Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
industrialized countries.
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In order to believe that climate change science is part of some new world
order plot, one would therefore need to imagine a rather implausible conspiracy among the world's
leading capitalist nations to undermine their own power and authority through the creation of a world
government. Ironically, while the Bush administration was casting doubt on the science of global
warming, the Pentagon was already getting busy planning for it, with its primary concerns not about
international regulation, but about the national security threats posed by a changing climate.
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Despite the multiple layers of review, errors sometime occur, not surprising given the huge size
of the multivolume reports. Detractors of the IPCC, for example, seized upon two minor errors in the
impacts (working group 2) part of the report in an attempt to undermine confidence in the 2007 IPCC
fourth assessment, as is discussed in a later chapter. One instance involved the year projected for the
disappearance of Himalayan glaciers, which, thorough a transposition error, turned 2350 into 2035. In
the other error, the report mistakenly cited the area of the Netherlands currently lying below sea level
as 55 percent rather than the true value of 26 percent. Neither of these two minor errors in the
several-thousand-page-long report made it into the technical summary report or the summary for
policy makers.
Ironically, a more defensible criticism was that the IPCC underestimated prospects for future sea
level rise. The report estimated the maximum sea level rise by the end of this century at less than a
foot and a half. However, that estimate—as the IPCC itself readily acknowledged—did not include
the effects of melting ice sheets, which are already known to be contributing to sea level rise. More
recent alternative estimates that attempt to account for such contributions estimate the maximum sea
estimates, but for a reason opposite to what climate change deniers argue.
Breaking of Paradigms
With all of this emphasis on consensus in science from initial paper publication to the elaborate
procedures of the IPCC, where is the room for outside-the-box thinking? Certainly there must be a
role for “pushing the envelope” in the progress of science? A healthy, functioning scientific
skepticism requires that we question, in good faith, any scientific finding, but particularly, as Carl
Sagan suggested, findings that seem most surprising or whose implications are potentially most far-
reaching. The underlying sentiment was perhaps best expressed in a quotation commonly attributed to
Mark Twain: “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that
just ain't so.” At times, dramatic and even fundamental revision in scientific thinking is required,
growing out of findings that cannot be accommodated by prevailing scientific theories. Such was the
viewpoint popularized in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn's
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
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Some of the greatest advances in modern scientific thinking have occurred through such a
breaking of scientific paradigms, with individual scientists bucking conventional wisdom. The poster
child is Galileo, who in the early seventeenth century championed the view of heliocentrism earlier
around, against the prevailing religious teachings of his day.
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Charles Darwin's theory of evolution
is another example.
In the Earth sciences, the archetypal example is the theory of continental drift advanced by
