The Upstream Questions: What We Ask Of Science
“Climate change asks us questions that climate science cannot answer,” — Dougald Hine
When it comes to climate change, it seems as if there are always new questions arising: How did we get to this point? How can we stop it? What’s next? Unfortunately, there is no black-and-white, straightforward answer to any of them — and how we choose to answer these questions may have consequences.
In the excerpt below, author Dougald Hine explores how we ask and answer these complicated questions about climate change.
The following is an excerpt from At Work in the Ruins by Dougald Hine. It has been adapted for the web.
Climate Change in the Present Tense
Back when I was working for the theatre, I got a message from a Sámi woman, an artist from a reindeer herding family. A few days later, we sat in a meeting room in Stockholm, drinking coffee, as she spoke about the part of the year she spends on the land, following the animals north each summer, across the mountains from Sweden to Norway.
The conversation came around to climate change and she told me about driving to fix her uncle’s cabin. To get there, you take a winter road, the kind that runs across a frozen river. The river is always frozen until at least the third week in May – you can count on it – but this year they had found it already thawed, way ahead of schedule.
There was no getting across. Further north, the same summer, they came to a mountain where they had always stored food in the ice of a glacier. Only this year, the glacier was gone. In July, the temperature remained at over 30°C for three straight weeks as the reindeer huddled, miserable in the heat.
This is climate change in the present tense. Not a warning about what happens if we fail but how things are already. If your life is bound to the seasons, it isn’t hard to see the signs. But our lives are bound to other things.
We live in a world whose winners can change seasons almost as easily as channels on the TV. Summer or winter are only ever an air ticket away. We see strawberries on the shelves in December and the strangeness of this hardly registers. Our liberation from the constraints of the seasons is assumed to be progress but it might be wiser to call it an illusion.
All that food in the supermarket is coming from places where the seasons still count. We still live off soil and sun and rain. There is no question of going ‘back to the land’ because we never left; we just stretched the chains that link us to it so far that we lost sense of what lies at the other end.
That afternoon in the air-conditioned meeting room, in the middle of that beautiful city, I saw more clearly than I had before my own dependence on science. The layers of infrastructure, the triple-glazed windows, all the fruits of progress that turn the seasons into background decoration – all this, I thought, is why people like me need the head of a famous research institute, standing in front of a PowerPoint, showing us figures on a chart, to tell us that something is going badly wrong.
Science’s Role in Climate Change
Science is synonymous with knowledge: the word ‘science’ just means ‘what is known’, although the historical figures we think of as the founders of modern science would have called what they were doing ‘natural philosophy’. It was only in the early nineteenth century that the word took on its current meaning, marking the authority which their activities had now assumed.
In modern societies, science tells us what is real; it produces the kind of knowledge which has the right to be taken seriously and it is given a central role in the big stories these societies like to tell about the shape of history.
Much of what we know about how and why the climate is changing is disclosed to us through the activities of science. Climate change is framed and presented with the authority of science. Yet in my conversations with climate scientists, I’ve often noticed a background hum of helplessness because climate change has a way of revealing how little the authority of science is worth.
This is true not only when it comes to the well-funded forces of outright climate denial, but also in these scientists’ experience of institutions, systems and leaders who say all the right things, who affirm the seriousness of the situation, but whose actions do not reflect their words.
The encounter with climate change is calling our societies into question: it reveals the gaps in the stories we like to tell; it shows us the places where the map no longer fits the landscape and the places where it never did.
Among the stories it is calling into question is the big one of science and its role in mastering the world. But to get a handle on this, we need to start with some of the questions science cannot answer, those questions that don’t fit within the scientific framing of climate change.
One way to bring them into view is to imagine a world where the message from the climate scientists was quite different. What would it make sense to ask and how would our answers change?
Let’s say that one morning next week the IPCC were to call a press conference at its headquarters in Geneva. Before the massed lenses of the world’s media, a spokesman steps up, taps the microphone, shuffles papers, clears his throat.
‘This is an embarrassing day for us,’ he begins. ‘I have to tell you that there has been a fundamental error in our calcula- tions.’ He goes on to explain the details but the upshot is clear enough: it turns out we can burn as much coal and oil as we want, send up all those greenhouse gases, and the atmosphere will take care of it after all!
This will not happen – the science of climate change is not vulnerable to the discovery of a mistake in the maths – but just suppose it did, where would that leave us? How much would change as a result? Would it be panic over, back to the comforting trajectory of human progress narrated by the likes of Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker?
The Paradox At-Hand
I am looking at a pair of photographs, side by side, before and after. In the first, a landscape of boreal forest stretches away, green and seemingly endless, even late in the twentieth century. The second shows the same landscape today, scraped bare, stripped and cratered, cut through by the tracks of vast machines. Far off in the distance are the towers of a mining station where the processing of the raw material begins.
These are the Athabasca tar sands. Within a few years, we’ve taken an area of old-growth forest the size of a small country and turned whole swathes of it into Mordor. You can see the scars from space. The forest had to go to get at the oil – not the sweet, gush- ing oil that once sent fortune-hunters rushing to Texas or Oklahoma, but a sludge that must be strip-mined from the soil and squeezed for every drop.
This is oil that we cannot afford to burn; not if we want a chance of staying within what’s sometimes called the ‘safe zone’, where global warming is kept to two degrees. But let’s stick with the thought experiment: would the spread of such scars be an acceptable price for life as we know it, if it turned out that the oil squeezed from the soil of Alberta, or the beef raised on what was recently Brazilian rainforest, were not destabilising the climate?
Faced with those before and after photographs, my hunch is that most of the people I’ve known who work with climate change would have the same reaction I did: whatever the impact on the atmosphere, this looks like a foolish and self-destructive way to go about inhabiting a planet. Yet what strikes me is how easy it is to spend years talking about climate change without touching on this kind of question.
There’s a paradox here, a paradox of scale. Climate change defeats our attempts at perspective: it is at once too large for our ways of speaking and too small for what we need to talk about. Too large, because to treat this as one subject among others – an entry in the Dewey decimal catalogue, a possible theme for next month’s issue – is a category error. A form of denial, even.
We are dealing with something that implies a transformation we have hardly begun to acknowledge. Even the bold talk about human extinction can be a way to defer acknowledgement: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the world as we know it. The hard part is to imagine still being here, to imagine lives worth living among the ruins of what we thought we knew, who we thought we were and where we thought the world was headed.
And yet, with all that said, this thing we call climate change is also too small a way of naming the trouble in which we find ourselves. Filled with a well-founded sense of urgency and alarm, our climate talk so easily slips into talking as though this were the sum of our pre- dicament, the decisive challenge, the one big call that will determine our collective fate. If we let this stand as a definition of the trouble we’re in, then it will have consequences.
Think again of that image of the wrecked landscape: what if I told you the devastation had been brought about not to squeeze oil out of Albertan tar sands, but to extract lithium to make batteries for electric cars?
Finding Answers: How Did We Get Here?
Here’s the question I keep coming back to, the one that seems to bring it all into focus: are we in this trouble because of a piece of bad luck with atmospheric chemistry – that all the CO2 unleashed by burning fossil fuels turned out to have unhappy and unforeseeable side effects – or did we get here because of an approach to the world, a way of seeing and treating everything, that would always have brought us to such a pass, even if the climate system had been less sensitive to our industrial emissions?
One way or another, any response to climate change is going to reflect an answer to this question, and how we answer it will determine what kind of action seems worth pursuing.
If we’re dealing with a piece of bad luck, then we’ll look for a mix of hacks and fixes to patch up the way we were already doing things and stay on our existing path; if the cause lies in that way of doing things, then while we may need some of the same tricks to handle the immediate mess, the path we are on now looks like a dead end and we are left to look for other paths worth taking.
The way we answer such a question can be informed by science, but science alone cannot answer it for us because we’re not dealing with the kind of question that can be answered definitively through processes of observation, measurement and calculation. Rather, what we have is a question that calls for the exercise of judgement.
And it cannot not be answered, since any response to climate change will contain an implicit answer. If the question is not made explicit – if the existence of upstream questions, these questions that take us beyond the boundaries of what science can tell us about climate change, is not recognised – then the default answer will be to treat it as bad luck and pursue some combination of techno-fixes and lifestyle adjustments.
The trouble is, compared to the promise of science, the exercise of human judgement looks terribly fragile and fallible. Indeed, from early in the development of modern science, before it even got that name, there have been those who hoped that scientific ways of seeing and knowing the world could free us from dependence on the exercise of judgement and the disputes to which it often leads.
You can trace this hope within the history of environmentalism and the climate move- ments arising from it. Yet to expect scientific knowledge to take the place of the exercise of judgement is to ask too much of science, and those who have done so tend to end up disappointed, as we shall see.
Recommended Reads
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At Work in the Ruins
Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies
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