[Vision2020] Realclimate.org 4-13-15: Ruddiman's Early Anthropogenic Climate Impact Theory

[Ted Moffett]

I was surprised to just today read on Realclimate.org a piece dated 13
April 2015, by climate scientist William Ruddiman, discussing how the
scientific community has received his controversial theory regarding early
(before major fossil fuel powered industrial civilization) human climate
impacts.

His Realclimate.org piece argues, and I quote, against the alleged "censure
from a nearly monolithic community intent on imposing a mainstream view"
that is sometimes claimed to exist by those critical of the science
demonstrating major human impacts on climate change.

I was particularly interested in this Realclimate.org piece because I
referenced his theory in a 2007 op-ed in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News,
which now has a Google News webpage of an actual scan of the actual op-ed
page in the Moscow-Pullman DN.  How or why this scan happened I do not
know, but it can be read at the webpage below:

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2026&dat=20070223&id=x14zAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MvAFAAAAIBAJ&pg=3113,2791746&hl=en

---------------------------------
Ruddiman's Realclimate.org article mentioned above is pasted in below, and
comments generated by his article are also available at the website below:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/04/a-scientific-debate/

A Scientific Debate Filed under: Climate Science — mike @ 13 April 2015

Bill Ruddiman, University of Virginia

Recently I’ve read claims that some scientists are opposed to AGW but won’t
speak out because they fear censure from a nearly monolithic community
intent on imposing a mainstream view. Yet my last 10 years of personal
experience refute this claim. This story began late in 2003 when I
introduced a new idea (the ‘early anthropogenic hypothesis’) that went
completely against a prevailing climatic paradigm of the time. I claimed
that detectable human influences on Earth’s surface and its climate began
thousands of years ago because of agriculture. Here I describe how this
radically different idea was received by the mainstream scientific
community.

Was my initial attempt to present this new idea suppressed? No. I submitted
a paper to Climatic Change, then edited by Steve Schneider, a well-known
climate scientist and AGW spokesman. From what I could tell, Steve was
agnostic about my idea but published it because he found it an interesting
challenge to the conventional wisdom. I also gave the Emiliani lecture at
the 2003 December American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference to some 800
people. I feel certain that very few of those scientists came to my talk
believing what my abstract claimed. They attended because they were
interested in a really new idea from someone with a decent career
reputation. The talk was covered by many prominent media sources, including
the New York Times and The Economist. This experience told me that
provocative new ideas draw interest because they are provocative and new,
provided that they pass the key ‘sniff test’ by presenting evidence in
support of their claims.

Did this radical new idea have difficulty receiving research funding? No.
Proposals submitted to the highly competitive National Science Foundation
(NSF) with John Kutzbach and Steve Vavrus have been fully funded since 2004
by 3-year grants. Even though the hypothesis of early anthropogenic effects
on climate has been controversial (and still is for some), we crafted
proposals that were carefully written, tightly reasoned, and focused on
testing the new idea. As a result, we succeeded against negative funding
odds of 4-1 or 5-1. One program manager told me he planned to put our grant
on a short list of ‘transformational’ proposals/grants that NSF had
requested. That didn’t mean he accepted our hypothesis. It meant that he
felt that our hypothesis had the potential to transform that particular
field of paleoclimatic research, if proven correct.

Were we able to get papers published? Yes. As any scientist will tell you,
this process is rarely easy. Even reviewers who basically support what you
have to say will rarely hand out ‘easy-pass’ reviews. They add their own
perspective, and they often point out useful improvements. A few reviews of
the 30-some papers we have published during the last 11 years have come
back with extremely negative reviews, seemingly from scientists who seem
deeply opposed to anything that even hints at large early anthropogenic
effects. While these uber-critical reviews are discouraging, I have learned
to put them aside for a few days, give my spirits time to rebound, and then
address the criticisms that are fair (that is, evidence-based), explain to
the journal editor why other criticisms are unfair, and submit a revised
(and inevitably improved) paper. Eventually, our views have always gotten
published, although sometimes only after considerable effort.

The decade-long argument over large early anthropogenic effects continues,
although recent syntheses of archeological and paleoecological data have
been increasingly supportive. In any case, I continue to trust the
scientific process to sort this debate out. I suggest that my experience is
a good index of the way the system actually operates when new and
controversial ideas emerge. I see no evidence that the system is muffling
good new ideas.
---------------------------------------
Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20150417/78f953e6/attachment-0001.html>