Where Are The Facts? Climate Change And The Science Of What We Don’t Know…
Tuesday,23 February 2010 by EmilyMason
It looks like science doesn’t have all the answers, but whoever said it did?
Since the release of private emails between climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, the climate change sceptics have been enjoying a renaissance. Apocalypse-predicting moralists have been covering up inconvenient findings and now the empirical basis of their research, and of the arguments for climate change, have been undermined. Whilst scientific cover-ups and data fiddling should, where they occur, be condemned, governments and scientists need to be more transparent about the limitations of understanding science (and the climate change debate) through a dogged, evidence-based, empiricist framework…
Yes, we have some physical evidence of climate change - rising sea levels, extreme weather conditions etc. And yes, despite the fact that the earth’s climate has witnessed dramatic changes in previous centuries, the changes we are witnessing now are identified as resulting from human behavior and the release of CO2s and can, crucially, be traced back to the early years of the twentieth century when the western world began to witness the impact of its transition into the industrial age.
But this doesn’t mean we can ever prove absolutely in all certainty that the global warming predictions will come true. And nor should we have to. Scientists will always find that their research produces some inconsistent results, some anomalies.
Rather than thinking in terms of concrete proof and absolute evidence, we need to reframe the public debate in terms of thinking about strong likelihoods and highly probable predictions. For the calls of climate change sceptics to be quashed the general public need to have a greater awareness and understanding of the limitations of scientific knowledge. The phenomena that makes up the natural world is extremely complex and scientific reductionism is, as a method, insufficient for solving many of the world’s great problems. From ecology, to economics, to the earth’s climate, knowing the rules that govern the parts of a system won’t always tell us what the system is going to do. Scientists working to combat climate change recognise this. Today, throughout the scientific world, across a broad-spectrum of disciplines, a more holistic approach to science is being adopted in an attempt to understand a world in constant creative activity. This doesn’t mean that we should stop trying to look for patterns and make predictions, but it does mean that we should be honest about the limitations of these predictions within public debate. Otherwise we argue with sceptics on their own terms, terms based on unflinching empirical proof – why not be more honest about the impossibility of the kind of proof they require? Why not address the populist understanding and expectation of scientific knowledge and encourage people to engage with science more realistically?
Ultimately it comes down to weighing up the risk. Despite anomalies, we do have evidence for climate change and it would be foolhardy (and very risky!) not to act to prevent disasters that will (most likely!) result from climate change in years to come. And anyway, we can see quite clearly that the world’s fuel and mineral resources are dwindling so we need to come up with some sustainable solutions whether we trust the predictions or not. So…nuclear power? Back to the future, forward to the past…
Tags: climate change, climate change debate, climate sceptics, science, UEA