Andrew Revkin, Wissenschaftsredakteur der New York Times, berichtet über wachsende Sorgen von Wissenschaftlern über die apokalyptischen Klimamodelle der Copenhagener Klimakonferenz: There are signs, some scientists warned on Thursday, that overheated descriptions of looming dangers coming out of the conference could actually backfire. The meeting, organized by 10 universities and paid for by a variety of corporate sponsors, was mainly aimed at moving beyond what many participants described as the overly conservative findings of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. News coverage of the presentations given at the conference over the last few days described new evidence that the Amazon rain forest was poised to dry up and that sea levels could rise more than twice as much as the intergovernmental climate panel projected.
On Thursday, an e-mail message was distributed to a host of Amazon forest experts and to a journalist by Yadvinder Malhi, an Oxford University biologist who is focused on the Amazon and climate. He questioned the Amazon findings presented at the meeting, and decried the resulting media coverage:
“I must say I find it frustrating that the gloomiest take on news gets such a big profile. This is based on one model, and that model has flaws (especially its temperature sensitivity that seems too great (David Galbraith’s work), and its rainfall that seems to low (our PNAS paper PDF). The danger is that that such apparent bad news makes all the efforts to conserve the Amazon forests worthless (why bother saving them if they are already doomed?), and encourages disengagement and hopelessness rather than action. If that conclusion was based on solid empirical science then so be it, but when such a story goes out on a pure model study (not yet peer-reviewed) with significant imperfections, it may do a lot of damage in the real world.”
A colleague of Dr. Malhi who attended the meeting responded by saying several scientists there were engaged in “damage control.” When I ran all of this by a couple of social scientists tracking how climate science is conveyed to the public, they groaned (or the e-mail equivalent).
Daniel Sarewitz at Arizona State University said this was a classic example of how scientists and the media play down complexity in their thirst for powerful framing that catches attention and might drive action. The problem, he and several colleagues said, is that over-reaching can also lead to distrust and further polarization of advocates threatened or empowered by the controversial finding. (This is the “climate porn” concept I wrote about a while back.)
Während apokalyptische Klimamodelle zu apokalyptischen Prognosen kommen, liefern reale Beobachtungen der Realität eher entgegengesetzte Resultate: The Amazon rainforest may be more resistant to rising temperatures than has been believed. Researchers found that during the 2005 drought, many parts of the rainforest “greened”, apparently growing faster. This finding contrasts with some computer models of climate change, which forecast that the Amazon would dry out and become savannah. Writing in the journal Science, the researchers say it is unclear how the forest would respond to a long drought.
