Scientists are trained to be professional skeptics: to always judge the validity of a claim or finding on the basis of objective, empirical evidence . They are not cynics; they just ask themselves and each other a lot of questions.
If they see a claim that a finding is true, they will ask: “Why?” They may hypothesize that if that finding is true, then some related findings must also be true. If it’s unclear whether one or more of those other findings is true, they will do more work to find out.
It is no wonder that science moves so slowly, especially on really important topics such as climate change.
Dogmatism is the opposite of skepticism. It is the proclivity to assert opinions as unequivocally true without taking account of contrary evidence or the contradictory findings. It is why public debate over scientific findings never seems to go away.
An example of the difference is the reaction to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s finding in 1995 that “ evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate .” The IPCC’s assessment reports involve hundreds of researchers from around the world who reviewed the global scientific understanding of the planet’s changing climate.
It’s an instructive case in the differences between skepticism and dogmatism, and it’s something to think about as you hear people talk about climate change.
Origins of a dogmatic response
Shortly after the IPCC released that finding in 1995, persistent and well-organized attacks on the science began. Many came from groups supported by the owners of Koch Industries , a conglomerate involved in oil refining and chemicals.
Their strategies mimicked earlier assaults on science and scientists who had warned the public that smoking posed a serious threat to their health. This time it was a warning about fossil fuels’ impact on the climate.
The similarity should not be a surprise. Science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, in their 2011 book “ Merchants of Doubt ,” and American historian Nancy MacLean, in her 2010 book “Democracy in Chains ,” have explained how the strategy was written by some of the same people who had tried to stop efforts to tighten tobacco regulations a decade or so earlier.
The dogma presented to the public for fighting regulation held that personal freedoms are paramount and that they are not to be diminished by any efforts designed explicitly to improve the general welfare.
What a skeptical response looks like
Climate scientists understood in 1995 that they must provide more than laboratory results, which go back to Svante Arrhenius’ work in 1895 demonstrating a causal correlation between increasing carbon dioxide concentrations and rising temperatures.
They also accepted the challenge of exploring collections of associated effects that should also be true if human activity was changing the climate.
Scientists have since examined dozens of different independently monitored aspects of climate change and confirmed the expected fingerprints of climate change all around the world .
Since the upper layers of the oceans absorb 90% of the atmosphere’s excess heat, they should be persistently warming as global temperatures rise. Has that happened? Yes, it has .
