Don’t gloss over social science! a response to: Glavovic et al. (2021) ‘the tragedy of climate change science’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Glavovic et al. ([2021]. The tragedy of climate change science. Climate and Development, 1–5.) recently argued that the science-society contract is broken and that – given the urgency of climate change – scientists should agree to a moratorium on climate change research. We are grateful to the authors for their courage to spark this very important discussion, even if we disagree with their proposed solution. They consider three solutions: continuing with science as usual, increasing social science research, and declaring a moratorium on climate change research and future IPCC reports; they argue that only the latter presents a real prospect for restoring the science-society contract. We certainly agree that the world has largely failed to act on the scientific knowledge on climate change. However, we disagree that the science-society contract is broken and that a moratorium on climate change research is a tenable or meaningful solution. Instead, we suggest that natural scientists have done their job effectively, but that powerful political and cultural forces are standing in the way of effective climate change mitigation and more social science and humanities research is needed to expose and address these power structures.