by: Lawrence Solomon
The UK today has made it official. With the release of its revised guide to climate change by the Royal Society, the nation’s preeminent scientific organization, the UK now formally joins the ranks of the denier nations. The science on climate change is no longer certain, the Society now says.
Climate change: a summary of the science was commissioned in May after a revolt by 43 Fellows of the Royal Society, who felt that the society had been acting more as hot-headed advocates than cool-headed scientists. Its previous president, Lord May, had particularly rankled Royal Society scientists by claiming, without having canvassed his membership, that “The debate on climate change is over” and that “On one hand, you have the entire scientific community and on the other you have a handful of people, half of them crackpots.”
The debate is now officially not over, the society says. “The size of future temperature increases and other aspects of climate change, especially at the regional scale, are still subject to uncertainty,” it explains, appearing to chide scientists who have tried to make scary predictions about the future that had no basis in science: “There is little confidence in specific projections of future regional climate change, except at continental scales.”
Moreover, the Royal Society now states that so little is known about how different today’s climate is from the past that “some uncertainties are unlikely ever to be significantly reduced.”
To see how far the Royal Society has come from its past pronouncements on climate change, see its notorious 2005 document, “A guide to facts and fictions about climate change.”
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