Climate scientists write…
Sir: Lord Lawson has written in his diary (30 November) under the online summary headline ‘my secret showdown with the Royal Society on global warming’, but the reality is rather different. As he is aware, the purpose of the meeting on 19 November was not to put on a public performance, but to provide Lord Lawson with expert advice on climate science. The science summarised by the climate scientists was generally agreed to by all present.
Lord Lawson charges that we ‘were very reluctant to engage on the crucial issue of climate change policy at all’ and that we had no interest in ‘the massive human and economic costs involved’ in implementing policies to mitigate the effects of climate change. As climate scientists, the human and economic costs of the changes happening to our climate are of grave concern. Climate science has a key role to play in informing policy.
That said, it is also crucial that the status of the science can be discussed independent of any political views. While climate science undoubtedly does have important policy implications, scientific conclusions about the scale and pace of climate change caused by human activity are independent of these considerations. Indeed, public understanding of and trust in scientific assessments of the risks posed by climate change will be greater if discussions about the science are not politicised. The fact that we focused on science rather than policy on this occasion was precisely for these reasons.
Brian Hoskins
Director, Grantham Institute for Climate Change, Imperial College London
Gideon Henderson
Professor of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford
Tim Palmer
Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics, University of Oxford
John Shepherd
Research Fellow in Earth System Science, University of Southampton
Keith Shine
Regius Professor of Meteorology and Climate Science, University of Reading
Andrew Watson
Royal Society Research Professor, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter
Mind the unmentionables
Sir: Educational underachievement may be a ‘classist’ issue more than a ‘racist’ one (‘You can’t say that’, 30 November).
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