Article Tags: You could not make it up
For Britain’s climate science community, the past few months have come as a profound shock.
First we had the so-called “climategate” scandal, where e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) showed apparent attempts to thwart Freedom of Information requests.
More recently we have had a series of reports suggesting that “key” sections of assessments of climate change science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were in error.
It all makes a profound contrast to the situation up until last November when the global consensus on climate change science seemed stronger than ever. For scientists, climate research was based on powerful computer models backed by a wealth of real-world evidence. Nothing was certain — in science it seldom is. But we could say with a high degree of certainty — and people believed us when we said it — that the world was warming and the consequences were likely to be serious.
Source: timesonline.co.uk