An editorial in today’s New York Times acknowledges something that everybody who doesn’t read the Times has known for several weeks now: sloppy work by climate scientists and the IPCC has severely dented public confidence in climate science generally, and has undermined the political prospects for government action on the issue.
Climate skeptics won’t be happy with the editorial, but considering the Times‘ stance in the recent past, the editorial represents a major advance:
The controversy over the 2007 report has been stoked by charges of poor sourcing and alarmist forecasts, prominently a prediction — in a 938-page working paper — that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. This was clearly an exaggeration, though it was not included in the final report. An overblown warning of crop failures in North Africa made it into the final report.
Set against the bulk of the panel’s work — for which it received a Nobel Prize in 2008 — these errors seem small, the result of sloppiness, not deliberate misrepresentation. But they are still costly.
In a recent editorial in the journal Nature, Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote that while the scientific understanding of climate change remains “undiminished,” the “perceived misbehavior of even a few scientists can diminish the credibility of science as a whole.”
Dr. Cicerone is right on all counts: given the complexity and urgency of climate change — and its vulnerability to political posturing — scientists engaged in the issue must avoid personal agendas and be intellectually vigilant and above reproach.
Read the whole thing. Hopefully this starts a new era in which the Times will keep its readers posted on an important story.
As of this morning, the whole staff doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. The Climate Action Partnership lost three major corporate members yesterday as BP, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar announced they were leaving the alliance of corporations pushing comprehensive climate change legislation. My environmentalist friends tell me this could be even bigger than climategate as a sign that the momentum for climate change legislation is rapidly waning. The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times put the story on the front page; the New York Times buried it on B-6 of its New York edition.