Attack climate symptoms not cause, say scientists

THE world's leading climate change body has been duped into  trying to prove global warming is man-made rather than figuring out what to do about it.

THE world's leading climate change body the IPCC has been duped by sceptics into obsessively trying to prove global warming is man-made rather than figuring out what to do about it, according to leading Australian and international scientists.

Writing in an article published recently in the scientific journal Nature, Australian, US and Spanish researchers stated it is rarely possible or useful to try to determine if specific biological impacts are caused by rising greenhouse gas emissions.

A better approach, the authors say, is to attack more familiar environmental problems, such as over-fishing, pollution and land clearing, in order to help ecosystems adapt.

The article responds to recommendations by the IPCC that its fifth assessment report should focus on 'attribution' - assessing the extent to which biological changes are driven by man-made as opposed to natural climate change - which the researchers see as misguided.

"It is rarely possible to attribute specific responses of individual wild species to human-induced climate change," the authors write. "From the perspective of a wild plant or animal, a changing climate is a changing climate, irrespective of its cause."

Trying to achieve this goal risks "taking research effort away from the critical issue of adaptation", the article claims, accusing the IPCC of "yielding to the contrarians".

The authors propose an alternative strategy of tackling easier-to-handle, traditional environmental problems that interact with climate change.

"Most importantly from a conservation standpoint, these other stressors are more easily managed on local scales than climate change itself, and thus, paradoxically, are crucial to constructing adaptation programs to cope with (man-made) climate change."

They cite the example of corals in over-fished areas struggling to recover from bleaching, compared to those in areas where fish stocks are well managed.

CSIRO scientist Dr Elvira Poloczanska, who is one of the authors, said more money should be spent researching climate change adaptation.

"We need to face up to the inevitability of climate change and start looking at ways we can help ecosystems adapt."