Ever wondered if alarmist climate scientists purposely hide uncertainties when they communicate with the media and the public? Wonder no longer. They do.

That’s the conclusion of Senja Post’s “Communicating science in public controversies: Strategic considerations of the German climate scientists,” published this month in the journal Public Understanding of Science. Here’s the abstract:

In public controversies on scientific issues, scientists likely consider the effects of their findings on journalists and on the public debate. A representative survey of 123 German climate scientists (42%) finds that although most climate scientists think that uncertainties about climate change should be made clearer in public they do not actively communicate this to journalists. Moreover, the climate scientists fear that their results could be misinterpreted in public or exploited by interest groups. Asking scientists about their readiness to publish one of two versions of a fictitious research finding shows that their concerns weigh heavier when a result implies that climate change will proceed slowly than when it implies that climate change will proceed fast.

If you read the full paper, you learn that “the more climate scientists are engaged with the media the less they intend to point out uncertainties about climate change and the more unambiguously they confirm the publicly held convictions that it is man-made, historically unique, dangerous and calculable,” and “climate scientists object to publishing a result in the media significantly more when it indicates that climate change proceeds more slowly rather than faster than expected,” which implies that they “are more inclined to communicate their results in public when they confirm rather than contradict that climate change is dramatic.”

As Craig Idso, whose piece brought Post’s article to my attention, puts it, “Such findings are saddening and shameful, highlighting a near-ubiquitous bias among climate scientists (at least in Germany) who willfully suppress the communication of research findings and uncertainties to the public when they do not support the alarmist narrative of CO₂-induced global warming. Such deceit has no place in science.”

 

 

Featured image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.