The House Science Committee is putting climate science on trial
Next Wednesday, the House Science Committee will meet for a full committee hearing to challenge climate science on a public stage.
The hearing, titled “Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method,” is the first full House Science Committee hearing that’s been scheduled since Scott Pruitt was confirmed as Trump’s EPA chief, and since Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney announced the White House’s latest budget drafts by declaring: “Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward — we’re not spending money on that anymore.”
“Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward — we’re not spending money on that anymore.”
The witnesses who have been called by the Republican majority are Dr. Judith Curry, Dr. John Christy, and Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. The committee Democrats have called their own witness, Dr. Michael Mann, who has publicly sparred with Curry, Christy, and Pielke on a number of occasions.
Curry announced the hearing on her blog “Climate, Etc.” by writing: “This should be high theater for climate geeks. Get your popcorn ready.”
Personally, I’ll leave the popcorn in the box.
Scientists like Curry and Pielke highlight the desperate need for responsible science communication — and the risks presented by scientists who fail to appreciate that the nuances of debates among colleagues rarely translate well for the general public when mediated by politicians.
Curry’s work has largely focused on variability and uncertainty in climate forecasting models, while criticizing those who don’t emphasize this uncertainty as much as she believes they should. What Curry and those who support her don’t recognize — or worse, choose to ignore — is that “uncertainty” for scientists and “uncertainty” for policymakers are two vastly different beasts.
While acknowledging limits and accounting for variability and uncertainty is critical for scientists who are designing research projects and forecasting models, “uncertainty” in the hands of climate change deniers is political cover to write off the whole subject as a sham. Politicians in the U.S. who deny that climate change is impacted by human activity — or, like House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith and his Senate counterpart Jim Inhofe (R-OK), deny that it exists at all — aren’t interested in why scientists disagree over certain research regarding climate change. These aren’t men genuinely interested in rigorous scientific debate. These are men searching for political cover in order to defund scientific agencies and environmental programs that, by and large, are valuable and necessary.
Pielke has, unfortunately, similarly struggled to bridge this communications gap. He rejects those who’ve labeled him as a climate change skeptic or denier. His work focuses on extreme weather, and he believes that no direct relationship can yet be established between climate change and extreme weather events around the globe. This is, of course, a fair conclusion regarding a topic of active debate among scientists. Yet any responsible scientist who grasps even the basic agenda of climate change deniers in Congress would understand that airing their disagreements with colleagues— as scientists — before the House Science Committee will do nothing to improve the state of climate science research today. Again, the Republican leadership of the House Science Committee has demonstrated absolutely no interest in the nuances of the scientific debate regarding different aspects of climate change; their driving motivation is to generate political cover for their climate change denial.
You see this sort of disconnect between the scientific community and the general public too often; take, for example, the ongoing debate in states like Texas regarding whether or not evolution should be taught alongside creationism in public schools. “Theory,” much like “uncertainty,” carries a vastly different meaning for scientists than for large portions of the general public. When those who argue that evolution and creationism should be taught side by side refer to evolution as a “theory,” they clearly aren’t using the term as scientists use it; the term is used to convey ambiguity rather than indicate a well-substantiated explanation based on repeated observation and experiment.
If only we lived at a time and in a country where climate science and the proper policy responses to climate change could be the subject of nuanced, thoughtful, reasoned public debate. But we do not. The political reality of the U.S. today doesn’t allow for it, and unfortunately this has resulted in a high degree of scrutiny for the field of climate science. Because the field itself is rapidly evolving, its natural that colleagues will disagree and question each others’ findings and debate about the significance of different data and models. But all of that is lost when scientists bring the debate into the public eye on a political stage.
Science communication is vitally important, particularly today, and scientists should defend their work before the public eye. But scientists must also learn when they’re being used as tools, and when what they might see as nuanced advocacy will simply be manipulated and warped by politicians who couldn’t care less about data or science or anything that doesn’t square with their own agendas.
