the climate brief Accurate Reporting of Climate Science

Research suggests  support for climate change action increases if the public is aware of a scientific consensus on the evidence for human causes. But how many scientists really agree? A new  study, out today, shows very few studies reject that climate change is human caused, and hopes to promote this message by encouraging the public to get involved. 

A team of volunteers from climate science blog, Skeptical Science, rated the abstracts of nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed papers based on their level of agreement that climate change is human caused. The new study aims to identify the level of consensus by analysing 20 years of climate change literature.  

For more than a hundred years, scientists have known greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere. But despite trapping more and more heat, earth's surface temperature over the past decade and a half has risen slowly. And understanding where the extra heat ends up can be more complicated. 

We talk to Dr Richard Allan, lead researcher on a new project called Deep-C, about how the tools to take earth's temperature have changed - and how new measurements can help scientists investigate what's behind the surface warming slowdown.

Allan is a climate science researcher at the University of Reading's department of meteorology. His career has focussed on combining measurements with climate models to understand changes in earth's climate.

Heat sink

When we talk about the earth's temperature, we usually mean the temperature of the air above the land and ocean, or surface temperature, as it's what humans experience most directly. But surface temperature is only a small part of the climate system. In fact, most of the extra heat the planet absorbs goes into the oceans. Allan tells us:

"The vast ocean has a huge capacity to store heat … There's a very good relationship between the extra radiative energy entering the top of Earth's atmosphere - due to increases in greenhouse gases - and ocean heating."

In a recent BBC Radio 4 programme on the origins of the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), the founders discussed why, in 1973, they'd felt moved to set up an eco-centre in an old Welsh slate quarry. Long before renewables were anything approaching mainstream, CAT was building wind turbines out of canvas and wood, and solar panels out of old radiators.

Since then renewable technology has been on a rhetorical journey.  The sustainable "good life" dream of the CAT pioneers has given way to issues of economic viability in the twenty-first century "green economy". But is the shift in framing from good life to green economy a movement betraying its principles, or evolving to address contemporary issues and concerns?

From Good Life to green economy

CAT's mission, states Radio 4's Sue MacGregor, "was to promote alternatives to the modern, high polluting technologies that produce so much of our energy, food and buildings". CAT's founders use phrases like "limits to growth" and "how to blend science with a way of doing more with less, and working with nature rather than destroying it". It's the philosophy that inspired Surbiton couple Barbara and Tom's pursuit of the sustainability dream in 1970s sitcom The Good Life.