What stressors and pressures to mainstream climate scientists face (and create) online when dealing with “non-experts”? To what kind of good online etiquette might we all aspire as the world bu… turns. Who will read this? All reasonable questions, kinda sorta answered below.
It started with a (snarky) repost, as internet spats so often do. And for once, it wasn’t me who started it.
I put up an interview with Professor Eliot Jacobson, a mathematician who posts regularly on social media about temperatures, and records falling. I then posted on the All Our Yesterdays (AOY) Bluesky account. which included “If you don’t already, please follow him on BSky and also All Our Yesterdays!”
Someone who does not follow the AOY Bluesky (but does follow my personal account) quote posted saying words to the effect “No, don’t. Follow actual climate scientists.” (maybe there was no adjective in there at all, but that was the gist and tone).
I replied, saying with something to the effect “that’s a very odd post; if you don’t want it amplified, Streisand effect? Would you like to do an uncensored, unsnarked interview to appear on All Our Yesterdays? I will follow you so you can DM me.”
He then replied, “idea, do good interviews.“
I replied with something like “ah, doubling down. Okay, fine. The offer still stands. An uncensored unedited interview where you can say what you want. The last question is always “anything else you want to say?”
Then, crickets.
I don’t have proof of this because he both blocked the All Our Yesterdays account
and deleted his quote post, which meant the replies went with it. (1)
Samaras’ bio btw is thus
Climate, energy, emerging tech, resilience, & policy professor. Carnegie Mellon Univ. Institute for Energy Innovation Director. Former Biden-Harris White House OSTP Chief Advisor for the Clean Energy Transition. Personal account. He/Him. costasamaras.com
So what?
There is an easy victim-y (narcissistic) narrative that you can build about “brittle mainstream climate scientists who are frustrated at what they perceive to be amateurs muscling in on their turf with unnecessarily apocalyptic rhetoric.”
The other half of this tedious narrative is “amateur truth-tellers blatantly trolled, dismissed etc” And then there’s the whole battle about who blocked, you know, etc.
Yawn. YAWN.
Besides being boring, there are two other reasons not to go down that route. First, it would probably be unfair to Prof Samaras (see below). Second, it would be unproductive, a waste of bandwidth and a missed opportunity to think about slightly deeper questions.
So, I’d like to try both an immediate and a longer term contextualization asking the question, how do we expect scientists to behave on The Internet? (btw they are human beings, with all of the capacities that ordinary human beings have.)
So let’s try, without being patronizing or condescending, to put this in context.
First,, anyone can have a bad day on the internet, and everyone does have bad days on the internet. I have had at least my fair share of bad days, and have been met with both hostility back, but also grace and compassion, etc.
Second, the specifics, -and this again, was without me trying to either make excuses for Samaras who possibly regrets his action (or doesn’t; that ‘s kind of irrelevant.)
If you had worked very hard on the most important issue that humans face, and you had slogged your guts out working for the Biden White House trying to get better energy policy through, then January 20, 2025, which is when this interaction happened, would be a very, very shitty day.
The goons and the loons have now taken over the White House and are going to destroy pretty much everything that you’ve built, except maybe some bits that the oil companies like around Direct Air Capture and CCS. (leaving the Paris agreement, drill baby drill).
They’re also destroying the last lingering shreds of any credible response to the dominating issue of the 21st century. And they’re able to do this because they have convinced enough people that climate change is not an/the existential threat in the democracy
This is a very, very sucky day for someone who had, as per Leonard Cohen, been sentenced to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within (2).
But wait, there’s more
There is a deeper problem for “mainstream” climate scientists. How do they respond – if at all – to people who do not have their extensive training and access to information, chiming in? How do they respond to what they probably perceive as irresponsible edge-lording, people who are saying it’s worse than it is in order to generate clicks or attention?
This can be personally galling, especially if the putative edge-lord has either a lot of followers or a disproportionate impact on conversations that you are trying to have.
And the danger goes back as far as at least as far as Paul Ehrlich et al in the late 60s, early 70s. If there are people out there saying it’s going to be a disaster really, really soon, and then there is not a disaster really, really soon, this makes the job of maintaining public concern, and policymaker interest that much harder.
So mainstream climate scientists with big social media footprints feel an obligation to stamp down what they perceive to be “unhelpful alarmists.”
And let’s not pretend over here on the apocalyptic climate end of things, that there haven’t been unhelpful apocalyptic alarmists – Guy McPherson comes to mind,
So as Samaras would see it, he is trying to prevent the spread of unhelpful disinformation, albeit by, erm, amplifying it (I think my opening sentence, that this was an odd action probably pissed him off because it was true).
I don’t know, perhaps Samaras also looked at the interview and felt that there were no challenging questions. This is absolutely fair, there were no challenging questions, which is something that I won’t do again. I did it consciously on this occasion, because it was my first interview with Eliot Jacobson (3).
What’s at stake?
So we need to understand how there are climate scientists who feel themselves caught in the middle trying to explain to a public that is largely confused and misinformed that, “yes, it’s very bad,” without giving in to “it’s so bad that we can’t do anything.” And I don’t know what Prof Samaras’ opinion of Eliot Jacobson is, but I can guess.
But let’s take a broader historical view. The first person to bring carbon dioxide build up to public attention (ish) in the 20th century was not a climatologist or a meteorologist. He was a steam engineer, Guy Callendar. It turns out that sometimes outsiders see things the insiders – in love with existing theories – do not. As per Kuhn and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions etc.
Secondly, let’s remember how James Hansen was treated in 1988-89 as an irresponsible outlier who was premature in saying that the “Greenhouse Effect” was here.
Now, I am not comparing Eliot Jacobson to James Hansen. That would be foolish, but I would point out that Hansen is still publishing, still on the record. He’s saying it’s going to be really bad. (4) I
Finally, I’ve tried to avoid pop psychology and cod-Freudianism and saying that this is all about jealousy and wanting attention, feeling aggrieved or whatever. I probably haven’t succeeded. It’s hard to talk about other people’s positionality and potential emotional responses without coming across as a superior tool.
Fear factor: Things are getting worse quicker than mainstream scientists said they would
It seems fairly clear that things are quite a lot worse than the “mainstream” scientists expected them to be and the best scientists are scratching their heads and tapping their computers – see for example this interview from last August ‘We should have better answers by now’: climate scientists baffled by unexpected pace of heating.” (5) The fact that atmospheric concentrations had an annual climb of 3.6ppm is also kinda.. ominous.
Anyone with much knowledge and even a small amount of imagination (or indeed direct experience of the 1 in a 100 year events that roll around every year or two) is going to be scared.
I think everyone feels scared.
The carbon sinks are failing, it seems. That doesn’t mean we’re all going to drown/cook next week, but it DOES mean shit is getting real for people who assumed their wealth (relative or absolute) would help them ride it out.
But it’s harder for some than others perhaps. If I were a climate scientist devoted to models, projections and predictions, then as well as feeling scared, I would feel frustrated and perhaps a little bit humiliated and out of my depth. The thing that I thought was, if not controllable, that at least predictable, turns out not to be.
I would be looking for outlets for that frustration, and I would find outlets. One would probably pointing at people who might have had the temerity to be closer to seeing what was actually unfolding (or unravelling) but having done so without having the exact qualifications. I’d be particularly pissed off by people using language that I had considered intemperate, but was now becoming a little bit harder to dismiss.
And if I’d spent 4 years building policy to see it torn up, I’d be sore. And I’d be thinking about another person who spent four years in a Democratic Party controlled White House trying to make energy policy work, Gus Speth, who was in the Carter Whitehouse.
So what do we learn?
Well, if you come this far, you’ll be saying “not as much as I needed to for the return on investment.”
As far as I can tell, this (drumroll please) we need to be as kind as possible to each other on the internet. That’s it. That is all I got.
Doing this is difficult because a) “human nature” and b) the algorithms and the snark possibilities seemingly baked in (6).
Secondly, over the next four years, and however long after that, we are going to see more of these sorts of flash points with mainstream climate scientists feeling hemmed in and ignored and attacked or whatever.
We should also remember that these scientists are getting it in the neck big time from “the right” and so forth and so forth,
So all I can say is, let’s try to be as kind and compassionate and patient with people, Short of tolerating racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, etc, or if tolerating it, being aware of the dangers of validating it, encouraging it, etc.
This stuff is all really, really difficult. If it weren’t difficult, we’d be much better at having a sustained public sphere and dialogs between experts, be they natural scientists, social scientists, whatever, people with non-accredited knowledge, and the “broader public”
But we suck at it,
Footnotes
- As well as some weird snark from some rando, I also was then accused of blocking Costas and lectured about being an intellectual, etc. It’s all somewhat tedious. The person did apologize, which is a rarity on the internet. Here’s the receipts.
- Again, perhaps Samaras rolls like this all the time? I’m just trying to lay out one scenario to explain how this came to be. It might not be right. It might not be appreciated. Whatever.
- But I digress – this post is not about me, or should not be about me, trying to tidy up my reputation or display my bona fides, because, frankly, who cares?
- I don’t know what (if anything) Hansen has said about Jacobson’s efforts, but I’d be interested if anyone knows any more.
- This is a pattern with a long history – see my Socialist Lurker front page from 2006
- I did not handle all the interactions perfectly. For example, when proving my bona fides again, who cares? I linked to a different piece that I put on Nature Climate Change.