Royal Society guide aims to remove bias from climate science

The Royal Society has produced a 60 second video and guide on climate change and its effect in an effort to remove bias and spin from climate science, instead focusing on what the experts say.

The guide and the questions and answers on the Climate Change: Evidence & Causes website is designed to inform the public in an easy to understand and engaging way. The organisation states the guide aims to put more scientific evidence into pub and family arguments on climate change.

Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, commented, “Most people in the UK grasp the basics of climate science and the need to take sensible actions about global warming.

“However, we all now someone who claims to know better than the vast majority of expert climate scientists. The ill-informed pub bore or the family know-it-all who claims, with great confidence, that global warming is not a problem or at the other end of the spectrum that extreme catastrophe is just around the corner.”

The guide is made up of twenty short questions and answers about climate science, which tackle the things typically raised by people who dismiss the current scientific basis of climate science, and covers topics including sea level rise, how climate change effects the frequency of extreme weather and what the recent global warming slowdown means.

Nurse added, “Climate science is very complex, but is something people read in the headline all the time. This document is for people who want to hear straight from expert climate scientists, without bias or spin, the science behind what is happening to our climate.”

Photo: Liam Quinn via Flickr 

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