Why is there little trust on issues of climate change?
Making people
anxious even to ask honest questions, by robbing them of the opportunity
to respectfully
disagree, isnt going to do
much good for
the climate
VASUDEVAN MUKUNTH
Other than the extreme position that humans are not influencing Earths climate in any measure, a retarding force to global climate deliberations also arises from a less radical, and more potent, camp that believes: That there is scientific consensus on the magnitude of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), and there is no consensus about how much humans are contributing to rising temperatures (or, how much natural variations could/couldnt account for)
AGW is valid. If we dont do something about the way were using Earths natural resources, AGW will be extremely damaging to the environment as soon as a century from now. To put it another way: that AGW will force nature to adapt in ways that will no longer preserve characteristics that we have been able to attribute to it for thousands of years. This said: there is a crisis of trust between the pro-AGW and AGW-skeptic camps, a self-fulfilling cycle of distrust that prevents anyone from questioning or criticising pro-AGW efforts without coming off scalded. Two exemplary, and non-exclusive, sources of information highlight the problem well.
Until the start of 2017, Judith Curry was the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. She quit on January 1. Curry shot into the limelight in 2005 after coauthoring a paper that linked a rising incidence of hurricanes with AGW. However, it wasnt the conclusion of the paper itself but what it led to that put Curry on the climatological map: she began to engage actively with climate skeptics on blogs and other fora in an effort to defend the methods of her paper. And this, for some reason, infuriated her peers. A profile of Curry in Nature in 2010 said:
Climate skeptics have seized on Currys statements to cast doubt on the basic science of climate change. So it is important to emphasize that nothing she encountered led her to question the science; she still has no doubt that the planet is warming, that human-generated greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are in large part to blame, or that the plausible worst-case scenario could be catastrophic. She does not believe that the Climategate e-mails are evidence of fraud or that the IPCC is some kind of grand international conspiracy. What she does believe is that the mainstream climate science community has moved beyond the ivory tower into a type of fortress mentality, in which insiders can do no wrong and outsiders are forbidden entry.
But Currys position has diverged further since: On April 15, 2015, she testified before the US House of Representatives Committee on Space, Science and Technology that she didnt think scientists knew how much humans influenced the climate, especially since the 1950s. This was a discomfiting discovery because the testimony now cast doubt over what qualms Curry had with climate science itself instead of only with the attitudes subsection of it. Ken Rice, a computational astrophysicist at the University of Edinburgh, commented at the time that Curry was simply missing the point it wasnt the precision of our knowledge that mattered anymore, simply that we knew enough to realise the magnitude of what was coming.
Again with all the we dont knows. Yes, we might not know but we have a pretty good idea of what caused the Little Ice Age (reduced solar insolation and increased volcanic activity) and it was obviously not attributed to humans. Why is that even worth mentioning? Again, we might not know what will happen in the 21st century, but we have a fairly good idea of what will happen if we continue to increase our emissions.
So, if were going to move forward by acknowledging that what weve been trying so far has failed and that others should have a stronger voice, why would we do so if some of those others dont appear to know anything? Given this, Ill expand a little on my thoughts with regards to [Steven] Moshers point that with regards to policy, science doesnt much matter. Yes, in some sense I agree with this; lets stop arguing about science and just get on with deciding on the optimal policies. However, science does inform policy and I fail to see how we can develop sensible policy if we start with the view that we dont know anything.
In the same vein: what reason is there to get out of the ivory tower at all if, from within, climate scientists have been able to accomplish so much? The simplest answer would be that Donald Trump is set become the 45th president of the US ten days from now, and the millions who voted him to power dont care that hes a climate skeptic. Even if outgoing president Barack Obama asserts that the American adoption of clean energy has acquired an irreversible momentum, what Trump still could do is delegitimise American leadership of international climate negotiations. AGW-endorsers sitting within their comfort zones of Numbers Dont Lie could find this a particularly difficult battle to win because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its brand of questionable integrity is doing no one any favours either. Even if the body has been on the right side of things, its attitude has been damaging to say the least.
Donald Trumps improbable march to the White House shocked many, but the tactics that made it possible undoubtedly looked familiar to those of us who have navigated the topsy-turvy landscape of contested science. For Trumps success was predicated on techniques that are used by advocates across the ideological spectrum to dispute or at least muddy established truths in science. With the ascension of Trump in 2016, have we graduated from truthiness to what some political observers are now calling the post-truth era? Post-truth is defined by Oxford Dictionary as a state in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion. But this doesnt do justice to the bending of reality by Trump en route to the White House. You cant do that simply with appeals to emotion; you need, as his triumph suggests, a made-for-media narrative, with villains, accomplices, and heroes. You need to do what has already been proven to work in warping public perceptions and discussion of certain fields of science.
Those who believe Curry shouldnt engage with skeptics because her decision could be interpreted as a prominent academic exiting the pro-AGW camp is difficult to buy into even if Curry did switch camps. It is hard to arbitrate because there are two variables: the uncertainties inherent in climate modelling (even if the bigger picture still endorses AGW) and how that changed the mind of someone of the calibre of Judith Curry. Surely the (former) head of a reputed department at Georgia Tech is not the same as any other skeptic?
Such graduated understanding of doubt, and subsequent engagement, is missing, in one case because it was simply deemed unnecessary. In May 2013, John Cook et al published a paper titled Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. It was a literature review of 11,944 papers published in 1,980 journals, all papers dealing with climate change. Using a large team of volunteers, the authors then classified each paper into one of five groups depending on what its abstract said about the papers position on climate change.
Isnt it obvious that there is an attitude problem here? The first sentence We found that about two-thirds of papers didnt express a position on the subject in the abstract, which confirms that we were conservative in our initial abstract ratings is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than anything else. The first part of the second sentence requires even more analysis to verify, considering the 11,944 papers they parsed appeared in 1,980 journals, and the fraction of journals that set a word-limit for the abstract might just be non-trivial. The second part is the display of off-putting arrogance. Doesnt saying frankly, every scientist doing climate research knows humans are causing global warming imply the authors are being dismissive of their ownconclusions? And finally, that Earth orbits the Sun is far more obvious than a thesis the defence of which rests on the presumption that the thesis isright a circularity that renders allfacts moot.
While none of this makes us question the validity of AGW, which finds endorsement for reasons other than just scientific consensus, Nuccitelli-Cooks pseudo-defence doesnt help us trust them in particular. In fact, their position ought to make us more suspicious of why they arrived at a number like 32.6% when they were assuming at the outset that it would really be 100%.
The Wire
