UEA is famous for its work on climate change; recently infamous in certain sceptic circles. It is also famous for its commitment to creative writing. At the annual creative writing festival this year there was an event devoted to climate change. Chaired by Sir David King the session involved contributions from Sir John Houghton, ex-head of the UK Met Office and Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The discussion covered many areas including the IPCC process and the ‘climate-gate’ saga. Though the mood was partly on how had climate science come to find itself in the position it currently resides, there was also a more optimistic, forward looking discussion covering how to rectify the apparently low levels of public belief in climate science and trust in the scientists. The unanimous verdict from the panel was that openness and transparency were vital. Phil Jones described in detail the challenges faced by CRU in making accessible all of the climate data made available to CRU and other key research organisations by the world’s various meteorological centres. It appears that good progress is being made to secure this. But will that alone provide the answer to the problem of low levels of trust? It may not. Opening up access to the data may well lead to even greater numbers of analyses but if these are not subject to the full peer review process then the media may well remain full of narrowly constructed poor quality science. The vested interests in protecting the status quo are powerful, economic ones. Unless handled very carefully then greater amounts of analysis might well be mobilised to promote confusion. Should this happen the net result is likely to be greater scepticism amongst the public and even more reason for inaction. Add to this the reduction in quality of the scientific press and it’s hard not to conclude that it’s a bleak prospect; particularly with today’s reports that global emissions are rising seemingly relentlessly. Data transparency is an important step, but only one step in a long journey ahead.
Dr Simon Gerrard, Chief Technical Officer
