Read With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change for Free Online

scientific consensus must, by definition, be wrong. As far as they are concerned, the thousands of scientists behind the IPCC models have either been seduced by their own doomladen narrative or are engaged in a gigantic conspiracy. For them, the 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 paradigmand 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 early 2005: "By ignoring these outliers, IPCC has failed for ten years to investigate the possible effects of more extreme climate change."
    So, despite their sometimes cynical motives, the skeptics have served a purpose in picking away at the IPCC orthodoxy. As in politics, every good government needs a good opposition. And though their arguments have often been opportunistic and personal, the skeptics have spotted the stifling impact of consensus-building. They are, if nothing else, helping to keep the good guys honest. The pity is that they have not done a better job, by engaging in more real science and less empty rhetoric. And in their enthusiasm to debunk climate change, they have failed to grasp one alarming possibility: that the IPCC could be underestimating, not overestimating, the threat that the world faces.

     

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    THE YEAR
    How the wild weather of x998 broke all records
    Lidia Rosa Paz was at a loss. She caught my arm and pointed despairingly into the raging river. Out there, about 50 yards into the water, was the spot where, until days before, she had lived. On the night of October 28, 1998, her shantytown of Pedro Dias, in the town of Choluteca, in Honduras, had been washed away, taking more than a hundred people to their deaths. Lidia had survived, but every one of her possessions was gone. "What will I do now?" she asked. I didn't have an answer.
    Hers was one story from a night when floods and landslides ripped apart the small Central American country's geography, leaving more than 10,000 Hondurans dead and 2 million homeless. It was the night that Hurricane Mitch, the most vicious hurricane to hit the Americas in 200 years, came calling, and dumped a year's rain in just a few hours. Choluteca is in southern Honduras, on the Pacific coast, far from the normal track of Caribbean hurricanes. When the radio issued