I remind you that in the lifetime of most scientists now living, wehave already had an example of dire predictions set aside by newtechnology. I refer to the green revolution. In 1960, Paul Ehrlichsaid, "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world willundergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve todeath." Ten years later, he predicted four billion people would dieduring the 1980s, including 65 million Americans. The mass starvationthat was predicted never occurred, and it now seems it isn't ever goingto happen. Nor is the population explosion going to reach the numberspredicted even ten years ago. In 1990, climate modelers anticipated aworld population of 11 billion by 2100. Today, some people think thecorrect number will be 7 billion and falling. But nobody knows forsure.

But it is impossible to ignore how closely the history of globalwarming fits on the previous template for nuclear winter. Just as theearliest studies of nuclear winter stated that the uncertainties wereso great that probabilities could never be known, so, too the firstpronouncements on global warming argued strong limits on what could bedetermined with certainty about climate change. The 1995 IPCC draftreport said, "Any claims of positive detection of significant climatechange are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in thetotal natural variability of the climate system are reduced." It alsosaid, "No study to date has positively attributed all or part ofobserved climate changes to anthropogenic causes." Those statementswere removed, and in their place appeared: "The balance of evidencesuggests a discernable human influence on climate."

What is clear, however, is that on this issue, science and policyhave become inextricably mixed to the point where it will be difficult,if not impossible, to separate them out. It is possible for an outsideobserver to ask serious questions about the conduct of investigationsinto global warming, such as whether we are taking appropriate steps toimprove the quality of our observational data records, whether we aresystematically obtaining the information that will clarify existinguncertainties, whether we have any organized disinterested mechanism todirect research in this contentious area.

The answer to all these questions is no. We don't.

In trying to think about how these questions can be resolved, itoccurs to me that in the progression from SETI to nuclear winter tosecond hand smoke to global warming, we have one clear message, andthat is that we can expect more and more problems of public policydealing with technical issues in the future-problems of ever greaterseriousness, where people care passionately on all sides.

And at the moment we have no mechanism to get good answers. So I will propose one.

Just as we have established a tradition of double-blinded researchto determine drug efficacy, we must institute double-blinded researchin other policy areas as well. Certainly the increased use of computermodels, such as GCMs, cries out for the separation of those who makethe models from those who verify them. The fact is that the presentstructure of science is entrepreneurial, with individual investigativeteams vying for funding from organizations which all too often have aclear stake in the outcome of the research - or appear to, which may bejust as bad. This is not healthy for science.

Sooner or later, we must form an independent research institute inthis country. It must be funded by industry, by government, and byprivate philanthropy, both individuals and trusts. The money must bepooled, so that investigators do not know who is paying them. Theinstitute must fund more than one team to do research in a particulararea, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement:teams will know their results will be checked by other groups. In manycases, those who decide how to gather the data will not gather it, andthose who gather the data will not analyze it. If we were to addressthe land temperature records with such rigor, we would be well on ourway to an understanding of exactly how much faith we can place inglobal warming, and therefore what seriousness we must address this.