2nd February 2012, 01:28 PM
tom wilson Wrote:...........About the time when the above paper was produced, a similar debate was taking place in ecology, as it was becomming increasingly clear that climate change was a very scary and real issue but the scientists involved were having trouble winning what could charitably be called a multi-vocal debate (i.e. against petrochemical naysayers). The ecologists actually had to become *less* 'scientific' in their interpretation, get over the fact that they didn't really 'know' what was happening and stop apologising for their methodologies in order to convince the world at large.
...at this point, I was going to quote "Ecology and the End of Postmodernity" by George Myerson, and go on to say why I think post-modernism was all played out by 1980, but I've run out of time...
*eta: to me that seems very Pollitically Constructive, which I am generally in favour of, but I don't see it as being mutually exclusive with 'scientific methodology', and don't see why we can't do both. Hell, I don't see why interpretations can't be scientific *and* femeinist *and* critical *and* neo-Marxist *and* ecological *and* *and* *and* all together and without any of the dynamic tension/oppositions expicit in post-modernism...but that's another post entirely.
Your mixing your metaphors there a bit.
The need for climatologists to change how they engaged with government and the public in order to get the message over in no way altered how the data, measurements, experiments, modelling etc etc were carried out.
The debate was how to present the results to a wider audience..............not how to get the results or how to interpret them or how to report them to the scientific community.