Sustainability and the issue of climate change
Hans von Storch, Nico Stehr, Sheldon Ungar

Sustainability and the issue of climate change
draft 11/30/2004 (with emphases added by SFS)

Hans von Storch, Nico Stehr, Sheldon Ungar
Hans von Storch Institut für Küstenforschung GKSS Forschungszentrum Geesthacht, Germany
Nico Stehr Karl Mannheim Chair for Cultural Studies Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen |Germany
Sheldon Ungar Sociological Department Univrsity of Toronto Toronto, Canada

Here is an argument calling for a change in the culture of climate science.

Before advancing our point of view, we will describe climate science as a social process that does not match the conventional image of science. Yet, in this sense, climate science is like many other sciences. In the past three decades, the perspective of anthropogenic climate change has been based on solid science. The increase of radiatively active greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere is well established. The linkage of increasing (near surface) air temperature and increasing GHG concentration has been shown to be plausible. Further details, however, of the association between climate change and anthropogenic causes remain contested. At the same time, quasi-realistic climate models have improved and are used to construct scenarios of possible future climate conditions - that is, predictions based especially upon anticipated socio-economic developments.

In parallel to this encouraging scientific progress, a public and media discourse has emerged as well as national and a transnational political process ("Kyoto and beyond") concerned with climate change. The Kyoto agreement logically aims at reducing the accumulation of GHGs in the atmosphere. Many citizens and interested groups are of the opinion that significantly limiting GHG concentrations requires a costly reconstruction of the modern economy and significant changes in lifestyle. Some scholars are convinced that such a restructuring may be achieved as a welcome side effect of the ongoing transformation of modern economy. (Significantly, past experience with energy efficiency shows it to be cost effective.)

This then is the classical set-up of a modern science with high policy relevance - high stakes (implementation of Kyoto and beyond), and high uncertainty (in the assessment of ongoing change and in perspective of what may come). This scenario is also associated with other phenomena, such as broad participation of citizens and social movements (including scientists from disciplines other than climate science) using popular knowledge; a blurring of the difference between experts scientists and advocates; intense lobbying by interest groups and their indentured scientists, the emergence of individual scientists as public and media figures - perceived by the public as representing the expertise of science, but often acting as advocates of a narrowly defined course of action.

Climate science has been in this state since 1988. But so far, the community of climate scientists has not acknowledged the dilemmas involved. Instead it tends to reiterate the claim that anthropogenic climate change is real, and needs public and policy attention - assertions which are frequently dramatized and even exaggerated. The concern for the "good" and "just" case of avoiding further dangerous human interference with the climate system has created a peculiar self-censorship among many climate scientists. Judgments of solid scientific findings are often not made with respect to their immanent quality but on the basis of their alleged or real potential as a weapon by "skeptics" in a struggle for dominance in public and policy discourse.

When we recently established that the method behind the so-called "hockey-stick" curve of Northern Hemisphere temperature is flawed, this result was not so much attacked as scientifically flawed but was seen both in private conversations and public discourse as outright dangerous, because it could be instrumentalized and undermine the success of the IPCC process. Similarly, the suggestion that hitherto excluded research and policy discussions devoted to adaptive measures ought to be undertaken in order to pursue a much more balanced strategy of adaptation to and mitigation of climate change is seen as undermining the Kyoto process.

The situation of climate science is neither unique nor new; similar developments have been observed in other recent cases, such as second-hand smoking, mad-cow disease, and nuclear power generation. Indeed, the process echoes the discussion between the little monk and Galileo in Brecht's drama "Galileo Galilei" - is the public really mature enough to not only deal with the truth but with the full truth which is uncertain. We are convinced, along with Brecht's Galileo, that the public is capable of dealing with the complex details and the unavoidable uncertainty.

The concept of anthropogenic climate change is compelling even if the hockey-stick curve is false. Efforts to reduce the release of GHGs into the atmosphere are probably rendered meaningful even if we reduce present and future vulnerability by suitable adaptation measures. Climate science needs to reach a new self-understanding of its own culture and how it resonates with its public image. This is a matter of values; not a matter of true and false, but a matter of good and bad.

Our personal advice is: We need to deal with the issue of anthropogenic climate change in a sustainable manner. The all too common practices of overselling and of even exaggerating adverse events by some must be strongly discouraged. Examples are the unfalsifiable, and thus useless, claims that current extreme weather events are, if not proof, strong indications of anthropogenic climate change. Sustainability requires that we tell the full truth as currently understood, irrespective if it fits into the politically correct agenda of the purportedly good case. People make all sorts of decisions under uncertainty - buying insurance, investing in the stock market, often with the advice of supposed financial experts, tolerating genetically modified foods - and there is no reason that uncertainty pertaining to climate change should be disabling.

We need to respond openly to the agenda-driven advocates, not only skeptics but also alarmists, who misuse their standing as scientists to pursue their private value-driven agendas. This is a Tragedy of the Commons, namely that the short-term gains (in terms of public attention; success of specific political agendas; possible funding) of a few are paid for in the long term by the scientific credibility of the whole discipline. Instead, sustainability requires that the discipline of climate science provide the public with options of policy responses to the challenge of climate change, and not prescriptively focus on only one such option (i.e., maximum reduction of GHG emissions). o Finally we need to accept that climate science (as any other science) is a social process. Social and cultural scientists should be invited to analyze this process, to identify hidden limitations and conventions rooted in social and cultural backgrounds of the scientific actors, and to reduce the role of group dynamics on the practice of science.