Reasoning In Spencer Weart's The Discovery Of Rapid Climate Change

Human understanding of their surrounding environment has always been a priority maintained since the ancient civilizations. The resources we need to sustain life rely on the natural climate, and understanding how it operates is extremely beneficial. As a society it is common knowledge that the climate is capable of change, but how quickly it could had to be investigated. In the essay, “The Discovery of Rapid Climate Change” by Spencer Weart, he analyzes how the scientific community and eventually the general public came to the belief that climates can shift in a shorter period of time than originally understood. In the essay there are many roles that predisposed beliefs, logical reasoning and faith plays to get to the eventual conclusion, as

With the use of reasoning, it began with the 1956 paper by Ewing and William Donn that investigated the cycle of ice ages, proposing that the feedback mechanism was triggered by ocean currents; when the ice sheets melted and sea level rose, the warm waters would flow and cause the Arctic to melt faster, but once all ice was gone the mass evaporation would switch the feedback to cooling (Weart, pg. 32). Ewing and William concluded that it was possible the “polar ocean might become ice-free and launch us into a new ice age within the next few hundred years,” Weart explains, and with this logical reasoning caused many to change their traditional belief of a perfect balanced nature (pg. 32). Their findings became the first possible scientifically backed model of an abrupt climate change, which encouraged others to widen their views and look into new information. Despite the theory eventually being denounced, it played its role in stimulating a possible paradigm-shift. Over the next forty years, many other models and theories depicted that abrupt climate change was a very real possibility, but the biggest turning point of evidence was from the 1993 report of the analysis of the Greenland ice cores. The project examined two cores that were drilled out from the Greenland ice plateau, with thirty kilometers of distance between them to assure the credibility

Godfrey-Smith explains Kuhn’s philosophy to be when “a new candidate paradigm appears… in which even very basic ideas are put back on the table for discussion, and a new direction eventually emerges from the chaos” (pg. 89). This can be seen when Ewing and William Donn first stimulated the possible idea that nature was not imperturbable, which went against every preceding belief. As more research was done and the definitive proof was finally found in the Greenland ice cores, the new belief or paradigm of abrupt climate change resulted. Kuhn would agree this pattern of events discussed about the knowledge of climate change to be consistent with how everything has evolved through history. However, he would advise society to be wary of the basis of a new paradigm, as it is based on the overall acceptance of that community; with a weak foundation it could lead to unreliable