Rick Piltz, over on ClimateScienceWatch has a thought provoking piece that begins by talking about Stephen Schneider and quickly turns to the thorny question of what the proper role is for climate scientists in society. (I shouldn’t have to point out this post to you, as Piltz’s site is without question one you should be following closely via RSS feed.)

From Ehrlich on Schneider: Being a scientist doesn’t relieve one of the obligations of a citizen (emphasis added):

Andy Revkin, in his New York Times DotEarth blog, touched on this divergence in a post focused on the eminent atmospheric scientist Richard Somerville (“The Road from Climate Science to Climate Advocacy”). Revkin wrote:

Richard C. J. Somerville, a climatologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography near San Diego, is one of a growing array of scientists who have chosen to move beyond studying heat transfer and cloud physics and take on the role of activist: prodding society to move aggressively to cut greenhouse gases….

“For me, and maybe for many, I think that ‘going public’ and making a statement as an individual, who is also a climate expert, is simply a next logical step,” Dr. Somerville said.

“After all, many politicians have said that scientists should be heard from more. As long as we are always at pains to make clear that we are speaking only as individuals, not on behalf of our employers or other organizations, then I think we are just behaving as good citizens.”

But Revkin noted:

Other scientists disagree with this kind of activism, most notably Susan Solomon, who was the co-leader of the 2007 I.P.C.C. assessment of climate trends. In an email exchange on the general issue of scientists and policy debate last weekend (just before she flew to Antarctica), she said: “If we as scientists go beyond what we know into our personal opinions and values, we begin to engage in the same sort of personal speculation masquerading as authoritative that we dislike when it is done by the skeptics.”

With all due respect to Susan Solomon, who has made an incalculable scientific contribution, it seems to me insufficient to speak in terms of a simple dichotomy between “what we know,” on the one hand, and “personal opinions” and “personal speculation,” on the other, as though there were no intellectual terrain between “knowing” something with, say, 95 percent confidence, and being reduced to something like speculative, amateurish punditry. It’s as though scientists, including those who write the IPCC assesssments, have nothing to offer to an actual dialogue with policymakers in terms of policymakers’ decisionmaking jurisdiction, or to a more general public audience.

On the contrary, what policymakers and the public need from the climate science community includes scientists’ synthesis of and expert judgments about the state of knowledge in terms of its implications for policymaking and societal decisionmaking – even though that involves a necessary element of subjectivity. Policymakers need scientists to advise them in the context of assessing and managing the risks of climate change – in particular, on the implications of their decisions about adaptation and mitigation response strategies.

It will come as a surprise to no one who’s read more than about five of my posts on this site that I agree completely with Piltz. Let me burn a few words trying to explain why.

Scientists working in any area with significant public policy implications should be involved in talking to both policymakers and the general public. They are human beings first, citizens second, and scientists third. Thanks to their training and research and experience, they are not just exceptionally well qualified to speak out on whatever the topic is at hand, but they have an onus to do so. At the risk of being too flip, one could say that with great knowledge of important topics comes great responsibility.

The objections to this view are both obvious and serious. The one I hear most often is that when scientists stop restricting themselves to facts and strong conclusions established over years by the scientific process, and let themselves act based on things they “know”, in the colloquial sense, they risk not just making mistakes, but using their influence to greatly magnify the impacts of those mistakes. This is a very real problem, one we already see in action, even if in perverted form, as various organizations or media outlets cherry pick experts and pseudo-experts to take useful positions. (E.g. Michael Crichton and Christopher Monckton testifying before Congress on climate change.)

Another real danger is that if scientists take public, high-stakes positions on topics — climate change, peak oil, stem cell research, etc. — they will then become far more entrenched in those positions and less likely to change their minds when new evidence tells them to do so.

As for Susan Solomon’s concern, that scientists who become engaged in the policy process will be no better than the “skeptics”[1], well, that doesn’t bother me. If nothing else, thanks to their background they can’t be exactly like the “skeptics”. But it also assumes that at least some of them will not just engage with policymakers or the public, but do so in an exceedingly bad way.

In general all these arguments strike me as taking a slippery slope view of the situation. The danger isn’t that all scientists will automatically descend into hyper-partisanship and Internet wackaloonery, but that some tiny percentage of them will, and even that is too high a price to pay for their public service in speaking out. While I sincerely appreciate that opinion and recognize how trained scientists would tend to see the world that way (medical doctors aren’t the only ones who believe “above all else, do no harm”), I also respectfully disagree with it.

The bottom line, for me, is that if we apply our best judgment and perform a cost/benefit analysis, it’s clear that there will be some cost in the form of scientists making mistakes or becoming too emotionally tied to a given position or simply turning into Internet nutjobs, but the benefit from scientist activism far outweighs it. Look at the current world situation regarding sustainability issues and read the available reports, from the latest IPCC publication to the barrage of papers in peer reviewed journals to all the measurements taken by real-life citizens (”environment auditors”?) recording when flowers bloom and lakes ice over and dozens of other yearly events, and the signs of not just a gentle warming of the climate but a shift into a much less kind version of the world humanity has lived on for 10,000 years are almost too numerous to count. We desperately need to take action to minimize the human pain from these changes, and leaving the communicating about climate change to paid and cherry-picked mouthpieces is unfathomably irresponsible.

Once again, I go back to James Hansen talking about what it would feel like if some day his grandchildren asked him why he didn’t do everything he could to stop climate change when he knew what was happening. This is why I keep saying that all the children and grandchildren of world belong to all of us. We — as in all of us — have a moral duty to do everything possible to avoid handing them a world that’s racing to a temperature increase of 3C to 6C (or more) and has acidified oceans, dangerous high and rising sea levels, and massive droughts and floods.

[1] Can we finally drive a stake into the ground and say that from this day forward “climate skepticism” cannot be more than a transitory condition for any individual? I would expect anyone who is new to the topic of climate change or any other complex topic to be a skeptic, in the original, unsullied meaning of the word. But given the state of climate science and the freely available information about it today, anyone who stays in the skeptic category for more than a relatively short period (a few weeks? a few months?) either isn’t researching the topic or is actively refusing to learn from the material at hand. You can debate all day exactly what state those people are in, such as paid shill or ideologue or liar; I will continue to put them in the umbrella category of “denier”.

 

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