What should climate scientists advocate for?

Abstract

In recent years, with the rise of social media, many more scientists are becoming public communicators. In politicized fields such as climate science, these communications can attract disproportionate attention. The author argues that public statements in such a situation are inevitably advocacy for some position, view, or outcome. However, rather than suggesting that scientists avoid advocacy in a misplaced attempt to remain objective, he recommends that scientists be explicit about the combination of values and science that drives their views, and discusses the ways scientists can ensure that their advocacy remains responsible.

Survey after survey indicates that a large majority of the general public wants to know more about the topic of climate but doesn’t know where to turn for credible information (for example, Leiserowitz et al., 2014). Unfortunately, the public discourse on climate science, climate change, and society’s possible responses has become “polluted” (Kahan, 2012; Kahan et al., 2011; Rapley et al., 2014), greatly complicating attempts at communication. In the United States, and to a lesser extent in other Anglophone countries (namely, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada), public statements about climate now tap into culturally, politically, and ethically charged backgrounds. In such an environment, noise can often overwhelm signal, and scientists who venture to voice opinions in public—whether related to science or policy—can find themselves on the receiving end of what can appear to be a completely disproportionate backlash.

This dynamic is not unique to climate science. In different political or national contexts, similar patterns can be discerned for a diversity of topics that straddle the science/policy divide: evolution, genetically modified foods, nuclear power, stem cell research, and fracking. In each of these cases, scientific information is often perceived to threaten an entrenched position or identity that can be religious, community-based, economic, political, or “tribal” (in a very general sense). Rejection of the mainstream scientific position can follow and, if important thought leaders echo this rejection, a very damaging large-scale polarization can occur.

For scientists working in fields with such a “polluted atmosphere” for discussion, there are a number of consequences. Most important, it is nearly impossible for any public communication on the topic to be perceived as neutral—the reception is almost always politicized. Whether a communication is a TV interview, a blog post, or a press release accompanying a research paper, it will invariably be parsed closely to see if it hews to any particular side in the wider public debate. If it does, media and political attention can follow—and the results will often be shorn of context, distorted, or misrepresented. In addition, if a communication is perceived as political, responses to it follow the harsher norms of political, not scientific, debate. Both of these effects can come as a shock to scientists when they have their first high-profile encounter with this dynamic.

A flip side to this politicization of the science is the “scientization” of politics (Sarewitz, 2004). Given the very positive image that science has in modern society, claiming that the science supports one’s political position is a common occurrence, but the “science-iness” on show has more in common with a salad bar—where people pick and choose convenient studies—than with the balanced search for truth that science aspires to.

Understanding this background, how then should a climate scientist view communication and advocacy?

Advocacy is unavoidable

Scientists and philosophers have long distinguished between descriptions of what “is” (derived from scientific investigations of the real world), what “ought” to be (based on one’s value system), and suggestions for what one “should” do in the face of this knowledge (Hume, 1740; Schneider, 1996). Despite this careful distinction between advocacy and facts, the term “advocate” is regularly used pejoratively in scientific circles and is frequently associated with the cherry-picking of science to support a preconceived idea. In order to avoid these connotations, scientists often go to great lengths to deny being advocates for specific policies. However, it is almost always the case that a scientist speaking in public is in fact advocating for something—deeper public understanding of the science, more research funding, a more informed public discourse, awareness, and, yes, sometimes for specific policy action. Each of these examples is a reflection of both a scientific background and a set of values that, for instance, might prize an informed populace or continued research employment. It is most often when addressing a group with a shared set of values that scientists are the least aware that their call for something that “should” happen is still advocacy.

In my view, it is impossible to divorce public communication from advocacy, and scientists should not even try. Instead, we should acknowledge and embrace the terminology and, in so doing, define clearly what our own values are and exactly what we are advocating for.

Some scientists might think that implicit advocacy for, say, greater scientific literacy does not need to be spelled out, or is somehow different in kind from any other sort of advocacy. It is not. Similarly, some scientists think that being open about their preferences somehow damages their credibility (as if hiding them would be less damaging).

In practice, however, regardless of scientists’ actual positions or advocacy, the very presence of their voices in public on a controversial topic will lead to assumptions that they are advocating for other public policy goals. For instance, a 2014 paper in the journal Public Understanding of Science assumed that any “mainstream” scientist (including me) quoted in a newspaper story about climate change (regardless of the topic or whether any policy issues were mentioned) was in fact advocating for “ambitious climate mitigation targets” (Grundmann and Scott, 2014: 226). Even a quote in a Washington Post article about farming impacts on the carbon cycle 5,000 years ago (Fahrenthold, 2009) was marshaled as evidence to support their claim of policy advocacy. While this was personally amusing, it actually typifies the polarized lens through which many people, even other scholars, may view a scientist’s public contributions in a field like climate science. In other words, scientists have little choice about whether they are declared to be advocates. However, they can declare clearly what they are (and are not) advocating for in their public communications, because if they don’t, others will do it for them.

Responsible and irresponsible advocacy

While the issues of public communication, advocacy, and scientific objectivity are not new, they are becoming more salient for a greater number of scientists who are embarking on roles as public communicators via growing social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or blogs (Van Noorden, 2014). What once was the concern and preoccupation of just a few “go-to” scientists (like Stephen Schneider or Carl Sagan, both scientists and frequent television presenters of popular science in the 1980s and 1990s) is now much more widely relevant, and the insights of those scientists deserve to be more widely discussed.

For instance, instead of a somewhat fallacious distinction between non-advocacy and advocacy in public communication, Schneider (1996) and, separately, the organizers of an American Association for the Advancement of Science workshop (Runkle and Frankel, 2012) focused on the difference between responsible and irresponsible advocacy. Responsible advocates are up-front about what is being advocated for and how the intersection of values and science led to that position. On the other hand, it is irresponsible to proclaim that there are no values involved, or to misrepresent what values are involved. Responsible advocacy must acknowledge that the same scientific conclusions may not lead everyone to the same policies (because values may differ). Assuming that one’s own personal values are universal, or that disagreement on policy can be solved by recourse to facts alone, is a common mistake. Deliberate irresponsibility, by advocates who purposefully obscure their values and who often resort to “science-y” sounding arguments to avoid addressing the real reasons for any disagreement, should be avoided by anyone wishing to remain a credible voice in science.

My exhortations here are (of course) also advocacy, and I would be remiss in not expounding on my own values and their relevance to this topic. I have a strong belief (or, perhaps, hope) that an informed democracy is more likely to make good decisions than one in which ignorance and tribalism are the dominant factors. I don’t believe that scientists themselves are in any special position when it comes to making decisions, but I do believe that their expertise must be an input into the decision-making process. The ability of climate science to probe and answer questions about the Earth system, the changes it has undergone, and the potential for change in the future has been (in my opinion) very successful in exploring the scope and limits of climate system predictability. There are many complexities and uncertainties, to be sure, but also many fundamental features that are as well established as any textbook science.

As a community, climate scientists—who are mostly taxpayer-funded—have a responsibility to the wider public, but, as individuals, we should also have rights. Scientists should have an absolute right to advocate for anything they like, or indeed nothing at all. Nobody should be bullied into advocacy for someone else’s cause, but neither should responsible individual advocacy or communication be suppressed at the whim of politically motivated government public affairs departments.

Perhaps the clearest question that climate scientists can ask themselves comes from the Nobel Prize–winning chemist F. Sherwood Rowland (quoted in Brodeur, 1986: 83) talking about the discovery of the chemistry that causes ozone depletion: “After all, what’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions, if in the end all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?”

Given the salience of climate science for society, I feel it is incumbent on climate scientists to share their understanding of what is known and their concerns for the future, and to suggest potential pathways forward. Because if they don’t, who will?