Himalayan Meltdown
Jan. 21st, 2010 10:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snousleI am truly disappointed by the recent retraction of an error in the IPCC fourth assessment report concerning a wildly incorrect forecast for the melting of Himalayan glaciers.
There's a paragraph in the report that states that the glaciers will have lost most of their mass by 2035. There is some suggestion that this is a typo, and was originally supposed to be 2350, which would be more reasonable. But the glacial retreat rates published on the very same page show that the date of 2035 could not possibly be correct... most glaciers will have retreated only a few hundred meters by then. D'oh! I have some sympathy with this, as I know how very hard it is to eliminate all errors in a work of this type, even when people are waving them in your face. But geez...
This may seem rather arcane, as it's one paragraph out of thousands of pages. But of course, the vast body of evidence assembled in that report isn't what sticks in the public mind. Climate-change conspiracy sites have all jumped on it as a basis for discrediting the entire report. Hardly anyone - well, other than myself - actually bothers to read the rest of it, so this error ends up being representative of the whole IPCC effort.
This is much worse for the public face of climatology than the "climategate" emails. It does not affect an informed assessment of climate-change risks in a substantial way (unless you live in India), but it will surely make the policy-making process much more difficult.
It also reinforces my growing belief that even the most resolutely honest, accurate and good-faith effort to communicate global risk ends up being a game for chumps. Inevitably! Science cannot contribute constructively to politics in this area because the public and non-scientist policymakers lack the statistical understanding required to make rational choices in the face of uncertainty. The public demands a degree of certainty that cannot be achieved, so even when risks are perfectly understood and totally uncontroversial, they cannot be meaningfully acted on. For scientists, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Again, this article stands out as one of the most important steps forward, and what it says to scientists is "give it up".
There's a paragraph in the report that states that the glaciers will have lost most of their mass by 2035. There is some suggestion that this is a typo, and was originally supposed to be 2350, which would be more reasonable. But the glacial retreat rates published on the very same page show that the date of 2035 could not possibly be correct... most glaciers will have retreated only a few hundred meters by then. D'oh! I have some sympathy with this, as I know how very hard it is to eliminate all errors in a work of this type, even when people are waving them in your face. But geez...
This may seem rather arcane, as it's one paragraph out of thousands of pages. But of course, the vast body of evidence assembled in that report isn't what sticks in the public mind. Climate-change conspiracy sites have all jumped on it as a basis for discrediting the entire report. Hardly anyone - well, other than myself - actually bothers to read the rest of it, so this error ends up being representative of the whole IPCC effort.
This is much worse for the public face of climatology than the "climategate" emails. It does not affect an informed assessment of climate-change risks in a substantial way (unless you live in India), but it will surely make the policy-making process much more difficult.
It also reinforces my growing belief that even the most resolutely honest, accurate and good-faith effort to communicate global risk ends up being a game for chumps. Inevitably! Science cannot contribute constructively to politics in this area because the public and non-scientist policymakers lack the statistical understanding required to make rational choices in the face of uncertainty. The public demands a degree of certainty that cannot be achieved, so even when risks are perfectly understood and totally uncontroversial, they cannot be meaningfully acted on. For scientists, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Again, this article stands out as one of the most important steps forward, and what it says to scientists is "give it up".
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-22 07:30 am (UTC)