Query: A recent essay in Scientific American argued that scientists “tend to underestimate the severity of threats and the rapidity with which they might unfold” and said one of the reasons was “the perceived need for consensus.”

Relevant passages:
Media coverage of global warming <=SEP=> Media coverage of climate change has had effects on public opinion on climate change, as it mediates the scientific opinion on climate change that the global temperature has increased in recent decades and that the trend is mainly caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. Almost all scientific bodies of national or international standing agree with this view, although a few organisations hold non-committal positions. Climate change communication research frequently studies the effectiveness of that media.  Some researchers and journalists believe that media coverage of political issues is adequate and fair, while a few feel that it is biased. However, most studies on media coverage of the topic are neither recent nor concerned with coverage of environmental issues. Moreover, they are only rarely concerned specifically with the question of bias.Despite recent trends in increased coverage on climate change, media coverage is not constant, and researchers wonder if the current increase in attention will be sustained.

Intelligent design <=SEP=> Intelligent design ( ID ) is a religious argument for the existence of God . Presented by its proponents as `` an evidence-based scientific theory about life 's origins '' , it has been found to be pseudoscience . Proponents claim that `` certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause , not an undirected process such as natural selection . '' Educators , philosophers , and the scientific community have demonstrated that ID is a religious argument , a form of creationism which lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses . Proponents argue that it challenges the methodological naturalism inherent in modern science , while conceding that they have yet to produce a scientific theory . The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute , a politically conservative think tank based in the United States . Although they state that ID is not creationism and deliberately avoid assigning a personality to the designer , many of these proponents express belief that the designer is the Christian deity .   ID presents two main arguments against evolutionary explanations : irreducible complexity and specified complexity . These arguments offer assertions that certain features ( biological and informational , respectively ) are too complex to be the result of natural processes . As a positive argument against evolution , ID proposes an analogy between natural systems and human artifacts , a version of the theological argument from design for the existence of God . ID proponents then conclude by analogy that the complex features , as defined by ID , are evidence of design . Detailed scientific examination has rebutted the claims that evolutionary explanations are inadequate , and this premise of intelligent design -- that evidence against evolution constitutes evidence for design -- has been criticized as a false dichotomy .   Though the phrase `` intelligent design '' had featured previously in theological discussions of the design argument , the first publication of the term intelligent design in its present use as an alternative term for creationism was in Of Pandas and People , a 1989 textbook intended for high school biology classes . The term was substituted into drafts of the book after the 1987 United States Supreme Court 's Edwards v. Aguillard decision , which barred the teaching of creation science in public schools on constitutional grounds . From the mid-1990s , the intelligent design movement ( IDM ) , supported by the Discovery Institute , advocated inclusion of intelligent design in public school biology curricula . This led to the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial in which U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science , that it `` can not uncouple itself from its creationist , and thus religious , antecedents , '' and that the school district 's promotion of it therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution , often described as the `` wall of separation between church and state '' .

Consciousness <=SEP=> Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness , or , of being aware of an external object or something within oneself . It has been defined variously in terms of sentience , awareness , subjectivity , the ability to experience or to feel , wakefulness , having a sense of selfhood or soul , the fact that there is something `` that it is like '' to `` have '' or `` be '' it , and the executive control system of the mind , or the state or quality of awareness , or , of being aware of an external object or something within oneself . In contemporary philosophy its definition is often hinted at via the logical possibility of its absence , the philosophical zombie , which is defined as a being whose behavior and function are identical to one 's own yet there is `` no-one in there '' experiencing it .   Despite the difficulty in definition , many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is . As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness : `` Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness , making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives . ''   Western philosophers , since the time of Descartes and Locke , have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and identify its essential properties . Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include whether the concept is fundamentally coherent ; whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically ; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how can it be recognized ; how consciousness relates to language ; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical states or properties ; and whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be conscious , a topic studied in the field of artificial intelligence .   Thanks to developments in technology over the past few decades , consciousness has become a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science , with significant contributions from fields such as psychology , neuropsychology and neuroscience . The primary focus is on understanding what it means biologically and psychologically for information to be present in consciousness -- that is , on determining the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness . The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness in humans by asking subjects for a verbal report of their experiences ( e.g. , `` tell me if you notice anything when I do this '' ) . Issues of interest include phenomena such as subliminal perception , blindsight , denial of impairment , and altered states of consciousness produced by alcohol and other drugs , or spiritual or meditative techniques .   In medicine , consciousness is assessed by observing a patient 's arousal and responsiveness , and can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension , through disorientation , delirium , loss of meaningful communication , and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli . Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill , comatose , or anesthetized people , and how to treat conditions in which consciousness is impaired or disrupted .

Thomas Kuhn <=SEP=> Thomas Samuel Kuhn ( -LSB- ˈkuːn -RSB- July 18 , 1922 -- June 17 , 1996 ) was an American physicist , historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles , introducing the term paradigm shift , which has since become an English-language idiom .   Kuhn made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge : that scientific fields undergo periodic `` paradigm shifts '' rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way , and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before ; and that the notion of scientific truth , at any given moment , can not be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community . Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable ; that is , they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality . Thus , our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon `` objectivity '' alone . Science must account for subjective perspectives as well , since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants .