How to Misinterpret Climate Change Research

Climate Change, Anthropocene, & Associated Issues

Date posted: 04/23/15

Gayathri Vaidyanathan reports that research into the cooling impact of aerosols sends climate contrarians into a tailspin.Slivers of dust float in the upper atmosphere, scattering the sun rays back into space and cooling the planet in some places. In other places, the particles warm the planet. The equivocation has meant that the particles, known as aerosols, are a significant wild card in our planet climate, rivaled only by clouds. So it was arguably not surprising that a study on aerosols would receive public attention. But it was not the type of attention that the study author, Bjorn Stevens, a climatologist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, was seeking. His work has been portrayed by conservative news outlets and blogs as undermining the theory of human-caused global warming. Red lights lit up. New Climate Paper Gives Global Warming Alarmists One Helluva Beating, Fox News declared. In the months since the study was published, Stevens has been peppered with emails from schoolteachers and laypeople asking him, broadly speaking, whether climate change is indeed something to worry about. That brought the normally reticent scientist, who says his aim is not to convince anyone of anything, into the public sphere. The misinterpretation of Stevens paper began with Nic Lewis, an independent climate scientist. In a blog post for Climate Audit, a prominent climate skeptic blog, he used the Stevens study to suggest that as CO2 levels double in the atmosphere, global temperatures would rise by only 1.2 to 1.8 degrees Celsius. The measure is called climate sensitivity. That is less than the assumed 2 C threshold for catastrophic climatic change in parts of the world. It is also lower than an IPCC estimate that a doubling of CO2 will raise global temperatures by 1.5 to 4.5 C. Lewis' blog post is what prompted conservative publications to crow that global warming is not a major threat.