Challenges to Authority: Understanding Critiques of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Abstract

I. Climate Change and The Science-Policy Divide In response to a growing body of research pointing to human-induced warming of Earth’s climate, and in recognition of the potentially sweeping impacts of climate change for humanity, the world’s governments launched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. The IPCC is a consultative body of volunteer scientists charged with periodically assessing the state of knowledge in the many areas of research relating to climate change, including both the physical and social sciences. Given the scope of these assessments, the IPCC has come to be viewed as the singular authority on climate change. The IPCC derives this authority from the credibility of its scientists,1 the comprehensive review that its assessments undergo,2 and the consensus that the assessments require from a broad range of participants, including governments and civil society organizations.3 The IPCC has been object of intense criticism since its creation,4 largely because of the considerable implications of climate change for public policy. The tension between the IPCC and its critics serve as a clear example of the uneasy relationship between science, the authority it aims to represent, and the rest of society. Although popular conceptions of science often depict a clearly demarcated line between the objective facts discovered by science and the negotiated values of the sociopolitical realm,5 the relationship between the two is in fact far more complex. Scientific processes and institutions influence, and are influenced by, political ones; trends in one field leave their mark in the other. The emergence of the modern scientific method in the seventeenth century, conceived of as a disinterested enterprise replicable by anyone with access to equivalent data and instruments, was intimately tied to the simultaneous rise of liberal conceptions of political authority like equality and equitable representation.6 Conversely, the Newtonian concept of discrete particles of matter, for example, laid the foundation for our “liberal conception of ‘possessive individualism’ [in which] consent was to be granted by