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snousleThere is a scene in the film Never Cry Wolf that has stuck with me for a long time. (Fans will forgive me if my recollection is inaccurate.) A scientist, studying wolves in the Arctic, is attempting to explain to an Inuit fellow what it is he is doing. He lives in a shack filled with glass jars, and when he is asked what is in the jars, he replies "wolf scat". The Inuit guy goes "Hmmmm". It goes downhill from there, and the comic absurdity of his work is laid bare in having to actually explain it to someone.
I've always felt that way about science. There is a myth out there that science is, like mathematics, a discipline of pure reason. That one can take any theory and demonstrate its truthfulness in a way that is inevitable and inarguable. That you should be able to reconstruct all of science from nothing but direct, tangible evidence combined with flawless reasoning.
Not so. Scientific theories are dog turds in glass jars. They are complicated, difficult to justify, implausible, and messy. They require forms of thinking that are deeply unnatural and in constant conflict with everyday intuition. They involve subjective judgments that are often a subject of earnest, long-lasting debate. That is why I describe science as "epistemically ridiculous" - to have to defend a theory on purely philosophical grounds can get a bit embarrassing. Paul Feyrabend, a well known philosopher of science, calls them "fairy tales". He's not wrong. Aside from moments of great structural beauty, they have only one redeeming quality: they work.
Science does not run on just evidence and logic. It also runs on trust. Reasoning makes the bricks, but trust is the mortar that binds them into a larger structure. No single person can understand the whole of even one scientific discipline. Every scientist relies on a small amount of direct evidence, a small amount of their own reasoning, and an entire cathedral of established knowledge that is far too large to fully question or apprehend.
So where does this trust come from? What justifies it? Trust is distinct from faith for a particular reason: faith is given blindly, but trust is earned. Specifically, it is built up from a deep understanding of some other person's worldview, combined with large numbers of small, rewarding transactions that work out in accordance with that understanding. Trust is built on a history of reliability and an expectation of more to come. It is not itself 100% reliable. But the presence of trust in science enables a process that is good enough to sustain a self-correcting system of knowlege that converges, as best as we can determine, on something that really does look like "truth".
(Oooh, that's a strong word for a postmodernist! But in saying this, I recognize that truth is inseparable from power; theory is considered true because it gets things done. That it is sometimes surprisingly elegant and parsimonious in its own right is a fringe benefit. I suppose that is unsatisfactory for certain kinds of idealists, but it's good enough for me.)
Science is a fault-tolerant system that admits human error. By way of illustrating this, it is instructive to look at previous scientific controversies that have involved political elements. The Millikan oil drop experiment is especially interesting - a quote from Feynman on this subject is worth copying here:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
I was discussing this with John over dinner, and asked him if he thought that the last sentence was correct - that scientists knew better than to do this nowadays. His answer was immediate: "No". He pointed out how powerful Millikan was at the time, and how intimidating it would have been to contradict his result in print. Well, I asked, how far astray do you think this leads science in our age? "Not very".
I think that's about right - Feynman is a little too optimistic in pronouncing the disease of politics to be cured. But the interesting thing is that, in the long run, it didn't matter so much - the correct value for the charge of the electron was established regardless, and it didn't take very long to sort out.
(It was an especially interesting discussion because he's been through a very similar thing himself, concerning the timing of volcanic eruptions in antiquity. Volcanic ash layers are used to date archaeological artifacts and can be recognized in ice cores. John's contention is that ash layers attributed to particular eruptions could in fact have been due to several others occurring at about the same time. He published a letter to Nature that rankled quite a few noses and got a scathing review from some "establishment" researchers whose existing body of research was substantially threatened by this contrary perspective. But his results were accepted in time.)
So... back to climate change. As I was saying, the most critical part of the climate-change argument, the part that is not simple arithmetic, is establishing that a little more carbon dioxide changes IR absorption in the atmosphere enough to change the whole climate. If this is true, the discussion moves from whether there is a substantial effect to exactly what that effect would be. This latter question is interesting and important, but not so urgent as the former.
There is a convenient summary of the "Carbon Dioxide Problem" here which serves as a useful jumping-off point into the literature. Step 2 of the argument is the "hard part" that I want to focus on - the notion that "trace gases contribute to the natural greenhouse effect".
The ten thousand dollar question: why should anyone believe that this is true?
[Twiddles thumbs, looks at watch, whistles idly...]
Why indeed. I began this investigation by searching Google with the phrase "carbon dioxide absorption spectrum". The very first article that pops up is a sophisticated-looking discussion from a guy named Gary Novak of why carbon dioxide could not possibly be a greenhouse gas. I thought, gosh, that's very interesting. I have to say, I was taken aback by this - until I realized the author is quite thoroughly insane. Aside from the CO2 issue, he is also asserting that there are fundamental and obvious contradictions in high school level physics that should be "considered proof in any rational mind" that the current definition of energy is incorrect.
Gosh, millions of people are taught this stuff, and there aren't enough rational minds out there to see this obvious problem? How curious. The conspiracy must be so much larger than I had expected. [snerk] I don't mean to dwell on this for too long - I mean, it's not nice to make fun of crazy people - but just how much time should someone spend on this sort of thing? Zero. While there might be brilliant lone-wolf scientists out there, if you don't participate in a system of trust, your work simply isn't trustworthy. It doesn't matter if you are right, because you have forsaken the only mechanism through which you can make your ideas useful to others. No, it's not "fair", merely practical.
If Novak had shown some restraint - reined back teh crazy just a little bit - and if the currently-accepted views were not embedded in a mostly-reliable system of knowledge, then it would not be possible to distinguish his conclusions from the currently accepted ones. Even his energy discussion, which I hope most readers will agree is pretty unlikely to be correct, shows great sophistication in befuddling the reader. I don't know if he is being deliberately deceitful or if he honestly believes this stuff. Either way, without the institutions of science, progress would grind to a halt because this sort of pathological anti-reason cannot be fought on purely logical grounds. There is not enough time for any single person to wade through it all.
[I will also point out that Google itself represents a kind of trust system, because it ranks articles by the number of incoming links. Novak has come out on top. Kind of disturbing, no? Here we are seeing a little corner of an alternative trust system established by radical skeptics. The reason we rely on the scientific establishment rather than this alternative system is not because science is essentially better, but because the skeptics have never produced anything of value. If the skeptics delivered computers and cars and GPS systems while the scientists sat around scratching their balls, I'd be following the skeptics.]
As it happens, before I concluded that Novak was nuts, I found a response to his first objection - that CO2 concentration doesn't matter because it's totally opaque to IR anyway - in an article from more than fifty years ago:
One further objection has been raised to the carbon dioxide theory: the atmosphere is completely opaque at the center of the carbon dioxide band and therefore there is no change in the absorption as the carbon dioxide amount varies. This is entirely true for a spectral interval about one micron wide on either side of the center of the carbon dioxide band. However, the argument neglects the hundreds of spectral lines from carbon dioxide that are outside this interval of complete absorption. The change in absorption for a given variation in carbon dioxide amount is greatest for a spectral interval that is only partially opaque; the temperature variation at the surface of the Earth is determined by the change in absorption of such intervals.
Note the difference here: the Plass article addresses Novak's objection, but Novak's article does not address Plass' answer to the objection, even though the Plass article came long before. The re-raising of old questions as if they were entirely new ones is a standard technique of denialists in all fields. In fact, almost all the questions they raise take this form - you almost never see an original question. One might speculate that the strategy being employed here is to troll the literature for old questions while ignoring any of the old responses to those questions.
In the meanwhile, from the summary page above, we find two lines of evidence that suggest that CO2 concentrations are relevant to IR emissions - more-recent calculations using "line by line" calculations of radiation flux through the atmosphere, and space-based measurements that assess the IR absorption more directly.
How far down the road do we need to go here in order to believe that these results are, if not perfectly correct, at least good-faith efforts that don't suffer from a fundamental error? Well, if you assume that everyone around you is lying to save their careers, there is no end to the questions you could raise. You could spend the rest of your life challenging the validity of every single data point in every single calculation.
Or, you can suppose that the result is actually incorrect, and ask: how likely it is that an error of this type could be sustained? Between the flux models and the satellite measurements, there are a LOT of people with much more intimate contact with the data than I have. Similarly, I see in the scientific community strong incentives to find errors in that data. Every scientist I know stays up late at night running endless "reality checks" against what more sensible people would simply take for granted, because the consequences of publishing something that is later invalidated are rather uncomfortable. How would you like to have been the first scientist to "confirm" Millikan's value for the charge of the electron? I blush just thinking about it.
The biggest error of science skeptics is to misunderstand the incentive structure under which researchers operate. Yes, there are incentives to conform to established theory - but there are also incentives to question it. The interaction is complicated and not nearly as tidy as I would personally like. Is it possible that after fifty years of hammering on the IR flux question, involving large numbers of independent approaches, the fundamental conclusion is incorrect? Yes, it is possible. But if there is an error here, it is not going to be an obvious one, and it is not even remotely plausible that such an error could have been discovered and systematically repressed for half a century.
So, in summary, the reasons I believe this are:
1) I can see that it's an old question which has been worked on for a long time, from multiple perspectives, spanning several generations of researchers.
2) The literature shows that the conclusion has been honestly challenged, and those challenges have not been ignored.
3) A large number of people have understood and thought about it before me.
4) I know from personal experience that published conclusions of this type are generally reliable.
5) I know something about how the calculations are performed, and do not see anything that is inconsistent with this understanding.
And there, I stop, because I have many other things to worry about, and the probability of having reached an incorrect conclusion - in my judgment - is not high enough to merit spending more time on it. Are these criteria that would satisfy a skeptic? No. Should a skeptic believe the claim that CO2 affects IR emissions on this basis? No.
NO??? What, wasn't the whole point of this exercise to beat down the skeptics? No, it was not - it's an explanation of why I believe it. Skeptics should not be so accepting. This conclusion might surprise you, but it is a rational one. Skeptics have not participated in the long stream of satisfactory transactions that have led me to personally trust the scientific establishment, despite its many flaws. If you have no experience with a supposedly "authoritative" source of knowledge, and that source is asking you to trust them on a matter of great importance, you'd be pretty stupid to go along with what they say. There is simply no substitute for the trust-building mechanisms I have enjoyed myself. I cannot transfer to a skeptic the history of my own interaction with science, so I cannot transfer the trust in science that is necessary to adequately resolve questions of this nature.
The skeptic is on his own - unless, by chance, his trust in my judgment is adequate to let him transitively trust the literature in the way I do. And that would be very flattering, but I don't see it as something I can take for granted.
So the problem here - which I see as blocking any hope of taking actions to reduce the risk of climate change - is that the network of trust that constitutes science is too insular. Too many people are outside of it, alienated by it, or even harmed by it. Arguably, it is a "marketing" problem. If the contributions of science were more consistently recognized as such, the situation might be very different. But science is not a corporation, or a brand, so it's hard to imagine how that could happen.
There is no amount of argumentation that is going to overcome this problem - each tour through the web of theory is just another opportunity to raise allegations of conspiracy and fraud. It is a tragedy, because climate change is not the only challenge our civilization faces, and it's not going to be the last time science will be rejected as untrustworthy.
I started out, years ago, being angry that denialists would reject science, and have ended by recognizing that science has actually earned more trust than one could reasonably expect from the public. The glass is already half-full. The way forward is not debate, but engagement.
I've always felt that way about science. There is a myth out there that science is, like mathematics, a discipline of pure reason. That one can take any theory and demonstrate its truthfulness in a way that is inevitable and inarguable. That you should be able to reconstruct all of science from nothing but direct, tangible evidence combined with flawless reasoning.
Not so. Scientific theories are dog turds in glass jars. They are complicated, difficult to justify, implausible, and messy. They require forms of thinking that are deeply unnatural and in constant conflict with everyday intuition. They involve subjective judgments that are often a subject of earnest, long-lasting debate. That is why I describe science as "epistemically ridiculous" - to have to defend a theory on purely philosophical grounds can get a bit embarrassing. Paul Feyrabend, a well known philosopher of science, calls them "fairy tales". He's not wrong. Aside from moments of great structural beauty, they have only one redeeming quality: they work.
Science does not run on just evidence and logic. It also runs on trust. Reasoning makes the bricks, but trust is the mortar that binds them into a larger structure. No single person can understand the whole of even one scientific discipline. Every scientist relies on a small amount of direct evidence, a small amount of their own reasoning, and an entire cathedral of established knowledge that is far too large to fully question or apprehend.
So where does this trust come from? What justifies it? Trust is distinct from faith for a particular reason: faith is given blindly, but trust is earned. Specifically, it is built up from a deep understanding of some other person's worldview, combined with large numbers of small, rewarding transactions that work out in accordance with that understanding. Trust is built on a history of reliability and an expectation of more to come. It is not itself 100% reliable. But the presence of trust in science enables a process that is good enough to sustain a self-correcting system of knowlege that converges, as best as we can determine, on something that really does look like "truth".
(Oooh, that's a strong word for a postmodernist! But in saying this, I recognize that truth is inseparable from power; theory is considered true because it gets things done. That it is sometimes surprisingly elegant and parsimonious in its own right is a fringe benefit. I suppose that is unsatisfactory for certain kinds of idealists, but it's good enough for me.)
Science is a fault-tolerant system that admits human error. By way of illustrating this, it is instructive to look at previous scientific controversies that have involved political elements. The Millikan oil drop experiment is especially interesting - a quote from Feynman on this subject is worth copying here:
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
I was discussing this with John over dinner, and asked him if he thought that the last sentence was correct - that scientists knew better than to do this nowadays. His answer was immediate: "No". He pointed out how powerful Millikan was at the time, and how intimidating it would have been to contradict his result in print. Well, I asked, how far astray do you think this leads science in our age? "Not very".
I think that's about right - Feynman is a little too optimistic in pronouncing the disease of politics to be cured. But the interesting thing is that, in the long run, it didn't matter so much - the correct value for the charge of the electron was established regardless, and it didn't take very long to sort out.
(It was an especially interesting discussion because he's been through a very similar thing himself, concerning the timing of volcanic eruptions in antiquity. Volcanic ash layers are used to date archaeological artifacts and can be recognized in ice cores. John's contention is that ash layers attributed to particular eruptions could in fact have been due to several others occurring at about the same time. He published a letter to Nature that rankled quite a few noses and got a scathing review from some "establishment" researchers whose existing body of research was substantially threatened by this contrary perspective. But his results were accepted in time.)
So... back to climate change. As I was saying, the most critical part of the climate-change argument, the part that is not simple arithmetic, is establishing that a little more carbon dioxide changes IR absorption in the atmosphere enough to change the whole climate. If this is true, the discussion moves from whether there is a substantial effect to exactly what that effect would be. This latter question is interesting and important, but not so urgent as the former.
There is a convenient summary of the "Carbon Dioxide Problem" here which serves as a useful jumping-off point into the literature. Step 2 of the argument is the "hard part" that I want to focus on - the notion that "trace gases contribute to the natural greenhouse effect".
The ten thousand dollar question: why should anyone believe that this is true?
[Twiddles thumbs, looks at watch, whistles idly...]
Why indeed. I began this investigation by searching Google with the phrase "carbon dioxide absorption spectrum". The very first article that pops up is a sophisticated-looking discussion from a guy named Gary Novak of why carbon dioxide could not possibly be a greenhouse gas. I thought, gosh, that's very interesting. I have to say, I was taken aback by this - until I realized the author is quite thoroughly insane. Aside from the CO2 issue, he is also asserting that there are fundamental and obvious contradictions in high school level physics that should be "considered proof in any rational mind" that the current definition of energy is incorrect.
Gosh, millions of people are taught this stuff, and there aren't enough rational minds out there to see this obvious problem? How curious. The conspiracy must be so much larger than I had expected. [snerk] I don't mean to dwell on this for too long - I mean, it's not nice to make fun of crazy people - but just how much time should someone spend on this sort of thing? Zero. While there might be brilliant lone-wolf scientists out there, if you don't participate in a system of trust, your work simply isn't trustworthy. It doesn't matter if you are right, because you have forsaken the only mechanism through which you can make your ideas useful to others. No, it's not "fair", merely practical.
If Novak had shown some restraint - reined back teh crazy just a little bit - and if the currently-accepted views were not embedded in a mostly-reliable system of knowledge, then it would not be possible to distinguish his conclusions from the currently accepted ones. Even his energy discussion, which I hope most readers will agree is pretty unlikely to be correct, shows great sophistication in befuddling the reader. I don't know if he is being deliberately deceitful or if he honestly believes this stuff. Either way, without the institutions of science, progress would grind to a halt because this sort of pathological anti-reason cannot be fought on purely logical grounds. There is not enough time for any single person to wade through it all.
[I will also point out that Google itself represents a kind of trust system, because it ranks articles by the number of incoming links. Novak has come out on top. Kind of disturbing, no? Here we are seeing a little corner of an alternative trust system established by radical skeptics. The reason we rely on the scientific establishment rather than this alternative system is not because science is essentially better, but because the skeptics have never produced anything of value. If the skeptics delivered computers and cars and GPS systems while the scientists sat around scratching their balls, I'd be following the skeptics.]
As it happens, before I concluded that Novak was nuts, I found a response to his first objection - that CO2 concentration doesn't matter because it's totally opaque to IR anyway - in an article from more than fifty years ago:
One further objection has been raised to the carbon dioxide theory: the atmosphere is completely opaque at the center of the carbon dioxide band and therefore there is no change in the absorption as the carbon dioxide amount varies. This is entirely true for a spectral interval about one micron wide on either side of the center of the carbon dioxide band. However, the argument neglects the hundreds of spectral lines from carbon dioxide that are outside this interval of complete absorption. The change in absorption for a given variation in carbon dioxide amount is greatest for a spectral interval that is only partially opaque; the temperature variation at the surface of the Earth is determined by the change in absorption of such intervals.
Note the difference here: the Plass article addresses Novak's objection, but Novak's article does not address Plass' answer to the objection, even though the Plass article came long before. The re-raising of old questions as if they were entirely new ones is a standard technique of denialists in all fields. In fact, almost all the questions they raise take this form - you almost never see an original question. One might speculate that the strategy being employed here is to troll the literature for old questions while ignoring any of the old responses to those questions.
In the meanwhile, from the summary page above, we find two lines of evidence that suggest that CO2 concentrations are relevant to IR emissions - more-recent calculations using "line by line" calculations of radiation flux through the atmosphere, and space-based measurements that assess the IR absorption more directly.
How far down the road do we need to go here in order to believe that these results are, if not perfectly correct, at least good-faith efforts that don't suffer from a fundamental error? Well, if you assume that everyone around you is lying to save their careers, there is no end to the questions you could raise. You could spend the rest of your life challenging the validity of every single data point in every single calculation.
Or, you can suppose that the result is actually incorrect, and ask: how likely it is that an error of this type could be sustained? Between the flux models and the satellite measurements, there are a LOT of people with much more intimate contact with the data than I have. Similarly, I see in the scientific community strong incentives to find errors in that data. Every scientist I know stays up late at night running endless "reality checks" against what more sensible people would simply take for granted, because the consequences of publishing something that is later invalidated are rather uncomfortable. How would you like to have been the first scientist to "confirm" Millikan's value for the charge of the electron? I blush just thinking about it.
The biggest error of science skeptics is to misunderstand the incentive structure under which researchers operate. Yes, there are incentives to conform to established theory - but there are also incentives to question it. The interaction is complicated and not nearly as tidy as I would personally like. Is it possible that after fifty years of hammering on the IR flux question, involving large numbers of independent approaches, the fundamental conclusion is incorrect? Yes, it is possible. But if there is an error here, it is not going to be an obvious one, and it is not even remotely plausible that such an error could have been discovered and systematically repressed for half a century.
So, in summary, the reasons I believe this are:
1) I can see that it's an old question which has been worked on for a long time, from multiple perspectives, spanning several generations of researchers.
2) The literature shows that the conclusion has been honestly challenged, and those challenges have not been ignored.
3) A large number of people have understood and thought about it before me.
4) I know from personal experience that published conclusions of this type are generally reliable.
5) I know something about how the calculations are performed, and do not see anything that is inconsistent with this understanding.
And there, I stop, because I have many other things to worry about, and the probability of having reached an incorrect conclusion - in my judgment - is not high enough to merit spending more time on it. Are these criteria that would satisfy a skeptic? No. Should a skeptic believe the claim that CO2 affects IR emissions on this basis? No.
NO??? What, wasn't the whole point of this exercise to beat down the skeptics? No, it was not - it's an explanation of why I believe it. Skeptics should not be so accepting. This conclusion might surprise you, but it is a rational one. Skeptics have not participated in the long stream of satisfactory transactions that have led me to personally trust the scientific establishment, despite its many flaws. If you have no experience with a supposedly "authoritative" source of knowledge, and that source is asking you to trust them on a matter of great importance, you'd be pretty stupid to go along with what they say. There is simply no substitute for the trust-building mechanisms I have enjoyed myself. I cannot transfer to a skeptic the history of my own interaction with science, so I cannot transfer the trust in science that is necessary to adequately resolve questions of this nature.
The skeptic is on his own - unless, by chance, his trust in my judgment is adequate to let him transitively trust the literature in the way I do. And that would be very flattering, but I don't see it as something I can take for granted.
So the problem here - which I see as blocking any hope of taking actions to reduce the risk of climate change - is that the network of trust that constitutes science is too insular. Too many people are outside of it, alienated by it, or even harmed by it. Arguably, it is a "marketing" problem. If the contributions of science were more consistently recognized as such, the situation might be very different. But science is not a corporation, or a brand, so it's hard to imagine how that could happen.
There is no amount of argumentation that is going to overcome this problem - each tour through the web of theory is just another opportunity to raise allegations of conspiracy and fraud. It is a tragedy, because climate change is not the only challenge our civilization faces, and it's not going to be the last time science will be rejected as untrustworthy.
I started out, years ago, being angry that denialists would reject science, and have ended by recognizing that science has actually earned more trust than one could reasonably expect from the public. The glass is already half-full. The way forward is not debate, but engagement.
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 02:10 am (UTC)A test I propose
Ecology of science
Bounded. You Trust me.
Unlike AIDS-virus denialists (as best I know their "issues", that is), climatic denialists seem to fall into a category in which physical science is at odds with their "values", the crux of their cognitive strain, perhaps. One can possibly grok that for 'creationism', but climate science? Really?
It's as though the politics for one issue has created a willing vortex for topic-du-jour.
Science as heresy reminds me of the Distant Origin Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin), in which it is demanded that the scientist admit that he could be mistaken, not that he is wrong - a fine point, but it makes this production a more subtle treatment of 'how it is done'.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 03:14 am (UTC)I do think there are a whole lot of gadflies and media whores who casually tie everything into climate change because it's trendy. They may even dominate the public face of climate research. But that's not quite the same as scientists faking their results.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-09 05:37 am (UTC)People as intelligent as C. Paglia have gone on record as "suspicious" of the "agenda" of climate scientists.
The basis for such beliefs could be that (hippy?) 'save the earth' was around, as a philosophy, long before climate change became a ... field of study, a reality, an imperative - whichever, take your pick.