Thursday, June 28, 2012

97% consensus of climate scientists OPPOSED good evidence of climate change in 1892,1902,1922,1942 etc

If today's climate scientists are united in accepting evidence of climate change it is NOT because the evidence has changed that way.

It is because the scientists themselves have changed - no longer living in (and promoting) High Modernity with its rarified/reified views of the unlimited potential of Man to quickly solve any little problem He himself might create.

Now they live in post-hegemonic times and while most of the population still lives off the values of High Modernity, most scientists in the non-applied physical sciences now reflect the values of low postmodernity and global commensality, with their much more cautious assessment of what Humanity can do to reverse the problems it itself creates.

One can confidently claim that if the case for human climate change via excess carbon pollution of the atmosphere had been put forth forcefully,repeatedly and publicly by a determined but small body of climate scientists during the heyday of High Modernity, it would have been shot down with the same sort of mechanisms that today's modernist , denier, scientists are still using.

Inadequate sets of data, uncertainty of cause versus effect, contaminated data sets - on and on.

If worrying about being able to reverse carbon pollution in time is a pecularily postmodernist concern - and I hold that it is - then we can see how other postmodernist style concerns and beliefs were in fact harshly dealt with, back  in the salad days of High Modernity.

The Missoula Floods, Tectonic Plates, bacteria in extreme environments like deep down oil wells, bacterial horizontal gene transfer /  biofilms /  molecular mimicry / quorum sensing. Bacterial Endosymbiosis leading to the development of all multi-celled life including humans.

All these were introduced by good scientists, using good evidence, to the general scientific world in the 1920s and shot down and often the scientist involved were hounded out of any chance of future advancement.

Later on, in the post-modern era and using the same evidence as was available in the 1920s, their theories were accepted into the general consensus ---- in fact forming the very foundation of it !

All had suffered scientific death earlier, because they crossed a forbidden line in the modernist sand : Modernity's core axiom : that the small building blocks of Reality were simple and stable at the bottom and got ever more complex and ever more unstable at they got bigger.

If I can switch from biology to physics, I need only add that holding that view today would get you thrown out of all grad seminars in any physics department world wide, thanks to the overwhelming experimental support for all the various quantum theories.

And need I add that the quantum theories were at best half-accepted in the 1920s on onward (half accepted until that white knight, Einstein, would return surely proving them wrong).

In any case, they were silently ignored in daily physics work, all through the apogee of High Modernity Science.

Today the modernists are no longer hegemonic dictators but mere 'deniers' and have been pushed into the vast, but academically less powerful worlds of applied and popular science.....


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