On the “reality” and reality of anthropogenic climate change

Abstract

Can scholars speak about the reality of climate change? By this I mean, can we fairly say that we know that anthropogenic climate change is real? Or is reality—and the very idea of knowing—something that needs to be continually qualified, by scare quotes or otherwise? Fifteen years ago this issue—broadly applied—erupted as a schism between social scientists who insisted on recognition of the social dimensions of scientific knowledge, and natural scientists who took such claims as an affront not just to their status and dignity, but to their ontology as well. [1] The question of how well anthropogenic knowledge maps onto anthro-independent phenomena is scarcely new: philosophers from Plato to Kant famously grappled with it. In the 20th century Pierre Duhen and W.V.O. Quine, working from very different perspectives, stressed that empirical evidence never uniquely defines theoretical possibility; our theories are always, to one degree or another, under-determined by our evidence. [2] In my own work, I have explored the opposite problem: that no one theory accounts for all the evidence that we have, so scientists pick and choose, focusing on the data that they find most important, convincing, and compelling. [3] Given this long history, the relation of our knowledge to the world it claims to describe could hardly be resolved here. Moreover, the history of science is a chronicle of epistemic frailty: both facts and theories have toppled in the face of new evidence and new interpretations of old evidence. From this, philosophers make a “pessimistic meta-induction”: since previously well-established scientific knowledge has been shown to be wrong, incomplete, partial or false, what does this say about our current knowledge? We must conclude that at least some of it will be rejected in the future as having been mistaken. [4] None of this undermines the existence of an anthro-independent world—it does not force us to take an ontologically anti-realist position. Nor does it undermine our claims to know things, in the ordinary sense of knowing that we use everyday. It does force us to be realistic about the claims of any individual or group to know nature in a culturally unmediated Climatic Change (2013) 119:559–560 DOI 10.1007/s10584-013-0779-3