts to regulate excess without falling into a clearly defined, pre-existing political battle are far too rare in this area. Here’s hoping that more media, and more scientists, see the value in such a third-way approach for keeping both skeptics and believers in check. In the long run, it is science that will benefit.