The IPCC and Public Debate on Science

Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the first part of its fifth assessment report.  This is a big event: IPCC reports are mammoth, multi-part documents that compile and summarize a vast range of widely-accepted scientific information on global climate change.  A new report is produced roughly every six years (the previous two reports were issued in 2007 and 2001), and each report is released in four parts over the course of a year.  Last week’s portion covers the physical science basis of climate change.  The remaining parts will cover impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (Mar 2014), mitigation (Apr 2014), and a synthesis report that ties everything together (Oct 2014).

IPCC Fifth Assessment Cover

IPCC reports are widely respected for their thoroughness and scientific conservatism, though this has led to under-prediction of observed climate change impacts in the past.  In the Daily Telegraph, Geoffrey Lean describes some of the thought and effort that went into the latest report:

The summary report published yesterday, and the million-word full version that will follow, result from a mindbogglingly thorough process. Together they were written by 259 top scientists from 30 countries, drawing on 9,200 mostly recent scientific publications – and checked by 1,089 reviewers, whose 54,677 comments all had to be taken into account. And over the past week “every single word” has been justified to 110 governments.

Unsurprisingly, this painstaking procedure produces cautious reports. It was not until 2007 that the IPPC straight-forwardly accepted that humanity was causing global warming, nearly 20 years after leading scientists had begun publicly saying so. Even then, it grossly underestimated the resulting sea level rise, and wholly failed to predict a dramatic melting of Arctic sea ice that year.

This mismatch between IPCC estimates and observations has been raised as a concern by the international community.  For example, the first “key message” developed at the 2009 United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (COP15) begins, “Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised.”

However, an average news reader could easily fail to recognize that the IPCC is both tremendously authoritative and scientifically conservative.  That is because, in recent years, the media has increasingly portrayed established scientific principles as a matter of opinion, endlessly up for debate.

One important factor in this trend is the ability afforded by the internet for any member of the public to comment on scientific topics and to have those comments viewed by a large audience.  Angry, insulting, and ill-informed comments can muddy the waters and significantly alter ordinary readers’ perceptions of the science.  On September 24, the magazine Popular Science decided to disable the ability of readers to post comments on their articles.  Suzanne LaBarre, the magazine’s online content director, explains the decision in a clear and important blog post.  LaBarre highlights the results of a study on the effect of comments on reader perceptions of the original article and notes:

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

If you read comments on news articles, you may regularly encounter statements that are more vicious, intolerant, and ill-informed than you encounter in other forms of media and in personal interactions, where people often exhibit more tact and care.  Some websites have crowd-sourced comment moderation systems (e.g. readers rate comments up or down), and often these can help, but they also can fail.  Sometimes there are too few readers with sufficient motivation to rate comments (which typically requires being logged into an account with the website).  Sometimes the low quality of the comments sections attract people who aggressively mark down the civil comments and up-rate the cynical, extremist, and insulting ones.

There are endless forums for public debate online.  Even if magazines like Popular Science disallow reader comments below their articles, there will be places for people to gather and discuss scientific topics.  The key difference is that ordinary readers will not be exposed to extreme, scientifically-unfounded views when they’re just trying to read the news.  Separating news reporting and popular debate into distinct digital spheres (i.e. news websites vs. blogs, forums, and the like) could be an important step toward restoring the media’s ability to effectively convey scientific information to the public.

That, in turn, could reduce one of the drivers of climate change skepticism, so that bodies like the IPCC can clearly convey what the science does, and doesn’t, support regarding climate change.