Researchers must take a more aggressive approach to counter shoddy journalism and set the scientific record straight, says Simon L. Lewis.

Simon L. Lewis

David H. Bromwich & Julien P. Nicolas

doi:10.1038/ngeo946

Gravity measurements of the ice-mass loss in Greenland and Antarctica are complicated by glacial isostatic adjustment. Simultaneous estimates of both signals confirm the negative trends in ice-sheet mass balance, but not their magnitude.

“A new study on Greenland’s and West Antarctica’s rate of ice loss halves the estimate of ice loss. Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the study takes into account a rebounding of the Earth’s crust called glacial isostatic adjustment, a continuing rise of the crust after being smashed under the weight of the Ice Age. ‘We have concluded that the Greenland and West Antarctica ice caps are melting at approximately half the speed originally predicted,’ said researcher Bert Vermeeersen.”

He has now answered the devastating debunking of his claims published by the professor of mechanical engineering John Abraham with a characteristically bonkers article(2). It conforms to the cast iron rules of climate change denial, which are as follows:

1. Falsely accuse the other person of ad hominem attacks, while making vicious ad hominem attacks of your own.

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2. Ignore or gloss over the most substantial criticisms.

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3. Never admit that you are wrong. Even when your errors are staring you in the face, do not acknowledge them. Never apologise, never concede. This is the crucial difference between scientists and charlatans. True scientists welcome challenges to their work, admit their mistakes and seek to refine and improve their hypotheses in the light of them. Charlatans raise the volume and denounce the people who expose their errors. Or they quietly drop their claims, without ever acknowledging that they were wrong, and replace them with a new set of implausible assertions.

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4. Project your worst characteristics onto your opponent.”

If you have any honor at all, you’ll set the record straight. You owe it to everyone, and especially to NOAA, to admit that you were wrong. And you certainly owe it to NOAA to apologize. You need to make a highly visible, highly public admission of error, and apology, for using falsehoods to accuse others of fraud.”

A leading Australian climate change scientist says experts are losing the fight against sceptics, who are distorting the science of global warming.

Professor Pitman was a lead author on the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports. He is also the co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

Professor Pitman says sceptics have used the IPCC’s error to skew the climate change debate.

“Climate scientists are losing the fight with the sceptics,” he said.

“The sceptics are so well funded, so well organised. “They have nothing else to do. They don’t have day jobs so they can put all their efforts into misinforming and miscommunicating climate science to the general public, whereas the climate scientists have day jobs and [managing publicity] actually isn’t one of them.

“All of the efforts you do in an IPCC report is done out of hours, voluntarily, for no funding and no pay, whereas the sceptics are being funded to put out full-scale misinformation campaigns and are doing a damn good job, I think.

“They are doing a superb job at misinforming and miscommunicating the general public, state and federal governments.”

And he says if scientists lose the climate change debate, it would be “potentially catastrophic”.

“If this was academic debate over some trivial issue [it wouldn't matter],” he said.

“But this isn’t. This is absolutely a fundamental problem for the Earth that we desperately needed full-scale international action on a decade ago.

“We are now 10 years too late to stop some of the major impacts that we will see and have seen as a consequence of global warming. It is not a future problem, it is a problem here today, around us.”

Professor Pitman has accused sceptics of failing to base their arguments on the facts.

“Most of the climate sceptics, particularly those that are wandering around publicly at the moment, don’t base their arguments on science,” he said.

“They have probably never read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report; they aren’t writing papers in peer-reviewed literature.

“They don’t update their arguments when their arguments are shown to be false, so they’ll have no problem at all using this ammunition inappropriately and out of context to further their aims in exactly the same way as people did when they were trying to disprove the relationship between smoking and human health.”

This is certainly one of the reasons why climate change denial remains so prevalent: people don’t trust scientific or political institutions anymore.