Climate Change Is Real - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 189

decisions about publication, public funding, and career advancement in
the field. 162
These authors draw on credible ideas about how science operates, but
they do not apply those ideas to the climate change controversy with suf-
ficient care. In the context of that controversy, research that undermines
the prevailing view would be a positive finding, for it would establish a sta-
tistically significant result. The IPCC incorporates many findings of this
kind, taking care to list many instances where research suggests that cer-
tain factors may not be causing climate change, or at least not through
any clearly demonstrated mechanism (for example, atmospheric aero-
sols), and that certain consequences one might expect, such as the thin-
ning of ice over the East Antarctic landmass, are not taking place.
Furthermore, researchers do not operate as if they are so many sheep;
they take delight when they encounter convincing arguments to the con-
trary, when they see data that upsets the established view in the field.
Scientists are interested in examining the dominant research paradigm,
to be sure, but they also know that it can be more important and ground-
breaking to create a new one. Most of the major reputations in science
are made when a researcher finds something genuinely different from
what has gone before, shifting the general orientation of the field in a
new direction.
Finally, the claim that the consensus view is not credible is itself an
example of “more” rather than “less,” for it inevitably gets an outsize
share of public atention. To suggest that people would prefer not to
hear a “skeptical” viewpoint simply ignores the public—and scientific—
response, since the public is just as interested in a contrary view as in
the consensus. he popularity of “skeptical” topics—including the one
Michaels and Balling themselves wrote—exempliies that patern.
The relatively cogent ideas put forward by Michaels and Balling are
more apparently responsible—and thus ultimately more devious—than
Lindzen's charge of a climate change conspiracy. But at least Lindzen
atempts to explain what might motivate a conspiracy at all: a wish to
corner the market on public funding for research. The problem with his
theory is that it's difficult to see why scientists would conspire to give the
world such consistently bad news. If they might be tempted (according to
this theory) by the promise of more grant money, nearly everything else