SCIENTISTS NEED to “emerge from their ivory towers” and communicate the risks of climate change more clearly to an increasingly sceptical public, a conference in Dublin was told yesterday.
Dr Olive Heffernan, an editor with the respected scientific journal Nature, also criticised the media for often failing to communicate the "real uncertainties" in climate science, the range of projections involved and the likely impacts.
She said the “glory days” of communicating global warming were in the immediate aftermath of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishing its Fourth Assessment in 2007, for which it jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Dr Heffernan, who is from Dún Laoghaire, Dublin, drew attention to the situation late last year with the “Climategate” controversy over e-mails at the University of East Anglia’s climate research unit, the inclusive outcome of the Copenhagen summit and the “cold snap”.
She told the conference, organised by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), that all of these factors had led to a decline in public confidence in climate science, which had been exacerbated by climate change sceptics, particularly in the US.
“There has been a really polarised debate in the blogosphere and the most popular blog sites are run by sceptics,” she said. “As a result, climate scientists don’t want to get involved. They fear being ‘targeted’ by what some see as a McCarthyite witch-hunt”
But Dr Heffernan, who holds a PhD in marine ecology from UCD and a primary degree in zoology from TCD, said the issue of climate change was too important to be left to sceptics and “deniers”.
She called on scientists to deal with this growing scepticism by doing more to engage the public “and get people to trust science again”. It was clear, however, that some of them “don’t want to do that” and would prefer to “retreat to their ivory tower”.
Dr Heffernan, who has been appointed as editor of a Nature journal on climate change due for publication next year, said the real test would come with the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment, due in 2014, and whether it would recapture the gains lost since 2007.
EPA director, Dr Mary Kelly said one of the aims of the conference was to “bring clarity to this issue” in the wake of “a lot of confused messages about climate change in the media”, both before and after the Copenhagen summit in December. Although the Copenhagen Accord was seen by many as disappointing, she said it included some “very important elements” that provided guidance for the UN negotiation process as well as backing for major financial aid for developing countries.
Dr Kelly said the accord’s target of seeking to limit the rise in average global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius, and the science and implications underlying this, needed to be spelled out in the run-up to next December’s climate summit in Mexico.
“Addressing climate change is an immense challenge and we don’t have time on our side”, she said.
“This is particularly the case with adaptation to climate impacts, where future climate has to be factored into long-term investments and planning.”
The EPA is expected to publish shortly an analysis of recent “extreme weather events” in Ireland, including the widespread flooding that hit many parts of the country last November, as part of its ongoing work on assessing adaptation options.
Valerie Cummins, of the Coastal and Marine Research Centre, said local authorities would have an important role in implementing adaptation strategies, but they would require “clear policy direction coupled with adequate resources”.