Overview

Adherents of the man-made global warming paradigm have often stated the science is settled and all scientists agree . In the preceding chapters we have amply shown that this is simply untrue. No wonder, since climatology is a relatively young science. It is no shame that its paradigm is still not settled. This is not unique. It happened to other sciences before. Is there something anything in the vast body of scientific knowledge which could be helpful to defuse the trench warfare between opposing views and which could shed some dispassionate light on the current scientific row about man-made global warming? After all, it might not be a bad thing to transcend the current stalemate and to let the normal dialectics of scientific inquiry run their course.

We believe there is. In our view Thomas S. Kuhn s classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which has been called a landmark in intellectual history might provide some clues as to where to go from here. Kuhn draws heavily on the historical experience in only a few scientific fields, mainly astronomy, physics and chemistry. But many practitioners of other scientific disciplines may easily recognise the universal validity of his analysis, because they have witnessed similar developments in their own fields of science. Let us first look at what paradigm means and what a paradigm shift entails.

Kuhn uses the word paradigm in several ways. ^[1] But basically they boil down to two different senses. On the one hand...