William M. Briggs, Statistician

The American Geophysical Union, of which I am a member, has, like many other organizations, e.g. the ASA, issued a statement concurring with the IPCC report. The text of that statement is here.

So far, nothing unusual, except that this statement was noticed by the New York Times and written about here. But Marc Morano, a staffer to Senator Inhofe of the now infamous “Inhofe 400″ posted a comment saying “this new AGU statement appears to in no way represent the views of the AGU rank-and-file members.”

Nobody can know whether or not that is true; that is, the entire rank and file are never polled. What happens, and I am on committees to write just these kind of statements, is that a small group writes a statement, which is put out for public comment. All comments must be answered, but, however, not all comments need be incorporated in the statement. After a period of time has passed, the statement is reworked and sent to some executive body which approves it. Most regular members do not notice these statements, nor do they take the time to be involved in their creation and editing. Most would not care, for example, about words changes one way or the other. And not all members would concur with the final wording the statement.

This the main point: just because an organization issues a report it does not follow that all who belong to the organization support that report. You would think any experience with any politics whatsoever would be proof enough of that. But, no. Andrew Revkin, who wrote the Times’ piece, offered to post, in bold, comments from AGU members who disagreed with the AGU statement. Quite a debate is unfolding at that site.

Here is the opening sentence of the AGU statement: “The Earth’s climate is now clearly out of balance and is warming.” And here is what I wrote:

I am a member of the AGU and the AMS and I do not support the language used in the AGU statement. Here is why.

I find the AGU statement, while accurate and useful in places, to be needlessly sensational and overconfident in others. To start the document with the statement that the Earth is “clearly out of balance” is silly and purposely provocative. It is a feeling among certain scientists that a little exaggeration in “the cause” is justified to “raise awareness”, but I disagree: it always does more harm than good. This statement will raise as many hackles as it does “awarenesses.”

There are some matters of observation and theory of which AGU members and scientists are competent to comment upon, but there are other topics in the statement that they are not, and I find the language used to express the certainty of these forecasts—and they are forecasts, for example, the “loss of biodiveristy” plug—to be far too strong. Or to say it another way, the statement is too sure of itself.

My last complaint will seem out of the blue, but I hope you will consider it: there is not one word about the possible benefits of warming. To say that there would be none or that they would be trivial is surely too strong.

Now, if you argue that no words of possible benefit should be in a statement like this, I would agree. But then I would also say that no words of possible harm should, either. Instead, the statement should be strictly limited to the science, couched in the language of probability: the warming will be this and such; a certain area will see X% more, another Y% less; there is a X% chance that if CO2 is reduced to a certain level, the warming will be reduced by Y%; and so on. Plain, simple, non-sensational, quantitative, verifiable predictions.

Obviously, there is much more to be said, particularly about the manic desire, most strongly felt in civilians, that it be true that mankind is causing warming. For example, here is the first comment to the Revkin story:

Right on! Andy. Yes! Yes! Yes! I?m sure I?ll be shaking my head in horror upon the first post that challenges ALL these institutions from SCIENCE AND SPACE but Jesus, what more do non believer?s, denialists need to get the point we need to act NOW? All of us!
This article is great!

There are others like that, equally breathless. Most of the running commentary is on peripheral questions, little of it answers comments made by people like me and Perry Clark (comment #3). Clearly, there is more to be said about the desire question, but I’ll have to pick that up later.