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.