The Global Warming Debate in the Public Eye

March 16, 2010 by jason

Anyone who has been following the news over the past few months has probably heard of the global warming debates, or should I say scandals, that have flooded recent news outlets. Words like Glaciergate (a pun on the Nixon Watergate scandal) have been used to describe an erroneous assertion in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) from 2007 that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035. The article initially caused shock and fear, followed by debate and skepticism, and finally an uproar that, in my opinion, was somewhat exaggerated.

Why the fuss about the IPCC error?

This quote from the UK Telegraph sums up the problem and some of the motivation behind the escalation of the "Glaciergate" incident quite well:

Source: "Pachauri: the real story behind the Glaciergate scandal"

The reason I say it only sums up some of the motivation for the escalation, is because one does need to keep in mind that this represents 1 (yes, one) certified error in the some 3000 page long report. Despite the fact that this was a serious error, one can't help but notice that this managed to get completely out of hand. What are the reasons for this? Well first there is the why:

There is a world of skepticism out there, and if you haven't already encountered it, you haven't been looking very hard. I study a course in sustainable resource management at a forestry department at a German university (you know, the country with all the solar panels?) so I don't meet many skeptics in person, but when I go online it's a whole different story. For anyone interested in learning more the other side of the coin, you can check out forums like Global Warming Skeptics, make sure you're wearing knee-pads though. The reasons for skepticism towards global warming theory are, in my opinion, a combination of fear of change and the fact that there simply isn't any solid proof that climate change is anthropological (i.e. caused by humans). So that's the why, what about the how?

Enter Climategate...

Skipping forward 2 years, around 20 November 2009 it emerged that hundreds of emails from as far back as 1996 had been obtained and leaked to the public by hackers. The emails, written by many IPCC Scientists, contained what skeptics called a "smoking gun" for evidence that climatologists were deliberately tampering with figures and simulations to make global warming appear more serious than it actually is (see the Guardian article titled Climate skeptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists). Suffice to say, it was this snafu combined with the "Glaciergate" incident that allowed skeptics to bombard the blogosphere and shed doubt on the IPCC as a whole.

When one takes a step back, and considers that all of this came from a handful of scientists and one erroneous statement in a 3000 page report, it all seems kind of silly...

How this has affected public opinion

The question now remains: Do people really care, or is this just the internet hotly debating and discussing topics that only other people writing on the internet actually care about? Lets take a look at a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (see their publication on Global Warming) found that 33% of Americans believed that there was no serious evidence that the earth is warming in 2009, up from 21% in 2008. I have represented public opinion over 4 years graphically below:

Plot of US public opinion on belief in solid evidence of global warming (Data sourced from: the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press)

This picture basically tells us that Americans are becoming more skeptical. From the available data it is not possible to see how the trend was before 2007, suffice to say it could not have been much worse than after the release of the IPCC AR4. To see how the motivations for why Americans believe in global warming have changed, I have plotted the percentage of each motivation for believing in global warming against the total percentage believing in global warming:

Plot of why Americans believe in global warming(Data sourced from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press)

From this, we can see one positive effect of the IPCC AR4 report: More people know why the do believe in global warming. This is a great thing, how much of it can be attributed to the publication of the IPCC report is of course a different question that I can't answer. As a point of curiosity I also plotted US public opinion across partisan lines, no surprise here:

Plot of US public opinion on belief in solid evidence of global warming across partisan lines (Data sourced from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press)

Republicans didn't like climate change before the report, and they still don't like it. In fact, they used to be skeptical, now they're just hating. Democrats are heading in the same direction. Personally, I find these graphs somewhat frightening. I am a believer of anthropological climate change, and believe that the sooner we act, the more we can do to mitigate what is becoming an inevitable global crisis. I did however stumble on something else during my research, namely a poll conducted by GlobeScan in 2006. The study asked people from 30 different countries a series of questions, one which was "How serious a problem do you consider [Climate change or global warming, due to the Greenhouse Effect] to be?". Compiling the results into a graph, and arranging the countries by the number of people who responded "Very Serious", gives us this:

Percentage of people who believe the threat of global warming from the greenhouse effect is very serious (Data sourced from GlobeScan Poll 2003-2006)

The US ranked 7th in this graph, and considering it has some of the best access to education in the world (certainly higher than the countries below it), it sheds some uncertainty of the validity of the other figures I used, as they more than likely do not represent global sentiments. I suspect that more global statistical data on this topic will come to light in the coming months, you will hear more on this topic from me when it does.

I think it's fair to say though, that the events since the last IPCC report have somewhat tainted the reputation of climate scientists. I am among the many who believe that this loss in trust is mostly unjustified and deliberately blown out of proportion. I am confident that public trust in the IPCC, or at least in the very real dangers of anthropological global warming, will soon be restored. Whether or not it will be too late is of course a very different question...