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The dangers of lazy science reporting
...A good example is a much cited essay by science historian Naomi Oreskes, seeking to assess the scientific consensus on climate change (1). Oreskes defined the consensus by quoting the Intergovernmenal Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2001 assessment: ‘Human activities ... are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents… that absorb or scatter radiant energy. ... [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.’

To assess the strength of this consensus she typed key words into a database and retrieved 928 abstracts that she categorised in relation to the consensus. She found none that disagreed with the consensus.

It is hard to imagine a more superficial approach. To assess the contribution of a paper requires more than simply reading an abstract. Each paper needs to be read and appropriately weighed with expert judgement. It is possible that, when viewed in light of all the evidence taken as a whole, a single study should be taken as key. In other cases, even when many studies point in a particular direction there will be unresolved problems that prevent a decisive conclusion. For an expert, the background knowledge will be much wider than that retrieved by a general search for keywords on ‘climate change’. (The IPCC, for all its problems, at least approximates the process of expert review more closely.)

Perhaps Oreskes never intended her study to be definitive, and she makes the point that ‘details about climate interactions are not well understood… The question of what to do about climate change is also still open.’ But the fact that it is reached for so readily in discussions over climate shows how trivialised discussion of science has become.

Oreskes attracted a flock of critics from amongst the climate skeptics who challenged details such as her choice of keywords or the classification of particular abstracts. They carried out their own, rival versions of the study with the same methodology but claiming to reach different results (2). The fact that few, if any, of Oreskes’ critics seem to have pointed out the absurd superficiality of the study confirms that for all sides in public debate, scientific studies have become little more than symbolic tokens that can be used to bludgeon opponents.

As it happens, anyone who spends substantial time reading the scientific literature will see that today it is now possible to have even more confidence than the IPCC had in 2001 that there is a detectable human influence on the climate. But to reach that conclusion, and to sustain the argument, you would have to read way beyond the abstracts. If you do so you will also come away with a rich sense of the debates and uncertainties over the pace, consequences and mechanisms of both natural and anthropogenic change. These do not fit easily into a ‘consensus’ v ‘skepticism’ framework and do not come with pre-attached policy proposals. ...