Back when I was in grad school, I once attended a talk given by a fellow member of the Semitics department on . . . Ugaritic, maybe? (I was in the Christian-era side of the program so I had only a passing interest in the pre-Christian semitic languages, honestly.) I recall that the talk was given by one of the more brilliant students in the program, and was correspondingly deep and technical. I could appreciate the depth of what was being said without actually being able to follow all of it in detail.
After the talk, there was some light applause, delivered with genuine respect (funny how you can *tell*, isn't it?). Then the department chair stood up to give his comments, and he started by chiding the presenting scholar: there was a serious deficiency in his paper. He had forgotten to draw out all the implications of his study . . . what would be the impact of his research on women's issues?! We all had a hearty shared laugh, and the rest of the evening went on pleasantly.
What was the joke? What you have to understand about the field of Early Christianity (which is the umbrella under which our department kind-of, sort-of rested), is that there is quite a lot of interest and funded research on women's issues in the early church. (I think this is true for a lot of liberal arts, actually, but I *know* it's true for early church history). There aren't a lot of conferences on Ugaritic, or paid seminars on cuneiform in early Mesopotamia; certainly not compared to the number conferences on the status of women in early Judaism, or oppressive patriarchal structures in early Christianity, etc., etc.
An example of this in Christian-era Semitics is recent trends in studies on Appa Shenoute, a most important early Coptic monk. The *only* recent, popular book published on Shenoute is from a scholarly feminist viewpoint: "Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery" by Rebecca Krawiec. (http://www.amazon.com/Shenoute-Women-White-Monastery-Monasticism/dp/0195129431). More hard-core Coptic scholars see books like this and shrug philosophically--since there's a ton of work that needs to be done in Coptic studies, and precious little interest and money to go around to get it done, the more exposure and interest the better. They just need to rewrite their papers a little bit to build off of or respond to issues raised by Krawiec, and they get a ready-made excuse to have their papers read by a wider crowd and to get into more conferences.
And *this* was the joke--this is the little dodge that arises from the basic realities of academic life, and that all academics become familiar with over time. You do the work you want to do, but you keep an eye on the winds of fashion (and of funding!), and you learn to tap into them to achieve relevance in your field, as much as you can. Sometimes it results in some rather absurd stretches to connect two things that are not really connected, but that's just academics. Everyone does it, or at least everyone knows about it; it's forgiven and then laughed about.
This is the origin of what I like to call the "Funding Hook", found in many (if not most) scholarly papers. There's often a very recognizable part of a paper that aims at this "tie-in" to what's currently relevant. Oftentimes, (unless the topic as a whole is already obviously "in style") it's easily identifiable in how it stands out from the rest of the paper--it's the part that says, "hey, this line of research is relevant and important! Someone should totally pay me to write another one!" Now, I say "funding" and use the word "pay", as if there was always literally money that was at stake. This isn't always the case. Oftentimes, what is asked for by the "Funding Hook" is not so much money as it is recognition of relevance and importance. But these may as well be money, because those things are what constitute the real currency of academia anyway.
What does this have to do with global warming? Quite a lot--it is something you absolutely should keep in mind when reading academic papers in the field of climate science. Because it's easy to see, if you pay attention, that global warming has given everyone in the climate science fields the *mother* of all funding hooks:
"So in conclusion, we need to continue my research in this area, or else maybe the whole world will burn and die. The end. P.S. My research assistants now take PayPal and coupons to Starbucks."
If there is *any* tie-in to global warming, then a paper can instantly claim relevance and importance of an (almost literal) earth-shattering scale. And almost any research having to do with the weather at all, or geological processes that might affect the weather, or anything that may have an effect on the biosphere, meaning anything to do with plan or animal life, can be spun plausibly as having something to do with global warming. So this happens a lot.
The problem is aggravated by the structure of an academic paper. All academic papers have the following three parts:
1) The introduction. Pretty straightforward, really--it's what you (and your adviser, if any) come up with initially. You tweak it at the end after the rest of the paper is done to whatever extent the research didn't go as you expected it would.
2) Presentation of research / arguments. This is the meat and potatoes of the paper. Here you have to be rigorous and definite. You don't use words like "could" or "maybe". If you have something to say, you say it and you defend it with evidence. If you can't come up with enough evidence for a point you wanted to make, you cut it from the body. (Or, you should.)
3) Conclusion. Here you do two things. First, you simply sum up the argument of the paper. But *then*, you also discuss relevance and application. *Here* is where you can relax on the rigor of academic argument, because here you can do things like pose possibilities (that could be followed up by future rigorous argumentation) and reflect on the importance of what you've just covered, even if the importance is subjective. You can even be poetic and flowery here, if you want. You can sneak in those points that you had to cut from the main body because you couldn't get enough hard evidence for them. And, of course, the funding hook fits perfectly in this section as well.
The upshot here is that the global warming funding hook is pretty much always found in the *least* academically rigorous part of the paper, the part of the paper that *academicians* know is to be read with a somewhat cynical eye. What happens, then, is that you have all these papers in climate science written in which the dire possibilities are raised, but with the minimum of scientific rigor. "Sure, maybe the temperature could raise 4 degrees C in the next century . . . who's to say it couldn't? It's a possibility. That'll make them think twice before cutting funding for my series of studies on wheat growth in Argentina."
This problem is compounded *again* by the way in which the media reads academic papers. To a media person, the same three sections I outlined above look like this:
1) Summary information. A very sketchy (and probably distorted) version of this is going to go in the body of the article to explain what's going on.
2) Blah, blah, blah.
3) Blah, blah *HEADLINE*, blah blah.
So there you have it: a prefect recipe for the very least dependable parts of academia being constantly presented to the public as the state of research.
Now, I don't want to say that *all* dire warnings of global warming catastrophe are just poorly understood "maybe's" that scientists have thrown out. There are plenty of papers in which the elements of risk regarding climate are the meat-and-potatoes part of the paper itself. But in my experience of watching a parade of climate-scare headlines over the years, more often than not when I click through to the actual article I find that the take-away point being trumpeted is really just a "maybe". I encourage everyone who cares about the actual state of the earth, and who doesn't want to be led away into irrational panic by the never-ending stream of alarmist headlines, to start clicking through more often and reading the actual articles.
You should start seeing that at least *part* of what is actually endangered in this world is really just the academic budget.
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