Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The state of climate communication is a disgrace. Speaking from personal experience, it is incredibly diffi-
culttogetastraight answeraboutwhatisandisn'tknowninthefield,because somuchofitiscatastrophic
speculation by people who seem more focused on a political goal than on clear, honest, big-picture com-
munication.
In 1996, Stanford climate scientist Stephen Schneider wrote an influential paper about the ethics of ex-
aggerating the evidence for catastrophic climate change.
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to
tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the
caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well.
And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our
working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some
broad based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of me-
dia coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make
little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves
in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being
effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.
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I disagree entirely that this is a double ethical bind. It is doubly unethical. It requires deliberately mis-
leading the public, which inevitably leads to uninformed, dangerous decision making.
Welive inasociety that hasrisen viathedivision oflabor,byeach ofusspecializing in,evenmastering,
some relatively small sliver of the ingredients of human survival and flourishing, so that in the aggregate
we might create a world with an amazing sum of knowledge, technological achievement, and progress.
Specialization implies a sacred obligation. The specialist must never misrepresent what he knows and
doesn't know, what he can do or can't do. The incompetent mechanic who claims that he can fix your
complex engine problem, capitalizing on the fact that you know even less about engines than he does, is
immoral.
In intellectual endeavors, in every field, there is an immense range of knowledge and opinion, from the
decisively demonstrated to the wildly speculative. This is a good thing: Human knowledge builds on es-
tablished knowledge, and each next step takes time to reach and establish. But specialists within the field
have an obligation to explain precisely what they know and don't know—and also to welcome critical
questioning and debate.
It can literally be deadly for a scientist to spread a hypothesis as fact. Take the realm of nutrition. For
years, the government spread the gospel, treated as nutritionally proved, that a low-fat diet was healthy—a
campaign that coincided with record obesity. I'm not going to claim that I know the perfect diet. The point
is that, at this stage, no one appears to—and when scientists with speculative theories feel licensed to dis-
seminate them as fact, it is the most irresponsible scientists who will often garner the most praise.
One such scientist is Paul Ehrlich, who writes: “Scientists need to be direct and succinct when dealing
withtheelectronicmedia.Onecouldtalkforhoursabouttheuncertainties associatedwithglobalwarming.
But a statement like 'Pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere could lead to large-scale food short-
ages' is entirely accurate scientifically and will catch the public's attention.”
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Is such a statement “entirely
accurate scientifically”? What about the fact that were it not for the industry that necessarily emits green-
house gases and were it not for the fact that Ehrlich's proposals to dismantle it were not followed, millions
or billions would have died of starvation?
