Post by Wayne Hall on Oct 20, 2005 23:48:20 GMT -5
In the context of a series of functions on the post-carbon economy, the British Council organized a public meeting this evening (20th October) in the Athens Concert Hall on climate change. The meeting was chaired by Dr. Christos Zerefos of the Athens Observatory and the University of Athens. The visiting speaker was Dr. Matthew Collins from the Hadley Centre in England.
Drs. Zerefos and Collins both gave standard accounts of the climate change issue, from a Mediterranean and global perspective respectively. In passing Dr. Matthew Collins mentioned the potential cooling effect of aerosols, which provided an opportunity for introduction in question time afterwards the subject of the BBC Global Dimming documentary that was screened earlier this year in Britain and Australia. I reminded Dr. Collins that the initial impulse for the documentary had come from his Hadley Centre colleague Peter Cox, who had wished to use Global Dimming to bring to the attention of the public the full enormity of climate change. He had introduced the subject of aerosols in order to emphasise that "if we carry on pumping out the particles it will have terrible impact on human health, I mean particles are involved in all sorts of respiratory diseases.... and of course they affect climate anyway. If you, if you fiddle with the, the balance of the planet, the radiative balance of the planet, you affect all sorts of circulation patterns like monsoons, which would have horrible effects on people. So it would be extremely difficult, in fact impossible, to cancel out the greenhouse effect just by carrying on pumping out particles, even if it wasn't for the fact that particles are damaging for human health."
I pointed out that the editorial policy of the documentary's director David Sington (and of the BBC) had been to dramatise both global dimming and climate change, even to the extent of frightening people, and that this had been counter-productive, because NASA climate modeller Gavin Schmidt had then effectively criticised Sington for carelessness with scientific data. And the criticism had stuck. The fact that the documentary had attracted a huge audience of three and a half million in Britain was neutralized by the general feeling that Sington had not adhered to proper scientific standards. I asked Dr. Matthew Collins if he didn't think that the programme might have been able to dispense with the over-dramatisation if instead of talking only of global dimming the documentary had also mentioned geoengineering, that is to say, of policies of deliberately introducing aerosols into the atmosphere as a means of counteracting global warming. That is to say politics of deliberate air pollution, which were on record as being proposed at the highest level, including by the IPCC.
In reply, Matthew Collins said that he didn't think Gavin Schmidt was engaging in a political attack against the Global Dimming documentary, but rather in scientific criticism. I replied that the effect of Schmidt's intervention had been to undermine the documentary's credibility. The point was not whether he was to be blamed for that, but whether the documentary's approach of substituting emotionalism for discussion of all relevant aspects of the problem (including geoengineering) was the most effective approach to take.
Drs. Zerefos and Collins both gave standard accounts of the climate change issue, from a Mediterranean and global perspective respectively. In passing Dr. Matthew Collins mentioned the potential cooling effect of aerosols, which provided an opportunity for introduction in question time afterwards the subject of the BBC Global Dimming documentary that was screened earlier this year in Britain and Australia. I reminded Dr. Collins that the initial impulse for the documentary had come from his Hadley Centre colleague Peter Cox, who had wished to use Global Dimming to bring to the attention of the public the full enormity of climate change. He had introduced the subject of aerosols in order to emphasise that "if we carry on pumping out the particles it will have terrible impact on human health, I mean particles are involved in all sorts of respiratory diseases.... and of course they affect climate anyway. If you, if you fiddle with the, the balance of the planet, the radiative balance of the planet, you affect all sorts of circulation patterns like monsoons, which would have horrible effects on people. So it would be extremely difficult, in fact impossible, to cancel out the greenhouse effect just by carrying on pumping out particles, even if it wasn't for the fact that particles are damaging for human health."
I pointed out that the editorial policy of the documentary's director David Sington (and of the BBC) had been to dramatise both global dimming and climate change, even to the extent of frightening people, and that this had been counter-productive, because NASA climate modeller Gavin Schmidt had then effectively criticised Sington for carelessness with scientific data. And the criticism had stuck. The fact that the documentary had attracted a huge audience of three and a half million in Britain was neutralized by the general feeling that Sington had not adhered to proper scientific standards. I asked Dr. Matthew Collins if he didn't think that the programme might have been able to dispense with the over-dramatisation if instead of talking only of global dimming the documentary had also mentioned geoengineering, that is to say, of policies of deliberately introducing aerosols into the atmosphere as a means of counteracting global warming. That is to say politics of deliberate air pollution, which were on record as being proposed at the highest level, including by the IPCC.
In reply, Matthew Collins said that he didn't think Gavin Schmidt was engaging in a political attack against the Global Dimming documentary, but rather in scientific criticism. I replied that the effect of Schmidt's intervention had been to undermine the documentary's credibility. The point was not whether he was to be blamed for that, but whether the documentary's approach of substituting emotionalism for discussion of all relevant aspects of the problem (including geoengineering) was the most effective approach to take.