September 25, 2013 — Over the course of the next year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release the various parts of its Fifth Assessment Report, summarizing what scientists have learned about climate change in the years since the last report was released in 2007.
It’s a massive set of documents — four sections, hundreds of pages long, thousands of citations. Ironically, for all that, it’s not likely to tell us much that we didn’t already know. Climate change is happening, the IPCC will say, and more than half of the change is attributable to humans. The panel told us roughly the same thing six years ago … and six years before that. It’s safe to say, at this point, that the evidence points firmly toward the reality and risk of global warming.
So why hasn’t there been much political change?
For those of us who long ago accepted the evidence for climate change, the default assumption tends to go something like this: Too many politicians are anti-science and have no interest in making the decisions that scientists say need to be made. While there’s certainly truth to that, there are a couple of other questions that we don’t ask ourselves often enough. First, what is the science actually telling us? Second, what should truly objective evidence-based political decision-making look like, anyway? If your answers to those questions just happen to match up identically with your own political ideologies, technological preferences and ideal lifestyle, then I have a modest proposal for you — you’re doing it wrong.
Not That Kind of Doctor
In 2006, climate scientist Gerald North sat before a congressional committee to deliver the findings of a National Academy of Sciences report on surface temperature reconstructions for the last 2,000 years. There was nothing truly surprising in that report — the evidence pointed toward man-made climate change. But North’s former colleague Ian Kraucunas said there was one big memorable moment during the testimony. “One of the committee members asked what do you think this means, in terms of should we put a tax on carbon,” Kraucunas says. “And Jerry North, in this Texas drawl, says, ‘I’m not that kind of doctor.’”
What climate science doesn’t do is tell us how to value the different policies to reduce emissions, or how to deal with unintended consequences of those policies.
Climate scientists exist on a spectrum. Some, as North did in that hearing, will tell you their job is to simply deliver the facts about what the climate is doing. Science is their area of expertise, not policy. Other climate scientists vehemently disagree with that approach, and a lot more will fall somewhere in between. But, regardless of what an individual climate scientist thinks he or she should be doing professionally, there really are some things climate science data tells us and some things it doesn’t.
The data does tell us that climate change is happening. It does tell us that this change is linked to human behavior. It does tell us something about how certain levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases will impact our lives. And it does give us guidelines about how much we should reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and by when, in order to avoid negative consequences.
What climate science doesn’t do is tell us how to value the different policies to reduce emissions, or how to deal with unintended consequences of those policies so we get the most benefits for the least harm.
Clash of Values
There’s not much room for legitimate disagreement about the reality of climate change. But there’s a lot of space for reasonable people to come to completely different conclusions about all the stuff climate science doesn’t tell us. That’s because those decisions aren’t just based on data — and, in fact, they shouldn’t be. Instead, they’re about the intertwining of data and personal values. And that’s where things get messy.
Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, suspects that the bulk of the disagreements Americans have over climate change have less to do with science than with the inevitable clash of different values (or, more frustratingly, with often-erroneous assumptions we make about other people’s values). It’s impossible to make policy without values, he says. And that doesn’t mean mixing rational science with irrational beliefs. Values aren’t really rational or irrational, Schmidt says. They’re just part of who we are and how we make decisions — and you’re never going to sidestep that.
Why do we spend so much time debating science? The science is solid. It’s the values debate that shapes what the policy should actually be.
Kraucunas agrees. It’s easy to understand if you think about a political decision that’s less contentious. Say you have $10 million, and you have to choose whether it goes to one of two programs. Do you spend that 10 large on mosquito nets in Africa, or do you spend it on cancer research in the United States? For most of us, the answer wouldn’t really be about evidence; it would be about what we value the most and why.
So, given that, here’s a question: Why do we spend so much time debating science? The science is solid, and its conclusions haven’t changed appreciably in more than a decade. It’s the values debate that shapes what the policy should actually be. It’s the values debate that we don’t have a good grasp on. Even within groups of people who supposedly agree on what we should do about climate change, our values — and our solutions — can be wildly different.
“Take Naomi Klein, for instance,” Schmidt says. “Sometimes she makes a good point, but I don’t share her values. So when she starts talking about climate change as a rod to break capitalism’s back, she loses me. She clearly has a political agenda that’s different from mine. But if we both say, ‘We should do something about climate change,’ there are people who will think we totally agree on what and why.”
Real people aren’t culture war caricatures. And polls have shown for years that Americans want to make changes to the way we make and use energy.
That misperception is a problem because it creates a political climate where science becomes a proxy for the largely unspoken values debate. People who actually agree assume they disagree. People who disagree assume they agree. And everybody thinks they know what’s motivating everybody else. Worse, it sets up a situation where it’s easy for individuals and groups to mesh the science and their values in such a way that everybody ends up deciding the science supports their values — and only their values. Anybody who denies something held true by another must, clearly, be denying science.
Make the Silent Loud
Schmidt has a solution: Make the silent loud.
It’s time to start talking about our values. It’s time to be explicit about what we believe and why, and how our beliefs affect what we think should be done with the science of climate change. We’d then be able to shift the debate from the science (which, again, isn’t terribly debatable) to what we’re all really talking about, anyway. We’d then be able to start working past the fake divisions that often make us think we have less in common than we do. Real people aren’t culture war caricatures. And polls have shown for years that Americans want to make changes to the way we make and use energy. Even if we don’t always agree on what those changes should be or why they should be made, that’s a better place to start a discussion.
Nobody expects this approach to, as Schmidt puts it, lead us all hand-in-hand into Kumbaya land. There are some real fundamental disagreements happening here — particularly about the role of government — that aren’t just going to magically go away. But actually talking about the places where a majority of people might be able to find common ground is more likely to finally get us some real political change than simply waving the banner of science and making assumptions about each other. 
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Dietz, Thomas. 2013. "Bringing Values and Deliberation to Science Communication." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110(10):14081-87.
1) I don't think the debate over the science of climate change is a proxy for anything. Some people seem to genuinely think the planet is not warming and thus dramatic action is unnecessary.
2) When it comes down to it, the central question in almost every mainstream value system is, "How can the most people have the best possible life?" Science is actually answering that question better and better all the time.
A second issue is what I call dreams, although most people object to that term. Visions of the future, perhaps? Find your own favorite term. Right now, we're faced with, basically, rebuilding our civilization from the ground up to be sustainable, or watching our civilization fail. What's the difference between these choices? I don't know, because stories like the Hunger Games or the Road (or Mad Max) are about as far as we've gotten on envisioning either one. We know what the Progressive Dream of Space Conquest looks like, because Star Trek played for decades, unrealistic as it was. But, even as an environmentalist, I have little clue what a sustainable future even looks like (do you?), or whether it's a place I want to go willingly. Without a dream to steer towards, how can we hope to convince anyone that rebuilding our civilization is worthwhile?
In trying to tackle the bigger question of how to proceed policy-wise, I have only the following thought to contribute: While some may disparage Capitalism, it is undeniable that international trade is a boon to all of us, as it allows people with a comparative advantage in divergent lines of work to exchange their respective surpluses and become more diversely equipped than either party would have been in the absence of such exchanges. All other things equal, this development makes it possible to live more cheaply than otherwise. And naturally, it therefore has the effect of increasing human populations. Some see this increase as a problem in and of itself, but that is a discussion for another post. The point here will be that any effort to massively restrict current trends in wide-spread energy use is going to have an adverse effect on human populations, since these populations can only be sustained at current levels given the current structure of energy production and distribution.
Now, why bother to point this out? In my view, and just as the author points out, because the discussion here is ultimately one about values (getting what we want) and not about science (the facts in isolation). As such, it won't do to overlook the grim reality that policy proposals which call for restriction on a global scale are death sentences for the multitudes. Who will volunteer to die for the sake of restrictive energy policies, so that others may theoretically live better, according to the cynical writings of Malthus?
Restriction-based policy is the wrong approach. If you can't solve a problem for one person without causing a problem for one or more other people, then you have merely redistributed the problem, and as such, you haven't actually found a solution.
I believe that technological innovation holds great promise as the ultimate overall solution to environment-based problems. But taking full advantage of such innovations requires us to make the best use of all the brilliant minds we have available for solving the problems we face. And we don't get more brilliant minds by eliminating people from the world.
Further discussions would benefit by including the somewhat inconsistent values-behaviour link. People value their lives and health yet continue to smoke cigarettes in spite of not-too-distant personal mortal consequences, for instance. Quitting smoking requires enormous willpower to make difficult decisions to take action for great future benefit with painful initial short-term consequences.
That the future is going to be challenging (and possibly unpleasant) is no reason to exit the debate by denial. This only serves to exacerbate the consequences of inaction and make future change more painful and expensive. That the discussion is incomprehensible to some of our human brothers and sisters is a good reason for them to get more background on much broader things (like: the scientific basis (i.e. facts not beliefs), human sociological and behavioural issues (such as this values debate), the political context, and the economic consequences), before wading into a debate ill-prepared.
I too have made, and continue to make, my share of mistakes. Now I'm trying really hard to figure out what I can do to rectify them and help others along the way.
A kind request: please could the author, Maggie Koerth-Baker @MaggieKB1, provide some references and primary sources (I like how your colleague @GeorgeMonbiot does it)? This would be helpful for PhD research into values-based decision-making for sustainability. Thank you! @richardkulczak