One of the aspects of science communications that can frustrate even its most sophisticated practitioners is the ability of scientists to reach confident conclusions about the big picture even when a field retains significant uncertainties. You can look no further than dark matter for an example: researchers are pretty confident that it’s out there, even though we still haven’t identified what it might consist of. But climatology remains the field where uncertainties, both real and imagined, are most likely to become front page news. The journal Nature has devoted a series of articles to discussing why that’s likely to be the case.
The editorial staff assigned one of their senior reporters to identifying the areas of most significant uncertainty when it comes to climatology and, as that reporter noted, the primary challenge is whittling things down: the most recent IPCC report identified 54 items that it termed “key uncertainties.” Contrary to some accusations, this suggests that the areas where climate science needs some work haven’t exactly been swept under the rug by the scientific community. But, at the same time, scientists have clearly looked at these uncertainties and decided that they’re not so significant that the basics of climate change are questionable.
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