Climate Change Speeding Toward Irreversible Tipping Points

In a recent posting on sundancechannel.com a review was made of the United Nations Environment Programme latest report on climate change called “Science Report: Climate Change Speeding Towards Irreversible Tipping Points”. In reading both the primary and secondary sources of information many differences and similarities are apparent.
The primary article reports only the facts and is completely unbiased as it provides only the results of many tests done on various aspects of climate change. While each test has a conclusion and perhaps rather inductive conclusions are made, there is no sense of personal opinion in the primary article. One example of this is when the primary article explicitly rejects one of their hypotheses as the data proves it wrong. This means that the primary source did not necessarily reflect the title of the secondary article nor the claims it seems to make.
The secondary article, written by someone in the eco-friendly world of science who potentially brings bias to the table, does show bias in certain aspects. The data the secondary source uses is very accurate in the sense that they don’t try and extrapolate on what the primary source says and they directly quote the primary source in their data. However, the information the secondary source chooses to use is the information supporting climate change and not the negative results which are presented in the primary article. This shows bias in a sense and a sort of misinformation of the primary article since the reader gets a false sense of what the results of the study actually were. For example the secondary article says, “The report underlines concern by scientists that the planet is now committed to damaging and irreversible impacts as a result of the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.” And while this may be true what the secondary article doesn’t tell us is that this was actually a quote placed in the foreword to the article. This leads to a false sense of the article because the reader would be lead to assume that studies and test had lead scientists to believe that the planet was committed to irreversible damage. The statement is not credible as it is a quote by someone based purely on opinion not the evidence.
One of the biggest differences between the primary and secondary source is that the secondary source reports not only the facts but also they assume what the results lead the scientists to conclude and believe. The secondary article uses such statements as “It shows that researchers have become increasingly concerned about ocean acidification due to the absorption of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in seawater and its impact on shellfish and coral reefs.” to try and prove that there is merit to their argument when really they are making assumptions based on conclusions the primary article makes which use phrases such as “could be a factor” and “might be a cause of global warming”. The conclusions from the primary article do not reflect the opinions of the scientists conducting the research.
The primary article, while reflecting accurate data, does not provide the reader with a complete overview of the results of the studies nor the processes which were used to obtain the results. The primary article is a brief overview of the journal article which offers only a biased view of many conflicting results.

References

Sundance Channel. "science report: climate change speeding toward irreversible tipping points" http://www.sundancechannel.com/sunfiltered/2009/09/science-report-climate-change-speeding-toward-irreversible-tipping-points/. September 27th, 2009. Accessed October 5th, 2009.

Various Authors. "climate change science compendium 2009". http://www.unep.org/compendium2009/PDF/Compendium2009_fullreport.pdf . September 2009. Accessed October 5th, 2009.