On the hidden purpose of climate research
Wolfgang Knorr is a climate scientist, consultant for the European Space Agency and guest researcher at the Department of Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University
Cross-posted from Wolfgang’s Substack Climate Uncensored
A dazzlingly detailed climate simulation in pastel colours, by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Brian Kahn, Climate Central. The 10-year-old article expresses the hope that very high-resolution models will soon provide super accurate climate predictions. Unfortunately, high-resolution models turned out to have the same kinds of biases as lower-resolution models.
A couple of weeks after global leaders again failed in Belém, Brazil, to even mention the word ‘fossil fuels’, let alone agree on phasing them out, it is about time to get to grips with some fundamental facts surrounding our society’s (in)ability to address vital environmental and, with it, security issues. If there is any kind of progress in humanity’s effort to address climate heating and environmental collapse, which itself is doubtful given not only US but also EU backtracking on environmental rules, then it is by far outpaced by the worsening situation. This has become obvious, but possibly there is a need to dig a lot deeper into the problem. Could it be that some of the actors that we thought would be on ‘our’ side – with ‘me’ meaning citizens threatened by a destabilizing situation – are in reality playing the same game of denial and procrastination?
There is currently growing interest within the social sciences concerned with the climate issue in what is called ‘mitigation deterrence’. What it means is that, very obviously, we need to mitigate against uncontrolled heating due to fossil-fuel emissions by – well – stopping to emit, but that there is a continued preference for ‘solutions’ that do nothing but effectively delay action. These solutions involve banking on some future mass deployment of yet unproven technologies to cool the planet back down, while doing nothing in the meantime. ‘Mitigation deterrence’ is thus a way of creating the illusion that ‘something is being done’, while nothing is. It is different from ‘climate obstruction’, which is more concerned with bad actors voluntarily derailing climate action.
While I find this laudable – I have myself argued many times that we need to aim at zero emissions, not ‘net’ zero – I believe that the notion of ‘mitigation deterrence’ should be understood in a much broader context, because there are far more, and more subtle ways to create the illusion of action with the effect of making real action seem less desirable. In fact, for a long time I had the distinct feeling that it is climate research itself that makes climate ‘mitigation’ – transitioning away from fossil fuels –seem less urgent than it probably is.
Following is a text that I sent last week to the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN), with which I have been loosely associated. In it, I argue that the emergence of ‘climate research’ as a distinct, non-traditional scientific discipline, has in effect served the purpose of creating the illusion of control. The illusion that there is a captain on deck who is looking after us. A scientifically non-sensical over-reliance on detailed models has created the impression we somehow ‘understand’ the problem where in reality we are poking around in the dark. As such, climate research has served very well economic and political interests that are invested in avoiding what is the most obvious, most common-sense solution: to apply the precautionary principle:
[…] even though I realize it comes unsolicited with some risks, I offer this comment here nonetheless, for you to either reject, take note of, or take in. Writing it down turned out to produce a somewhat lengthy text, for which I ask you for your forgiveness, given that it encapsulates much of what I’ve learned in the course of several decades in climate research.
My general comment is that studying and engaging the issue of Mitigation Deterrence risks becoming much like engaging with the issue of climate denial. It tends to be all “over there”. This is certainly very general and unspecific, and therefore not very helpful. So to make it more helpful and to better illustrate what I’m talking about, I will first provide a personal story.
Just the other day I passed by Hamburg and visited the site where I used to start out in the early 1990s at the then recently founded Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the then handful of climate modelling centres. Our old makeshift building has long been taken down, but now what I saw was a massive building project with some ambitious but crammed-in architecture. Outside of it there was a huge sign stating that this was going to be the new centre of “climate research and the geosciences” by the University of Hamburg – at a place where there just used to be the “geosciences”. So climate research has not only been established as a scientific field, but it somehow now stands apart from the more traditional disciplines. There is something very distinct about this framing and accompanying narrative that is – and has been for decades – making me feel uncomfortable. And that, in my opinion, has a lot to do with “mitigation deterrence”. Probably not easy to make the connection, but I’ll explain.
“Climate research” certainly has its various constituent areas of study, and within the physical sciences, the main ones are probably meteorology, oceanography, geochemistry, glaciology, and then things like phytogeography, geomorphology, etc. including their paleoclimatic sub-disciplines. These are all very well established subject areas of the physical sciences, where you tend to have clear hypotheses, testing, and either validation or falsification – with all the usual caveats. But when it comes to the core activities of what is often seen as “climate research”, i.e. the parts that get most coverage in IPCC summaries and the press, then my experience has been that these tried and tested principles of scientific investigation seem not to matter.
What I mean with this is the phenomenon of climate science “getting lost” in the model world, which has been proliferating especially since around the year 2000, when it became fashionable to talk about “earth system models” instead of simply “climate models”. But in reality, a climate or other mathematical model is no more than a very complex hypothesis, that by virtue of its complexity is almost impossible to either verify or falsify. (To be fair, early biogeochemical research used very simple models that were rigorously tested against observations, but this has since fallen out of fashion.) Much of the most visible parts of “climate research” engage in arguments that only follow from very complex hypotheses that have undergone, at best, only very sparse and incomplete testing against observations.
You could first of all point out that this is due to the nature of the problem, because you cannot test climate predictions, and also point to the fact that this also applies in other areas of applied science, such as medicine or engineering. Getting the job done may be more important than academic rigour. However, a closer look quickly reveals that this argument falls flat. First, both medicine and engineering tend to apply the precautionary principle generously in order to mitigate against the lack of rigour. As it has been argued many, many times, “climate research” does none of this, on the contrary (see the “erring on the side of least drama” debate). Second, the lack of proper anchoring of the science in hypothesis testing does not only apply to climate prediction. Just yesterday I read a publication – by a collaborator, so I won’t name names, and also admit that I have been culpable myself many times – that almost entirely lives in the mathematical model world. (So even the discussion section only talks about comparison with other modelling studies and projects.) It may be so that the model has been trained by actual observations, but the error margins of those and the number of data points vs. the number of degrees of freedom of the model are such that adherence to the real world is flimsy at best. But this is research offered for very practical applications regarding the computation of carbon credits in natural ecosystems to support activities under the Paris Agreement (in other words, Carbon Dioxide Removal!)
What has all this got to do with mitigation deterrence? I would like to offer the following hypothesis: if established methodologies of scientific investigation were rigorously applied to “climate science”, then the conclusion would have to be that no meaningful prediction of future climate impacts is possible apart from some vague and qualitative series of if-then-hypotheses, and that therefore we essentially have no idea, as (a) society(ies), what we are doing. As an example regarding sea level rise: we know from glaciologists that ice sheets are far more vulnerable than mathematical models tend to simulate them, but this is not quantifiable. The same applies to others of the famous “tipping points”. Therefore, the situation urgently calls for the, as referred to above, “generous application of the precautionary principle”. This obviously is politically impossible, so there we are! What that means for “climate research”, however, is that it is becoming an activity the existence of which is shielding the public from the uncomfortable insight that there is no-one taking care of the situation. So in essence, climate research has become what is, in my opinion at least, the ultimate mitigation deterrence. (Not least because in the view of the public it involves the ultimate “experts”.)
I’m not a social scientist, so I don’t feel called to judge if this applies to CSSN as well, but there is another hypothesis I would like to offer that may point in this direction. It states that the kind of society that we live in – with its existing power structures and social conventions and mores – is simply incapable of responding to the challenge of climate change and large-scale, systemic environmental degradation. If this is so, then, almost by definition, any in-system response will have the character of what in German is called an “ersatz handlung”, i.e. a surrogate activity that happens in order to create the feeling of agency. If you cast the net as wide as this, then CSSN itself could be characterised, under certain circumstances, to be another surrogate activity, or a form of Mitigation Deterrence. Or indeed any academic activity having to do with climate change. (The first time I remember coming across the concept of “Ersatzhandlung” was actually in conjunction with zoo animals who show signs of mental deprivation. Maybe this could serve as an apt metaphor: we are all trapped, and because we see clearly how the problem is getting worse, albeit slowly, with no signs of a turnaround, this increases levels of anxiety. And so we need to study the phenomenon for the sake of our own psychological sanity.)
I realize this is probably nothing you could put on a grant proposal or into the intro section of an academic journal article, so here is my core recommendation that hopefully some of you may find helpful:
Identifying the more egregious and obvious examples of Mitigation Deterrence still makes perfect sense in order to alert wider audiences to the problem. However, the goal should be to shift the narrative away from the symptoms, such as Mitigation Deterrence, to the core of the problem. And that is, in my opinion, the solid structural impediments of current society – what/which exactly is meant by that could be a subject of debate or investigation – to any form of meaningful climate action. If that shift succeeds even to a small degree, then we could finally stop seeing in the “climate problem” something having to do with physical mechanisms, like heating causing this or that catastrophe – but something having to do with resilience at the societal level. – Just in the same way that nobody studying the nuclear threat would deploy an army of models that would make minutely detailed predictions of the impacts of a nuclear war, but instead study it as a social, political and ethical issue. And therefore, if we talk about Mitigation Deterrence, we should always be open to the possibility that we, possibly against our will, are also part of it.
Be the first to comment