The Catholic Church charged Galileo as a heretic for his radical idea of heliocentricity. They released Galileo from custody, but he decided to let the evidence support itself and published a book about his theories. Afterwards, the Catholic Church charged him with heresy again and sentenced him to house arrest until his death. Skeptics scrutinize the findings of climate scientists today, just as the Catholic Church did to Galileo. The idea of global warming creates both avid believers and skeptics out of both scientists and students. To approach both without alienating one or the other, scientists must establish their credentials, prove results and conclusions match, and make evidence available to everyone. After this, skeptics make consider taking a second look.
In “Climate of Suspicion,” an article written for the January 2010 edition of Nature, the author claims that the best way to approach skeptics is to return each argument tit for tat and that the “evidence will eventually speak for itself.” However, can a scientist both vehemently ague their position and allow evidence to support itself? Can these two ideas be reconciled? They can, but for the evidence to effectively argue for itself scientists must create a transparent structure of support on which their evidence can stand.
First, it is necessary to establish your credentials and reliability, and thus the integrity of your ideas. For climate scientists this means establishing their expertise and using appropriate methods. Establishing expertise is difficult. Sometimes it is enough to simply be a biologist, other times a computational biologist or an ecologist, but some skeptics won’t be satisfied. To establish credibility climate scientists use their fieldwork experience or their collaboration on other scientists’ experiments. To ensure that their results are appropriate and reliable, scientists need to assure disbelievers that they follow the proper measures and set conventions when collecting any evidence as well as conducting any experiments used to generate the data. Because skeptics pick and choose which scientists they trust, they don’t believe a consensus between experts can be reached. As a result they think scientists’ global warming models are unreliable. In reality, 97% of climate experts agree that global warming occurs and scientific models have successfully reproduced temperatures since 1900. Extensive peer review and public accountability causes scientists to make sure to develop correct and reliable models.
Second, an argument supported by unbiased conclusions will better convince an audience looking for discrepancies. Skeptics realize that science is not immune to societal pressures, meaning that oftentimes science is subject to society‘s morals or ideas, such as the ban against cloning humans, or Galileo’s heliocentric universe. Disbelievers choose to impose these societal pressures as a means to discredit the evidence and work of scientists. As such, climate scientists must also recognize this fact and work to present their data in a way that shows it is not skewed or biased. A consensus between scientists in different fields goes a long way in proving that results are honest and that scientists don’t skew data to match preconceived ideas. Scientists must make it clear that nature, or global warming, will not comply with the agendas of others. Scientists must prove that research into climate change does not create global warming or uncover a Socialist agenda, as some extreme skeptics believe; it merely uncovers pre-existing patterns in nature.
Third, it is necessary to freely share and make comprehensible the results, conclusions, and implications of new ideas and research. Scientists need to make their research easily available to the public, because skeptics often believe that they don't need to be a global warming expert to believe that it doesn't occur or to discredit scientific claims. A lot of the times, it seems that skeptics are Google-ing their information or using sources like Wikipedia to verify unfounded thinking, and what happens is that this same information shows up repeatedly and therefore it becomes regarded as true despite its sources or what it originally supported. Some skeptics who actually conduct valid research but these skeptics are often overshadowed, and prevented from making significant progress for their argument. If scientists presented scientific data and wrote it in both a scientific form and in terms any layman could understand, then the general public, especially skeptics, could access information and determine for themselves whether or not they want to believe in global warming. For example, a lot of the arguments that skeptics employ against global warming occur because they don’t believe some of the correlations that scientists make, such as the fact that extreme weather events are made more frequent and worse by global warming.
In conclusion, skeptics are a hard crowd to convince; because they readily criticize any information presented, even if the intuitive thinking they use to do so is flawed. Scientists must work hard to both produce reliable data and present it in a way that makes skeptics take a second more open-minded look at what they present. Scientists must establish their credentials, prove that their results are honest, show that results match conclusions, and they must provide a means for the public to easily access these results. Skeptics will always remain skeptical, but if scientists present scientific data in a way that convinces them to reconsider or reevaluate their thinking, then the battle to creating change in response to global warming is already half-way won.
Cook, John, “Skeptic Arguments and What the Science Says”, July 26 2010, http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
Dejoie, Joyce, “Galileo Galilei”, http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_level2/galileo.html
Dougherty, Michael J., “Can Science Win Over Climate Change Skeptics?”, July 2009,
Unknown Author, “Climate of Suspicion”, Nature, Vol 463, Issue 269, January 21 2010,
Picture: Lourdes272, http://www.flickr.com/photos/22237639@N06/2141805638/
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