Chapter 2 Introduction

Climate change can be an intimidating subject for beginners. For one thing, it is a messy topic. It begins with basic scientific questions about the way that heat flows into and out of the earth, but it leads quickly to important practical, political, and philosophical questions about how changes in climate will affect people’s lives around the world, about what we—as individuals and as a society—should do about climate change, and about what responsibility individuals and groups of people should bear, both for past actions that have contributed to climate change, and for future actions that must be taken in response to the threat of climate change.

In principle, many people argue that the political aspects of climate change should be distinct and separate from the scientific aspects. The scientific facts of whether or not the climate is changing, whether or not human activity is causing climate to change, and how future climate change will affect sea-level, floods, severe storms, and other natural hazards—these questions have factual answers, and even though scientists may not know the answers yet those answers will be true or false regardless of a person’s political views or affiliation. In this view, political questions of what people should do about climate change are separate: Science tells us what the positive and negative consequences of different actions will be and then we decide through some political process which actions we want to pursue. (Beck 2011)

However, things are not so simple in practice. (Sarewitz 2004) First, there is a very powerful psychological effect called “solution aversion,” (Campbell & Kay 2014) which makes people doubt or distrust objective scientific facts if they believe that those facts imply that they should do things they do not want to do. One famous case of this was Ronald A. Fisher, one of the greatest statisticians of the 20th century, who refused to belief the overwhelming statistical evidence that smoking caused cancer because he loved to smoke his pipe and feared that if he acknowledged that smoking really did cause cancer, he might feel obliged to give up smoking. (Salsburg 2002 pp. 181–182)

Second, although we may hope that scientists do not allow political considerations to color their judgment, it turns out that scientists are only human. When factual evidence is clear and decisive, scientists do follow the evidence, even when it requires them to reject propositions they wish were true for aesthetic or political reasons. However, when the factual evidence is ambiguous scientists have to make judgment calls about what they think is most likely to be true, and in these cases, there is clear evidence that political preferences can influence scientists’ judgment. In the late 1970s, a number of experts on nuclear energy technology were asked for their judgment about several scientific and technical questions relating to energy—such as the amount of high-quality uranium ore in the world and whether cheap solar energy technology would become available in the next several decades—for which there were correct answers (there is an actual amount of uranium ore and there would be an actual price for solar energy in the year 2000) but for which the answers were not known at the time. There was no scientific reason why the answer to one question should not affect the answers to the others, but the experts’ answers fell almost entirely into two groups: Experts who favored investments into a politically controversial type of nuclear reactor believed that the answer to almost every scientific question would be the answer that would favor this kind of reactor, and the experts who opposed this nuclear reactor gave answers that did not favor that kind of reactor. (Brooks 1984; Manne & Richels 1980)

Thus, the boundaries between science and politics on controversial issues such as climate change, are not as clean as we wish they were. This does not mean that climate science is purely political. It is not. There are large parts of climate science, including the science of human-caused climate change, where the factual evidence is so overwhelming and decisive that there is little to no room for a reasonable person to doubt that temperatures are rising quickly and that human activity—mostly the use of fossil fuels—is causing almost all of this warming. However, on many other aspects, such as predicting whether severe hurricanes or tornadoes will become more intense or more frequent in the future, we don’t know the answers with great certainty and good, responsible scientists can and do disagree strongly about what they think the answer is. (Harvey 2017)

This combination of great scientific certainty about some things and great uncertainty about others makes climate science a fascinating research area but it can also make it intimidating for beginners. It is difficult for a newcomer to know what scientists know, what is certain, and what is uncertain. The fierce political debates lead many non-scientists to attack the character and honesty of scientists, and even small errors or missteps by scientists are often treated as “gotcha” moments and publicized as though they were evidence that the scientists are incompetent, dishonest, and corrupt. This can make a non-expert reluctant to say much for fear of being attacked.

Another thing that can make climate science intimidating is that the details of climate are very complex and mathematical. Teams of hundreds of climate scientists have spent decades developing huge computer models to solve the mathematical equations of the earth’s climate system, and even so, they are frustrated because the world’s biggest supercomputers can take months to make a single prediction of how the climate will change in the next century.

The good news is that you can understand a lot about the climate system and the human influence upon it without years of mathematical training. You won’t even need to know calculus. In this book, I will introduce you to the basics of the climate system and what scientists know about climate change and its causes with a minimum of mathematics. You will understand the basics of what the greenhouse effect is, how it works, and what it means for understanding how fossil fuel use is affecting the climate today and how it will affect climate in the future.

I will not review all of the evidence for the human impact on climate—that would take a whole semester and if you’re interested I would recommend my course EES 3310, which I teach every spring—but you will have a sense of what kinds of evidence scientists use to assess climate change and its causes and why scientists are so unanimous that human activity is causing rapid climate change. (Anderegg et al. 2010; Cook & Jacobs 2015; Cook et al. 2013, 2016; Doran & Zimmerman 2009; Lewandowsky et al. 2013; Linden et al. 2015; Oreskes 2004; Skuce et al. 2016; Verheggen et al. 2014)

Finally, I will review what scientists do and don’t know about how climate will change in the future and how this will affect people’s lives.

References

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