Has the BBC broken faith with the General Public?
The program was supposed to deal with the failure of the presentation of uncertainties regarding climate science, the criticism is that climate science has presented to politicians a narrative of ‘unprecedented’ temperature rise which ‘must be due to humans.
Yet the ‘complication’ that is not explained clearly to the public or politicians, is that temperature proxies declined when modern thermometers showed warming. Even the simplest of politicians could grasp that if the proxies decline when thermometers show warming it reduces their credibility of recording historic temperatures.
Yet somehow it is deemed to complicated, this is a prime example of scientist becoming advocates for policy and presenting the issues as certain when they are not. Remember this was the described purpose of the program.
An interesting response to ‘hide the decline’
James Delingpole wrote in his blog [2]about how the mathematician Simon Singh, the best selling author of ‘Fermat’s Last Theorum’ had tweeted:
Sorry, but @JamesDelingpole[3] deserves mockery ‘cos he has the arrogance to think he knows more of science than a Nobel Laureate
Simon Singh wrote a rebuttal in his own blog, yet in the the comments there arose an excellent rebuttal to the programs description of ‘hide the decline’ from a respected scientist Paul Dennis who is also at the University of East Anglia
Paul Dennis said…
Before I add anything further to the debate I should say that I’m an Isotope Geochemist and Head of the Stable Isotope and Noble Gas Laboratories in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. I’ve also contributed to and published a large number of peer-reviewed scientific papers in the general field of palaoclimate studies.
I don’t say this because I think my views should carry any more weight. They shouldn’t. But they show there is a range and diversity of opinion amongst professionals working in this area.
What concerns me about the hide the decline debate is that the divergence between tree ring width and temperature in the latter half of the 20th century points to possibly both a strong non-linear response and threshold type behaviour.