Justan Spaid’s column “Global warming or cooling?” highlights a key issue in public perception of climate change, and that is how the media often misrepresents science.

Spaid cited no scientific publications, basing his article on a 1974 Time magazine that did get the current scientific view on climate change wrong (see “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Sep. 2008). Getting the science wrong happens often in the popular press because articles don’t undergo the same rigorous review process as articles published in a scientific journal. Time magazine and other media outlets aren’t reliable sources for any physical science. We should take what the media has to say about climate change with skepticism.

Spaid made a good point when he said “global warming has been the ‘cause’ of almost all the weather patterns and natural disasters in our world,” though the statement is missing the clause “according to the media.” The media tries to grip us with shocking stories about global warming, stories which often stray away from the actual science. The evidence shows that there may be changes in the frequencies of certain weather events, but no single weather event or natural disaster can be blamed entirely on global warming.

Climate change has been a widely used term in the scientific community for years. You can blame the media for the supposed changes in the popularity of certain terminology. I prefer to use the term climate change in most cases, because it places emphasis on more climate variables than the rise in global mean temperature. Arguably more important to us here in an agricultural state is how precipitation and other aspects of the local hydrology are changing. But if we want to talk about what’s causing the overall climate to change, it comes back to global warming.

Whether we’re talking chemistry, biology or atmospheric science, serious evidence is published in scientific journal articles. Spaid failed to point out that the vast majority of such journal articles related to the current climate change agree with the International Panel on Climate Change’s findings. It is clear that the weight of the evidence points toward a warming world, much of which is our doing.

Still disagree? Then make your points where real scientific debate happens: scientific journals. Until then, you’re not going to win over any “crackpot scientists,” especially the many who have been studying atmospheric science since before Spaid was born.

Jason Patton

Graduate student

Agronomy