PRIVALEGED PLACE OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE?

In the News Scan section of the August, 2003 issue of Scientific American there is an article titled “Hot Words” (by David Appell -- not yet posted on the web) about the battle going on in the climatology community. It seems that a recent article in Climate Research suggests that 50 year long anomalies are regular occurrences in the climate record, and that recent warming trends may be just such an anomaly. Apparently this claim is being very strongly refuted by other climatologists.

What caught my attention was the final comment:

“’You’d be challenged, I’d bet, to find someone who supports the Kyoto Protocol and also thinks that this paper is good science, or someone who thinks the paper is bad science and is opposed to Kyoto,’ predicts Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado.”

There is a saying: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” Thus scientists may be expected to view new publications through the lens of their scientific positions. Still, it is too bad when political views determine a scientists opinion of a piece of meta-analysis of scientific literature, or when the political processes can not get a fair read of the state of scientific consensus on a point of fact underlying public policy.

I have suggested that knowledge provided by the scientific community should be given special value in policy processes, given the nature of scientific epistemological processes. If the validity of an assertion is warranted by data, repeatedly verified under controlled conditions, and by peer review to assure that it is consistent with theory and other observations, there is a certain credibility. Many of the assertions made in public debate on climate policy seem to be less credible, having less credible epistemological processes for their warrants.

Kuhn has suggested that it is seldom the weight of evidence that sways opinion of scientists vis a vis paradigm changing analyses. In the case of anthropogenic climate change, the paradigm seems much less mature than that of say planetary astronomy or common mechanics. The massive release of greenhouse gasses is after all relative recent (in terms of the centuries of development of other scientific fields), and the development of significant bodies of relevant data from remote sensing and paleo-climatology has occurred over only the past decade or two. If there are serious debates over the key issues in planetology and cosmology, which should be more mature fields, perhaps we should expect them in climatology.

It may also be that there is so much as stake, that the danger of waiting for scientific consensus before influencing policy is not acceptable to most citizen-scientists.

Putting diplomats from poor countries, especially small poor countries in this debate seems especially cruel. OECD country diplomats negotiating climate treaties at least can draw on strong, multifaceted scientific communities for support, and on institutions such as national academies of science and offices of technology assessment in evaluating negotiating positions and crafting arguments and refutations. My observation is that most small, poor countries don’t have the scientific capacity to do this well, nor the institutional mechanisms to bring what scientific capacity they do have effectively to the assistance of their diplomats.