Don’t they understand climate science? Reflections in times of crisis in science and politics

Narrative 1: they do not understand climate science nor do they wish to understand it

Within this multifaceted and predominant narrative identified in IFLS, at least two main repertoires can be distinguished that resemble the core beliefs of the modern model and the public deficit model, respectively. In what follows, I highlight these repertoires and I discuss them in the light of these models.

Firstly, I distinguish the following repertoire about how science is conceived and imagined in the climate change issue: ‘Climate change is a matter of science which has provided “us” with overwhelming evidence about the human impact on climate change. Science is about truth and facts. It is not about personal and religious beliefs or opinions. It is neutral and has no political bias or parties’. This repertoire echoes an old repertoire of demarcation from the modern model of legitimation or dual legitimacy system, which is characterized by the central belief that science deals with ‘facts’ and produces valid, reliable, value-neutral and objective knowledge to inform politics on what to do (Funtowicz and Strand, 2007). A full discussion of the historical origins and features of this model is outside the scope of this article and I will only introduce briefly some historical and cultural events that gave rise to those beliefs. Although scientific revolution as such is a post hoc historical construct (Shapin, 1998), the thinking of figures, such as Bacon, Descartes, Galileo and Leibniz, contains the seeds for the emergence of the central tenets of the dual legitimacy system (Rommetveit et al., 2013). At a time when the cosmological vision of the earth spinning quickly around the sun was not obvious from observation itself and the senses could be deceptive, Galileo and later Descartes, in a more radical way, distinguished between primary and secondary qualities (Husserl, 1954). Primary qualities were related, for example, to the position, weight or speed of a feather, and therefore susceptible to exact measurement. Secondary qualities, on the other hand, included colour, sound and sense impressions such as that of a feather touching one’s nose. This was a very significant conceptual distinction: the human being (qua scientist) separated from the outside world, also referred to as the universe or nature, which is suspended in an abstract sphere based on the language of geometry and mathematics (Rommetveit et al., 2013: 22). Suspending the world in this abstract and ideal space seemed a better option in the face of deceptive corporal senses and the devastating religious war between Catholics and Protestants in Europe (1618–1648). In this way, central beliefs began to interlock as a result of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. The role of the modern state emerged as the provider of social order and stability through clear and certain (scientific) knowledge, which would be useful for religious and political negotiations. This knowledge was to be isolated from unqualified opinions and would be conceived as ‘value-neutral and objective’ and as describing the ‘truth’ (or the almost ‘truth’) of the ‘facts’ of the outside world. This knowledge would tell power of what to do.

Scholars like Shapin and Schaffer (2011) have also argued how scientific knowledge had to be brought to society. In the constitution of the Royal Society of London and other scientific societies throughout Europe, it was forbidden to talk about politics, religion, metaphysics, passions or moral values. Disagreement and dissent were possible but, to quote Shapin (1998, 135), ‘without bringing down the whole house of knowledge’. The human scientific enterprise of new knowledge had to be made attractive for the social order, clearly outlining the boundaries between what was and was not scientific.

In a similar direction, Jasanoff (2005, 2012) introduced the concept of ‘civic epistemologies’ by referring to the culturally specific ways in which public expect scientific knowledge to be produced and consequently to be used in decision-making and argue how such epistemologies are inserted in the institutional and scientific practices, discourses and techniques that historically have been exercised. At the same time, the efforts to legitimate such discourses and forms of reasoning have depended on acceptance by citizens. From this perspective, the repertoire being discussed can be seen, more specifically, as contemporary cultural expectations by an online community about the idealized role of science, derived from the modern model, in the climate change issue. Such expectations have been fuelled by discourses (and practices) of a notable international scientific body: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2019). The IPCC has warned and provided ‘evidence’ about the threat of climate change through catastrophic predictions since the late 80s and has claimed that its scientific reports are guaranteed by objectivity and neutrality (IPCC, 2019). Below, there are several comments (respecting participant anonymity) that express the repertoire of demarcation from the modern model and a clear instance (the first) that invokes the IPCC’s authority:

According to the repertoire of demarcation from the modern model, legitimate action should then be based on having ‘value-neutral and objective’ knowledge about predicting catastrophe in climate change by the experts. I shall discuss this principle in greater depth in the next section. For now, I will provide additional characteristics of this repertoire of demarcation. This repertoire has also been referred to as the ‘received view of science’ (Rommetveit et al., 2013: 11), roughly defined as a mixture of cultural beliefs, norms of practice and ideals to navigate by. Since ideals, such as objectivity and neutrality, cannot be tested by experiment or empirical observation according to the very criteria of scientific practice, the received view is composed by a set of unscientific beliefs in science. In other words, it is, indeed, an ideology. From a different perspective, Latour (2007) distinguishes two types of tasks that modern societies combine: the work of purification as the intellectual and ideological work that aims to separate ‘Nature’ from ‘Society’, ‘Science’ from ‘Politics’, ‘facts’ from ‘values’; and the work of hybridization that increasingly entangles the natural world with society and culture. Latour argues how these combined tasks become functional to evade the political responsibility of scientific activity itself.

Moreover, within the main narrative identified in IFLS, I distinguish another repertoire: ‘The problem is not only that “they” (Trump, the elected politicians and the people who voted for them) are ignorant, uneducated and do not understand climate science but also that “they” do not wish to understand climate science and choose to continue being ignorant. “They” are denying science and are anti-science. “They” should be re-educated in science and “we” should show “them” the importance of science’. This repertoire echoes the features of the public deficit model. The public deficit model reappeared in the mid-1980s to combat the increasing mistrust, discontent and scepticism of science in previous decades (Irwin and Wynne, 1996; Nieto, 2016). Specifically, the deficit model became popular in the field of social research known as public understanding of science and through its parallel appearance in the influential 1985 report of the Royal Society of London (Bauer, 2009). The model embedded in this report announced a deficit in support for science that was attributed to a deficit in knowledge of scientific ‘facts’. In particular, the report was especially concerned with those ‘disinterested attitudes’ (Bauer, 2009: 4) towards science and assumed that better knowledge drives positive attitudes – ‘the more you know, the more you love it’. In this way, the public was seen as ignorant, not well informed and with a deficit in knowledge of science. Increasing scientific literacy and re-educating in science (and technology) would therefore improve the support for and understanding of science. A return to the repertoire discussed reveals that the subject ‘they’ (represented by Trump, the elected politicians and the citizens who voted for them) resembles the subject ‘the public’ of the deficit model. The following comments exemplify the characterization of the subject ‘they’ and those disinterested attitudes:

In addition, those disinterested attitudes to (climate) science that seem to be alleviated with more re-education in science are exemplified by the following comments:

The deficit model has also been justified by reasons of democracy since an ‘ignorant public’ was seen as unfit for democratic electoral participation and a well-informed public was conceived as making better political decisions (Bauer et al., 2007). The following comments in IFLS resemble these features:

To sum up, the most predominant narrative identified in IFLS on Trump’s election reinstates a version from the modern model that is entangled with a repertoire that resembles the public deficit model, and this narrative appears to increase polarization. How might criteria be uncovered to deal with the climate change issue and to promote a space of public dialogue and conviviality? I will pursue this question in the following section. Beforehand, I will briefly discuss the other two narratives identified in IFLS.

Narrative 2: science as an issue of safety and hope in the era of Trump’s policy

The second most observed narrative identified in IFLS is closely interlinked with the first. If ‘they’ (Trump, the elected politicians and the people who voted for them) are denying the scientific ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ on climate change (as expressed in the first narrative), ‘they’ are a threat to the environment and science itself. In this situation, science is conceived as an issue of hope and unity on Trump’s election. The following quotes express this last narrative:

For some participants science was an even more explicit issue of faith, exemplified by the following quotes:

Such statements were, sometimes, clarified by other participants who stated that science is not about personal or religious beliefs. Interestingly and more dogmatically, for other participants, any post referring to the new US president was perceived as annoying and the IFLS website itself was repeatedly critiqued by comments such as:

These comments disclose how the modern model has worked at a deeper cultural level, to the extent that, for some, science has become something to which one belongs and is judged as being safe to belong to.

Narrative 3: science as moral progress to control population growth and relieve environmental problems

Although the third narrative is not as prevalent as the other two, it still displays additional signals of how modern narratives of scientific progress have worked at a deep cultural level. In this narrative, population growth is mainly embraced as a situation of conflict that aggravates environmental problems, such as climate change, and science and education are petitioned as providers of the appropriate moral attitude to address the problem and ultimately, to increase happiness. This narrative shares certain features of the Marquis de Condorcet’s historical utopian view of scientific progress in the late 18th century (Strand, 2013). According to Strand (2013), Condorcet shared the same pessimistic view as Malthus: the decline of happiness and descent into barbarism since the growing human population will outstrip food supply on a planet with finite resources. However, his response to this problem was different: science and education will propagate reason and rational thinking, which will improve human morality. Consequently, sophisticated citizens will know how to create sustainable societies because they will value happiness and will stop population growth. The following quote expresses this view:

From a similar perspective, Foucault (2008) argues how more subtle conduct was induced in the population through state administration from the mid-18th century onwards in issues, such as birth rates. According to Foucault (2008), liberal economic thought formed an apparatus of knowledge–power based on the belief that expert knowledge provides government with the power to act in terms of what is true or false or what is or is not right to do; and this conduct was established among the population. The following quote reflects this type of ‘self-disciplinary’ conduct for stopping population growth:

Revisiting criticisms of the deficit model

Criticisms of the deficit model generally advocate a transition from its top-down perspective to the bottom-up model in which more participation in scientific knowledge production can lead to more democratic processes (Irwin and Wynne, 1996; Stilgoe et al., 2014; Ziman, 1991). However, such a transition appears not to have been reached or effectively undertaken (Hagendijk, 2004; Macnaghten et al., 2005; Wynne, 2006). Other criticisms have argued that the information needed by the citizens to make better decisions is not about the content of science, but the political role of science and technology (Collins and Pinch, 1998). In what follows, I revisit Irwin and Wynne’s (1996) criticism of the deficit model by following Latour’s insights to learn a lesson from taking this critical stance against the main narrative conceptualized in IFLS.

Interestingly, Latour (2007) has pointed to an ironic aspect of the ‘modern constitution’: how a critical stance against ‘modernity’ and ‘the modern’ might reinforce what the critique is trying to defeat. In this sense, Latour argues that the critique seeks prodigious reasons and causes to argue with, such as an absolute domination and invasion by science and technology. Paradoxically, the critique would involve assuming that we are being invaded by a scientific and technical world separated from society. However, these demarcations (Science/Nature separated from Politics/Society) are indeed miraculous and are precisely the ideological demarcations of the modern constitution. In this way, the critique allows blame to be placed on science and on the victimization of others. In addition, Latour (2018) has pointed out a problem of dimension and scale which we must face, namely, a basic dichotomic tension between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’. This tension implies that simultaneously (1) the planet is too big to remain within the limits of a given locality and (2) the planet is too limited and narrow for the ‘global’ and the world of globalization; hence, there is need for locality (Latour, 2018: 16). In the following two paragraphs, I review Irwin and Wynne’s (1996) criticism of the deficit model by keeping in mind this tension (between the global and the local) and the action of blaming science.

Irwin and Wynne critically analyzed the vision of science (and technology) portrayed in the deficit model of the Royal Society Report through three cases of environmental problems: the pollution of hill sheep-farming in the Lake District (United Kingdom) by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and two polluted sites located near hazardous industries in northwest England. The critique repeatedly shows how, in dealing with environmental problems, science and scientific knowledge was one-dimensional, reductionist, abstract, standardized and practically devastating to the environment and humans (e.g. the cultural and social identity of farmers was under threat because people experience scientific knowledge as a social negotiation; however, local knowledge tends to be excluded). The critique also shows how the consequences would have been different if the local, complex and multiple dimensions of humans and nature had been included in a timely fashion in a participatory process of scientific knowledge production.

On the one hand, this critical stance involves an awareness of the condition of complexity of environmental problems. However, science and every solution deriving from it (e.g. techno-scientific solutions) appear as imperfect in the face of this complexity of the problems, as if the solutions were to be judged according to some cognitive or corrective standard. More specifically, criticism of science appears to be based on harm and injustice to nature, the environment or human beings (e.g. farmers or lay people). In this way, science (and the technological solutions deriving from it) can be blamed. This insight might show why discussions about environmental governance are so difficult and the possibilities of arriving at a consensus are small. On one side, there might be optimistic voices advocating for the vision of science portrayed in the deficit model and proposing techno-scientific ‘solutions’. On the other, there will be voices repeatedly trying to show how methods and solutions deriving from science for dealing with complex problems caused injustice and harm. Discussions about genetically modified plants present a similar stalemate of cognitive incommensurability (Strand, 2001). In addition, Irwin and Wynne’s criticism of science also appears to be based on harm inflicted at the ‘local’ level, at which environmental problems are usually lived and experienced. Blame can therefore be placed on ‘global’ technological solutions deriving from science.

A public discussion on climate change might experience a similar stalemate. For instance, some voices might advocate (naively or desperately in the face of an incipient awareness of the complexity of the climate change issue) the main beliefs and ideals about climate science identified in IFLS and described as Narrative 1 (i.e. that science is about truth and facts (. . .) they (. . .) are ignorant, uneducated (. . .) they should be re-educated in science). ⁶ Other voices might criticize this narrative anchored to the modern model entangled with the public deficit model. Such criticism might include cognitive issues about the need to demonstrate the inflicted harm for which this narrative can be blamed. Specifically, they might criticize climate science and its particular ‘global’ technological solutions to combat the complex problem of climate change (e.g. technology to capture CO₂) by assessing them and persistently showing their ineffectiveness and aggravation of other environmental problems on a ‘local’ level (e.g. increasing local depletion of non-renewable resources to produce those technologies on a large scale). Conversely, the voices that hold the main beliefs described as Narrative 1 might point in the direction of a ‘global’ planet as a common world for collective problems, such as scarcity and depletion of non-renewable sources, and turn to ‘global’ (and optimistic) technological solutions to deal with these problems. And these solutions might again be criticized by counter-narratives that show inflicted harm on a ‘local’ level.

Overall, this example illustrates how a debate on climate change might not go further but will reach a stalemate. In the following subsection, I continue my attempts to disclose criteria for dealing with the climate issue. For this purpose, I analyze how scientific uncertainty is handled in a political statement from the Trump administration and I contrast this statement as a foil to illustrate how Trump’s policy might also be anchored to the modern model. I then explore how the same condition of uncertainty disarms a core principle from the modern model reinstated in the main reaction conceptualized inside IFLS.

Letting uncertainty be displayed

In a brief interview in 2017, Scott Pruitt, new head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, stated the following:

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. . . [. . .] But we don’t know that yet . . . We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis (Pruitt, 2017).

The statement is interesting for several reasons. First, uncertainty and dissent in scientific practice when measuring human impact on climate change are presented as a problem to practically dismiss the relationship between climate change and human activity. In addition, it is argued that more debate and research will solve the problem. The politicization of scientific uncertainty in environmental controversies, such as climate change, has been a common practice during US presidential elections (Sarewitz, 2004). That uncertainty is politicized in this case to brazenly justify other economic purposes may also be quite plausible. Rather, the interesting point is that Pruitt’s statement concurs indirectly with what has been identified as the ‘speaking consensus to power’ approach (Van der Sluijs, 2012), by which multiple and competing scientific perspectives in dissent need to be mediated into a consensus that works as a proxy for truth to inform policy in the best possible way. In other words, implicitly operating at the heart of this statement is the modern model which holds the central belief that ‘valid, reliable, value-neutral and objective’ knowledge produced by experts will tell us what to do and assumes that uncertainty can be eliminated or controlled. In this way, while political statements by the Trump administration (outside IFLS) implicitly operate according to the modern model, the main reaction conceptualized inside IFLS reinstates a version of this model through a polarized narrative (Revisit Section 3 for a full description of the Narrative 1). ⁷

However, if a core principle from the modern model embedded in Narrative 1 implies that legitimate action should be based on having ‘value-neutral and objective’ knowledge about predicting catastrophe in climate change, climate science and catastrophic predictions by the experts may not discover the truth or the almost truth to tell us what to do when dealing with this issue. The same condition of high uncertainty is connected with the future, that is, with the exact predictions of future catastrophes and, at the same time, with the exact predictions of the future consequences of interventions to mitigate such catastrophes. In this way, the irreducible and inherent condition of high uncertainty breaks down the legitimacy of an action based on the prediction of the future (Funtowicz and Strand, 2011). What remains as legitimate grounding on which to base actions is what already exists and what ‘we’ (as a community) have: the present. Indeed, uncertainty may not be connected with a wrongdoing. In the climate issue, we usually know the right thing to do, for example, reduce pollution.

According to Funtowicz and Strand (2011), the problem of the lack of collective agency when dealing with the challenge of climate change can be found in the same expert prediction of catastrophe. Specifically, these scholars suggest that Arendt’s analysis published in 1951 could be extended not only to refugees, victims of war, the unemployed or industrialized labour but also to the contemporary context of the expertise that predicts catastrophic effects on climate change. Arendt (2006) points to an experience of the modern masses since the Industrial Revolution that has been accentuated by the rise of imperialisms: loneliness that comes from uprootedness and superfluousness in modern industrial societies. She argues how this basic experience became fertile ground for the logic of totalitarian ideological thought to develop an unreflective obedience that was able to deprive human beings of all agency and even of identity and personhood in the concentration camps. When this analysis is extended to the context of expert predictions of catastrophe, these predictions are the outcome of an isolated form of productive work (knowledge and truth must be isolated from unqualified opinions, the community) and are thus not grounded in a collective agency. The prediction is only for those who execute technical intervention (be they a scientific or political elite). In this way, expert prediction is marginalizing an essential part of the present called our praxis, our political community life. Indeed, from this perspective what might be at risk is not so much the planet, climate or natural resources, but, paradoxically, ‘we’, as a collective agency, that is, our human right of personhood and hope.

Interestingly, the great frustration over political inaction on the climate issue has provoked curious reactions by some institutional leaders. Strand (2015) analyzed a statement from a speech given in 2007 by Gro Harlem Brundtland (at the time, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Change). Brundtland opted for a discourse of certainty: ‘what is new today is that doubt has been eliminated [. . .] the time for diagnosis is over. Now it is time to act’. Strand speculates why Brundtland did not follow a more defensible discourse – say, ‘Science is telling us that the climate problem is extremely urgent and, of course, there may be uncertainty; however this does not justify inaction and uncertainty may be a reason for precautionary action’ (Strand, 2015: 205). Instead, Brundtland argues as if the uncertainty is a matter of the past.