The media is bit by bit begin­ning to accept that the sci­en­tific con­sensus really is that serious human-​​induced global warming is a go. It has taken years for us to get to this point, and we’re not fully here yet anyway. One of my most grumpy moments this summer was on a day off in town, standing in a line up in a king sized gro­cery store, staring at a 3″ National Post head­line claiming that global warming skep­tics have been unfairly ignored.

Strangely enough, it hasn’t been very dif­fi­cult to figure out what the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity has actu­ally been thinking on this issue. Not for years. There is a single cred­ible and com­pre­hen­sive inter­na­tional body which coor­di­nates global warming research and goes to great lengths to assemble and sum­ma­rize find­ings on the topic. I can’t off­hand think of any other major science-​​related issue that has been made as trans­par­ently easy to research.

But I guess that wasn’t enough for the press. They could hardly be expected to, you know, read the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change’s reports. They had sto­ries to write and dead­lines to meet. Poor bug­gers. It must be a real exis­ten­tial chal­lenge, keeping a sense of reality when you are charged to make it up without ref­er­ence to it on a daily basis.

I’m not com­plaining here about the edi­to­rial posi­tion of jour­nal­ists or jour­nalism out­fits. People are free to dis­miss the find­ings of the sci­en­tific enter­prise if they have doubts about its integrity or value. The thing is, the media haven’t been casting doubt on the value of the sci­ence, they’ve just been rou­tinely mis­stating that sci­ence, for years. For the most part it’s been to play up the uncer­tainty angle. Maybe it made for more exciting reading. You would think cer­tain impending social and envi­ron­mental dis­aster would be more inter­esting than uncer­tain impending social and envi­ron­mental dis­aster. Guess not.

So the poor folks at the IPCC who have been writing these reports every few years have, I imagine, been get­ting more and more des­perate each year at the lack of impact of their cru­cially impor­tant pub­li­ca­tions. The last one came out in 2001. The next one is due out in 2007.

Looks like the sci­en­tificos are trying some tac­tics this time round. In par­tic­ular, indi­vidual sci­en­tists are giving inter­views talking up the report as being wildly impor­tant and con­taining amazing infor­ma­tion. Which it is and does, no doubt, it’s just not like an esteemed inter­na­tional sci­en­tific body to pimp it’s pubs with teasers and interviews.

There are, for example, some great lines in this news­paper article from CanWest:

”I can tell you for sure that the state­ments in that report will be far stronger than what existed in 2001. It will be flab­ber­gast­ingly stronger.”

Holy crap, that’s a lot stronger. Let’s hope the brave new edi­tion of the report will be enough to do it. And let’s hope that if it is action-​​jam-​​packed with unequiv­ocal state­ments of flab­ber­gasting strength, that they will be inter­preted for what they are: the highly unusual result of the highly unusual sit­u­a­tion in which the level of doubt around a sci­en­tific ques­tion has drained almost com­pletely away; and not for what they aren’t: evi­dence that the sci­en­tists have lost objec­tivity and are making per­son­ally moti­vated overclaims.

I guess we’ll see. If any­body pays attention.