Legal Commentary

Hulme on ClimateGate and the Politicization of Science

By Jonathan H. Adler

Climatologist Mike Hulme, who worked at the University of East Anglia?s Climate Research Unit, gets the big picture in a WSJ Europe op-ed.  Some excerpts:

One thing the episode has made clear is that it has become difficult to disentangle political arguments about climate policies from scientific arguments about the evidence for man-made climate change and the confidence placed in predictions of future change. The quality of both political debate and scientific practice suffers as a consequence. . . .

If we build the foundations of our climate-change policies so confidently and so single-mindedly on scientific claims about what the future holds and what therefore ?has to be done,? then science will inevitably become the field on which political battles are waged. The mantra becomes: Get the science right, reduce the scientific uncertainties, compel everyone to believe it. . . and we will have won. Not only is this an unrealistic view about how policy gets made, it also places much too great a burden on science, certainly on climate science with all of its struggles with complexity, contingency and uncertainty. . . .

The problem then with getting our relationship with science wrong is simple: We expect too much certainty, and hence clarity, about what should be done. Consequently, we fail to engage in honest and robust argument about our competing political visions and ethical values.

Science never writes closed textbooks. It does not offer us a holy scripture, infallible and complete. This is especially the case with the science of climate, a complex system of enormous scale, at every turn influenced by human contingencies. Yes, science has clearly revealed that humans are influencing global climate and will continue to do so, but we don?t know the full scale of the risks involved, nor how rapidly they will evolve, nor indeed?with clear insight?the relative roles of all the forcing agents involved at different scales. . . .

The central battlegrounds on which we need to fight out the policy implications of climate change concern matters of risk management, of valuation, and political ideology. We must move the locus of public argumentation here not because the science has somehow been ?done? or ?is settled?; science will never be either of these things, although it can offer powerful forms of knowledge not available in other ways. It is a false hope to expect science to dispel the fog of uncertainty so that it finally becomes clear exactly what the future holds and what role humans have in causing it.

There are also good comments from Roger Pielke Jr. and Roger Pielke Sr. on Dot Earth.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on December 02, 2009 (boomark / email).