The Role of the Oceans in Climatic Change: A Theory of the Ice Ages

Strategic narratives (persuasive use of story systems) in science communication have been gathering increasing support, especially in the face of misunderstandings about high-impact climatic change and hydrometeorologic extremes. The use of these narratives reveals, in line with linguistic research, that traditional scientific discourse conception has become outdated. Should scientific discourse be centered on the description of discoveries? Should the role of political discourse be to convince someone to act? Before answering these, it is necessary to understand the crucial function that uncertainty plays in communication, along with its consequences in the concepts of objectivity and truth. More importantly, understanding its role in scientific society and sustainability. Unable to eliminate uncertainty altogether, science becomes an essential escort to recognize, manage and communicate its pertinency. However, the most popular strategic narratives sideline uncertainty as a threat. Denialists follow a similar approach, though they communicate uncertainty to discredit evidence. Comparatively, in their latest Assessment Report, the IPCC characterized uncertainty whilst stating: &#8220;uncertainty about impacts does not prevent immediate action&#8221;. Scientific discourse outputs and social reality constructions influence each other. The moralization of science communication reveals how XVII century revolutionary skepticism can now be perceived as a threat, and facts expected from science can be deemed dogmatic truths and perceived as decrees through rationalism and as an extension of Judeo-Christian philosophical influence. Equally important, uncertainty reinforces individual freedom, while society grasps and recognizes certainty as security and demands it from institutions, accepting degrees of authoritarianism to maintain a tolerable living condition. From &#8220;Climate Emergency&#8221; to &#8220;Thousand-Year Flood&#8221;, public interest in climatic change and extremes increases following high-impact events, yet trust in science plunges into a deep polarized divide among absolute acceptance and outright rejection relative to the bold headlines conveyed not only in the media but also in some scientific literature. Political, religious and activist leaders strike one as prophets acting in the name of science. From rationalism to rationality, scientific culture is pivotal to the analysis of complexity, objectivity, and uncertainty in the definition of truth (absent from epistemological discussions for centuries). Humor/sarcasm, literature or dialectic are examples of how to communicate entropy of scientific models, while reflecting about the role, uncertainty, and mistake, retain in life. &#8220;People want certainty, not knowledge&#8221;, said Bertrand Russel. However, neither science nor democracy work like that, rather taking reality as having shades of grey instead of a reduced black-or-white dichotomy. Science is not about giving just one single number to problems clearly not reducible to such, as that gives a false sense of certainty and security in an entropic world where we cannot control everything. In order to objectively analyze discourses in light of their uncertainty features, detecting whether they contain polarized, absolutistic narrative patterns, we introduce a new process-consistent Artificial Intelligence framework, building from Perdig&#227;o (2020, https://doi.org/10.46337/200930). The complementarity of our approach relative to both social and information technologies is brought out, along with ways forward to reinforce the fundamental role of uncertainty in scientific communication, and to strengthen public confidence in the scientific endeavor.

Download Full-text

The Role of Methane in a Strategy for Limiting Climatic Change

Energy & Environment ◽

10.1177/0958305x9400500104 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 47-63

Author(s):

H. Selzer

Keyword(s):

Climatic Change

Download Full-text

The Role of Climatic Change in Alluvial Fan Development

Geomorphology of Desert Environments ◽

10.1007/978-94-015-8254-4_23 ◽

1994 ◽

pp. 593-615 ◽

Cited By ~ 21

Author(s):

Ronald I. Dorn

Keyword(s):

Climatic Change ◽

Alluvial Fan

Download Full-text

Civilization and Rapid Climatic Change

Environmental Conservation ◽

10.1017/s037689290002840x ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 15 (1) ◽

pp. 7-15 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Reid A. Bryson

Keyword(s):

Climatic Change ◽

Volcanic Activity ◽

Plate Tectonics ◽

Field Experiments ◽

Climatic Changes ◽

Climatic Variation ◽

Past Century ◽

Ice Ages ◽

The Past ◽

The Impact

Research over the past century has shown that the rates and magnitudes of climatic change constitute a continuum. Changes have now been identified in the climatic record that range in duration from interannual through decades and centuries to the multi-millennial time-scale. Examples range from the drought years of the 1930 and 1970 decades to the ponderous comings and goings of the ice-ages. More recently it has become clear that some changes can be quite rapid. In recent decades great progress has been made in identifying the causes of climatic variation.The present understanding of the causes of climatic change emphasizes continental drift (or ‘plate tectonics’) at the million-years' scale, with pulses of plate movement producing significant bursts of volcanic activity that may act on the millennial or century scale. At the multi-millennial scale there is growing agreement that the variations in irradiance of the Earth, resulting from slow changes in the Sun-Earth geometry (the so-called Milankovitch variations), exercise the operative control on the timing of ice-ages and interglacials. At the decadal and interannual scales there is less agreement; but there is at least a body of research which suggests that significant volcanic activity is a contributing factor. There is considerable agreement—but little direct evidence—that anthropogenic causes such as increased carbon dioxide and other Man-made or-enhanced trace gases in the atmosphere, will be important in the coming decades.Cultural responses might be expected to differ across this continuum. To assess the expected response to a climatic variation, one must know at least the shape of the response surface.There is probably a critical threshold combination of climatic change magnitude and duration. Human cultures seem to be adapted to frequently-occurring short ‘aberrations’ from the expected climate. Some evidence indicates, on the other hand, that relatively small changes of climates (of the order of a century in duration) have been associated over the past 8,000 years with cultural changes that proved large enough to lead to different names being assigned in perhaps half of the cultural termini identified. A climate model which includes the effect of volcanic aerosols, suggests that most of the climatic changes associated with these globally synchronous cultural termini are related to peaks of volcanic activity. Some apparently catastrophic events have been recognized in this connection.There remains the problem of assessing, in realistic terms, the impact of large-magnitude climatic variations on modern human societies. Of particular concern is the effect of climatic events associated with very large-scale short-term insertions of aerosols into the atmosphere. It is likely that non-equilibrium models of the atmosphere, with specified sea-surface temperatures, would give realistic results if refined to the degree that they could replicate events of lesser magnitude which have occurred in the past century. At present there appear to be no models in which the formulation of the radiative effect of aerosols or gases gives a good match with observed radiative effects. It seems that much more research, including field experiments, will be needed if science is to supply reliable advice to society on the nature of coming climatic changes.

Download Full-text