Climate Change Is Real - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 195

change is beneficial to the public, for it forces researchers to account
for their way of gathering and analyzing data much more carefully and
to sharpen their research methods as well. Even the research—not the
rhetoric—of contrarian scientists such as Lindzen who cultivate the lone
wolf persona continues to benefit climate research today, for his challenge
to the consensus view helps it sharpen its own account of climate change
and prevent it from becoming too uncritical of its findings. Such contrar-
ian viewpoints serve an important public function. Because the news is
so bad, and has such a huge potential impact on our lives, it's only natural
that we'd resist it with everything we've got—and force the experts to lis-
ten to a wide range of objections and doubts. Making researchers defend
their findings is a good thing: there is no reason to let their work influ-
ence our lives until they make a case that is truly convincing. Skepticism
here, as in so many walks of life, can be a real boon.
But skepticism of this sort is non-dogmatic, open-minded, and curi-
ous; when it is true to itself, it hesitates to endorse any of the findings
outright, including the work of contrarian scientists. (Nor would it, like
Lindzen, describe those who accept the consensus as venal or hysteri-
cal.) This kind of skepticism, in fact, permeates the scientific commu-
nity; it is the lifeblood of research, its motivating force. No self-respecting
researcher could get up in the morning without the perpetual suspicion
that earlier work in the field was incomplete, that there are huge gaps in
existing knowledge, and that another angle might reveal more. Because of
this atitude, the statements about climate change that scientists give to
the public even today are not declarations of absolute faith but carefully
phrased descriptions of a plausible scenario, descriptions that have prob-
ability and hesitation built into them as a mater of course.
Such doubts are not present merely out of habit, merely because sci-
entists just can't commit. On the contrary, it's quite clear that there are, in
fact, vast gaps in our knowledge. Nobody really understands what causes
clouds to form, what effect climate change might have in creating more
or fewer of them, and whether the ability of clouds to reflect potentially
warming sunlight back into space may increase or decrease in the future
(and thus affect the planet's warming in some manner). 170 Furthermore,
the computer models that predict future warming are not yet capable of
describing the incredibly complex, dynamic systems of the planet with