My writings - and those of others.
Roles
Though all the news is focused on COP26 today, I’m going to back up to an article in the Globe and Mail this past Saturday which has some important implications for all who write and read. Viviane Fairbank, in her essay, An Inconvenient Truth, argues that we have to review what science is and does and how those who write and read about it need to respond.
She starts by looking at the relationship of weather events and climate models, Most of us are aware of weather - especially when it affects us directly. I live in an old apartment building which is too hot indoors and have to check the temperature outside before I leave it because there can be large differences. We also are aware of disasters like heat and fire in Lytton BC, referenced yesterday by the Canadian Prime Minister at the climate conference. Our common understanding of climate is regional or seasonal. The author makes the case that the understanding of scientists and their models is a different one, spurred on exponentially now with the advantages provided by super computers. When they try to connect the two, weather events and climate change - they speculate about event attribution - how changes in climate might have an effect on specific events. They look at long term patterns of 30 years or more and combine findings from land, sea and ice and even more.
Journalists like event attribution because they think it will influence our behaviour. The scientists are less willing to go there quickly, even though they know it can have a positive effect. Not all scientists agree about the models and this is where trouble can start and it relates to the readers’ understanding of science - usually gained from our high school study experience. It showed up as well during COVID19 when changing reports suggested to some that the news must be fake. Any uncertainty around climate change being caused by humans gives opportunities to discredit findings and allows those benefiting from fossil fuels to sow distrust of all science.
Fairbank takes us back to high school. but before that she deals with the question of whether science is seen as objective - an argument we frequently hear. Science itself is in the midst of a battle about that. There is also a danger that we simply accept the science that lines up with our current beliefs. We underestimate the power of tweets. Her estimate is that 25% of the ones denying climate change are produced by bots - software programs that perform automated, repetitive, pre-defined tasks. There are far more transmittals of skepticism that statements by professional scientists. Scientists become conservative in estimates to avoid being harassed with endless questions from journalists. That creates doubt.
Back to high school. We were told that scientists start with a hypothesis and then test it with experiments. If the results were consistent, the hypothesis was confirmed and became fact. Nevertheless scientists work in an explorative fashion. Research often does not produce conclusive results. That doesn’t prove it wrong so much as it reveals the complexity and need for continuous learning. The models have to be as good as possible. What makes the difference is time. If a model is consistent with what happens over a number of decades, it is safe to assume that there is a degree of accuracy. As time goes on there are also many more factors coming into play. Scientists take time to do their work and don’t make public statements lightly. That’s when the deniers pounce.
Fairbank quotes French philosopher of science Bruno Latour on scientific truth - “not by some world shaking fool-proof demonstration, but by the weaving together of thousands of tiny facts, reworked through modeling into a tissue of proofs that draw their robustness from the multiplicity of data, each piece of which remains obviously fragile”. Scientists are not value free. but their choices inform what they study and care about.
Both pandemics and climate change provoke strong reactions. The risks of a pandemic produced very different responses of acceptance and denial - but we learned pretty quickly what the consequences were. Five million deaths worldwide is both shocking and informative and the feedback has come pretty quickly. The risks of climate change are immense but longer term. Thomas Berry understood them well as early as 1978 when he commented, “The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of Earth.”