What are the key themes from this book? How do they relate to the arc of our class? Leave your thoughts here, and we’ll discuss on Monday.
What are the key themes from this book? How do they relate to the arc of our class? Leave your thoughts here, and we’ll discuss on Monday.
“Everyone has his own theory-and each sounds good- until the next lad comes along with his theory and knocks the others into smithereens. ” (11) The quote i think covers a lot of the theme so far in the book. The chapters talked a lot about early theories, and after a period of time, with more in depth research from different people, new theories are created. In class we are (or in the future) probably will brain storm ways (theories) to solve the problem and create solution’s. Some may be better or more effective than others. I also thought that towards the end of the reflections piece was an insightful conclusion. It pretty much summed up the problem. “climate changes is a major social, economic, and political issue'” (201) and i agree with the author that people on the lower end of social economic spectrum will have a harder time to adjusting to anything that changes. “Citizens will need reliable info., the flexibility to change their personal lives, and efficient and appropriate help to form all levels of the government.” (201)
The Reflections would be what the scientific method might call an evaluation as it looks critically at how the book might be viewed in order to clarify possible misconceptions for example: who discovered global warming? Was it Guy Stewart Callendar as he was the first one mentioned in the book? The answer is no one person discovered global warming but various scientific communities did. Things such as that are discusses in the Reflections making it a very good place to start reading so as not to fall victim to the possible misconceptions.
The Milestones section shows the progress of technology, the occurrence of natural disaster, economic changes, wars and advances in research all of which affect both the progress of awareness of climate change and its development.
One key idea of the main text that I would like to share relates to the progression of knowledge and awareness of global climate change and how the whole concept was initiated and why. What is particularly interesting about this story is the idea of denial and the damage it has done to later generations. As the problem evolved, people were more and more in denial that it existed or that it was a problem at all and were much less worried to do anything about it which is the main reason why it is such a pressing issue NOW.
As progress was made in research and discovery of the causes of global warming, the results were more disregarded as “who cares” as opposed to today’s reaction of “oh no!”. This is interesting to me as it shows humans past actions affect the future and how if action had been taken to slow climate change 100 years ago, we would not be in the messy state where we are now where finding a solution is almost literally a matter of life or death.
In the chapters Weart reiterated what was said in the milestone section in more depth. I also noticed several reoccuring themes in what he was saying. He consistently mentioned how people only seemed to search for climate change solutions when it began to affect the livelyhood of the people (such as when smog began to make people sick after the industrial revolution) or when it would give countries advantages in war. It was only after world war two that some people saw international cooperation in science as something that could “bind people together with interests that transcended the self-serving nationalism that brought so much honor and death” (32). In the reflections section the theme of “togetherness” that is pushed in Ignition (and on all of the online initiatives we have looked at in class) is commented upon again when he speaks about how scientists must be able to communicate and trust each other if we want to work out a solution. The patterns in the book show that people tend to be complacent about what is going on around them until their short-term livelyhood is affected. As Weart says in the reflection “This is not a job for someone else, sometime down the road: we have already run out of time (200). We need to act now.
The books main themes trace the history of the global warming movement and how it became the critical issue it is today. Global warming’s evolution from relative obscurity in the beginning of the century to one of the most pressing global issues today is remarkable. Trial and error is a major occurrence in the discovery of this unprecedented phenomenom. From Swedish scientists who used pollen to track the weather to the use of radio-carbon dating and computers climatology has expanded considerably and with that our knowledge of the climate.
Another theme is also the dismissal of climatology by scientists and the “accidental” discovery of global warming. If not for military funding and side experiments we would not be as knowledgeable about the subject. Perhaps most important is the discovery that any little tweak in climate, including human intervention, can drastically change our climate.
This relates to our class because acceptance of global warming and our role in it has been through so many obstacles and doubts over the last century. Now that it has gained widespread acceptance, we need to act and find solutions even if we face challenges equally as daunting as discovering global warming in the first place.
I thought that the most interesting part of the reading was the cyclical aspect of the whole research process. Although theories from hundreds of years ago, such as Milankovitch’s, were discredited and said to have nothing to do with Global Warming and the cycles of the Ice Ages, their theories and timelines are repeatedly revisited through more research for years to come. Not until later did scientists realize that “everything seemed to be interacting with everything else” (64) and that the research that had once been discarded and discredited was actually tied to the truth about global warming. As Weart puts it, “There was nothing extraordinary in…a combination of discovery and error. Every great scientific paper is written at the outside edge of what can be known, and deserves to be remembered if there is a nugget of value amid the inevitable confusion.” (49) The discovery of Global Warming was truly a group effort and it needs to remain that way as we move forward into the next stages of stopping it!
The main theme in this novel was basically the evolution of the global warming issue and how through tedious studies and experiments, scientists have expanded their knowledge on the issue dramatically. Spencer Weart spends a long time educating the reader about the versatile group of scientists and different groups who were all looking for a solution to help aid this serious problem.
Global Warming has been a serious issue for a while, but had only started being intensively researched for about a century. At the beginning of all of these experiments, many math and physics experts were attempting to find solutions, and many of these attempts led to frustrating dead ends.
The beginning of this book was very enjoyable to read because it looks further then just the solutions of global warming. Weart spends a sufficient amount of time talking about the studies and history of characterizing Global Warming. I thought this was very important because it makes people more aware and more educated about the issue.
“There had never been a community of scientists studying climate change.” (33) Instead, scientists studied in their own individual fields, which included, but were not limited to geography, oceanography, astronomy, and meteorology. This slowed down the discovery of climate change because they did not work collectively to challenge each other and share ideas. Only until the 1965 Boulder conference scientists of different fields began working together. When they finally did, they accomplished much more. This is shown when Reville and Suess, both of different fields, joined forces and successfully studied carbon in oceans. Like the scientists, different people from all around the world should join the environmental movement. This would not only strengthen the movement numerically, but there would be more ideas and strategies to act upon. This also relates to social capital and how it is necessary to not only bond with people similar to you but to branch out to those who are unlike you.
I thought it was interesting how scientists centuries, even decades, ago believed that human advancement in technology would prevent global warming from occurring. They even thought that humans would be able to turn “deserts into gardens.” Ironically, human technology and fossil fuel burning has been the cause of global warming. Yet today, we still are relying on future technology to prevent climate change from worsening.
Some key themes to point out were:
1) The concept of perspective in science and history. I found it so interesting that for such a long time, leading scientists couldn’t grasp the fact, or even the possibility, that humans are in fact able to change the climate. We now take for granted how easily our actions can affect the climate of the earth, but that was a process that took years of experiments, mistakes, and connections between scientists to figure out. It’s a larger lesson of how much humans’ perspective can change in less than 100 years, and the fact that we need to be able to critically inquire about our situation in the world without closing out possibilities because they seem implausible.
2) The concept of movement building in order to progress. At the start of the quest to understand how climate change works and if humans can really affect the climate, I thought that the description of monetary/ legitimacy struggles and lack of cooperation between the different fields of sciences was extremely interesting. It seemed that only once people were able to bridge math, physics, oceanography, geology and even astronomy that real progress could be made in figuring out how we affect climate change.
At the same time, though, an interesting question to ask is whether we need that period of lack of communication and coalition in order to move on to a period where we can make real progress on an issue (not only environmentally) or whether it is possible for a group of people to learn from past instances and, in essence, skip over those growing pains.
P.S. I never knew why fossil fuels had that name until reading the book!
As we begin to understand the full effects of global warming, it is important to look back and realize how we got here. Indeed global warming did not happen over night, and therefore, we must understand our past, if we plan to focus on an “environmentally friendly” future. We must understand the consequences of our actions, and therefore, Weart starts at the beginning and at a time in which climate change had yet to be defined.
This is during the early years of the 20th century, and at this point in history, scientists were still debating the effects that humanity had had on the environment. They had yet to agree on a cause for such phenomena, which include the warming of the earth or previous ice ages, and thus, their constant struggle (which creates a timeline of “twists and turns”) is a crucial theme throughout the novel.
Nevertheless, as Weart states, this constant debate/discussion over our climate was great, because it sparked curiosity and helped further experiments. Scientists were now intrigued by questions such as: “can humans really affect the climate” or “how can we predict the weather”, and yet, in their quest for answers, they sometimes ended up committing errors; something, which Weart states is never bad. This is because, as Weart reemphasizes, any contribution that sparks curiosity among scientists is great because it furthers the search for knowledge; a message that our class is also structured around.
We too are also at a stage in which we are trying to find solutions for this global problem, and therefore, any idea – good or bad – may lead us closer to a solution. Our journey will also have “twists and turns” (just like the history of global warming), and therefore, we must not get discouraged when ideas or theories fail, because that is just part of the process.
Instead, we must keep our debates and class discussions open, because just like in the novel, it was those exchanges of ideas, which brought the scientific community together and allowed them to reach a consensus.
This book is a discovery of how do scientists reach reliable conclusions. It shows us that climate change is not a simple story but many parallel stories. All the chapters could help us to weave these different theories together into a single overview and grasp the history that how we got to understand our present situation.
I thought the one of the key themes in this book is discovering possibilities. I’d love to read chapter one since it offers many theories to explain the cause of climate change. It starts from 19 century, Fourier, the first people who recognized that a greenhouse effect could keep the Earth from freezing, till figure out Carbon dioxide might be the greenhouse gas, and then many scientists have do a lot of researches to inquiry the cause of the temperature changed, such as the pattern of winds and ocean currents, the relationship of sunspots and Earth mechanics. Until the end of this chapter, we still have many debates to be continued. More than offering the common sense of global warming solutions, Weart points out that “how to make enough possibilities” is the critical issue in discovery. Because the first step to solve a problem is to realize the cause.
Another main theme in this book is cooperation. Since there are so many disciplines involved in the discovery in the global warming, as for instance meteorology, oceanography, geography and plant ecology, to make it impossible to work only by one or two individuals. So in the chapter 2, Weart has mentioned that “There had never been a community of scientists studying climate change” to implies that such fragmentation was becoming intolerable in the following studies of climate change. In this case, I have a deep understand that why we need to have so many organizations to build a grassroots movement to fight for the global warming. We need to work together to bulid a strong union. This union is not only exist in the science field, but also in our daily life.
Weart has creatively approached addressing the climate change through highlighting why and how the global community must break from the slow linearity of the scientific establishment of climate change. This book details upon the ongoing struggle between the reality of the sciences behind global warming and the “social process” of its comprehension and acceptance within society. It is most unfortunate that, as displayed in the book, the paths of scientific awakening to climate change and the gravity of the crisis are so parallel. It provides answers to questions such as why did we not begin measures of prevention when we had the knowledge and resources to do so.
This leads on to Weart introducing systematically how we have arrived in an age when research into climate change has turned a corner and has ceased to be a study limited to those who hold a mere interest in the science such as Callender (who actually believed that global warming was a potentially positive phenomenon for mankind) to the modern scene of desperation and worry. The scientific base on which we stand today is rooted in information which in the late 1950s began to provide irrefutable evidence to climate change. In the recent past, there were yet open questions regarding its influence on mankind and if at all, when would these begin not appear? Thus, one major theme is also how important it is for science to be directed in a particular direction if one desires pertinent results. The book shows how the lack of a sound and unified aim for scientists (as we are slowly building back today) caused the study of climate change to diversify and lose its uniformity of purpose.
Thus a significant role of the book is to possibly draw the reader back to a position where he may holistically view the scientific story of the “discovery” of climate change and global warming and therefore strive for uniform action, both scientific and social which is better oriented as it draws upon the successes and is cognizant of the failures of the past.
It was definitely interesting to see the scientific evolution of global warming knowledge in the reading, but what stood out most to me was the lag time between discovery and action. There is the obvious time that it takes for a scientific discovery to be tested and retested by the scientific community, and following that, the time necessary for that discovery to be widely accepted as a truism. What strikes me, however, was the disparity between scientifc knowledge and public knowledge. It seems that the academics were working in purely academic circles, and what “normal” person reads the Journal of Science regularly? I was amazed by the early date that global warming was discovered, and how only in the past couple of years, literally more than a century after the discovery was made, is action being taken to fight it. For me, this highlights the necessity of open dialogue between the scientist who make discoveries of such importance, and the people who these discoveries effect. In the end, it is not the academics who will enact widespread change, but the regular people who must take charge of their collective future.
The material was really interesting and just as you said some of it was really dense. I guess that main theme that stayed in my mind throughout much of the reading was the idea of unity, sharing ideas and checking on others. Basically there should never be any “by yourself” investigation. Many of the scientists in the book did research that was then checked over by scientists, that then did there own research, that was then checked over by other scientists. The example I believe would be the best way to work with others especially when your errors are becoming noticeable and then are up for discussion. I believe this theme carries over into our class because in order to come with solutions to global warming it will require an overwhelming amount of unity and sharing of ideas. Also the thought process was pretty much played around with throughout the people who dont believe its possible, throughout the people who have theories but think that science can always change, and thoughts about simply what is global warming and was has caused it.
I’ve read through many of the responses already and I think I am reiterating what others have said.
What I believed to be the main point of the reading, is that this project called “global warming” not necessarily an easy one, nor is it a static pool of thought. The ever changing paradigm of conservation and global warming is concurrent with the dynamic progress of global warming research. There have been countless theories, many of which have been proven wrong; while others live to change the established paradigm. However, it is the phenomena of creating a new niche of science that is the most striking to me. Humans have this great ability to realize something about their world and create, out of nothing, a way to rationalize it all.
The process of the creation of global warming research is important to the solution side of global warming. Now that scientists have generally agreed upon the existence of global warming, the next step is agreeing upon a solution. The process of developing a solution will have many successes and failures, but looking back on the creation of global warming and the unity that it brought internationally, gives hope the those who are mere citizens of the world. If humans can rationalize something completely new, like global warming, that the solution will be obtained in due time.
Sorry this is late everybody, I wasn’t aware we had a blog post due until I got to class. I’ll start checking my email more frequently. For me, this last reading was refreshing because of the accelerated flow. The first couple of chapters were so dense and inundated with facts that simply getting through the pages was a challenge. The facts did help to legitimize the actuality of global warming. It is no accident that we have uncovered the truth about our climate, but rather the effort started with Arrhenius in 1896 and required countless other scientist’s contributions to prove. While I wont go through the list of people who made the discovery possible, I will say that Weart opened my eyes to the teamwork science requires. Complicated issues draw scientist from all fields together, and instead of competing against each other, scientist seem to genuinely have a passion and curiosity for their occupations and are content to be just a small piece of the puzzle, a simple building block to a discovery. Most also didn’t seem to have big ego’s; instead of taking a colleague’s disagreement personally, Scientist’s would regroup and reevaluate their claim. I think many lessons can be drawn from this book, as the importance of working together was shown by understanding of global warming and the danger it may cause. If we can learn to work together, we can get results to issue’s even as confusing as global warming.