DISCOVERING THE FUTURE IN THE PAST: DOING QUATERNARY SCIENCE IN THE SPIRIT OF JIM KNOX

Quaternary scientists love to explore in the field the sediments, soils, and landforms that signify the operations of past processes. Unfortunately there are some who would denigrate this style of science as the mere generation of “just-so stories.” For some the primary goal of modern science is to produce the “predictive understanding” of floods, climate change and other environmental concerns that is necessary to reduce the uncertainties for the quantitative predictions made by the simulation models that provide the essential basis for wise policy decisions. Those who hold most strongly such views (including the reviewers of grant proposals, journal articles, promotion packages, etc.) seem to be unaware that there are serious flaws of pure logic with the “hypothetico-deductive” model of scientific explanation that underpins the use of prediction and testing as a means for generating scientific truth. Quaternary scientists like the late James C. Knox (1941-2012) have a different scientific approach from this “what-we-say” (with our predictive modeling) methodology. That methodology definitely does not consist in making up a story; instead Knox and his intellectual fellow travelers apply a “what-nature-says” (with sediments, soils, etc.) methodology. Jim Knox’s extensive body of field-based research from the upper Mississippi basin revealed patterns of flood behavior over the past 5000 years. He found that small changes in climatic circulation patterns produce large changes in flood patterns, such that periods of large flooding tend to cluster in any particular region. It is exactly this sort of understanding from the “what-nature-says” viewpoint that is most needed (but most lacking) in the present-day policy/science debates on global environmental issues