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There are often accusations made by both sides in this debate that the other side has a hidden, non-scientific agenda. Now, it's fairly obvious what the benefits are if, say, a power company argues that carbon dioxide is harmless. To wit, they don't have to switch to other fuels than coal. But what is the benefit for the other side? How can anyone gain from hampering their own economy? (And yes, scientists will have to live with the effects of a less consumerist society too).
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Fair enough. On the other hand, is it likely that 90% of the scientific community involved with these matters is motivated by such?
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Not really. Science is a very conservative field. It usually takes decades for a new theory that trumps an old theory to be accepted by the majority of peers. It can often take years for the cowboy scientist with the hot new theory to be recognized, and this is only if his theory has been through rigorous testing and turned out to be the better predictor than the old theory.
Posts: 438 | Registered: Apr 2004
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Well, twenty to thirty years is several decades. Also, I'd like to point out some exceptions (taken from particle physics, since that is my field) :
Electroweak unification : proposed 1971, widely used in the seventies, direct experimental evidence 1982, Nobel Prize 1999.
Quark theory : Proposed 1955-ish, accepted ten years later.
Positron : Theoretically predicted 1930 (IIRC), seen in experiment 1934.
Muon : Observed 1948 (?), accepted immediately despite the total overturning of then-current theory. (Granted, this might have something to do with people running out of things to work with.) Some experiments are just obviously unarguable.
Neutral currents : Ah, a complicated one. Theory in 1972 was that 'neutral currents don't exist.' Then they were observed. Then the experimenter found an error. Then a different experimenter saw them too. The original experimenter found an error in his error. In 1975, neutral currents were quite OK as long as they did not change any flavours; the new argument was 'flavour-changing neutral currents don't exist.' And Rubbia was famous for having discovered 'alternating neutral currents.' (Incidentally, these days we know that neutral currents can change flavour, too, but the effect is so small that you need modern accelerators to observe it).
Besides that, wasn't the greenhouse effect once a hotshot new theory itself? Certainly there was a time when most scientists believed that no human action could much affect the ocean or the atmosphere, both being far too big and stable for small perturbations to do anything. I suggest that a theory capable of breaking such a dogma to become a new dogma must have something going for it.
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