“Epi-blog”

In what has been a look at an issue that is still under fire and yet to reach the height of debate (mostly, a lot of talking by George W., etal. and no doing), I bring these last few weeks and term to a close. This weblog has documented my inquiry into the examination of the controversy and key issues surrounding global climate change. We have seen how I, the players, and the public debate this issue in the collective square. As my research developed, my commentary turned toward the inevitable questioning of how to report science ala Latour in my discussion of matters of fact vs. matters of concern and how progress doesn't always have to be defined by upward mobility at the expense of Nature.

To explain to the reader, my sense of how the issue of global warming is being played out, I found that a number of experts in the field brought up the question of what constitutes sound science. In sum, there are two very different radical sides, or houses, when debating climate research especially when attempting to make sense of science. There is one hand that denies that science is speaking to us about an urgent matter and one that sees that the clay has been shaped and is being squashed by those still in denial. Latour would suggest that we come out of the cave, look at what is already there - what is already known about Science - and try our hand in ending this debate and moving forward.

To raise one last point in parting, one that hasn’t yet been mentioned… My interests have always been in the stewardship of the environment and protecting finite resources for generations to come, not wiping out millions of years of life in the span of 200-300 years. I hope that I have raised some interesting points and that my methods and techniques have been helpful in providing more information and perhaps a different way of thinking. I have tried to provide a look into my own viewpoints as well through this controversy that is still unfolding in a way that has been inspired by this class, Science: Power-Knowledge, and the readings of Latour and Seth Shulman. Primarily, I hope that I have demonstrated that while no argument can be pitted one against the other, science vs. nature, politics vs. science, black vs. white, certainly we can find a way to keep the facts straight and report what we know rather than distorting scientific evidence.

Taking a Stand

Some think that documentaries such as An Inconvenient Truth are just preaching to the converted. Are people not watching these movies? Most would rather see Kevin Costner play a war hero than watch Al Gore’s film. How can we gather the collective together and educate the masses without boring them? The proposition is a daunting one.

It is thought that the next Nobel Prize will go to someone who solves the environmental problem of global warming. On NPR today, they were discussing this notion of bracing for a change in climate on the islands of Fuji. More and more, climate change is in the news. It was reported last week that according to the EPA, the Robert W. Scherer Power Plant near Macon, Ga., emits more carbon dioxide than any other power plant in the United States. It’s no secret. The government has known this for years.

Framing Science

In the last 30 days (or the last 6 years depending on how you frame the argument) President Bush has done a complete about-face where he now shows his support to cut emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. In an article published on June 3rd in the International Herald Tribune, it is reported that after all the foot-dragging and insistence that science was too iffy and the costs of change too high, Bush is proposing to get his cowboy on and round ‘em up – that is, the 15 countries responsible for 85% of the problem and over the next 18 months lay out a plan, nation-by-nation, to slow and eventually reduce emissions. The impression that the article gives is that there might be something worthwhile in the Bush plan. In fact, the headline signals that last week's initial reaction to the plan might have been too harsh. For its international readership, the article leads with specifics on support from the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, a very strong opinion leader endorsement for that audience. The article closes with comments from Stanford communication professor Jon Krosnick, who implies that public opinion trends have left a once reluctant administration with nothing to lose by offering up meaningful policy.

In an subsequent article published on June 4th in The New York Times, the headlines are far less positive, implying that there are a few who find something to like with the Bush plan, though expert opinion still weighs in heavily against it. The introductory paragraph reinforces this impression, asserting any support is “conditional” upon the administration following through on its plan. The end quote in the article, from Dartmouth professor and environmental advocate Michael Dorsey, emphasizes that on climate change, given its track record, the Bush administration is not to be trusted.

The point is that when we are asked to make sense of an uncertain and complex subject, perception will be at least in part both frame and reference dependent. This framing-by-way-of-editing leads to slightly different interpretations as to the motivations of the Bush administration and how experts are evaluating its new climate plan.

“Give us a press conference to say what you've done yesterday. Don't tell us any more what you're going to do tomorrow.” ~Michael Dorsey

Moral Obligation

Latour reminds us that “Society (as well as Nature) is a consequence of settling controversies and thus cannot be used as an explanation for how or why controversies end.” Global warming is an issue where science and politics intersect and sound science is vital in matters of fact where future generations are concerned.

In our argument for or against the cause of global climate change, we are driven to ask who the scientists and statisticians are and who their allies are. Also, we ask, ‘who are the dissenters?’ More often, we find the naysayers are special interest groups with strong ties to the oil and gas industries who are looking to protect their pocketbooks, thwarting public policy in the direction that favors the contributors of global warming. Science has a vital role to play in global climate research by offering the best, most accurate data possible to help inform the policymaking process. This is where the Bush administration could uphold integrity in a forthright manner and welcome any new scientific evidence showing that the earth is, in fact, warming as a result of human-made greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, the current administration continues to censor and falsify information which undermines scientific and technical expertise. The earth has been warming at an unprecedented rate and there is almost unanimous scientific consensus about global climate change, yet the current administration is more concerned about the economic impact on the United States. President Bush said, “most reasonable people will understand that [the Kyoto Protocol is] not sound public policy.”

Integrity

Science is an account of things we can’t see in terms of things we can. Latour and Kosso tell a tale in which different people with different beliefs about the world will see different theories as having internal virtues. Science and technology have shaped the world we know and every story we have ever been told is to separate facts and values, science and nature, but that is not the way to go. Take an alternative look, says Latour. Civic engagement would encourage a look at the alternatives and rather than muck around we can try and solidify our claim by being objective and well-connected to the debate over global warming. Debates don’t come to a principled end but rather they come to practical ends. Drawing boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate claims of whether something is solid or not are the multiplicities of the outcome and further outcomes. In the undoing of science an of the facts which speak to us over climate change, we have been undoing the evidence, going upstream, and offering alternatives to meet practical ends.

Latour provides us the opportunity to move ahead and take matters into our own hands and come out of the cave so that we can think better than we did before about issues such as these. Science is an account of things we can’t see in terms of things we can. These different propositions will bring about integrity and is a dynamic worth exploring.

More Skepticism

In 2002 Donald Rumsfeld was asked how he was so sure that Iraq has attempted to or was willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. In an answer that would become fodder for public speculation, he actually said: "There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." Got that?

Five years later, here's what ExxonMobil's Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson said in late May to the annual shareholders meeting when asked why the company has funded groups that deny global warming is a real problem in the face of scientific consensus. He said: "There's much we know and can agree on around the climate change issue, and there's much that we just don't believe we do know...and we want to have a debate about the things we know and understand, the things we know about that we don't understand very well, and the things we don't even know about around this very complex issue of climate science. So that is what will continue to be our position." Sound familiar?

Vagueness of Assembly

Rather than being forced to see the divides between nature and society, Latour would argue that it's about time "for social and natural scientists to forget what separates them and start looking jointly at those ‘things’ whose hybrid nature has, for many decades now, already united them in practice." The common world made up of assemblages and natural scientists who deal with primary qualities of the natural world might prove favorable to the social sciences in not taking short cuts of due process.

Countries shouldn't be "free" to pursue their own strategies for meeting targets of reducing greenhouse gasses, an approach some environmental groups called vague. Why would it be voluntary not mandatory for all global economies? Mr. Bush is delaying in setting goals for reducing greenhouse gasses. He didn't support the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and he skirts around the subject of global warming by playing his political trump card of reducing chaos and suffering in the world by making "America safer, because prosperous nations are less likely to breed violence and export terror.'' What does violence and terror have to do with global warming? It may be his way of mixing politics and science.

Abandoning Progress

Some things are as they are. Everyone agrees that global warming is drastic but what we need to do about it is perplexing. A sense of urgency has taken hold. The more the Sciences tell us about the world the more we see clearly, and that will help us reduce the social aspect of science. Growing detached of our ideas of economic progress and our over consumptive behaviors will, over time, help us in trying to achieve the good common world. These are the things we have to continue to be concerned about.

To make life out of nothing, engineering the cooling of the planet by injecting sulphate particles into the atmosphere, is not a modest intervention and a band-aid cure for slowing the warming of the planet as a placeholder for future research. At least we might know of one way to move if need be. Some things we need to do rapidly. This new interest of geoengineering was set off by and article written by Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and published in the journal of Climate Change in August of 2006. He believes that political attempts to limit man-made greenhouse gases are so pitiful that a radical contingency plan is needed, and radical it is! His claim that injecting sulphates into the stratosphere would postpone the effects of emissions control and buy the time needed for emissions reductions to start having an effect. Crutzen’s matter-of-fact way of framing the issue is striking. He points out that mankind already puts more than 100 million tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere every year that sits lower in the atmosphere in the air we breathe and does us no good and contributes to 500,000 premature deaths every year. However, introducing sulpher into the stratosphere every year only seems that it would get rid off the short-term effects of global warming and does not address the real need for change in our behavior, to abandon progress – economic mainly – because we have to slow down.

When Nature Speaks for Itself

Facts about the world can be explained in terms of things we can’t see derived from things that tell us how the world is after the dust settles. In our attempt to make sense of the world beyond two houses, two camps, bicameralism is more than pitting facts vs. values or politics vs. nature. The mobilization of nature takes place inside the collective which is made up of humans and non-humans and the proposition of how the world hangs together – or not. But the world seems more plausible when it fits together.

Because of the gaps in understanding between scientists, policy makers, journalists, and the public domain, there remains a major barrier to the adoption of sensible responses to the climate problem. So, how do disputes end? When the dust settles. How could the collective get on with doing something about global warming, since the debate already seems to have shifted from whether humans are warming the planet, to what to do about it? What we know and what we should believe, or as Latour would say, what is and what ought to be, appears in Dressler and Parson’s book, The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change: A Guide to the Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2006), where they distinguish between objective understanding and subjective value judgment. This way of thinking holds promise because it curbs the potential to use ignorance to manipulate the debate, but also acknowledges the limits of scientific understanding. Even when policy makers ground their decisions in the best available knowledge, they must still balance that knowledge with ethical considerations and the policy implications to a broad range of constituents.

When Science and Politics Intersect

Global warming science has been swept under the rug by the Bush Administration in the suppression and distortion of scientific research that obviously points to evidence that the earth’s temperature is rising at an unprecedented rate. I will never forget when George Bush said global warming is not based on "sound science.” The question keeps coming back, although we know the answer very well, that human activity is largely to blame for the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, in spite of the fact that both the oceans and the land biosphere respond to global warming. Sadly, the White House knowingly caters to the polluters that ought to be curbing their carbon emissions. With industry goals in mind, it’s not sound ‘public policy’ to look at the facts. However, among experts global warming is an ecological crisis. “We can either wait until the sciences come up with additional proofs that will put an end to uncertainties or we can consider uncertainty as the inevitable ingredient of crises in the environment and in public health” (B. Latour, Politics of Nature, p 63). I believe, and I am sure Latour would too, that the slowness to react to the cause and effect of climate change is only creating new difficulties.

Science in Action

Our term’s focus has thus far explored the writings of Bruno Latour, a trained philosopher of social science, in our reading of his books Science in Action and Politics of Nature and the discussion of the “doing” of science. I will keep a running post of my examination into the key issues that surround global warming, who the key players are that do the controversial talking, and the collective’s responsibility to do the right thing for future generations.

Bruno Latour, a trained philosopher of social science, reminds us of the late Rene Descartes who debated existentialism and rationalism in the 17th century. In his book Science in Action, Latour is powerfully persuasive. What is most interesting about his contextual argument is the “doing” of science and how he has brought about certain things that are well established, claims as he calls black boxes. How scientists have arrived at those claims and the actual instruments used to establish those claims help the non-scientist go beyond conventional thinking into the more post conventional and philosophic way of undoing science and opening the black box. He uses the black box as a metaphor denoting a piece of machinery that “runs by itself.” That is, when a series of instructions are too complicated to be repeated all the time, a black box is drawn around it, allowing it to function only by giving it “input” and “output” data. For example a CPU inside a computer is a black box. Its inner complexity doesn't have to be known; one only needs to use it in their everyday activities.

I find Latour’s portrayal of science interesting as he uses the black box analogy to make way through the interpretation of scientific claims. In our inquiry, we are trying to put ourselves beyond the course of fact-finding and get to the “how” facts came to be. Thus we anticipate future moves and counter moves in an attempt to understand moves of others while not always having control over what others say and this is what makes the ‘game’ interesting. In my interpretation of Latour’s argument he means to say that the fate of the claim you make is in the hands of others.

Conventional stories don’t tell us the insider info. For instance an introductory biology course taught at university is so many miles away from what biologists actually do. The intro courses don’t get at how the bold-faced definitions in our text books came to be. They just exist. I would ask Latour and others, why explore what is already known of science? Why not explore supporting evidence of unfounded science?

When we think of science, it is not as free from politics as one might think. Scientific experts practice ways to democratize politicoscientific controversy and the only players are not just the experts who come to understand the dispute. It is how we reevaluate past events to understand current events that we can reaffirm and further solidify our claims. Furthermore, there are things that are well established in science and we are interested in how we arrive at the well established. Even though the conventional way of understanding things is a lot easier to debate, what is inside the black box is the object of our inquiry. Latour’s aim is to penetrate science from the outside by following controversies. When we no longer dispute the content, the dispute is over and it becomes true. It’s true because that’s the way the world “is.”

There is a great distinction between the understanding of science and the undoing of science. How do we begin to untangle such claims and tease out the theories to back up the dam? We move through time, up and downstream and within boundaries of what is real. Science is an account of things we can’t see in terms of things we can. We don’t want to get carried along in our dissention. We want to tear the claims apart so we can continue our journey through the construction of facts.