Final thoughts- for now

This post is my final for the Geogg3057 course, although I'm sure I'll be back for more. However, I thought it provided a good opportunity to reflect on what I've learnt from this project so far.

I started the blog largely out of frustration at the poor quality of science reporting in the media, and because I was tired of hearing people spouting unchallenged climate change myths. As the project's gone on I've realised that communicating science is more challenging than I expected. Reassuringly, I've found that many other people have experienced this too, and many have tried to find novel ways to combat it. Others however have tried to exploit this, whether that's simply by trying to get away with lazy reporting or by actively trying to obscure the truth for personal gain.

There's no silver bullet to deal with all this. With media that focuses on bad news and social media that allows us to live in bubbles of like-minded people, in many ways it seems there is little to do. However, I would argue that this makes it more important than ever to find novel ways to communicate climate science.

In some ways social media makes this easier than before, as traditional media can be bypassed. I thought the post about sea ice, in which I used graphs from twitter, was an excellent example of this. Graphics are an excellent way to communicate a lot of information in a simple way, and mediums such as twitter allow a large audience to see them without necessarily having to search for them.

However, as has been widely discussed recently, social media promotes an echo-chamber effect. Even more worryingly, it allows the proliferation of fake news. How this can be combated is a more challenging problem, one for which I'm still not sure I have any good answers.

Overall, I think the main takeaways from this blog should be:
1) Just because something is published in a major newspaper or website, it isn't necessarily true. It's worth learning which outlets tend to report science most accurately, and knowing a good place to fact check (I'd recommend skeptical science for all climate-related queries).
2) Look beyond the headline; more often than not it's clickbait.
3) The importance of effective science communication cannot be overstated, and is certainly an area that would benefit from improvement.
4) Climate change is one of the biggest threats facing the world today, but the worst thing we can do is give up the fight before its even begun. We need to arm ourselves with the facts and build a solution from there.

Finally, I hope you've enjoyed reading the blog so far as much as I've enjoyed writing it. Keep the comments coming, it's always great to hear feedback. Thanks for all your interest so far!

Pause for thought

Possibly inspired by this blog (it’s always good to dream big), it seems that some of the world’s most preeminent climate scientists have been doing some fact checking of their own. This week, a paper was released in Science Advances adding support to the argument that there has not actually been a ‘hiatus’ in warming at all.

You may have seen this reported in the news. It has received quite a lot of attention as it refutes one of the most popular arguments of climate change ‘sceptics’ (see my first mythbusting post).

The paper corroborates an earlier study by the NOAA that the apparent slow down in warming is in fact an artefact of the way measurements are made. Changes in the way sea surface temperature measurements are taken, for example a move towards using buoys rather than ships, have resulted in measurement biases. This distorted the true trend in temperature changes.

Figure 1: From the BBC website, showing the NOAAs new dataset (red), which corrected the biases from older, less accurate instruments (blue).

This week’s paper presented a climate dataset which fully corrected for the different methods of collecting temperature observations. Both this and the NOAA data found rates of warming over the past decade to be comparable to earlier rates, in contrast to previous reports of a ‘hiatus’ which even made it into the 5^th IPCC report.

This paper highlights the importance of critically evaluating science. However, it also reinforces the message from the extreme weather report is discussed in my earlier blog about the difficulty of communicating science. People with more experience science understand the concepts of instrumental bias, error, and uncertainty. However, to most people these words suggest something entirely different.

In some ways it is understandable why so many people are suspicious of claims about climate change when climate scientists themselves can’t seem to decide what’s going on. The scientific community as a whole needs to work on making science communication more accessible. In climate science especially this is of the upmost importance. I think a good start would to spend more time focussing on what we know, and less on what we don’t.