Ah! Humans. A prideful lot, really. And among their number are those termed archaeologists, a special group of people devoted to ancient times. Put their devotion to their craft in an environment of professional journals, academic departments, and sensational news reporting, and you get competition: For funding, publication, and recognition. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be recognized as the person who discovered Eldorado, Atlantis, or some antique writing that explains why people drew lines on the Plain of Nazca?
And so, in the Americas, there’s been a problem for archaeologists. How could they compete with those who discovered Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and the like? How could they find something that put people in the Americas before the Bering Land Bridge lay above sea level? I mean, everyone knew about the Clovis people. What’re they? Inhabitants about nine or ten millennia ago, maybe a few millennia earlier at best? And then relentless diggers that they are, a few archaeologists discovered evidence of older habitation: Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in western Pennsylvania, for example, and the Topper site along the Savannah River.
Like so many of our species, archaeologists have emotional attachments to what they know. That’s been the story of scientists left behind as knew discoveries displace older ones. And all the paradigm-changers face the same doubt, disbelief, and, sad to say, disgust from adherents of previous knowledge. I mean, who likes to have what he has built a career on overturned at a moment’s notice, a chance discovery of an unknown phenomenon?
But, of course, you know, as I know, that archaeologists aren’t the only humans who hold onto that in which they have invested time. And you also know about intellectual inertia. It took a number of years for Einstein’s five groundbreaking 1905 physics papers to work their way into a new physics paradigm. It took decades for Alfred Wegener’s continental drift to be understood as seafloor spreading. And it has taken a number of years to get past the Clovis-as-first-North-Americans mantra among archaeologists. And of recent, the Topper site along the Savannah River, uncovered by a group from the U. of South Carolina led by Dr. Albert Goodyear III, has encountered the same resistance.
Now don’t get me wrong. Doubt is the scientific method of choice. I witnessed that in person when I attended a seminar at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at the U. of Miami in 1980. Cesare Emiliani had returned from a visit to the Alvarez father-son team, who, with Asaro and Michel, studied the ash layer at Gubio, Italy, and concluded that a worldwide disaster had occurred when an asteroid or comet hit the planet 65 million years ago (goodbye, dinosaurs). After Emiliani explained what the Alvarezes had discovered and postulated to the seminar audience, the attendees showed healthy skepticism. After all, where was the crater made by this impact? No one in the attendance at the time seemed to know of a discovery by Camargo and Penfield that further confirmed a Yucatan Peninsula site as a large crater.* In a world with so many scouring Earth’s surface for discovery, scientists can become quite isolated—this was especially so in the largely pre-Web era of 1980. Anyway, at the time, I was willing to cast doubt aside in favor of the hypothesis backed by an iridium-laced ash layer. I thought, these guys are onto something that might have been a big contributor to the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. However, I understood at the time that most scientists at the seminar seemed to respond emotionally rather than rationally, but that they also knew that other extinction mechanisms could have been at work, such as a pandemic. Yet, their doubt seemed to me to be a kind of protective doubt, a mechanism to save “secure” knowledge.
Back to Topper. I’m not an archaeologist. But anyone who looks even rather briefly at the discoveries of American archaeologists during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries will notice the reluctance of older archaeologists to relinquish their hold on “established” hypotheses like the primacy of the Clovis culture in North America. They don’t want their research to be topped.
There are reasons for the reluctance to change, as I wrote above: Pride being one; funding being another. And that seems to be applicable to the current intellectual climate of climate studies. There are a good many scientists supported by government funding for work on “climate change.” If you read through the studies supported by governments and that lend support to the IPCC’s main theme, you’ll see articles that lie on the periphery, yet appear to be central to “scientific belief.”
When we hear often enough that a bolide of some sort killed the dinosaurs, we make it part of our worldview. When we hear often enough that the earliest people in the Americas were the
Clovis, we make it part of our worldview. And when we hear that we’re all doomed because the climates continue to exhibit vicissitudes, we make it part of our worldview. And why shouldn’t we believe what we constantly hear? Isn’t everyone saying it? And that applies to panic among the uneducated who want to turn common weather events, such as droughts and storms, into “evidence” for their beliefs. “But aren’t those fires in California and Brazil evidence of climate change?”
And that is what makes science unscientific. That is what keeps not only the majority of the laity in the secure darkness of isolated thinking, but also scientists who should doubt both the conclusions of others and their own conclusions. It seems to me that we’ve arrived at an era of “finished science,” but then, maybe every era since the ancient Greeks has been so. Aristotle might hold the Guinness World Record for the endurance of a “theory” when he told us why objects move. It took almost two millennia until Galileo and Newton overturned his thinking. It then took hundreds of years to alter Newton’s understanding of gravity. And then Einstein topped Newton.
Remember phrenologists? They could explain personality by bumps on the head. Think of astrologers. They explain personality by the position in the zodiac. You might say, “Well, those are just extreme beliefs, debunked by science. But who can debunk climate science?” Think of what the reporters have repeatedly told their TV audiences when a major hurricane hits the Caribbean islands or the coast of the USA. The sky is falling. The climate is dying. People are doomed. “We have the established science, and all the scientists—save some oddball deniers—agree.”
But wasn’t the Clovis Culture supposed to be the oldest in North America. Wasn’t the Bering Land Bridge supposed to be the route from Asia into America? What the heck are we to do with the Topper archaeological site and the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter site? Are the carbon-14 dates for Clovis legitimate but the carbon-14 dates for Topper and Meadowcroft illegitimate? Anyway, how did those Topper and Meadowcroft people get to America?
“It’s not the same. It’s not the same. Climate science is established. And we’re going to have more and more studies that prove it’s established. We’re all doomed by rising temperatures. And no one can top that with a contradictory study.”
Hold on a moment. “Doomed”? Oh! Right! I recently heard that we have just 12 years until climate doomsday (2031?). So, following the advice to shut down all fossil fuel use in North America to save the world, we might make a dent by less than a tenth of a percent in the supposed temperature rise while China and India continue to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere unabated.
The discoveries at Topper and Meadowcroft appear to top the previous discoveries. They were made by tenacious archaeologists who bucked the trend. Their discoveries, however, haven’t been fully accepted by the establishment because of intellectual and professional inertia. Climate deniers face an even more difficult uphill climb. The world is settling on the hypothesis by consensus, and that, in science is tantamount to making a theory. And the theory means inevitable doom.
The masses appear to have abandoned doubt, and in doing so, have made topping the climate story only a matter of producing more of the same. Imagine. Someone identifies Clovis. Someone else finds a better Clovis site. And so on, and so on. All within the context of the belief that the Clovis culture was primary. Who among those committed to Clovis will yield to the discoverers of Topper and Meadowcroft? That’s the way it is with climate science today. The only topping is to do more of the same. That’s where the grant money is. That’s where the pride lies.
Unfortunately for the masses, the repeated becomes the true. And the repeated “truth” has inertia. It’s not going anywhere because more and more of us are becoming comfortable with it. There’s a Higgs Field for ideas and facts that counter the truth du jour. Those facts take on such mass that no intellectual endeavor can move them. So, the panicked masses will believe Earth has “12 years,” and will then, 12 years from now, hear that “Earth has just 12 years.” And on and on, not much different, you realize from the Y2K scare, the numerous doomsday dates that have come and gone, such as the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide date, and others, like the one centered on syzygy. How you goin’ to top ‘em? You’re not. The isolated voice of reason isn’t, either.
When everyone is on the same intellectual plane, there’s no high ground, there’s no “topping.” Every climate study will lie on the same contour line. I find it a bit interesting that in order to top previous studies and hypotheses in archaeology, one has to dig a hole. I have a feeling that climate science lies at the bottom of a very large hole. Every acceptable climate study appears to derive from a dig at the established “Clovis-equivalent Climate level.”
*Pemex, the company that funded the research Penfield did, didn’t let an earlier researcher, Robert Baltosser, publish similar findings about the Chixulub crater. Baltosser found the crater a decade earlier than Penfield, but the Alvarezes had no access to that finding.
And so, in the Americas, there’s been a problem for archaeologists. How could they compete with those who discovered Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and the like? How could they find something that put people in the Americas before the Bering Land Bridge lay above sea level? I mean, everyone knew about the Clovis people. What’re they? Inhabitants about nine or ten millennia ago, maybe a few millennia earlier at best? And then relentless diggers that they are, a few archaeologists discovered evidence of older habitation: Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in western Pennsylvania, for example, and the Topper site along the Savannah River.
Like so many of our species, archaeologists have emotional attachments to what they know. That’s been the story of scientists left behind as knew discoveries displace older ones. And all the paradigm-changers face the same doubt, disbelief, and, sad to say, disgust from adherents of previous knowledge. I mean, who likes to have what he has built a career on overturned at a moment’s notice, a chance discovery of an unknown phenomenon?
But, of course, you know, as I know, that archaeologists aren’t the only humans who hold onto that in which they have invested time. And you also know about intellectual inertia. It took a number of years for Einstein’s five groundbreaking 1905 physics papers to work their way into a new physics paradigm. It took decades for Alfred Wegener’s continental drift to be understood as seafloor spreading. And it has taken a number of years to get past the Clovis-as-first-North-Americans mantra among archaeologists. And of recent, the Topper site along the Savannah River, uncovered by a group from the U. of South Carolina led by Dr. Albert Goodyear III, has encountered the same resistance.
Now don’t get me wrong. Doubt is the scientific method of choice. I witnessed that in person when I attended a seminar at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at the U. of Miami in 1980. Cesare Emiliani had returned from a visit to the Alvarez father-son team, who, with Asaro and Michel, studied the ash layer at Gubio, Italy, and concluded that a worldwide disaster had occurred when an asteroid or comet hit the planet 65 million years ago (goodbye, dinosaurs). After Emiliani explained what the Alvarezes had discovered and postulated to the seminar audience, the attendees showed healthy skepticism. After all, where was the crater made by this impact? No one in the attendance at the time seemed to know of a discovery by Camargo and Penfield that further confirmed a Yucatan Peninsula site as a large crater.* In a world with so many scouring Earth’s surface for discovery, scientists can become quite isolated—this was especially so in the largely pre-Web era of 1980. Anyway, at the time, I was willing to cast doubt aside in favor of the hypothesis backed by an iridium-laced ash layer. I thought, these guys are onto something that might have been a big contributor to the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. However, I understood at the time that most scientists at the seminar seemed to respond emotionally rather than rationally, but that they also knew that other extinction mechanisms could have been at work, such as a pandemic. Yet, their doubt seemed to me to be a kind of protective doubt, a mechanism to save “secure” knowledge.
Back to Topper. I’m not an archaeologist. But anyone who looks even rather briefly at the discoveries of American archaeologists during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries will notice the reluctance of older archaeologists to relinquish their hold on “established” hypotheses like the primacy of the Clovis culture in North America. They don’t want their research to be topped.
There are reasons for the reluctance to change, as I wrote above: Pride being one; funding being another. And that seems to be applicable to the current intellectual climate of climate studies. There are a good many scientists supported by government funding for work on “climate change.” If you read through the studies supported by governments and that lend support to the IPCC’s main theme, you’ll see articles that lie on the periphery, yet appear to be central to “scientific belief.”
When we hear often enough that a bolide of some sort killed the dinosaurs, we make it part of our worldview. When we hear often enough that the earliest people in the Americas were the
Clovis, we make it part of our worldview. And when we hear that we’re all doomed because the climates continue to exhibit vicissitudes, we make it part of our worldview. And why shouldn’t we believe what we constantly hear? Isn’t everyone saying it? And that applies to panic among the uneducated who want to turn common weather events, such as droughts and storms, into “evidence” for their beliefs. “But aren’t those fires in California and Brazil evidence of climate change?”
And that is what makes science unscientific. That is what keeps not only the majority of the laity in the secure darkness of isolated thinking, but also scientists who should doubt both the conclusions of others and their own conclusions. It seems to me that we’ve arrived at an era of “finished science,” but then, maybe every era since the ancient Greeks has been so. Aristotle might hold the Guinness World Record for the endurance of a “theory” when he told us why objects move. It took almost two millennia until Galileo and Newton overturned his thinking. It then took hundreds of years to alter Newton’s understanding of gravity. And then Einstein topped Newton.
Remember phrenologists? They could explain personality by bumps on the head. Think of astrologers. They explain personality by the position in the zodiac. You might say, “Well, those are just extreme beliefs, debunked by science. But who can debunk climate science?” Think of what the reporters have repeatedly told their TV audiences when a major hurricane hits the Caribbean islands or the coast of the USA. The sky is falling. The climate is dying. People are doomed. “We have the established science, and all the scientists—save some oddball deniers—agree.”
But wasn’t the Clovis Culture supposed to be the oldest in North America. Wasn’t the Bering Land Bridge supposed to be the route from Asia into America? What the heck are we to do with the Topper archaeological site and the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter site? Are the carbon-14 dates for Clovis legitimate but the carbon-14 dates for Topper and Meadowcroft illegitimate? Anyway, how did those Topper and Meadowcroft people get to America?
“It’s not the same. It’s not the same. Climate science is established. And we’re going to have more and more studies that prove it’s established. We’re all doomed by rising temperatures. And no one can top that with a contradictory study.”
Hold on a moment. “Doomed”? Oh! Right! I recently heard that we have just 12 years until climate doomsday (2031?). So, following the advice to shut down all fossil fuel use in North America to save the world, we might make a dent by less than a tenth of a percent in the supposed temperature rise while China and India continue to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere unabated.
The discoveries at Topper and Meadowcroft appear to top the previous discoveries. They were made by tenacious archaeologists who bucked the trend. Their discoveries, however, haven’t been fully accepted by the establishment because of intellectual and professional inertia. Climate deniers face an even more difficult uphill climb. The world is settling on the hypothesis by consensus, and that, in science is tantamount to making a theory. And the theory means inevitable doom.
The masses appear to have abandoned doubt, and in doing so, have made topping the climate story only a matter of producing more of the same. Imagine. Someone identifies Clovis. Someone else finds a better Clovis site. And so on, and so on. All within the context of the belief that the Clovis culture was primary. Who among those committed to Clovis will yield to the discoverers of Topper and Meadowcroft? That’s the way it is with climate science today. The only topping is to do more of the same. That’s where the grant money is. That’s where the pride lies.
Unfortunately for the masses, the repeated becomes the true. And the repeated “truth” has inertia. It’s not going anywhere because more and more of us are becoming comfortable with it. There’s a Higgs Field for ideas and facts that counter the truth du jour. Those facts take on such mass that no intellectual endeavor can move them. So, the panicked masses will believe Earth has “12 years,” and will then, 12 years from now, hear that “Earth has just 12 years.” And on and on, not much different, you realize from the Y2K scare, the numerous doomsday dates that have come and gone, such as the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide date, and others, like the one centered on syzygy. How you goin’ to top ‘em? You’re not. The isolated voice of reason isn’t, either.
When everyone is on the same intellectual plane, there’s no high ground, there’s no “topping.” Every climate study will lie on the same contour line. I find it a bit interesting that in order to top previous studies and hypotheses in archaeology, one has to dig a hole. I have a feeling that climate science lies at the bottom of a very large hole. Every acceptable climate study appears to derive from a dig at the established “Clovis-equivalent Climate level.”
*Pemex, the company that funded the research Penfield did, didn’t let an earlier researcher, Robert Baltosser, publish similar findings about the Chixulub crater. Baltosser found the crater a decade earlier than Penfield, but the Alvarezes had no access to that finding.
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