lic faith in the claims made by climatologists have highlighted the uncertainties in their work. This is a not-so-subtle way of implying that scientists have yet to hit the nail on the head with respect to global warming, with the upshot being that, since definitive evidence hasnt been found to link human activity to global temperature increases, then we really dont know for sure whats going on, and, they argue with a wink, it clearly wouldnt be prudent to take any rash actions at this pointcertainly not any that might put a cramp in American economic growth or corporate profits.
This is precisely the tack bureaucrats in the Bush administration have taken. The chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, for example, from 2001 to 2005 repeatedly altered official scientific reports on global climate change. Apart from deemphasizing the potential devastating effects of this phenomena, his primary work focused on changing wording in ways that increased perceptions of uncertainty in the various reports. Efforts to add statements about the uncertain status of climate knowledge into an Environmental Protection Agency document were also made in 2003 by administration officials, signaling a pattern of distortion and suppression of science for ideological purposes (Shulman, 2006; see also Mooney, 2005).
Now, of course, scientists and those who study science know that science and uncertainty go hand in hand. Moreover, the scientific truths that can be derived from direct evidence that tightly couples cause to effect in an unambiguous, repeatable way is limited, mostly to situations where researchers can actually put their hands on and manipulate the systems in questionsuch is the case in fields such as molecular biology or in certain areas of physics and chemistry, to name a few. There are other sciences, however, that, because they deal with phenomena that are not easily manipulated, rely on indirect evidence, statistical reasoning, or other less obviously experimental methods (Longino, 2001; Rudolph, 2001).
Climate science is one of those fields. Those who study global warming deal with extremely complex, probabilistic systems that change over periods of time that exceed the typical human life span. Researchers, thus, use a host of other scientific methods including tracking patterns of indirect evidence from widely disparate sources as well as using computer models to simulate global changes over time. There is no crucial experiment that can be done to prove that global warming is upon us. Thats simply not how the science is done. But this doesnt mean that the knowledge generated about global warming is somehow suspect. Its as reliable as any knowledge can be about the phenomena in questionand its scientific through and through.
The problem is that the public doesnt have an adequate grasp of the wide range of methods that scientists use in exploring the different aspects of the world, and this isnt the first time weve seen the publics narrow view of science exploited. Time and again, big tobacco companies have argued over whether cigarettes have been proven to cause cancer. Opponents of teaching evolution have long thrived in this environment as well, asking biologists to demonstrate conclusively an instance of one species evolving into another. Its not surprising perhaps that the parent who objected to the Gore film is a young-earth creationist, who insists that the information in the documentary is, in his words, a very cockeyed view of what the truth is (McClure & Stiffler, 2007).
What should be done? More science isnt the answer, especially in the current climate of standardized testing, where additional facts will only exacerbate the problem, reinforcing in students minds the identification of science with certain knowledge. Neither is greater emphasis on the nature of science likely to help as long as such instruction remains limited to a monolithic picture of how science is done. The notion that there is a single scientific method or nature of science is simply wrong and does a disservice to a publ