Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
that climate changes will result from man's combustion of fossil fuels and
changes in land use.”
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In
The Genesis Strategy,
Stephen Schneider had criti-
cized the plodding process of consensus building as a poor way to do sci-
ence, but Tom Moss and his AAAS colleagues now saw an opportunity to
capitalize on the power of a unified scientific voice. They hoped to encour-
age consensus by bringing scientists from different disciplines together to
hash out the presumably minor points on which they disagreed.
In hindsight, the AAAS group's faith in the power and possibility of
consensus seems problematic at best. As scholars Naomi Oreskes, Erik
Conway, and Matthew Shindell explain in their work on what they call
the “social deconstruction of scientific knowledge,” scientific consensus,
for all its power, can become extremely vulnerable in the face of dissent.
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Scientists rarely define the criteria for establishing consensus on an issue;
but as was the case with the AAAS, unanimity is often the ideal. As long
as an individual scientist can demonstrate her adherence to the standards
of “good science”— political neutrality, objectivity, and a disciplinarily
defined methodological rigor— her single dissenting voice can under-
mine the ideal of unanimity and cast doubt upon a scientific community's
“consensus” view. The more powerful or prestigious the dissenting sci-
entist, the greater the challenge to consensus. As both environmentalists
and antitobacco advocates learned during the 1970s and 1980s, destroying
consensus by manufacturing doubt is far easier than forging even an over-
whelming majority of agreement, let alone a unanimous viewpoint.
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In
fact, much of the debate about global warming in the years since 1979 has
been a contest over the meaning and value of scientific consensus.
For climate scientists, however, these were mostly lessons of the 1980s.
In 1978, their bitterest battles over consensus still lay ahead. With a
National Climate Program supported by both parties in Congress, a Demo-
cratic president in favor of renewable energy, and an increasingly interested
world public, the AAAS saw an opportunity to turn good climate science
into good climate policy by bringing together the diverse group of biologi-
cal, physical, environmental, and social scientists working on problems of
climate change.
The AAAS found an ally in President Carter's new Department of
Energy (DOE). An exceptionally cold winter and a shortage of natu-
ral gas in 1976- 77, along with increasing gas prices and inflation, con-
fronted Carter at his inauguration, and his single term would be marred
