Ramp up the Rhetoric - Tone down the Skepticism .... This is the Credo of today's mainstream Climate Scientist

With thirteen thousand people at a confab of geophysicists and geophysicists-in-training, a few thousand of whom work on something related to the climate system, you expect to hear about climate change. In perhaps a short decade, climate change has rapidly surpassed seismology as the primary membrane between the public and the geophysics research world. Climate is now what most makes the American Geophysical Union relevant to non-members; climate is now what essentially drives the meeting despite the presence of dozens of other specialties represented.
As a physical oceanographer (which by definition also means "climatologist")- become-enviro policy guy, though, I wasn't so much interested in the details of climate science at this year's AGU. What I was (and am) interested in is seeing the conference as a whole. My interest in AGU has strayed from the hardrock science, moving into something more to do with feelings and hunches. That's right, feelings. Hunches. Intuition. The squishy, soft underbelly of the human mind; the part we want to ignore in pursuing geophysical data analysis. What I want to know is attitude. More than the state of the science, I now want to know about the state of the scientists.
I will grant that talking to the people I did at AGU represents a small fraction of all the attendees. I will grant that there is no way to know whether my averaging of attitudes in the climsci world, as sensed by talking with a few people over a few days, scales up to represent the true feelings of the collective. But I will tell you what I found, and what I felt, and whether you think it might represent the current attitude of climsci world is up to you.
To sum the state of climsci world in one word, as I see it right now, it is this: tension.
What I am starting to hear is internal backlash. Sure, science is messy and always full of tension between holders of competing positions, opinions and analyses. That has always been the nature of science, and of course extends to climate science. Tensions come out at meetings, on listservs, on letters pages, and in the press. But these tensions normally surround a particular paper, or a particular question. While much more broadly-based tensions have existed for years on the state of understanding on global warming, they haven't really been tensions internal to the climsci community, but tensions between the climsci community and interested outsiders.
What I am sensing now is something much broader and more diffuse, something that has less to do with particular components of the science in the field and is much more about how the field is composing itself.
What I see is something that I am having a hard time labeling, but that I might call either a "hangover" or a "sophomore slump" or "buyers remorse." None fit perfectly, but perhaps the combination does. I speak for (my interpretation) of the collective: {We tried for years – decades – to get them to listen to us about climate change. To do that we had to ramp up our rhetoric. We had to figure out ways to tone down our natural skepticism (we are scientists, after all) in order to put on a united face. We knew it would mean pushing the science harder than it should be. We knew it would mean allowing the boundary-pushers on the "it's happening" side free reign while stifling the boundary-pushers on the other side. But knowing the science, we knew the stakes to humanity were high and that the opposition to the truth would be fierce, so we knew we had to dig in. But now they are listening. Now they do believe us. Now they say they're ready to take action. And now we're wondering if we didn't create a monster. We're wondering if they realize how uncertain our projections of future climate are. We wonder if we've oversold the science. We're wondering what happened to our community, that individuals caveat even the most minor questionings of barely-proven climate change evidence, lest they be tagged as "skeptics." We're wondering if we've let our alarm at the problem trickle to the public sphere, missing all the caveats in translation that we have internalized. And we're wondering if we’ve let some of our scientists take the science too far, promise too much knowledge, and promote more certainty in ourselves than is warranted.}
I came to this place in a few ways. One was a colleague describing a caveat he put into his poster abstract out of fear --- yes, fear! (He strongly called into question widely-quoted data supporting a decline in snowpack and advance in spring peak runoff in the northern Rockies.) Another was multiple colleagues giving me independent but similar blistering accounts of the GCMs they work on (upcoming post on this). Yet another was listening to competing ideas presented by Torn (GC22A-02) and Knutti (-04) in this session. It was in these and other events and conversations that a theme arose that pervaded my meeting.
None of this is to say that the risk of climate change is being questioned or downplayed by our community; it's not. It is to say that I think some people feel that we've created a monster by limiting the ability of people in our community to question results that say "climate change is right here!" It is to say that a number of climsci people I heard from are not comfortable enough with the science to want our community to push to outsiders an idea that we have fully or even adequately bounded the risk. I heard from a few people a sentiment that we need to stop making assumptions and decisions for decision-makers; that we need to give decision-makers only the unvarnished truth with realistic bounds on our uncertainty, and trust that the decision-makers will know what to do with it. These feelings came of frustration that many of us are downplaying uncertainties for fear of not being listened to.
I don't play in the weeds of climate change anymore, I play in the weeds of how the science gets to policy makers and how the nature of policy-making gets back to the scientists. My own feeling of self-responsibility in this field is to be that translator in any small way I can; to hear what each sides thinks and needs and to play go-between. (I am certainly not the only one, but there aren't many of us, either.) It is for that reason that what I heard concerns me greatly, because I see negative implications for the credibility of the climsci world.
In upcoming posts I will give concrete examples of events and discussions from which I draw these conclusions. For now I leave the concerned climsci community with the thoughts of one former Congressional science fellow who is now back in research science (with some additions of my own): dealing with uncertainty is exactly what Congresspeople do, and they do it a lot better than we do. For scientists, uncertainty is an abstract concept, something that feeds into an academic study, a place where the stakes are low and time-scale is long-term. For politicians and unelected decision-makers, uncertainty is life-or-death, yet decisions must still be made. Politicians constantly make decisions amid levels of uncertainty that would stifle the publication of any academic climate change paper. We need to realize that, give the politicians their due, and get the hell out of their way. Give them the science and the uncertainties and let them make the decisions. Overplaying our hand is a dangerous gambit, and may spell big trouble for us in the future.
I realize that many of you will disagree with the notion that we are overplaying our hand, or are not giving full voice to our uncertainties. I'm not sure the answer to this question myself. But I write all this because I sense a sea change in attitudes amongst climsci people that I know as good scientists without agendas. These are solid scientists, and some told me in no uncertain terms that we are not giving full voice to uncertainties; others implied as much. Therein lies the tension. Where we go from here is anybody's guess, but I tend to agree with the Oracle in the second Matrix movie: we already know the answer to that question, our task is to understand why we are going to do what we are going to do.Posted on December 20, 2006 02:16 PM
Comments
Let us hope cooler heads are prevailing. I'm quite sure the vast majority of climate scientists, dedicated to their work, see the underhandedness of carbon traders donating $300,000 to a website proclaiming to clear the air, or a website developed to covering up bad science, or even a politician running around like Chicken Little when he has a financial stake in spreading that fear.
It could be as bad as many think, or it could be a non-event. Right now, with our ignorance of feedbacks, crippling the ability of society to fund scientific research is far from the ideal solution. It would certainly be better, for the sake of knowledge as a start, to fill the holes in our understanding of climate rather than dogmatically pursue a luddite-like existence, where real problems like malaria etc. would certainly be worse than a world with the resources to fight such problems.
Posted by: Steve Hemphill at December 20, 2006 08:57 PM
Thank you for this thoughtful post. We need more discussion of this nature.
My impression (as a lay observer) is that the discussion has been hijacked by those with an agenda, and who acknowledge (Stephen Schneider, Al Gore) that the problem for us all is so serious that they are compelled to exaggerate the issues so that they can get attention focussed on AGW issues.
Problem is, the open discussion and hard questioning that is facilitated by the emergence of blogs on the internet is exposing sloppy science that is now leading to a serious loss of credibility for many "climate scientists" who have taken the lead in scaring the public.
This is probably an intermediate phase, a time of change, as all involved begin to understand the power of open communication, especially with the opportunity for learned people to contribute without exposing their real names.
Hopefully the end result will be a dramatic improvement in what real science involves, and lead away from the current situation where an individual (I have in mind Phil Jones) can drive the debate by presenting to the world processed data without revealing any detail of how they have adjusted for the changing population of temperature stations, Urban Heat Island effects etc. "Trust me", says Phil, "I have made appropriate adjustments."
The blinding insight that emerges from the new information age is that many of us are saying "True science doesn't involve us trusting you Phil. Show us the data, show us the methods. Explain what you have done. Prove to us that what you say is true."
All this is good. Very very good. With this new age of open communication, we will hopefully get to the real answers much more quickly than might have been possible before. Whatever they are.
Posted by: bruce at December 21, 2006 01:08 AM
Clearly your impressions are your own,and just that, impressions, but you are emphasising only one end of the uncertainty spectrum, here. Recent papers (Barrie Pittock's springs to mind) and recent model output has also suggested to some in the climsci community that the scientists concerned haven't gone far enough; in attempts to moderate the possibility of media-induced 'panics' (which clearly hasn't worked), the 'big picture' might well have underplayed the real risk that temperatures (and associated by-products) might well reach levels greater than +4C, especially given the recent increases in CO2 output globally, and the unlikeliness of any policy change in at least two, and more likely five years from now.
This, of course, only goes to underline what you say about uncertainty, but might cast a different slant on what the source of doubt is.
Another, completely different interpretation could be that this 'tension' you speak of is a 'frontlash' response to what is anticipated to be in the AR4, and the likely public and political responses to this. If, as seems likely, the AR4 is more forceful than ever on the role of CO2, is more precise on the likely range of warming, and more detailed in its record of observed change since about 1970, then there's going to be a very large spotlight placed on decision-makers and the people who provide them with information in the coming year - even more so than currently. Perhaps, in the words of the song, climsciers are aware that 'there may be trouble ahead...'
Posted by: Fergus Brown at December 21, 2006 03:31 AM
Bruce, thanks for the comment.
Fergus, thanks to you as well. You may be right, of course, and I was very careful to indicate that this is my reading only, based on talking to only a few people. Sometimes small samples represent the population well, sometimes they don't, but I do honestly believe that anybody hearing what I heard last week would have come to the same or similar conclusions. As far as the frontlash on AR4, here's something to think about: what I did not bring out in my post but which was an underlying subtext is that I think this is in part a generational dichotomy. I spoke mostly (but not exclusively) with junior scientists -- still very good scientists, but out of their PhDs only within the past ten years. None of these are involved in AR4 and most don't even care about it. (In fact, of all the people I talked to I think I'm the only one involved in AR4 -- I was expert reviewer on two WGII chapters.) This may actually bolster your argument -- that junior people in the field (probably in some unarticulated way) do not fully trust the IPCC process and want to distance themselves from it. I highly doubt anybody I was talking to thinks this explicitly though.
Posted by: kevin v at December 21, 2006 12:06 PM
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