An unsettling science, or poor marketing?

T he debate on whether global warming is a threat to humankind, if human activity has been its cause, and what actions should or could be taken to confront it has exceeded the borders of academic dispute to become a public and political issue. Any action taken in response to global warming, from business as usual to drastic CO2 emissions reduction, will have severe consequences for the environment and the global economy. Therefore, appropriate political decisions should be taken based on the best scientific evidence available. Unfortunately, the debate on climate change has been hampered by systematic distortion of the available facts, and reciprocal accusations of misconduct between the polarized fields of pro-AGW adherents and AGW-denialists which have had the effect of undermining the credibility of science itself. Bob Heath’s article on climate change/global warming published in First Break November (Heath, 2015) reminded me of similar papers published a few years ago by different authors and in a different journal, strikingly similar in their approach to the issue of climate change. The papers’ audience was very similar of First Break’s public, addressed to a general audience of geologists belonging to different disciplines of the earth sciences, not necessarily experts in climate science but with an understanding of the science and its problems. Those papers were also disputing the validity of AGW, using more or less the same arguments that Heath uses, mixing together technical data to disprove AGW and rhetorical tools to discredit the scientists supporting the opposite position. I am not going to address here the validity of Heath’s claims about the reality, origin, amplitude, and impact of climate change: maybe global warming is not happening, or if it is happening it could be natural, and even if it is anthropogenic there is nothing we can do to stop it, and it may be that a warmer planet is better. Moreover, the climate change debate seems to be more a subject for anthropologists or social scientists, and individual positions on the matter appear to be mainly motivated by personal cultural prejudice, regardless of the science behind (Boykoff, 2008; Kahan et al., 2010; Lewandowsky et al., 2013a, 2013b). The bottom line is that, even using the best science available, there is no way in which a pro-AGW reader or an AGW-skeptic will change their minds.