Climate, Science and Growing Up as a Species

One of the doyens of climate science visited our campus last week and he said something that I can't shake. Steven Schneider has been one of the world leaders in articulating the results of the global study of climate. I met him first as a young man 23 years ago, long before, the greenhouse effect was a household word. He knows of what he speaks.
In his talk Schneider raised an issue, which rarely gets attention in the media or in academic discussions. As a science, the study of climate represents something new, something different and that change matters because it says a lot about what we are up against and how far we have come.

The study of climate not a laboratory science with neat, tidy boundaries between apparatus and subject. It’s not a pure theoretical science where mathematical models can be expected to embrace entire systems and provide single sharp answers that match single sharp data points to within a percent or less. Instead it’s a systems science where many interlocking parts fit together through complicated nonlinear interactions. Atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and biosphere are all complicated enough on their own but together they form a "co-evolutionary" complex that simply does not yield up its secrets in the same way as, say, sulfur ion in a magnetic field does.

Systems science relies on massive multi-variate datasets and equally massive computer simulations. The large sets of coupled linear partial differential equations that govern these systems are inherently chaotic. That means they and the real systems they describe will be sensitive to small changes in how things bump against each other. In a nutshell, the systems represent complexity on a grand scale. Our ability to study such a large and complex system is new and is still developing.

The truth of this bare fact has not really been absorbed by either the scientific or popular culture. While the kind of systems science climate study represents is a beautiful and intellectually exciting thing to behold, its specific link to very specific decisions we need to make about our future is troubling.

If people keep thinking of climate study as a science in the old way they will expect an answer – a single result either proving or disproving the whole shebang. This expectation is exactly the reason why so called “climate skeptics” can publish a single paper focusing on a single aspect of the problem and get major media attention for “proving” climate change wrong. What Schneider was arguing for was a view in which the different communities of study (atmospheric chemistry, glaciers, ocean circulation etc.) form a dialogue in which consensus can be reached on what we think we know and how well we think we know it. Only then can risks associated with different potential outcomes can be assessed. From this view the urgency of acting on the science already “in the bag” can much more readily appreciated.

The really cool and really important point for me here is that our worldview is changing in our encounter with climate change. It is a different kind of science that demands a different approach to the world. Taken as a whole it’s all about growing up as a species and our tools growing with us.

The Value of Value and the Climate Change Debate

After marveling at the wonderful back and forth over the last post I am going to change subjects here to climate change, politics, values and the way forward.

Last Friday Gavin Schmidt visited the UR to give a talk on the current state of climate models. Schmidt is a researcher at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS). GISS has a long and influential history in the climate debate as its director James Hansen has been at forefront of the efforts to warn the public of the dangers of greenhouse emissions (some would say too much at that forefront). My first science Job out of undergrad land was at GISS in 1985 so I have fond memories of the place - and it was better my previous job as a bouncer (!) at the Rocky Horror Picture Show (oy).

Schmidt is quite influential in his own right as one of the contributors to Real Climate which many consider to be the best blog for explaining the science of climate change to rest of us and taking on the day to day issues in the field.

In my book I spent a whole chapter reviewing climate science and trying to show how it unintentionally recovers the traditional and quite ubiquitous myth of the flood. One of my themes in the book was that science serves a similar function in modern culture that the great myth systems served in earlier cultures. In most of the great narratives of science (the origin of the Universe, the origin of Life, etc) you can see mythological themes poking their heads up. Its inevitable because we must always parse the data we gather into stories. At the highest levels we pull our explanatory stories from this great storehouse of narratives that is human mythology.

Flood myths are so common in comparative mythology you can even find them in cultures that did not live close to water. The myths almost always involve humans suffering some kind of retribution for sins against whatever animate powers are in control. This story of careless greed and retribution now appears in the way narratives of modern climate science gets told. It too is a story of technological humanity ignoring, in its greed, the limits the Earth imposes on all species.

I don't think we can help but tell the story this way because, in a real sense, it is a story we have been telling for a long time. But there will be value in this narrative too as we come to understand that what we value, what we hold sacred, is what motivates broad changes in cultural behavior.

Culture's evolve because of some deep underlying change in their values. The change is never solely in response to some technical argument. And it is exactly at this point the technical specifics of scientific research get braided into the deeper mythological, spiritual and moral context in which that science exists.

When we talked I asked Schmidt about the way climate science fits into these mythologies of meaning. He raised a very important point which must be considered. The problem with linking science with any value system is that it can make the evaluation of that science suspect. The more climate science is seen as part of a narrative of humanity embracing its rightful place in a deep ecological view of planetary evolution, the more difficult it becomes to evaluate what is correct and what is false in that science on its own merits. The science has to be allowed to speak for itself and the methods and modes of inquiry which, at it best, science embodies must be allowed to move in whatever direction they will follow.

As a researcher I am really sympathetic to what Schmidt was saying. At the same time meaning will be drawn from the science. Meaning is always drawn from our largest scientific narratives. That is where the link with mythologies occurs even if we don't intent it to. I am sure that we can not manifest the will to act collectively without understanding that link and fostering it in the service of new mythologies that speak directly to our moment in evolution.

The question then is how to keep the "ethic of inquiry" I have written about before while still acting in the service of those new mythologies.