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Climate change deniers are “winning the propaganda war” at
present, one of the Ireland’s best-known experts on global
warming has admitted.
Prof John Sweeney, director of the Irish Climate Analysis
and Research Unit (ICARUS)
at NUI Maynooth, acknowledged that scientists were “lousy”
at communicating their ideas to the general public.
They were being faced by sceptics - often drawn from the
ranks of journalism and lobbying - who were better communicators,
but had no background in science, he said.
Prof Sweeney was speaking at a conference on climate change,
organised by Celsius, DCU’s interdisciplinary research group
on science in society, last week.
He conceded that controversies involving the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed some “things should
have been done differently”.
Climate change scientists have been on the defensive following
the leaking
of emails from the University of East Anglia - one
of the world’s leading research bodies on global warning -
suggesting a possible cover-up and the recent move by the
IPCC to retract its claim that the Himalayan glaciers could
melt away by 2035.
The relative failure of the Copenhagen summit in December
has also emboldened climate sceptics.
Prof Sweeney said that, though mistakes were made, it did
not change the reality that man-made climate change was an
accepted fact among climate scientists and that failings had
been “blown out of proportion”.
He said that climate sceptics had become adept at marshalling
a small number of arguments that could be construed as being
plausible. Such sceptics, he explained, often set up institutes
with grandiose-sounding names - such as the Heartland Institute
in the United States - and many of them were involved in previous
campaigns to try to sow doubt among the public about the damage
done by tobacco products, despite the existence of overwhelming
scientific evidence.
“Not having being brought up in the literary and debating
societies, scientists are not very good at winning arguments,”
Prof Sweeney said. “We are facing a very articulated, very
well-rehearsed and a very well-expanded set of arguments.
We have to give credit where it is due. They [sceptics] are
winning the science communication war at the moment.”
He told students that climate sceptics have marshalled a
small number of arguments which sound scientifically plausible,
to back up their beliefs that man-made global warming is not
happening. There is even an internet guide called the Sceptics
Notebook, which details how sceptics should deal with those
who believe in man-made climate change.
The sceptics’ most commonly rehearsed argument is that the
world is actually cooling because no year has been hotter
than 1998, the warmest year on record. However, Prof Sweeney
said that argument could be easily refuted by looking at temperature
changes since 1980, which would show that temperatures have
been on an upward trajectory.
Prof Sweeney said that other arguments marshalled by sceptics
could be similarly refuted if the public knew the science.
There was no evidence either, he maintained, that changes
in the sun’s activity had a meaningful effect on climate change
in the short-term.
“Selective information and communicating it in a very selective
way can distort many of the arguments concerned,” he said.
Source - The Irish Times
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