What are Climate Scientists to do?

Spontaneous Generations 5 (1):19-26 (2011)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The campaign to discredit predictions of man-made global warming—originally organized by readily identifiable vested interests—has by now recruited a large popular constituency of declared “skeptics” increasingly disposed to “take a stand”: some of them opposed to government regulation in general, some resistant to any claims to intellectual authority (perhaps especially scientific), and some mobilized by a version of the right to individual freedom of opinion. As a result, confidence in the expertise of scientists has reached an all time low: Internet sites, radio talk shows, and television channels preferentially transmit “contrarian” attacks on the credibility of climate scientists. Even our most responsible newspapers and journals, in their very commitment to the traditional ethic of “balance,” sometimes contribute to the widespread misimpression that climate scientists are deeply divided about both the extent of the dangers we face and the relevance of human activity to global warming. Not knowing who or what to believe, the natural response for most people is to do nothing, and the consequence, as Thomas Homer-Dixon wrote last year for the New York Times: “Climate policy is gridlocked, and there’s virtually no chance of a breakthrough” (2010). Meanwhile, as evidence both of the role of human contributions to global warming and the dangers of that warming continues to mount, consensus among climate scientists grows ever stronger, and those of us who attend to that evidence are increasingly alarmed

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Understanding pluralism in climate modeling.Wendy Parker - 2006 - Foundations of Science 11 (4):349-368.
Introduction.Raymond Anthony - 2012 - Ethics and the Environment 17 (2):1-8.
Climate Models, Calibration, and Confirmation.Katie Steele & Charlotte Werndl - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (3):609-635.
Justice and Climate Change: Toward a Libertarian Analysis.Dan C. Shahar - 2009 - The Independent Review 14 (2):219-237.
On the concept of climate debt: its moral and political value.Jonathan Pickering & Christian Barry - 2012 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 15 (5):667-685.

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-10-18

Downloads
48 (#293,064)

6 months
6 (#202,901)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

Experts within Democracy: The Turner Version.Joseph Agassi - 2015 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 45 (3):370-384.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Add more references