Discussion including climate modeling and CE questions.
-- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full Schrickel, Isabell; Engemann, Christoph (2017): Dealing with Climate Change. A Conversation with Paul N. Edwards and Oliver Geden. In: Ber. Wissenschaftsgesch. 40 (2), S. 175–185. DOI: 10.1002/bewi.201701848. Dealing with Climate Change: A Conversation with Paul N. Edwards and Oliver Geden * First published: 12 June 2017 <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#publication-history> Full publication history * DOI: 10.1002/bewi.201701848 View/save citation <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/exportCitation/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848> * Cited by (CrossRef): 0 articles Last updated 14 June 2017 * * <https://www.altmetric.com/details.php?domain=onlinelibrary.wiley.com&citation_id=20993751> Over the course of March 2017 we posed a number of questions on the current developments of climate research and politics to two of the most prominent authors in the field: Paul N. Edwards is a historian of science and technology who has worked at the intersection of politics, computers and knowledge infrastructures. In his recent book, A Vast Machine (2010), he has described the emergence of the global knowledge infrastructures of climate science in the historical context. He is actively involved in the debates on the Anthropocene – as an educator as well as a writer. Oliver Geden has a background in anthropology and is head of the European Union research division of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung für Wissenschaft und Politik, SWP), one of Europe's largest foreign policy think tanks. Frequently called the ‘enfant terrible’ of German climate policy, Geden has developed a reputation for pointing out often overlooked strategic framings within climate science and policy discourses, and raises concern about their possible dynamics. The conversation took place via e-mails and a shared online document and was concluded on March 28, 2017. We made minor edits for clarity and readability, which were authorized by both authors. Isabell Schrickel & Christoph Engemann: In the past years we've seen on all levels a tremendous rise of awareness for anthropogenic environmental change, its economic costs, political impacts and the threatening extreme events it may cause. The adoption of the Paris Agreement (PA) in 2015 indicates that the broad consensus on climate change also entered the macro-level political sphere. But we have also seen the ascendency of right-wing and science skeptic movements, for now culminating in the election and inauguration of the 45th US president. How would you draw a relationship between these events? Oliver Geden: It all depends on the way the Trump administration will deal with the PA. Will they simply not adhere to the national emissions reduction pledge made under the Obama administration? Or will they formally withdraw from the Agreement maybe even from the overarching United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), since that would be the faster route to quit the PA? With formal US withdrawal from the PA international climate policy would fall into deep crisis, and this would be hard to deny even for those countries willing to go on. We would certainly hear claims like “the global transformation is unstoppable” more often – but of course it is stoppable, it has not even really begun (with the exception of the electricity sector, which covers not more than a third of global emissions). Formal withdrawal means that everybody can see that a bottom-up climate policy regime is very vulnerable if the world's second largest emitter can simply decide to drop out of the game. Without formal US withdrawal from the PA, which seems to be more likely, it would be much easier for international climate policymakers to deal with Trump. The US would still be part of the game, officially, which allows for keeping the mechanism of hope so well-established in 25 years of UN climate policy. Basically, the major post-Paris narrative would remain unchanged: Cumulative pledges until 2030 are not sufficient to meet 2 °Celsius, let alone 1.5 °Celsius. After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change (IPCC) special report on 1.5 °Celsius in September 2018, there will be a global dialogue how to ratchet-up commitments and this will lead to new pledges and to more progressive climate policies overall. It would be about intentions, not about (recent) results. And it would work in global climate policy circles, particularly by not pressing the Trump administration to tell exactly what their future plans are. You wouldn't want to know, obviously, since it could threaten the narrative that everything's going to be fine eventually. Even if Trump plays hardball climate diplomats can still hope the Trump presidency will last only four years, so there could be a restart in US climate policy by 2021. And if not, then we just have to wait until January 2025. >From today's perspective, most in the global climate community would say >“Well, but then it's too late to reach the Paris temperature targets,” but the >history of the climate science/policy interface shows that there's a high >probability that scientists and economists might come up with some modeling >features to keep the hope alive. Paul N. Edwards: Early signals from the Trump administration support the view that his appointees will rapidly reduce or eliminate federal efforts to regulate greenhouse gases. Under the tripartite US government system, laws passed by the legislative branch (Congress) are interpreted and enforced by the executive branch, with the President as chief executive. This gives the President broad powers, expressed through his appointment of executive agency leaders. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), long a target of Congressional conservatives, regulates air and water pollution – including carbon dioxide, considered an air pollutant under the controversial “endangerment finding” upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007. The Department of Energy (DoE) manages the vast system of US national laboratories, originally established for nuclear weapons research. Since the end of the Cold War, most of the national labs have devoted significant resources to climate modeling and climate data. Other executive agencies involved in climate research include the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which collects and interprets satellite data, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the US Weather Service and the National Centers for Environmental Information. So far, most (but not all) of the leaders appointed by President Trump are either skeptical of human influence on climate change (Scott Pruitt, EPA), or committed to Trump's own view that climate change is a hoax (Rick Perry, DoE). Trump is easily swayed by conspiracy theories such as this one, promoted by his chief strategist Steve Bannon and many others in his inner circle. This false view runs counter not only to science, but also to the majority view of the American public – including Trump's own supporters, nearly half of whom support the PA. According to a February 2017 poll by Yale University researchers, the majority of Trump supporters (62 percent) “support taxing and/or regulating the pollution that causes global warming, with nearly one in three (31 percent) supporting both approaches.”[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0001> 1] At this writing, Trump plans an EPA budget cut of over 30 percent, sharply focused on eliminating climate change research and regulation. A chief target is the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan, a principal component of American commitments to the PA. Trump's inner circle is pushing him to keep his campaign promise to withdraw from the PA. But new Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Trump's daughter Ivanka, and numerous career diplomatic staff are warning of the potential repercussions of a precipitous withdrawal, not only for the climate change issue but for America's reputation and for all other international agreements. Technically, withdrawal from the PA is a four-year process, but as Oliver notes, a presidential executive order declaring that intention would effectively gut the accord overnight. Proposed budget cuts of similar magnitude lie in store for the DoE, NOAA, and NASA. Climate research programs at all of those agencies will also be reduced or eliminated, perhaps under the guise of “moving” programs from one agency to another for no clear reason other than to disrupt research […]. In the near term, the most imminent threats to research quality come from Congress, which is pushing through laws that would permit political vetting of scientific results before they are released to the public, or political review of internal communication (such as e-mail) among research scientists, popular among climate conspiracy theorists since the 2010 Climategate episode. Such political oversight will certainly affect the morale of agency scientists. Many may leave the agencies in search of employment that allows them intellectual freedom. American universities, however, cannot possibly absorb all of them. Nor can most universities provide the enormous computer power needed for robust programs of climate modeling, which requires the world's fastest supercomputers which can produce petabytes of data. Even the US National Center for Atmospheric Research currently conducts a considerable amount of its modeling activity on DoE computers at Oak Ridge and other labs. (This is not to say that university-based climate modelers could not work at all without such access. They could, but they would be forced to use lower model resolutions and do fewer runs, leaving them behind the state of the art represented by such European groups as the UK Hadley Centre and the German Max Planck Institute for Meteorology Hamburg). Immediately after the election, a few dozen social scientists in the USA and Canada formed a loose network known as the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, with which I've been peripherally affiliated.[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0002> 2] We are documenting the dismantling of environmental regulation and research through interviews with agency leaders, staff members, and scientists. Another network, Data Refuge, has been systematically archiving documents, scientific data, and web pages in case the new administration seeks to delete them. While (institutional) websites have already been altered, most climate scientists I have talked to seem to regard climate data as safe from outright destruction. But the ferociousness of the Trump agenda gives even some of them pause. Even the President cannot instantly abandon regulations mandated by law – the province of the third branch of American government, the judiciary. Its attempts to do so have already been met with numerous legal challenges that will take years to decide. Trump's antagonistic approach to the judiciary will not be enough to overcome those challenges. Current law also provides numerous mechanisms designed to protect the integrity of agency research work, preventing political appointees from targeting individuals or altering results. Yet these laws did not stop some George W. Bush appointees from secretly editing scientific reports on climate change in the mid-2000s. The aggressive, even brutal, Trump approach suggests it will overtly suppress research and encourage political interference. Dark times for climate science lie ahead. Schrickel & Engemann: In this special issue we explore the epistemological and practical problems and challenges of modeling and simulating climate change along the lines of Peter Galison's concept of the “trading zone,” which certainly has been one of the most successful metaphors to describe the practices involved with simulation knowledge. Looking back at his book – now over 20 years old – in light of the contemporary crisis of liberalism, Galison's “trading zone” metaphor seems in itself to be closely related to the ideas of liberalism: He emphasizes negotiation across different communities, the establishment of a shared set of assumptions, generating a common if also reduced language and enabling local coordination despite fundamental differences. It seems that the Trump administration and similar movements in Europe view maintaining and enforcing differences as a goal in itself. Instead of creating “trading zones” that overcome differences – potentially on a global scale –, such practices are viewed as drowning out fundamental ontological differences and hence “true diversity.” Before this background, do you view these developments as iterations of “sound science” attacks of the 1990s or do you observe any indicators of new formations emerging? Edwards: Interesting point about Galison's “trading zone” concept. He was, of course, talking about how exchange between experimentalists and theorists works in physics. Taking the idea literally (with its original reference to cross-cultural trade in goods), I might suggest that trading zones exist only because the traders have certain shared goals: All perceive potential profit or value in the transaction. So as long as we are talking about different merchants, or scientists, or other groups with similar fundamental projects, trading zones will always arise organically among them. As you point out, the liberal project has been built on the assumption that cross- cultural trade (whether in goods, services, cultural products, or scientific ideas) is a net benefit to all. It's a different story when some groups perceive trading as a zero-sum game, where one player's profit or benefit is necessarily another one's loss. That's the fundamental position of many populist movements sweeping America and Europe. To them, hanging on to what they already have (national identity, religion, jobs, lifeways, “freedom” as they understand it) matters much more than any putative benefit from exchange across borders of all sorts. Yes, there are definitely ontological dimensions to this position – mostly binary ontologies such as us vs. them, our world vs. theirs, etc. This ontology of radical difference doesn't really permit a coherent epistemology. Instead, all evidence must be twisted to support it. That's what makes it ideological, and it's the reason that numerous ‘alternative facts’ are now being invented to shore up arguments that are fundamentally incoherent, anti-scientific, and often racist. These movements depend on powerful emotions, which are far more easily provoked and maintained by anecdotes and demonized Others than by dry, methodical evidence-based reasoning. In answer to your question, I do not detect anything resembling a ‘new’ attitude toward simulations among right-wing-affiliated scientists. It is, of course, entirely possible to be a moderate conservative and a climate scientist, viz. the paleoclimatologist Richard Alley, who made an excellent documentary on climate change (and repudiates his party's denialist position).[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0003> 3] Only a handful of climate scientists actually take the extreme position that the major climate simulations are baseless. Most of them are the same people (Willie Soon, Patrick Michaels, Roy Spencer, John Christy, S. Fred Singer, Judith Curry, etc.) who have been arguing against anthropogenic climate change for the last few decades. None are climate modelers themselves. They simply recycle long-debunked ideas and data or, as in the case of Curry, argue that the degree of uncertainty is larger than the IPCC consensus estimates. When these scientists do deny the realism of complex climate models, since 2000 they have mostly claimed that simple models, such as the one published in 2011 by Roy Spencer and William Braswell, predict the actual course of climate observations better than complex Global Circulation Models (GCMs) – and also predict a much lower sensitivity to CO2. Remote Sensing editor Wolfgang Wagner resigned his position for his role in allowing the publication of that article, which he described in an editorial as “fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal.” Wagner went on to note that “comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted in open discussions and to some extend also in the literature, a fact which was ignored by Spencer & Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers.” Kevin E. Trenberth and John T. Fasullo published a rebuttal of the Spencer & Braswell model, pointing out that it fails to include ocean dynamics, cannot be replicated from the information published in the article, and can only achieve its claimed results by using one particular dataset. To the extent that there is a genuine epistemological position about simulation in the strange world of climate change deniers, it's an assertion that the complex models regarded highly by most climate scientists must contain fundamental flaws, even if those flaws can't be readily identified. The other articles of faith are that simulations are “just” models, as if they were mere fantasies or ungrounded assertions, and that modelers tweak the knobs of their models (i.e., tune their parameters) to produce results that conform to a political agenda of “climate alarmism.” Finally, this group tends to distrust any kind of adjustments to data – even though all climate data are routinely, and necessarily, adjusted for reasons I outlined in exhaustive detail in A Vast Machine.[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0004> 4] Schrickel & Engemann: Paul, in your latest book, A Vast Machine, you investigate the emergence of an “infrastructural globalism” visible in the science and politics of climate change from technological developments largely related to the Cold War – computer simulations, satellites, nuclear strategy. In a previous book you have analyzed, how the political goal of “containment” spurred these developments and produced the World as a closed system.[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0005> 5] How would you describe the political imaginary fuelling the Vast Machine? What replaced the Cold War goal of containment? Edwards: I've often talked about the idea of an “apocalypse gap” in the late 1980s. As the Cold War came to a close – first with the dramatic reduction of nuclear weapons after 1986, then with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites – the threat of nuclear holocaust suddenly seemed to diminish. Climate change had become a political issue in the 1970s, but in the USA it did not become truly salient until James Hansen's famous testimony to the US Congress in the hot summer of 1988, when he declared it “99 percent certain” that anthropogenic climate change was already occurring. Within a couple of years environmental groups had begun to make climate change a centerpiece of their agendas. Most religions and cultures have apocalyptic myths, from Armageddon to Ragnarök to Frashokereti (Zoroastrianism). Perhaps in some sense we need such myths. They contain and represent our fears that death will overtake not only ourselves as individuals, but our families and even our people as a whole. The populist movements we have been discussing make much use of apocalyptic imagery. They view the “invasion” of their nations by “foreign” cultures and religions as just such an event. In extreme versions of their worldview, violent confrontations between races, or religious wars between Islam and the “Christian” West, are inevitable. You ask what replaced the Cold War goal of containment. I guess I would say that in the 1990s, when the USA reigned as the sole superpower, economic globalisation – what we might call the Davos neoliberal agenda – became a principal focus. Meanwhile, resources formerly devoted to the Cold War were released and repurposed (notably satellites, supercomputers originally purchased for nuclear weapons work, and scientists at the US national laboratories). Environmental regulatory work, such as the successful reduction of sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, proceeded against resistance, but with broad public support. The rapid and remarkable success of the 1980s ozone depletion accords contributed to a sense, in the 1990s, that a similar grand global agreement might resolve climate change as well. The UNFCCC and its scientific advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), reflect the optimism generated by the Montreal Protocol. Overall, then, what initially replaced containment policy was economic globalisation and a kind of environmental globalism. The latter built in large part on the base established by Cold War monitoring networks, and the strong US and European environmental movements of the 1980s and 1990s. Following September 11, 2001, and the wars that ensued, however, the fight against terrorism came to occupy an ever larger space in the political imaginary of the USA. During the 2016 US election, in particular, right-wing politicians used the Syrian refugee crisis to fuel fears of terrorism, reflected in Trump's efforts to impose a Muslim immigration ban. Among populists, the Davos consensus eroded in favor of protectionist views. The rapidly emerging US plutocracy plans to disembowel environmental regulation, which it sees as bad for business. Although public support for environmental regulation remains broad, the business agenda dominates – at least for now. Schrickel & Engemann: Paul has remarkably demonstrated the epistemological robustness of climate research and its infrastructures but both of you offer pessimistic descriptions of the current shifts in the political sphere. The potential repercussion of the political developments described by Paul for the climate science/policy interface are difficult to assess, but we understand Oliver's reasoning about it as a call to render climate research in general also politically more robust. Oliver frequently points to questions of the integrity of policy advisors, the inconsistency of policies, the fudge around inconvenient aspects such as climate engineering.[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0006> 6] With regards to the climate science/policy interface you observe a “co-production of irresponsibility”: the rationality of the political system is not to solve problems but to deal with them while the rationality of the sciences rests upon the pretense of solving problems. A co-production of irresponsibility arises when scientific advisers become political entrepreneurs, offering politicians too optimistic views about what is achievable while the political system readily absorbs these views and pursues its own goals. The political results in climate policy will thus be inconsistent on many levels, which can be OK within the confines of a nation state but becomes problematic with a global scenario like climate change where inconsistencies can have catastrophic consequences. Do you see any tools, methods and procedures that would increase the political robustness of climate research? What epistemic developments have initially contributed to this situation? And how could they be overcome? Geden: First, I should stress that there's no way to overcome inconsistency in policy making. Although consistency (between talk, decisions, and actions) is the cultural norm when we assess policies, inconsistency can be seen as the ‘modus operandi’ of policy making. This is true for any field of policy, but the effects of basing assumptions on the norm of consistency are particularly problematic in public domains with a deliberately transformative agenda, like energy and climate policy, because of the complex long-term planning involved. This is not so much a problem for natural scientists. If they don't sit on policy advisory panels and if they are not part of the broader public debate, then their intellectual work on certain aspects of the climate system (e.g. marine geochemistry) is not really affected by inconsistencies between talk, decisions and actions in climate policy. But if you are a climate economist, working on emissions mitigation pathways that could help to avoid dangerous or catastrophic climate change, then your models will rest on assumptions about how policymakers and high-level decision makers will deal with the challenge of radical mitigation. And if you get it all wrong, and if neither policymakers’ self-manifestations nor political science textbooks are of any help to get a better picture, then you are in danger of presenting far too optimistic scenarios of what political responses to expect in the future. For two decades there has been a narrative that “it is five minutes to midnight, but we can still make it, if we start to act now.” But since policymakers didn't start to act appropriately, the relevant benchmarks started to shift in assessment reports, based on ever more optimistic assumptions about decarbonisation and even ‘negative emissions’ in the future. For example, the fourth IPCC assessment report, published in 2007, stated that global emissions must peak by 2015 to stay within 2 °Celsius of warming; yet the fifth IPCC report (2014), refers to 2030 emissions levels higher than today's that are still compatible with this limit, albeit with annual emissions-reduction rates of six percent and large volumes of ‘negative emissions.’ Likewise, the annual Emissions Gap Report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) had an original deadline of 2020 for its analysis of how to fill the gap between global emissions levels compatible with a 2 °Celsius target and national pledges; the 2014 edition extended it to 2030. Usually, researchers take climate policy decisions (and the associated talk) far too seriously, especially decisions on global climate targets like limiting the temperature increase to 2 °Celsius or 1.5 °Celsius. If the expectation is that a decision leads to appropriate action (or that actors at least make serious attempts) then you can see your role as helping policymakers to chart out pathways on how to achieve these targets. But if you look at climate policy making strictly empirically, then you cannot find that many governments that really try to act consistent with UN decisions they support. Inconsistency in policy making stems from the simple fact that political organisations have to secure external support, but are confronted with inconsistent demands by different stakeholders. The most practical way to deal with this challenge is to address some stakeholder groups by talk, some by decisions, and some by actions – simply by treating them as individual organisational products. This inevitably leads to inconsistency. Unfortunately, in climate policy most governments choose a more progressive stance while talking and deciding, but a more modest one when acting. The easiest way for them to deal with impending inconsistency is – in the words of organisational theorist Nils Brunsson – ‘hypocrisy’, e.g. by talking and making decisions about the far-away future, where the need for immediate action is relatively limited.[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0007> 7] Unsurprisingly, climate policy has been much more about intentions than results. So far, setting ambitious long-term global climate targets has not been a prerequisite but a substitute for appropriate action. And inadvertently, researchers have been covering political inaction by introducing technological imaginaries like ‘negative emissions’ into climate-economic models, in order to find ‘feasible’ pathways to meet ambitious global climate targets, while policymakers ignored the growing importance of negative emissions in the models for almost a decade, and did not even set up research programs until recently. That's a prime example for the ‘co-production of irresponsibility.’ But if consistency can't be assumed, then popular concepts like ‘evidence-based policy making’ become shallow. And there's no way in which climate scientists could force policymakers to act consistently. But it might be a good starting point for researchers, especially for the economists dominating the IPCC's Working Group 3 on mitigation, to get a much better idea how governments and politicians are dealing with new knowledge, and why they constantly ask for more although they've ignored most of it in the past. Schrickel & Engemann: In A Vast Machine, Paul retraces the infrastructural inversions substantiating the epistemological positions of climate modeling as a basis for making robust scientific knowledge about climate change in valuable ways, we wonder how you respond to the dilemmas at the interface of science and policy making as outlined by Oliver? Climate science – as part of a historical formation outlined by yourself above – is ‘nolens volens’ part of a political discourse: it makes projections about the future, it questions lifestyles, it assesses unevenly distributed effects globally, it makes us rethink how we got to this point. In this regard Oliver points to the fact that the actual challenging aspect is to bring science and policy making together in meaningful and robust ways. Is there a risk that climate science gets twisted to a certain degree because it increasingly has to deal with assessments for solutions to climate change? Solutionism might ultimately be a new common denominator for some scientists and certain political and economic actors. What twists are brought into the climate sciences by debates on ‘negative emissions’ and climate engineering? What happens, for instance, when scientists start to offer their models in order to validate different engineering options? What is the (new) role of the IPCC here? Geden: I wouldn't say that climate science gets twisted by prominent calls for ‘turning the focus to solutions’ (IPCC chair Hoesung Lee[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0008> 8]) but of course the turn toward ‘solutionism’ does affect the incentive structures for researchers to some extent, shifting the focus from basic to applied research, from purely analytical approaches towards ‘policy-relevant’ approaches. And the more researchers are confronted with demands for (societal, political, economic) ‘impact’ (like in the UK's or the EU's research funding system), the more often climate scientists are confronted with reactions by climate-friendly governments and environmental NGOs that their results are ‘not helpful’ for the on-going political process, the higher the pressure to choose sides. If you decide to be in the purely analytical camp you're in danger to become ‘irrelevant’ to policymakers. If you want to be part of the solutions camp and stay ‘relevant’ then your knowledge production is in danger of being infected by the inconsistencies of the policy making process. Edwards: I agree with Oliver, but I'd make the point in a somewhat different way. The traditional stance of most natural scientists (climate physics, climate modeling, data collectors, etc.) has been that their work should serve only as an input to policy making. In other words, natural science can tell us what's happened already and what's likely to come if we pursue various policy paths, but it can't and shouldn't generate those policy paths. The problem is that when natural scientists begin to scrutinize policy paths in detail, they cannot avoid creating at least the impression of involvement. And the gravity of the climate change problem does make it difficult for anyone who studies it to remain neutral on a personal level. In many areas of public life, we accept this duality without question. Medical researchers can remain neutral in analyzing the effectiveness of cancer treatments, yet they are entirely non-neutral with respect to the goal of eradicating cancer. Economists use evidence to study the effectiveness of different labour policies, even as they are non-neutral with respect to the value of full employment. And so on. Meanwhile, the environmental sciences have always had more difficulty maintaining this dual perspective. The risks they analyze are often invisible, slow-acting, and not seen by individuals to be directly and crucially important to their everyday lives. The history of climate change as a policy issue looks very similar to many other environmental issues in this respect: the risks seems distant and diffuse, but the costs of policy action are immediate and focused. Those who stand to lose something from policy action can get a lot of mileage out of blaming the science for the proposed solutions. So in a way it doesn't matter whether climate scientists actually take up a ‘solutionist’ approach or try to remain neutral. They will inevitably be portrayed as playing a critical role in whatever solutions are proposed. Geden: There is one unique feature of climate policy making that might change the future conversation drastically, and that's the brutal math of the carbon budget. This budget gives scientifically calculated numbers on how much CO2 the world can still emit in order to meet temperature targets like 1.5 °Celsius or 2 °Celsius.[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0009> 9] These calculations are based on many assumptions[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0010> 10] not visible to policymakers and deliver a simple message: There is a finite allowable volume for global emissions. It's not enough that global emissions stay flat for some time, start to decrease and reach zero eventually. It's about cumulative emissions that have to stay within certain limits. This effectively hinders governments and NGOs to do policy making the usual way – attaching their pet solutions to suitable problem descriptions and developing narratives that we are going into the right direction. Following 20 years of a global climate debate without appropriate action, economists started to integrate ‘negative emissions’ into budgeting some years ago, betting on future large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal technologies that don't exist today, and that are considered ‘climate engineering’ by many. Governments and NGOs have been trying to ignore these technology options for years, since they are not very attractive politically,[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0011> 11] but this debate is emerging now since the overall budget numbers have to add up. If global emissions don't go down drastically pretty soon, the same can be expected for solar geoengineering (e.g., by spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere, reducing incoming sunlight), particularly in the context of the new 1.5 °Celsius target, for which the remaining carbon budget is close to zero. Environmentalists have been trying to evade this uncomfortable situation, in which they are forced to debate technologies they want the climate policy community to be silent about. But efforts like questioning carbon accounting[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0012> 12] itself have not been fruitful since it means attacking one of the dominant frames of climate policy, a frame that has been used to promote environmental policies for more than two decades. As Clare Heyward and Steve Rayner have pointed out,[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0013> 13] the debate on geoengineering might even bring conservatives and deniers of anthropogenic climate change back to the table. If the proposed solution is a ‘technofix’, an engineering approach that doesn't seem to attack the global economic order, then even today's deniers might accept that there is a problem that needs to be solved. Following Silke Beck and Martin Mahony,[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0014> 14] I think the IPCC has to start to accept responsibility for the performative character of large-scale assessments. The IPCC's pathways are increasingly pre-structuring the discourse on climate governance, whether this leads to appropriate mitigation action or only to political hypocrisy. For researchers exploring potential mitigation pathways this would mean going beyond assessing only technological and economic feasibility, but also dealing with social acceptability and socio-political feasibility. Since quantitative modeling can't do the latter, this calls for bringing the dominant climate-economic approach into a critical conversation with other strands of social science knowledge on energy system transitions, as Geels, Berkhout and van Vuuren have suggested.[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0015> 15] This would inevitably lead to a more complex picture of the challenges ahead, and it's foreseeable that it would test the limits of the IPCC's consensus approach. If the IPCC wouldn't organize solutions primarily around different technology pathways but around pathways of societal transformation, then the panel would have to deal with a plurality of distinct possible futures. This could overcome the impression that climate scientists simply state “what needs to be done” and instead catalyze a more fruitful debate on macro policy alternatives. Edwards: Following on what I said above, I'd add this to Oliver's excellent discussion: The technocratic character of the IPCC has tended to center the debate on technological solutions, especially renewable energy. I'm not against technocracy; in fact I think it's absolutely necessary, more now than ever. So long as the subject is breaking our addiction to fossil fuels, I think the technocratic approach is really the right one, and the IPCC has played a major role in promoting that. Yet agricultural practices, meat-based diets, and deforestation are at least equally important causes of climate change. In many respects, those are much harder problems than energy, where real and successful solutions are well along. Mike Hulme's great book Why We Disagree about Climate Change points to the deep connections between climate and culture, from religion and housing to clothing and food.[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0016> 16] Eco-modernist techno-solutionism barely touches the holistic kinds of social change that would really be needed for drastic emissions reductions. Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything does a better job of sketching those solutions than the IPCC, but as Oliver points out, her vision – like those of many others searching for ways to move us off the path of self-destruction we are currently walking – would require revolutionary and extremely widespread social change of a kind that seems depressingly unlikely at present.[ <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0017> 17] The dilemma is clear. Scientists’ greatest asset is the high degree of trust invested in them by the public, at least in much of the developed world. To participate effectively in building climate solutions, they must maintain that. Yet this trust depends on the perception that science seeks truth, not power. To the degree that scientists advocate particular solutions over others, they may be seen as partisans. The challenge for scientists is to retain what Roger Pielke Jr. calls the “honest broker” position: proposing as many solution paths as they can find, evaluating their effects from a neutral point of view, while never advocating any particular path over others.[18 <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bewi.201701848/full#bewi201701848-bib-0018> ] Ancillary * 1Anthony Leiserowitz, Edward Maibach, Connie Roser-Renouf, Matthew Cutler, Seth Rosenthal, Trump Voters & Global Warming, Yale University, George Mason University, New Haven/CT: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication 2017, http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/trump-voters-global-warming/ (21.3.2017). * 2Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, https://envirodatagov.org/ (21.3.2017). * 3Richard Alley, Earth: The Operator's Manual, 2011, http://earththeoperatorsmanual.com/ (21.03.2017). * 4Paul N. Edwards, A Vast Machine – Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming, Cambridge/MA: 2010. * 5Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World. Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, Cambridge/MA: 1996. * 6Oliver Geden, Climate Advisers Must Maintain Integrity, Nature 521/7550 (2015), 27–28; Oliver Geden, The Paris Agreement and the Inherent Inconsistency of Climate Policymaking, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 7/6 (2016), 790–797; Andy Parker, Oliver Geden, No Fudging on Geoengineering, Nature Geoscience 9/12 (2016), 859–860. * 7Nils Brunsson, The Organization of Hypocrisy: Talk, Decisions, and Actions in Organizations, New York: Wiley 1989. * 8Hoesung Lee, Turning the Focus to Solutions, Science 350/6264 (2015), 1007. * 9The estimated budget for meeting the 1.5 °Celsius target is 150 Gigatons (Gt) CO2, for 2 °Celsius it's 800 Gt. With current annual emissions of 40 Gt, the budget for 1.5 °Celsius would be blown within 4 years, for 2 °Celsius within 20 years. * 10Glen Peters, How Much Carbon Dioxide Can We Emit? Cicero, Center for International Climate Research, 16.03.2017, http://www.cicero.uio.no/no/posts/klima/how-much-carbon-dioxide-can-we-emit (21.03.2017). * 11Oliver Geden, Stefan Schäfer, ‘Negative Emissions’: A Challenge for Climate Policy, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik SWP Comments 53 (December 2016), https://www.swp-berlin.org/en/publication/negative-emissions-a-challenge-for-climate-policy/ (21.03.2017). * 12Camila Moreno, Daniel Speich Chassé, Lili Fuhr, Wolfgang Sachs, Carbon Metrics. Global Abstractions and Ecological Epistemicide, Heinrich Böll Stiftung Publication Series Ecology, 2016. https://www.boell.de/de/node/287891 (21.03.2017). * 13Clare Heyward/Steve Rayner, Apocalypse Nicked!, Climate Geoengineering Governance Working Paper Series 2013, http://geoengineering-governance-research.org/cgg-working-papers.php (21.03.2017). * 14Silke Beck, Martin Mahony, The IPCC and the Politics of Anticipation, Nature Climate Change 7/5 (2017). * 15Frank W. Geels, Frans Berkhout, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Bridging Analytical Approaches for Low-Carbon Transitions, Nature Climate Change 6/6 (2016), 576–583. * 16Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity, Cambridge/UK, New York: Cambridge University Press 2009. * 17Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, New York: Simon & Schuster 2014. * 18Roger A. Pielke Jr., The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics, Cambridge/UK: Cambridge University Press 2007. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
