SMH : “the science of global warming has become more clear and more alarming”

“Non-peer-reviewed scientists” threaten the survival of the planet.

Professor Ross Garnaut pointed out an interesting inverse relationship this week. Over the past three years the science of global warming has become more clear and more alarming, but in that same period, fewer Australians believed it was true.

Most Australians accept the climate is warming but the public has become somewhat less confident about the proposition even as the evidence has become more certain.

It is a shaky foundation for a rational policy debate about the best policy solution. It might be one reason why we are not having one.

But why is it so? Part of the explanation undoubtedly lies with the enormous publicity given to the so-called ”climategate” emails. Subsequent reviews cleared the scientists involved of deliberately manipulating results but the saga remains contentious and it forced a reanalysis of data and more transparency. According to Garnaut none of the findings is ”material to the reliability of the main propositions of the mainstream science”. That message has been lost on the public.

Another explanation may lie in the fact that Kevin Rudd told everyone global warming was the ”greatest moral challenge of our time” but then he and Julia Gillard decided it was not great enough to stop them deferring the emissions trading scheme.

Garnaut reckons the disconnect is in part caused by the fact that newspapers and blogs give the same credence to mainstream peer-reviewed scientists as they do to anyone else who has a strong opinion, might have written a book or is willing to fill in some airtime on radio or television.

In fact sometimes they elevated non-mainstream and non-peer-reviewed scientists in order to provide ”balance”, which was a funny way to define the term, he said.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/little-logic-to-heated-debate-20110311-1br8z.html