Is climate science in crisis?
It is the way of science that dominant paradigms emerge – the prevailing consensus. Alongside those also come observations that don’t fit in. At first, they can be explained, but if they start coming increasingly often they raise serious issues. Eventually there comes a time when the consensus must be questioned because the field has reached a crisis. This could be the case for climate science, and before you dismiss this view as that of a ‘contrarian’, register that it’s put forward in the prestigious journal Nature by Dr Tiffany Shaw from The University of Chicago and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology’s Director Bjorn Stevens. ‘Even among climate scientists, it is perhaps not fully appreciated how simple ideas and the assumptions common to these ideas underpin this consensus…discrepancies are, in fact, accumulating’, they say.
Crises in science are common. At the start of the 20th century, classical physics underwent such a crisis, resulting in quantum physics. More recently particle physics and its lack of new particles is making physicists question their so-called ‘standard model’. Likewise, there are some who consider the growing problems and inconsistencies in cosmology as the start of a crisis. There are, according to the authors of this report, signs that climate science might be facing its own crisis.
They describe the dominant paradigm of climate science developed over the past 60 years as coming from applying fundamental laws of physics to the climate system under the assumption that small-scale processes are determined by statistical climate-parameter averages over large scales. This allowed the climate system to be described in a relatively simplistic way. ‘The standard approach has been extremely successful in explaining general features of the climate system and certain aspects of its response to increased carbon dioxide concentrations’, says Tiffany Shaw. The consensus explains the vertical structure of the atmosphere, and some aspects of the spatial pattern of warming of the Earth due to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
But given the growing number of observations at odds with the consensus, some scientists have been asking if that simplicity has been deceiving. For example, contrary to all model predictions, the eastern Tropical Pacific has cooled. Also, models cannot explain the increased frequency of blocking weather conditions over Greenland in summer, and although it was correctly predicted that the Arctic would warm faster than the rest of the globe, the observed Arctic temperature is far greater than expected. These are fundamental issues.
Shaw and Stevens suggest that these discrepancies could undermine climate science’s basic assumptions about how large- and small-scale processes and climate system components couple together. They say that if they continue to accumulate climate scientists might have to revise their consensus.
The science of how global temperatures respond to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases is based on fundamental physics. But the Earth is a complicated system that we have clearly not captured with our consensus or in our supercomputers. This leads to the question if climate science is entering a more uncertain, and some might argue, more realistic phase. Is there a crisis?