With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

greater the consensus, the worse the conspiracy. The maverick climatologist
Pat Michaels, of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, says we are
faced with what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called a "paradigm
problem." Michaels, who is also the state meteorologist for Virginia, one of
the United States' largest coal producers, and a consultant to numerous
fossil fuel companies, says: "Most scientists spend their lives working to
shore up the reigning world view—the dominant paradigm—and those who
disagree are always much fewer in number." The drive to conformity, he says,
is accentuated by peer review, which ensures that only papers in support of
the paradigm appear in the research literature, and by public funding of
research into the prevailing "paradigm of doom."
Even if you accept this cynical view of how science is done, it doesn't mean
that the orthodoxy is always wrong. The fact that scientists universally agree
that the world is round does not make it flat. Many of the same claims that
are now made against the global warming "paradigm" were once made about
the "AIDS industry" by people who disputed that HIV caused AIDS. Some
governments took their side for a long time, and their citizens are now living
with the consequences. Where are those skeptics now? Some of them can be
heard making the case against climate change.
But all that said, I do think the skeptics are important to the arguments
about climate science. The desire for consensus is always likely to lead the
mainstream scientific community to don blinkers. This has not only blotted
out the arguments of skeptics but also sidelined results from the handful of
"rogue" climate models that keep turning up tipping points that could
tumble the world into much worse shape than what is currently predicted by
the mainstream. One scientist told me in the corridors of a conference in