A problematic social science approach to the study of climate science

Abstract

Myanna Lahsen is concerned about the backlash to climate policy triggered by Climategate in 2009. To counteract such backlash in the future she recommends more symmetrical studies of the social aspects of climate science. There is a need to study distorting extrascientific factors on standard climate science. The study of climate “deniers” or “contrarians” as inMerchants of Doubt (Oreskes and Conway 2010) is not enough. There is a “dominance of idealized understandings of science” on both sides in the climate debates, and this makes the public “vulnerable to backlash campaigns,” claims Lahsen (2013). And this widespread misunderstanding needs to be revealed before political progress can be made. However, she is not clear on what these “idealized understandings” are. Is there, for instance, a “tendency on the part of IPCC scientists and sympathizing academics analysts to uphold climate science as unassailable and purged of the imprint of social processes that create it.”And is it common among climate scientists to hold a “scientific fundamentalism” that sees “science as an objective authority that operates separately from particularities of culture and politics”? All scientific knowledge is uncertain and preliminary, likely to be revised in the future. This insight was clearly articulated by the end of the 19th century. Since then it has become widely accepted both in the history and philosophy of science and among most working scientists. However, this fundamental uncertainty does not prevent empirical science from producing highly reliable knowledge. “Truths” as we say in daily discourse. Lahsen apparently accepts IPCC’s conclusions on ACC (anthropogenic climate change) as a sound basis for climate policy. There is a scientifically well-founded difference between mainstream climate science and the controversial claims of the contrarians. Lahsen takes the idea of “co-production” of science and society to be a suitable basis for the new deal needed in studies of climate science and politics. In recent decades a large body of theoretical and empirical scholarly literature has shown how “science is internally heterogeneous and inextricably interlinked and co-produced with society,” she writes. But, once again, this was hardly a new insight of the new wave of science studies starting in the 1970s (Jasanoff 2004). The social dependence of scientific knowledge, and the political threat to sound science, was at the center of the research programmes of logical empiricists and critical rationalists in the 1930s to 1950s. Such questions were also central through the Climatic Change (2013) 119:561–563 DOI 10.1007/s10584-013-0778-4