03.26.08

Continental Drift and Global Warming

I just had a hallway conversation with a colleague, most of whose work is in paleontology. Much of his recent work has been in providing fine-grained measures of climate variability in late prehistorical times. The time period between ten and twenty thousand years ago is of great interest to climatologists because it was a period of rapid warming and huge climate shifts, especially as compared to the unusually stable conditions of the subsequent ten thousand years. It's clear that this stability is coming to an end.

Hank stopped me because he had recently discovered my blogging efforts. I always cringe a bit when someone says that, especially around the Institute, which after all is a very conservative place with lots of ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Hank has been around the earth sciences long enough that some of his oldest professors in school predated the understanding of continental drift.

Continental drift, or more properly "plate tectonics" is the theory of how continents rearranged their positions over time. According to Wikipedia (whence this public domain image) the mechanisms and evidence for this emerged substantially around 1950, but effective unanimity among geologists took decades after that to achieve.


Many geologists in living memory went to their graves believing that the whole idea was a ridiculous fad, even as evidence started piling up form various different directions about the magnitude and timing of it all. And of course, there was some resistance from the most literalist among religious camps, who had trouble with any process taking millions of years.

As he has moved gradually into climate from geology, Hank's awareness of climate change theory greatly predates his awareness of the peculiar structure of the public debate. Increasingly, he is running into friends of friends who take a distrustful attitude toward him for even participating in the study of climate. He finds people making extravagant statements about Mr. Gore and his movie, despite the fact that any substantive criticisms of it are very minor. He finds himself getting into very bitter arguments about matters that should be matters of dispassionate reasoning, not of partisan bickering.

I explained to him that I have been watching this pattern emerge for twenty years now, how there is strong overlap with anti-communism and with the tobacco industry, and how, after all, the problem does have a slight ideological tinge: there aren't any solutions that make any sense that don't involve the collective will. All of this largely affected by Naomi Oreseks' remarkable work on studying the obfuscators. In the linked lecture, she makes the comparison directly. (See also this related presentation on YouTube.)

It wasn't me or Oreskes, though, who brought up to Hank the analogy to continental drift. He came up with it independently. The point is that some people are inaccessible to evidence, no matter how cogent. The further you have stuck your neck out, the harder it is to consider the whole fabric of evidence. The dwindling opposition eventually finds itself grasping at straws.

There are differences though. What the general public belives and understands about global climate forcing and global climate response has consequences. It is (or at least it's perceived to be) in the interest of certain corporations to prolong the indecision as long as possible.

I pointed out that what was new about the situation is the injection of ideology beyond the realm of opinion and into the realm of facts.  Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was quoted as saying that one is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts. That always seemed to me nothing more than a clever tautology, but apparently it is no longer an obvious distinction to some people. This is pretty unfortunate.

Then Hank pointed something new out to me. He suggested that fifty years from now, when the consequences become huge and inescapable, scientists will be blamed. "They should have known better, but they kept sending us mixed messages," he predicts, is what people will say about us.

Tags: climatology, paleontology

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