You probably can’t attend the American Meteorological Society’s AMS Environmental Science Seminar Series
in person. This is a shame, because the seminars are so good. Last month’s talk by Dr. Naomi Oreskes was particularly fine. But you can get descriptions of these talks, along with slides and background material, from the AMS web site, and these are among the best online resources for educating the public about climate change.
Dr. Naomi Oreskes
Most of the AMS Environmental Science Seminars have dealt with aspects of climate change, including such daunting topics as melting permafrost, increasing oceanic acidity, and declining snowpack in the Western United States. Oreskes’ talk was more about philosophy — it was called “The Scientific Consensus On Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong?” Oreskes is an historian of science at the University of California-San Diego, and the presentation reviews decades of climate research to support a masterful description of how scientists prove things.
Induction means generalizing from observations. This method supports the argument for human-induced climate change through the use of temperature records. Deduction means proving a hypothesis. More than 75 years ago, Guy Stewart Callendar made the hypothesis that increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause increases in temperature — and the evidence has shown he was correct.
The philosopher Karl Popper famously suggested that it is impossible to prove a theory true, but you can prove it false. So far, despite monumental effort, no one has disproven the theory of human-induced climate change. Oreskes also illustrates the concept of consilience, or the agreement toward a central principle from a variety of approaches using different kinds of data. She reviews 928 studies of climate change in peer-reviewed journals and finds none that take issue with the basic idea that people are causing the earth to get hotter.
Oreskes’ talk, which is available as a free download on the AMS site, is also a chapter in the book Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren (MIT Press, 2007). The essay has a dual purpose — explaining scientific methods and also outlining the reasons for consensus on climate change — and it succeeds brilliantly because of the quality and grace of her prose.
Back on June 20, 2005, during the second AMS seminar, a meterologist and a sociologist said, “It just may be that New Orleans is already at or near the margins of its resiliency . . . stretching that resiliency to accommodate a changing climate will be a formidable but seemingly unavoidable challenge.” Hurricane Katrina hit the city nine weeks later. If only we had paid attention.
[…] We might mark the June 22, 2007 AMS Seminar as the official end of the argument over whether or not people are heating up the planet. Dr. Naomi Oreskes, an historian of science at the University of California-San Diego, reviewed 928 articles published in refereed journals found none that disputed the theory of human-induced climate change. She showed how the theory has been supported by inductive and deductive methods, by the consilience of evidence from multiple sources, and by successfully withstanding attempts to prove it false. Like any theory, human-induced climate change is an inference, she said, but decades of research have established it as the best explanation. The disagreements scientists now have are over the pace of climate change,the ways in which it will occur, and what its effects will be. For more on her presentation, see the July 9 post below. […]