Dr. Dagomar Degroot, Georgetown University International climate change agreements have long aimed at limiting anthropogenic global warming to 2°C Celsius, relative to “pre-industrial” averages. Yet in early 2015, more than 70 scientists contributed to a report that warned about then-poorly understood dangers of warming short of 2° C. Several months later, Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) met in Paris and reached what seemed to be a promising agreement that aimed at keeping global warming to “well below” 2° C. The Paris Agreement invited the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to prepare a special Assessment Report on the consequences of, and means of avoiding, warming on the order of 1.5° C. The IPCC accepted the invitation in 2016. This week, it published its report, together with a short summary for policymakers. In it, 91 scholars from 40 countries summarize the results of more than 6,000 peer-reviewed articles on climate change. The published report still captured headlines and provoked justified alarm. Here’s what struck me as I read through it this week. The Importance of 0.5° CThe new assessment report is really all about half a degree Celsius. Since the world has now warmed by roughly one degree Celsius since a 1850-1900 baseline, only half a degree Celsius separates us from 1.5° C of warming, which in turn is of course only half a degree removed from the infamous 2° C threshold previously emphasized by the IPCC and the UNFCCC. So, what difference does 0.5° C make? It depends on the perspective you take. The new report shocked many by predicting that some of the profound environmental transformations long anticipated with 2° C warming, relative to the nineteenth-century baseline, would be well underway with just 1.5° C warming. By 2100, for example, sea levels could rise by up to 0.77 meters if temperatures increase by no more than 1.5° C, which may only be around 0.1 meters lower than the level they would reach with 2° C warming. Worse, it now seems that marine ice cliff instability in Antarctica and the irreversible collapse of the Greenland ice sheet – two frightening scenarios that could each raise global sea levels by many more meters and set off additional tipping points in the climate system (see below) – could be triggered by just 1.5° C warming. Perhaps 90% of the world’s coral reefs could be lost with 1.5°C warming, compared to every reef in a 2° C world. In one sense, there seems to be a huge gulf between where we are now and where we’d be with another half-degree of warming, and comparatively little difference between a 1.5° C and a 2° C world. Yet in other, critically important ways, there could be an equally big gap between the 1.5° C and 2° C scenarios. Of 105,000 species considered in the report, three times as many insects, and twice as many plants and animals, would endure profound climatically-determined changes in geographic range in a 2° C world, relative to a 1.5° C world. A threefold increase in the terrestrial land area projected to change from one ecosystem to another also seperates the 1.5° C and 2° C worlds. The importance of just half a degree Celsius is particularly clear at local and regional scales. Warming is greater on land than at sea, and much greater across the Arctic. In cities, urban heat islands double or even treble global warming trends. In many regions, extreme weather events – droughts, torrential rains, heat waves and even cold snaps – are now much more likely to occur than they once were. Superficially modest trends on a global scale can mask tremendous shifts in local or regional weather. The critical importance of warming on the order of just half a degree Celsius for ecosystems around the world invites us to revisit some of the more controversial claims made by climate historians about the environmental impacts of past climate change. There is, of course, a range of natural climatic variability that most ecosystems can accommodate, and we are on the verge of leaving that range across much of the Earth, if we have not left it already. Yet it now seems painfully clear that even small fluctuations in Earth’s average annual temperature can have truly profound ramifications for the regional or local ranges and life cycles of plants, animals, and microbes. Risk, Uncertainty, and ScaleBack to the difference between 1°, 1.5°, and 2° C warming. Perhaps the most alarming part of the new assessment report – one seemingly lost on many environmental journalists – is what it says about the value of the whole project of establishing numbers that become touchstones in climate change discourse. Beginning well before 2015, climate scholars pointed out that attempts to emphasize the danger of 2° C warming risked creating the false impression, among policymakers and the public, that the worst impacts of climate change would suddenly unfold only after Earth passed that threshold. I’d wager that for most people, the 2° C limit still seems like a distant threat, one we will eventually face only if we don’t gradually reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yet the new report confirms that the 2° C threshold was all along an arbitrary standard, one that did not really convey the nature of the threat we face. It is now plain that we will not only trigger vast and irreversible changes to Earth’s climate system with 1.5° C warming, but worse: we have already engaged some of them, and we may unlock more in coming years. Nature, unfortunately, cares little for our nicely rounded numbers. There’s more. Even before its release, some climate scientists and activists criticized the new report for understating the extent of present-day warming, and more importantly: ignoring the so-called “fat tail” threat of runaway warming triggered by positive feedbacks, or “tipping points,” buried within the climate system. Of these feedbacks, the best known is probably the ice-albedo feedback, where modest warming melts bright sea ice that normally bounces sunlight back into space, replacing it with dark water that absorbs solar radiation, contributes to more warming, more melting, and so on. Another well-known feedback involves methane that now lies buried in Arctic permafrost and frozen seabed sediment. Warming is already melting tons of methane into the atmosphere, where it traps far more heat than carbon dioxide. Again: warming will lead to more melting, more warming, and so on. These feedbacks have historically converted relatively minor sources of warming or cooling into profound climatic trends. Yet scientists don’t know precisely how all such feedbacks work, or when exactly they are triggered. If we’re lucky, we won’t trigger most of them at all, not even if we reach that 2° C threshold. Yet it’s also possible that we have already set some of them in motion, in ways that will irreversibly lead us to runaway warming. In that case, our children – or our children’s children – will have to survive a “hothouse” world, one fundamentally different from our own. This brings us back to the issue of risk and probability, which the IPCC’s scientists stress in every assessment reports. The IPCC expresses uncertainty using the terms “confidence” and “likelihood,” and it is very important to decode these terms in order to understand the new assessment report. In it, the terms “very low,” “low,” “medium,” “high,” and “very high” confidence all refer to the confidence the report authors have in key findings. Their level of confidence reflects both the quality, quantity, and type of evidence used to support those findings, and the extent to which different lines of evidence agree with the findings. In the report, the terms “exceptionally unlikely,” “extremely unlikely,” “very unlikely,” “unlikely,” “about as likely as not,” “likely, “very likely,’ and “extremely likely” all refer to the statistical probability of outcomes actually happening, based in part on the findings. Unfortunately, these definitions are buried on page 40 of the first chapter of the new assessment report. Yet they make it impossible to conclude, as so many journalists have written, that the new report predicts what will happen in the future. Using such language plays into the hands of climate change deniers, who rightly point out that nobody can predict the future with certainty. Climate scientists, of course, know that better than most, which is why they always attempt to qualify and quantify their predictions. Climate historians also deal with probability. As I point out in a forthcoming article, we can never really reconstruct the local or regional manifestations of climate change with perfect certainty, nor can we be completely sure of local connections between climatic trends and human or animal behavior. Some of the most interesting relationships we can discern are among the least documented, especially once we get away from the usual European or Chinese focus of most climate historians. At its best, climate history therefore deals explicitly with risk and uncertainty by qualifying its major findings. Other historians tend to rebel against such qualifiers. More than one peer reviewer, for example, has told me to be more authoritative, to forcefully express that climate change directly caused humans to do something in the past. To these historians, qualifiers communicate the kind of weak uncertainty that seems to suggest that an argument is not well grounded on solid scholarship. These criticisms come from the practice of traditional historical scholarship, where documents seem to communicate exactly what happened to whom, and when. Yet when we work with different kinds of sources, from natural archives, those relationships cannot always be clearly or simply established. The more, and more diverse, information you have, the more uncertain the past can become. Still, abundant information from many natural and human sources can also provoke questions, and suggest relationships, that traditional historians have not imagined. The best documented and seemingly most certain version of the past, in other words, isn't always the most accurate. A Determined Future (and Past?)The new IPCC report also abounds with exactly the kind of sweeping statements that historians – myself included – have attacked in the past. In a brilliant 2011 article I often ask my students to read, Mike Hulme criticizes how the predictive natural sciences have promoted a new variant of the climate determinism many Europeans once used to explain the expansion of western empires. Because climate change can be predicted more easily than social change, Hulme argues, climate science has promoted a kind of climate reductionism that “downgrades human agency and constrains the human imagination.” Surely, the human future will not be crudely determined by climatic trends. And yet, the IPCC concludes that climate change will probably exacerbate poverty, provoke catastrophic migration, impede or annihilate economic growth, amplify the risk of disease, and, in short, sharply undermine human wellbeing, especially for “disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, some indigenous peoples, and local communities dependent on agricultural or coastal livelihoods.” While there will be ways for communities and societies to adapt, the IPCC’s summary for policymakers finds that “there are limits to adaptation and adaptive capacity for some human and natural systems” in even a 1.5° C world. Warming, in short, will likely provoke human suffering. Should we be skeptical of such claims? As usual: it’s complicated. While historians like to emphasize complexity and contingency in narratives of the past, scientists search for patterns in complex systems that permit predictive models. Many historians therefore feel uncomfortable when asked to anticipate the future in light of the past, and that discomfort is partly to blame for the unfortunate absence of historical scholarship in the new assessment report. Of course, scientists have no such problem. Their models can indeed be deterministic – by necessity, they only consider so many variables – yet they still provide some of our best perspectives on what the future might have in store. With that said, it's important to again stress that many of these models should be taken as estimates of what might happen in our future. They cannot tell us what will actually unfold. History does teach us that the human story involves both steady trends and sudden leaps: technological breakthroughs, revolutions, and the like. It is simply wrong to conclude that even 2° C warming will make the world a more impoverished, more violent place, as some assume. Older predictions of “peak oil,” for example, or a “population bomb” have not (yet) come to pass, partly because individuals and institutions responded creatively, on many different scales, to menacing trends. The new assessment report actually describes the kind of action that would help state and non-state actors confront the challenge of climate change (spoiler alert: it’s not geo-engineering). People are not passive, static victims in the IPCC’s assessment, as they tend to be in reductionist literature. Yet even if the wise policies recommended by the IPCC are ignored, we cannot predict or quantify exactly what the future has in store for humanity. But now, back to those controversial claims made by climate historians. Critics have accused some of the more ambitious books in climate history – authored by the likes of John Brooke and Geoffrey Parker, for example – of crude determinism for suggesting that past climatic fluctuations on the order of just half a degree Celsius unleashed disaster for societies around the pre-modern world. Indeed, some calamities that climate historians have blamed on climate change had many alternate or additional causes, and most coincided with examples of communities and societies successfully weathering climate change. Yet the scale of social disruption predicted by the IPCC in a world just a little warmer than our own does invite us to consider whether the fates of pre-industrial societies were not more closely connected to climatic trends than most historians and archaeologists have allowed. Both environments and societies, in other words, seem more vulnerable to even slight climatic fluctuations than we had imagined. The Popular ResponseIn the wake of the new report, articles in popular media and discussions in social media have predictably focused on how its findings should be communicated. Should climate communicators try to drum up fear, or should be we inspire hope? Hope does seem to be more useful emotion in motivation public engagement on global warming. Yet recently, many scholars have actually moved beyond this question. A 2017 article in the journal Nature, for example, concludes that climate change messages should be carefully calibrated to their audience. Neither hope nor fear will motivate everyone; in fact, a catchall message that relies on either emotion will likely provoke the opposite of the desired response in a sizable part of the population. This is hardly surprising: political operatives and advertisers have known for years that the best messages are highly targeted. Some news articles have stressed what individuals can do in order to lower their personal carbon emissions. Many scientists and environmentalists have responded by arguing that only government policy can begin to address climate change on the scale we need. By stressing personal accountability, some argue, journalists shift attention from the real climate culprits: the big corporations and well-funded political interests with a stake in the fossil fuel economy. As in most such debates, both sides have valid points. Clearly, we should all aim to limit our emissions while at the same time becoming politically motivated as never before. We will need to fundamentally transform our economy and our politics – quickly! – if we are to confront the challenge of climate change. How we do this, and what it will mean for us personally, is something all of us will need to sort out soon. Those of us who have chosen to remain above the political fray will need to re-evaluate that decision. Some of the first news articles about the IPCC's new report included commentaries on the need for journalists to make climate change the biggest story they cover. I wrote an article to that effect during the 2016 election, and sent it to the editors of the New York Times. Predictably, there was no response. And now, even in the wake of hurricane Michael’s rapid intensification and calamitous landfall, climate change has already moved off the front pages of many newspapers. Politicians in the United States and elsewhere have already brushed off the IPCC’s urgent warnings. One wonders: will the new report really change anything? Or will the capitalist dynamics behind our media outlets and political processes derail the changes we so urgently need to make? Ultimately, it’s clear that nobody and nothing will rise to save us from our fate. Those of us who understand the science behind climate change need to do more than communicate. Now, we need to actively be part of the solution. We need to act. Recommended ReadingThis site explores interdisciplinary research into climate changes past, present, and future. Its articles express my conviction that diverse approaches, methodologies, and findings can yield the most accurate perspectives on complex problems. To contextualize modern warming, for example, we can reconstruct past climate change using models developed by computer scientists; tree rings or ice cores examined by climatologists; and documents interpreted by historians. We gain far more by using these sources in concert than we would by examining each in isolation. Yet we must approach such interdisciplinarity with caution. The problems presented by climate change scepticism provide lessons for academics crossing disciplinary boundaries, and for policymakers, journalists, and laypeople interpreting interdisciplinary findings. In academia, climate change scepticism is usually interdisciplinary. To attack climate change research, academic sceptics use credibility and, occasionally, scholarly methods accrued in relevant disciplines but often unrelated fields. For example, in the late 1980s and 1990s, eminent physicists William Nierenberg and Fred Seitz were among the most outspoken critics of the global warming hypothesis. According to historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, the scepticism expressed by Nierenberg and Seitz grew, in part, from their belief that the ends of supporting unfettered capitalism justified the means of deliberately distorting scientific evidence (Oreskes and Conway, 190). However, another part – perhaps the most damaging – emerged from the conviction that their disciplinary backgrounds gave them special insight into climate change research Physicists – including one of our own editors – play a crucial role in modelling and interpreting climate change. Yet not all physicists are alike. Nierenberg was a renowned nuclear physicist who oversaw the development of military and industrial technologies for exploiting the sea. Seitz developed one of the first quantum theories of crystals, and contributed to major innovations in solid-state physics. Owing to their similar academic backgrounds, both Nierenberg and Seitz distrusted the lack of certainty in climate modelling, and both would have despised the occasionally fuzzy probabilities that must accompany climate history. Their scepticism effectively takes the most tenuous elements of climate science and argues that they are not science, because “real scientists” know better. These attitudes highlight one of the most important but least appreciated aspects of interdisciplinary research: humility. When we step into another field, we step into another culture with characteristics that often have sound reasons for existing. Before challenging assumptions that inform a discipline, we should thoroughly learn the language, methods, and concepts of scholars in that discipline. Only then can we appreciate their findings. Climate scepticism can also reveal that differences between subfields within academic disciplines can be more significant than distinctions between those disciplines. An environmental historian, for instance, can have much more in common with a climatologist than a postmodern cultural historian. Another example: Fred Singer is an atmospheric physicist who played an important role in developing the first weather satellites. However, he has little respect for the methods or conclusions of mainstream climate research. In 2006, Singer told the CBC’s The Fifth Estate that “it was warmer a thousand years ago than it is today. Vikings settled Greenland. Is that good or bad? I think it's good.” In an interview with The Daily Telegraph three years later, he acknowledged that “we are certainly putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” However, he argued that “there is no evidence that this high CO2 is making a detectable difference. It should in principle, however the atmosphere is very complicated and one cannot simply argue that just because CO2 is a greenhouse gas it causes warming.” Vikings did settle in Greenland, and the atmosphere is very complicated. However, global temperatures are warmer now than they were a millennium ago, and we can certainly trace relationships between modern warming and atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Singer may be an atmospheric physicist, but he is hardly qualified to offer any observations on the state of climate change research. Distinctions between different kinds of scientists – and different agendas among scientists – are always worth remembering when exploring the study of climate change. In a recent article, the popular website Reporting Climate Science described a disagreement between physical oceanographer Jochem Marotzke and meteorologist Piers Forster on the one hand, and “climate scientist” Nic Lewis on the other. Marotzke and Forster recently published an article in the journal Nature that confirmed the reliability of climate models for predicting climate change. Lewis accused them of circular reasoning and basic mathematical and statistical errors.
Lewis is, in fact, a retired financier with a degree in mathematics, and a minor in physics, from Cambridge University. Does that make him a climate scientist? He is certainly qualified to challenge mathematical approaches, and he does not deny the basic physics of anthropogenic climate change. For policymakers, journalists, and even scholars in different disciplines, it can be difficult to discern with what authority he speaks. Similar problems are at work in another recent academic debate. This one unfolded in the pages of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. As described on this website, two economists took issue with the notion of a “Little Ice Age” between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. They waded into an established field – climate history – and assailed one of its most important themes – the existence of a Little Ice Age – without appreciating the methods and findings of recent scholarship. For example, they used a graph of early modern British grain prices as a direct proxy for contemporary changes in temperature. But those grain prices were influenced by so many human variables that, for modern scholars, they can, at best, suggest only how one society responded to climate change. While attacking the rigour of climate reconstructions, the economists actually introduced data that is far less rigorous than climate historians use today. Within academia, most instances of climate change scepticism are case studies of interdisciplinary approaches gone wrong. Interdisciplinarity can help us approach thorny issues in new ways, but such work should be collaborative. When adherents of one discipline or field dictate to those in another, the results are usually destructive. ~Dagomar Degroot Note: the cover photo was taken by our editor, Benoit Lecavalier, during a recent trip to Greenland. Last month, world leaders met at UN Headquarters in New York City for Climate Summit 2014. As protests raged across the globe, diplomats established the framework for a major climate change agreement next year. The aim will be to limit anthropogenic warming to no more than 2 °C, a threshold established by scientists and policymakers, beyond which climate change is increasingly dangerous and unpredictable. Just days after the 2014 summit, policy expert David Victor and influential astrophysicist Charles Kennel published an article in Nature that called on governments to “ditch the 2 °C warming goal.” Kennel and Victor argue that the rise in average global temperatures has stalled since 1998, as warming is increasingly absorbed by the world’s oceans. Variations in global temperature therefore do not directly reflect climate change, and governments should adopt other benchmarks for action. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, they contend, more accurately reveal the relentless advance of climate change. In any case, limiting the rise in global temperatures to just 2 °C would impose unrealistic costs on national economies. Not surprisingly, responses to Victor and Kennel have been swift and comprehensive. For example, physicist and oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf argues that short-term temperature variability does not undermine the case for a 2 °C limit, especially when there is little evidence for a “pause” in global warming. He explains how scientists and policymakers selected the limit, and cites studies synthesized by the IPCC, which conclude that holding the rise in planetary temperatures to 2 °C would cost no more than 0.06% of the world’s annual GDP. Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, claims that Victor and Kennel have confused the roles that should be pursued by scientists in international climate change negotiations. Like Rahmstorf, he maintains that the 2 °C limit is neither misplaced nor unachievable. As a climate change advisor to the British government, he explains that, “the UK, almost overnight, conjured up over £350b to bail out the banks and stimulate the economy – but it has earmarked just £3.8b for its Green investment bank!” Physicist Joe Romm argues that a new study, which finds that scientists may have underestimated the extent of global warming, only strengthens the case for a 2 °C limit. To their credit, Victor and Kennel wrote a lengthy response in the New York Times to these and other critiques. Missing from this debate are perspectives from those who study the past: the ways in which natural climate change has actually influenced human history. This is unfortunate, because historical relationships between climate and society can yield important insights on the usefulness of a 2 °C limit. Take, for example, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Europeans entered the Arctic and Subarctic as never before. Journeys of exploration gradually transformed scholarly understandings of the Far North and shaped popular attitudes towards nature and empire. They paved the way for new settlements and laid the groundwork for the exploitation of marine resources that would alter European diets, stimulate the continent’s northern economies, and transform Arctic environments. All this during an early modern “Little Ice Age” that cooled temperatures across the Arctic and Subarctic by at least 0.5 °C, relative to the twentieth-century norm. This apparent paradox is a focus of my recent research. I have learned that it can be tempting to assume that global cooling or warming will have straightforward impacts at the regional or local level, but such assumptions are often wrong. It often feels as though climate history is the study of bewildering, sometimes infuriating complexity. I frequently find myself using eclectic sources to trace, for example, how changes in solar radiation altered global temperatures, regional cyclonic activity, a series of storms above a town, damage sustained in that town, and how people understood what was going on. This is a part of what makes climate historians so useful to the broader historical discipline: we are always coming up with new ways of understanding how the local reflects the global, of discerning how – and why - things change over time. Lately, I have used cutting-edge scientific data to reinterpret journals written by Arctic and Subarctic explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I discovered that some expeditions to the Far North benefitted from unusually warm ocean currents and hot summers that actually reflected counter-intuitive links between local environments and the globally cool Little Ice Age. I have also started to investigate the seventeenth-century rise of the Dutch and English whaling industry around the island of Spitsbergen in the seas north of Norway. It might seem obvious that Arctic whaling expeditions would suffer in colder decades, and indeed the pack ice between Spitsbergen and Greenland would expand as regional temperatures cooled. However, at the same time bowhead whales prized by hunters would congregate near the pack ice, which made them much easier to hunt. The whaling industry therefore enjoyed its best years during the coldest phases of the Little Ice Age. In other words, my research has revealed that when our focus is strictly on warming or cooling trends, we can lose sight of how climatic shifts actually affect people. Still, interdisciplinary scholars of past climates trace climate change by reconstructing variations in average temperature. We classify our climatic past according to these swings in average temperature, and how they influenced the advance and retreat of glaciers. Hence our (little) ice ages and warm periods, our minima, maxima, and anomalies. Archeologists, historians, and scientists of many stripes then investigate how humans and animals responded to particularly warm or cold periods. Of course, many continue to dig deeper, considering diverse weather patterns and reaching sometimes-surprising conclusions. Nevertheless, our initial focus on average temperatures usually shapes the kinds of questions we can ask.
Does that mean we miss the mark? Should we stop assuming that climate change and average temperature change are one and the same? Perhaps not. In reconstructing past climates, scholars of past climates often find that while changes in average temperature do not tell the whole story, they can and should tell us where to start looking. Average temperatures are closely linked to changes in the solar energy earth receives and absorbs, which ultimately drives the environmental changes that reflect climate change. Shifts in regional precipitation, wind dynamics, or ice cover therefore usually respond to shifts in average regional temperature, which are closely correlated to fluctuations in average global temperature. In that light, the 2 °C limit makes a lot of sense. A focus on average temperature might miss some of the complexity of climate change and its possible ramifications for our future, but changes in temperature are closely linked to the kinds of environmental conditions that Victor and Kennel would rather track separately. Moreover, nuance is less important in climate change mitigation than it is for climate change adaptation. Greenhouse gas emissions need to decrease because temperatures can only increase so much before they imperil our civilization. The mechanisms and technologies for limiting emissions exist today; now is the time to implement them, rather than adjust our acceptable thresholds. After all, the human history of past climate change also provides a warning. During the Little Ice Age, a moderate decline in average temperatures profoundly and often disastrously affected societies around the world. What will unprecedented warming do to us? ~Dagomar Degroot In order to keep global warming below 2° C, there is desperate need for urgency in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. However, national and international policymakers have yet to take action on the scale that would prevent catastrophe. In the most recent issue of Nature Climate Change, Cambridge University geographer David Christian Rose explains why even the governments that have publicly acknowledged the threat of climate change have been so slow to address it. He then introduces practical ways for researchers to communicate more effectively to policymakers. Most scholars understandably assume that policy should respond to the weight of evidence. To them, influencing policy is simply a matter of articulating abundant evidence with clarity. However, Rose argues that evidence derived from “scientific rationality” is just one factor among the many that influence policy. Rose draws on principles developed by political scientist John Kingdon, who holds that even ideas backed by the best scientific evidence do not become policy unless they fit prevailing political conditions. To Rose, nothing is more misguided than the continued focus on producing better evidence, undertaken most famously by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Increasing the certainly of anthropogenic change from 90% (in the IPCC’s fourth report), to 95% (in its fifth), does not account for the ways in which policy is actually formulated.
Rose argues that, in climate change negotiations, progress is rarely impeded by a lack of sufficiently reliable evidence. Instead, Rose claims that talks break down because of questions such as: “Who wins? Who loses? Who decides?” Scientists and other scholars should therefore figure out how their evidence can be presented to policymakers in ways that give it maximum leverage alongside other influences. Scientists and other climate researchers have a tendency to advertise the peril of inaction. Their frequently apocalyptic narratives are both evidence-based, and intended to galvanize policymakers and the public into action. However, Rose finds that telling “good news stories” can be much more effective, because policy is rarely agreed upon without concrete evidence that it will work. By better communicating these stories, academics and activists alike can demonstrate that adaptation is both possible, and applicable in policy. Finally, Rose argues that climate change policy recommendations presented by scientists should be attached to issues that are political winners. As an example, he explains that European researchers campaigning against the trade in wild birds were only able to influence policy when they tied the issue to the spread of bird flu. Given the other political influences faced by policymakers, animal welfare was a political non-starter, but public health was not. Ultimately, the guidelines presented by Rose will strike many academics as cynical recommendations that threaten to turn scientists into lobbyists. Academics, they might claim, should have an unimpeachable voice precisely because they do not employ the tactics used, for example, by big oil lobbyists. Some activists may hold that the inability of political systems to respond directly to evidence is, if left unaltered, a long-term threat to meaningful environmentalism. However, we do not live in a world where these lofty ideals can always yield practical, short-term solutions of the kind necessary to mitigate, and adapt to, global warming. Rose therefore presents a convincing case: if researchers want policymakers to take action, they should start thinking like policymakers. ~Dagomar Degroot David Christian Rose, "Five ways to enhance the impact of climate science." Nature Climate CHange 4 (2014): 522-524. In 2012 the Canadian government infamously announced changes to Library and Archives Canada (LAC) that made it much harder for researchers to access their country’s documentary heritage. The LAC’s mandate was transformed: rather than acquiring and maintaining a “comprehensive” collection, it now aimed merely to gather a “representative” assembly of Canadian documents. Funding was slashed, employees were laid off, new acquisitions were paused, documents were sold to private bidders, and resources were decentralized across Canada. In the last month, interviews with scientists by The Tyee have revealed how the conservative regime’s attitude towards the environment meant that environmental archives suffered the most. Government scientists, who have asked to remain anonymous, report that the chaotic closure of world-class environmental libraries resulted in the destruction of priceless documents relevant to environmental and climate history. The same scientists allege that the government falsely assured that all documents were preserved through digitalization. "The cuts were carried out in great haste apparently in order to meet some unknown agenda,” one scientist told The Tyee. “No records have been provided with regard to what material has been dumped or the value of this public property. No formal attempt was made to transfer material to libraries of existing academic institutions." The rich resources for environmental research at the St. Andrews Biological Station in New Brunswick are gone, as is the Freshwater Institute Library in Winnipeg, and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in Newfoundland. At a time when historical climatology has increasingly turned to ship logbooks, the 50-volume logbook of the HMS Challenger has been destroyed. In 1876 the Challenger completed the first global marine research expedition, and its logbooks contain priceless data about the contemporary biosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. A copy of its logbooks exists outside of Canada, but it is less accessible for Canadian researchers.
The attack on environmental and, in particular, climate history by Canada’s Harper government demonstrates yet again that scientific or historical research into the environment is inherently political. Sadly, Canadian researchers cannot take even their archives for granted. We must do our best to digitalize what we can, ourselves, before it is lost forever. Note: in coming years, digitalized sources relevant to climate history will appear on this website, where permission is granted. ~Dagomar Degroot Links: 1. Save Library and Archives Canada. 2. Canadian libricide: Tories torch and dump centuries of priceless, irreplaceable environmental archives. 3. Fisheries and Oceans Library closings called loss to science. |
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