The year of 2016 was recorded as the hottest year in history as
reported by the UK Met Office and NASA and NOAA in the US –
and they also depicted that we have experienced 16 of the 17 hottest years
during this century. Climate scientists and many scholars currently blame this
climate change and global warming on the human activities that have caused in
warming up the earth to the level which it was 115,000 years ago (Carrington,
2017). With this drastic change in the climate, we are encountering discourses
from around the world and specifically the powerful nation that global warming
is a hoax. How do we deal with such denialism and present an alternative
discourse showing that the climate change is real and we are already on fire. The
apparent changes in the climatic conditions are definitely not enough to stop the
narcissist development enthusiasts for looking for all the comfort at the cost
of ruining the nature. In this paper, I
will engage with Paul Edwards, author of A Vast Machine, who sets such
skepticism to rest using his idea of a combination of data and model which he
calls the global knowledge infrastructure and how the World Wide Web is changing
the paradigm of climate knowledge.
Paul Edwards has thoroughly presented a historical view of the
evolution of a wide scientific field that was initiated by curiosity of a few
explorers and scholars in 19th-century and now is engaged in by a worldwide
community of scientists, engineers, and other specialists working with huge
number of data, highly complex computer models, and many sophisticated and
modern instruments and measurement platforms. His main argument is that the
ways in which environmental measurements are now carried out, analyzed,
interpreted, and utilized in science and in global debates about environmental
management and policy have designed and framed our “knowledge infrastructure”. He
has presented the notion that the raw data cannot make up the global climate
knowledge without framing in a model that helps us in understanding the overall
scenario. This combination of acquiring data globally and passing them through
a series of data models is what makes up the “Global Knowledge infrastructure”.
Paul is of the opinion that computers are absolutely important in this
knowledge and has categorized the knowledge about climate change into three
kinds of computer models: simulation models of weather and climate; reanalysis
models, which reconstruct climate history from historical weather data; and
data models, used to mix and adjust measurements from various sources.
The introduction of World Wide Web in this changing context of
understanding knowledge about climate change has made the dispersion of
knowledge easier and accessible. With this openness, there comes an issue of
what resources and models to trust when we have everyone accessing the data and
presenting their understanding of the climate change. Many people write on
internet and/or talk about climate change in popular media and have more reach
to people than people who actually research on data and put them in different
models. He warns us that one should not buy every argument in climate
knowledge; rather the academic papers which go through various peer reviews and
survive the critiques can be trusted. The good part is that now “there are too many models, there are too many controls on the data, too
much scrutiny of every possibility, and there is too much integrity in the IPCC process that the
denialists view of climate change being a hoax cannot be true” (Edwards, 2010).
In conclusion, Edwards
has engaged with the science behind the scientific consensus on climate change,
showing that over the year data and models have united to form a stable,
consistent, and responsible basis for establishing the reality of global
warming.
References
Carrington, D.
(2017). 2016 hottest year ever recorded – and scientists say human activity
to blame. The Guardian.
Edwards, P.
(2010). Vast Machine (1st ed.). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
