There’s a story we have told which goes something like this. Once upon a time, everybody was stupid, superstitious, and prone to poor judgement. Then, out of the unwashed masses, a new and brilliant breed of human emerged: the modern scientist. They could see further and with greater clarity than pretty much anyone else, and had a particular calling; to reveal – and thus subdue – anything which fell into the category of ‘nature’. Their endeavours would no doubt be for the good of humanity, but humanity in general could hardly be trusted to participate – after all, most of them can’t count very high. They would simply have to leave the scientists to it if they wanted their nasty, brutish lives to see any improvement.[1] Thus, a split reality was born. Over here is the scientist, their data, and the closest we can get to unfiltered truth. Over there is everything else.
To be fair, this story is probably about 50% true. I know I hit the universe’s jackpot when it comes to the time and place of my birth, and a lot of that is thanks to the work of myriad scientific discoveries, the majority of which I never think about long enough to question. And of course, there are plenty of scientists who do their best not to separate scientific research from the messy rest of humanity. But the divide is nevertheless real, and I’m not convinced it’s actually doing scientists any favours.
The editorial in Vol. 2, no.2 of the CO2 Newsletter complains about precisely the effects of this split reality; the findings of climate science simply aren’t landing in public, despite the best efforts of some very earnest people. This is partly because some public officials don’t want to know. But it is also partly because some scientists refuse to join everybody else at the table. There is the meteorologist who opposes the use of his work by policy makers, or a report by SRI International which argues for delaying the release of information until a more ‘credible’ case can be brought. In the climate conversations of the 1980s, a healthy number of scientists (enough to spark a debate) seemed to believe that there are research findings which ought to remain private even when they are at least partially publicly funded; it is better that the public do not know, and they – the scientists – are uniquely qualified to make such a judgement.
Barbat’s editorial suggests that this communication problem stems from the recent ‘politicisation’ of environmental sciences. But what if the opposite is true – what if the problem is that science has not historically been political enough? The attempt to purify science via the closed doors of the laboratory has not protected scientific research from the influence of humans being human. Instead, it has given a free pass to everybody who would like to ignore scientific research when it is convenient to them. Now, when a climate scientist tries to protest the actions of a political party funded by a fossil fuel corporation, they can be told to ‘stick to the science’ (or have the truth of their research rejected entirely) because they have transgressed the invisible science/politics line.
Have we learnt anything since 1981? Perhaps a little. The growing enthusiasm for citizen science projects is good, exciting, and might offer us a route into genuinely public scientific conversations about the future of the earth. Scientists have also started to change their tune. A few years ago, science communicator Joe Duggan ran a project called ‘Is This How You Feel’, asking climate scientists to – well – talk about their feelings. His premise was simple; climate scientists ‘are not robots… they are real people’.[2] Many of the contributions are moving calls to greater public engagement. But it’s striking to note that some of the scientists involved still felt the need to separate their research from the rest of their experiences. Here’s a quote from one professor at a leading British university:
“As a climate scientist I feel privileged to be alive when things are changing so fast… as a research scientist that is exciting! As a human-being, and especially as a parent, I feel concerned that we are doing damage to the planet. I don’t want to leave a mess for my children, or anyone else’s children, to clear-up.”
When scientists do their research, are they still human beings? Perhaps – in the year of our Lord 2026 – we might want to insist that scientists are people, too, and that their work belongs at the public table with everybody else.
[1] Special thanks are due to Robert Boyle and Francis Bacon for getting the ball rolling on this one. For really good commentaries on this story, see Bruno Latour and Hannah Arendt.
[2] https://www.isthishowyoufeel.com/this-is-how-scientists-feel.html