“JC comment: The year 2000, the publication of the IPCC TAR, and the elevation by IPCC Chair John Houghton of the hockey stick to icon status. A small accident in the history of the IPCC has had serious adverse consequences for climate science.”
To me 2000 was a watershed year for science, the year when speculation, particularly with regards to cataclysmic events, became legitimate.
We recall the Y2K potential disaster that gripped the White House and Congress, the military, business and air flights and trains and cars and everything that goes, suddenly, and terribly stopping or going haywire. Executives of sensitive infrastructure stayed the night with their IT people at ready. Not a blip.
2000 was also the time of the peak and bust of the Dot-Com bubble. Speculative value rising and falling in a blink of an eye.
Prior to 2000, on the societal side, there was great social euphoria buoyed by apparent wealth and rising expectations. Restraints on personal expression were decried and demonized; the pointing out of doing things the old way as being ancient and wrong. And then there was the crash, as into buildings on September 11, 2001.
My proposition is: at a time of great speculative expectations along with a general naivete about what were the dark forces operating in the world around us, there was a collapse in individualism and a waning of self-assurance. This has led us as a society, to becoming more dependent on authority sources and allowing the rise of demagogues and ideologists.
Here today, science like most other human endeavors is reflective of the social realm in which it operates, and, science, as it had once been known, i.e. a Feynman integrity model, has devolved to the Mann model: relativistic, authoritarian, stifling progress.
Insight alone is not sufficient to recover from this stumble. Dogged articulation of the evolving facts as we know them can and will lead to science integrity and back onto a road of human social and scientific progress.
