Sci-Epic

In case you thought that science was no-nonsense, hard-nosed knowledge production, take a look at this opening paragaph:

It is an epic story: the struggle of thousands of men and women over the course of a century for very high stakes. For some, the work required actual physical courage, a risk to life and limb in icy wastes or on the high seas. The rest needed more subtle forms of courage. They gambled decades of arduous effort on the chance of a useful discovery, and staked their reputations on what they claimed to have found. Even as they stretched their minds to the limit on intellectual problems that often proved insoluble, their attention was diverted into grueling administrative struggles to win minimal support for the great work. A few took the battle into the public arena, often getting more blame than praise; most labored to the end of their lives in obscurity. In the end they did win their goal, which was simply knowledge.

This is the first paragraph (I can't make this up) of a history of the science of climate change entitled The Discovery of Global Warming (Harvard University Press), written by the Director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) who holds Ph.D.'s in physics and history, and was a lecturer at CalTech for a few years before pursuing history of science topics.

Maybe it's not pure mythology, but if it's not it still a bit too adventurous to be talking about what is probably the biggest epistemological issue of modern science: climate prediction. The issue is that it's not easy even to write down the argument for global warming in a few equations, or to show a few graphs. Certainly we can show a graph that seems to show that the climate is warming, but that does not tell us how this change is being effected (i.e., are humans involved, and how). And it doesn't just boil down to a physical argument. It boils down to a whole host of cumulative evidence no single piece of which is the nail in the coffin. So the question is, when do we know what's going on with the climate? What do we point to as the criteria of that knowledge, even within science?