Climate Change Politics and Science
by Justin Podur

A lot of people come to the climate change issue as environmentalists. Environmentalism is diverse, but I would say that a common denominator for environmentalists is that they are concerned with the negative impact of human activity on the ecosystems that sustain life on the planet and want to make changes that reduce that negative impact – or have no impact or positive impact. But having agreed on this, there are many different views within environmentalism. Some environmentalists want to protect nature from humans, some want to protect nature for humans. Some think technology is to blame, others think technology could be the solution.

Environmentalists sometimes talk about a “triple bottom line”. That’s ‘social, economic, and environmental’. The ‘social’ part is ‘social justice’, it’s a concern for people. People concerned about social justice usually believe that equality is a value society should strive for, especially in the economy. They are critical, skeptical, of the claims of those in power or authority.

I am also concerned about climate change as a scientist. The scientists who have developed our understanding of climate change are mostly atmospheric physicists. I studied atmospheric physics as an undergraduate, but now I work in forestry, and like most scientists, I work in a fairly specialized area. My work is not about how climate change occurs in the atmosphere, but on the impact of that change on forests, specifically on forest fires in the Canadian province of Ontario. I will elaborate on climate science below, but I want to say that working in this field, I have had the experience of most scientists. We use the established models from our field of application (in my case, models about how fast fires spread in different forest types and under different weather conditions). We feed these models some possible, and likely scenarios for what the weather will be like if things continue along present trends. We look at the results and are shocked by how much worse things are than we could have predicted. That's the experience of modelers like me. The scientists who gather the data, who are watching the polar ice or the temperature trends, are similarly shocked every time they look at the new data.

I think that having all three of these lenses: an environmentalist one, a ‘social’ one, and a scientific one, is very useful in looking at the climate problem and possible solutions. It takes a bit of work to bring these views together, but in the end you get a good picture of the situation and what has to be done about it.

Science and environmentalism

Let me start by talking a little more about the science. I thought Al Gore's film was a good and straightforward presentation of the science. Some of the best books on solutions to the problem – George Monbiot's “Heat”, for example – don't get into the science very much. They assume it, or they accept the authority of the scientific consensus. Should we? There are legitimate questions about this. Leftists raise legitimate questions about this. Even though not all questions about the science of climate change are legitimate or well-meaning or raised by people with decent values, it is worth spending some time taking them on.

A lot of the controversies about climate science are artificial. They are manufactured by petroleum-industry funded lobbyists who have gotten visibility and equal time in the media despite not having scientific credibility. Monbiot, who is a journalist and an expert at the kind of investigation that exposes these links, exposes these 'denialists' in his book, 'Heat'. Here is a problem though, for someone who is concerned about social justice and critical of the media. We might believe there is an establishment that uses mechanisms like editorial review, self-censorship, and social sanction, to exercise a subtle control over what information gets out and what information gets emphasized in the public conversation. Is the scientific establishment any different, a socially critical person could ask? And is the current media interest in climate change not a sign that climate change isn't really a problem, since we know the system tells lies? This is the argument made by a pair of (frequently very perceptive) social critics from my part of the world, in Canada, and by Alexander Cockburn here in the US. To answer this argument requires some quick discussion on what science is.

To repeat the problem: we are all told that we face a very serious threat to human civilization in the form of global warming caused by our emission of CO2 and other gases into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels. We have to act against this threat, and we have to act quickly. We are told this by 'science'. But why should we believe 'science'? Who is behind it? Is it a network of university-trained elite professionals, funded by government and private sector grants, a gentlemen's club that protects its interests and promotes ideas that will further those interests?

Of course it is. Some of the better known philosophy of science, like Thomas Kuhn's “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, shows how most scientists in most times work within a set of assumptions – what he calls a paradigm – and that science advances when one or more of these assumptions is shown not to hold. Those scientists who work within a paradigm are doing what Kuhn calls “normal science”, and there is certainly lots of “normal science” going on in climate research. It's humble stuff. Kuhn shows how “normal science” defends itself by excluding new ideas and that new ideas only advance when old generations die off. But it gets worse even than that. Physicist Jeff Schmidt wrote a book, “Disciplined Minds”, that gives just such an analysis. In that book he shows how graduate and professional school, even in the most “disinterested” of sciences like physics, train people to think creatively, but inside a box. And still worse, consider how much of research activity is ultimately intended for military ends. Or how much pharmaceutical research and medical research has been corrupted by the interests of drug companies. And this doesn't even get into the social sciences, like economics, which produce arguments in favor of inequality and barbarism and present them with scientific authority. So yes, science is an establishment.

But it is also something else. In Einstein's words, science is the refinement of everyday thinking. To me, science is applying certain human capacities – combining consistent logic and reasoning, creative leaps and then systematic testing, attention to evidence – to the world. It is something everyone can do and it is cumulative, maybe the most cumulative of our activities because it is intrinsically based on building on what others have done. The promise of science is that we can, if we pay attention, discipline ourselves to think clearly, and work and think with others, and give ourselves time and make the effort, come to some understanding about the world. It will be tentative, it will be subject to change, but we will be able to have some mental understanding, some mental model, that corresponds to reality. What I like about science, in other words, is that it doesn't depend on authority. It is about not accepting things on authority. It's actually when we don't use our scientific capacities that we are left with nothing but some external authority to tell us how to understand the world.

Of course, ‘science’ itself is presented as just such an authority. Psychologists, doctors, government- and university-employed scientists constantly make public claims invoking the authority of science. What they do not do enough is actually open the process up: talk about the evidence behind the claims, the methods they use, the assumptions they make. They don’t present science as the refinement of everyday thinking and help people refine their thinking because that would actually reduce their authority. If you reject their claims, you can be accused of being ‘unscientific’. Who wants to be ‘unscientific’? Outrageous claims made by people with an air of authority can be used to make something seem ‘controversial’. If the process were more open, people could be invited to look at the methods, the evidence, the assumptions, and decide how credible a claim is. Because some things, some fields, are better understood than others.

Atmospheric science involves mostly physics and chemistry. Fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, and spectroscopy are well-developed, well-understood fields with experimental backing and very credible theory. The atmosphere is complex, but it is a much more narrow field of inquiry than the ecosystems it interacts with, because adding life to the mix introduces something qualitatively different. Add human society and economy into this and you get another qualitative change. And in general, the more narrow the field of inquiry, the deeper the understanding. Social sciences like economics are intrinsically incredibly broad, and the results are therefore shallow if they’re valid. Economists try to narrow their inquiries by making assumptions, but this often abstracts out very important elements of the real world and makes their results useless for the real world.

I am arguing that atmospheric science, the science that tells us the climate is changing, is a field where more precise and accurate claims can be made than in economics. But the public discussion is presented as if the opposite were true. As if our society had to weigh the ‘certain’ costs of dealing with climate change against the ‘uncertain’ threats from it.