Climate Science and Politics 2010

Three items on the topic of climate science and politics catch my eye this week.

"We might err, but science is self-correcting," by John Krebs, Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, in the (London) Times:

Scientists tend to be portrayed as voices of authority who are able to reveal truths about arcane problems, be it the nature of quarks or the molecular basis of ageing. In fact, science is almost the opposite of this. In The Trouble With Physics, physicist Lee Smolin considers how to describe science and concludes that Nobel Prize winner Richard Feyman’s phrase says it best: “Science is the organised scepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.”

An Oxford colleague, one of the world’s top climate scientists, made the same point last week when he said to me: “It’s odd that people talk about ‘climate sceptics’ as though they are a special category. All of us in the climate science community are climate sceptics. It’s our job to question and challenge everything.” ...

You might retort that science and scientists often don’t live up to this ideal. And you would be right. Scientists, like everyone else, have human frailties and are susceptible to fashion and orthodoxy. Nevertheless, over time, science is self-correcting because someone will have the courage to challenge the prevailing view and win the argument, provided he or she has sufficient evidence.

From a letter to Science, "Stop Listening to Scientists?" by Kevin Robert Gurney, Purdue University:

As a climate scientist and a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, my heart always warms when I hear policy-makers refer to doing what "the science dictates," as President Obama did in his remarks toward the end of the U.N. Climate Change Treaty negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark. However, after the first-hand experience of the rapid crash of the Copenhagen meeting, I have changed my thinking: World leaders, please stop listening to us! I don't say this because I have lost faith in the verity of scientific results or the projected warming and subsequent global damages. I say this because international policy-makers are adhering too rigidly and too literally to recommended concentration thresholds and emissions targets, and it is crippling the international policy process. …

By demanding nothing less than rigid recipes, we have lost valuable momentum. To combat this trend, I offer the following recommendations.

Leave aside the near-obsessive need to benchmark everything against the 2°C target. ...

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. ...

Lower the rhetoric.

From "On being sadder but wiser, China, and justice as the way forward," by Tom Athanasiou of EcoEquity:

Copenhagen, for all its disappointments, marked a turn.  The need for an emergency mobilization is obvious, and with it a set of challenges that can no longer be denied.  These will get clearer in the days and years ahead, but the essential situation is already before us – with the atmosphere’s ability to absorb carbon now critically limited, we face the greatest resource-sharing problem of all time.  And for all its complexity, the core of this problem can be stated simply enough – what kind of a climate transition would be fair enough to actually work?