SOLAR TODAY - June 2010

showed instead that scientists are human. Many climate researchers have been angered by all the attempts by the skeptic community to apply political spin to their data, and some of them have become resistant to sharing those data. (In truth, there is a plethora of data readily available on the web. For people with a lot of time on their hands, the Real Climate web site provides links to the various sources at realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources.)

The second event was the revelation that some errors appeared in the 2007 three-volume set of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In particular, a statement in Volume 2 (which focuses on climate change impacts) cited the likelihood of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner.” Here, the IPCC authors admittedly erred by quoting an incorrect date that was used in another publication. It is important to understand that the error appears on one line of one page in the 976-page Volume 2 and does not appear in any of the other sections and volumes covering glaciers. Anyone who has ever worked in an international group (and I am one) will hardly be surprised if a set of three volumes by teams of international authors, each about 1,000 pages in length, is not 100 percent error-free. Discrediting all of the work on the basis of a few mistakes is ludicrous.

Lost in all the righteous indignation at the IPCC’s date error was the fact that, according to the World Glacier Monitoring Service, more than 90 percent of the glaciers around the world are disappearing at an alarming and accelerating rate. In the April issue of National Geographic, an article entitled “The Big Melt” described the serious social impacts already occurring as a result of the rapid shrinkage of Himalayan glaciers, which provide water to 2 billion people. Closer to home, the U.S. Geological Survey has predicted that glaciers will completely disappear from Montana’s Glacier National Park by 2030 or sooner, leaving that area free of glaciers for the first time in at least 7,000 years. (On April 7, the official glacier count in the park dropped to 25, down from 150 in 1850.)

I do not dispute that political reality dictates the use of careful messaging, and I don’t expect my congressman to invoke the threat of climate change whenever he pushes for clean energy legislation. Indeed, even a casual observer of the health care debate can see that how information was messaged (from “death panels” on one side of the debate to the highlighting of insurance industry abuses on the other side) had more impact on public opinion than the actual contents of the bill. But I believe it’s vitally important that

Kutscher continued on page 51.

Climate scientists find themselves matched up against lawyers and public relations experts for whom communicating a corporate message is a full-time job.