The previous week in the Guardian Newspaper she was quoted as saying: “News headlines vie for attention and it is easy for scientists to grab this attention by linking climate change to the latest extreme weather event or apocalyptic prediction. But in doing so, the public perception of climate change can be distorted. The reality is that extreme events arise when natural variations in the weather and climate combine with long-term climate change. This message is more difficult to get heard. Scientists and journalists need to find ways to help to make this clear, without the wider audience switching off."
How does she think that the message can be got across by scientists if they do not try to grab the headlines? She admits that if the public are told the boring truth then they will switch off. Isn’t it better that people have half the truth than no truth at all?
Meanwhile in the February issue of the Royal Meteorological Society’s magazine “Weather” Simon Keeling of the University of Birmingham’s Weather Consultancy Services asked “Could we be in danger of raising the public’s understanding of climate change to a level beyond that of the current science?” Presumably by that he does not mean the public are being converted into Einsteins, but rather he too is worried that the dangers of climate change are being exaggerated.
But you don’t get people to buy house insurance by telling them that their home might not burn down, despite the fact that it is most likely true! Nor do you get people to give up flying to Thailand for their annual holiday, nor abandoning their car and using public transport, by downplaying the dangers of climate change. It seems from what these two scientists wrote that they do not see a major danger from global warming.
Perhaps that is because they are unaware of the facts. For instance, Dr Pope continued with a reference to the Arctic sea ice. She wrote "The record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather.” But these losses are almost certainly due to the thinning of the sea ice which has been happening as a result of climate change. In fact the recent contraction in the area of summer ice is well outside the limits set by natural variability over the last twenty years.
As Julienne Stroeve, from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union: “The sea ice is entering a new state where the ice cover has become so thin that no matter what happens during the summer in terms of temperature or circulation patterns, you're still going to have very low ice conditions."
Chris Field was a coordinating lead author of the fourth assessment report (AR4) produced by the IPCC, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Field believes that the dire warnings about the oncoming devastation wrought by global warming were not dire enough. The same day as Dr Pope’s comments were published he wrote "We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected." The 2007 AR4 presented at a "very conservative range of climate outcomes" but the next report will "include futures with a lot more warming," Field said. "We now know that, without effective action, climate change is going to be larger and more difficult to deal with than we thought" the Telegraph reported.
So rather than the dangers being exaggerated, they have been down played. The Credit Crunch may well be followed by a Climate Crunch. In this age of gender equality who can rule out that Dr Pope may not be the first female head of the Met Office. If there is a climate catastrophe how will she behave. Will she, unlike the ex-chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland who led the British economy to disaster, accept responsibility and refuse to take her pension?
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