CWA Preview: Science historian discusses challenge of communicating climate science

In the last year, global warming skeptics seem to have redoubled their efforts to challenge the consensus that climate change is both real and caused by humans.

But this kind of pushback to “inconvenient” scientific conclusions should not come as a surprise, according to Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at the University of California in San Diego and co-author of book “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming,” which will be released in late May.

“What's great about this book is that it explains the paradox that as the science has gotten stronger, the challenges have gotten more clear,” said Oreskes, who is scheduled to give a lecture Monday at the Conference on World Affairs. Her talk — “Communicating climate science: Why is this so hard?” — is sponsored by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Accepting that global warming is real also means accepting that the world economy needs to make a radical shift away from fossil fuels, which threatens an entire industry. So, as the scientific consensus around global warming became firmer, it makes sense that the opposition — those who have something to lose — would also take a stronger stand, Oreskes said.

“This is not a scientific debate,” she said. “When your survival is at stake, you're going to do everything possible to strike back. ... We shouldn't be naive. We should expect pushback, and the scientific community has been massively naive.”

This same pattern has been borne out repeatedly over the last several decades, Oreskes said, beginning with the scientific discovery in the early 1950s that smoking causes cancer, a finding that was vigorously disputed by the tobacco industry. Similar situations also played out over acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer, she said.

Since the fall, climate science has taken hits in the media on several points. First, hackers stole about 1,000 emails written by a number of well-known climate scientists — including some in Boulder — from a computer server at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England and posted them on the Internet, launching the “climategate” controversy.

And in March, the United Nations announced that an independent panel would review the procedures used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to create its 2007, Nobel Prize-winning report on the state of climate change science after a handful of mistakes in the document were identified.

But while these events have eroded public confidence in the veracity of the science of climate change, Oreskes said she does not believe that the consensus within the scientific community has wavered.

“The scientists say that warming is unequivocal,” she said. “That's a staggering thing for scientists to say.”