2005 American Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (AARST)
Workshop: Rhetoric and the Politicization of Science
Wednesday, November 16, 2005 – Boston, MA

The controversy over the “politicization” of science advice and policy under
the Bush administration provides an opportunity for rhetoricians of science to
engage with a broader public discourse about the role of science in society.
The American Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology is
soliciting proposals for its 2005 pre-conference, held on Nov. 16 in
conjunction with the annual meeting of the National Communication Association
in Boston, MA. Desired proposals include but are not limited to the following
types:

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Author: Hans Von Storch and Nico Stehr in Der Speigel

The following essay by "http://w3g.gkss.de/G/Mitarbeiter/storch/">Hans Von Storch and = "http://www.itas.fzk.de/mahp/stehr/stehr.htm">Nico Stehr was
originally published in Der Spiegel, a German newspaper, on 24 January
2005. We are providing an English translation with the permission of the
authors and Der Speigel.

The days are gone when climate researchers sat in their ivory towers
packed to the rafters with supercomputers. Nowadays their field has become
the stuff of thrillers, and they themselves have risen to take on the
leading roles. The topic is so hotly contested, the prognoses so
spectacular, that they are no longer merely the subject of media reports;
now the specialists in staged apocalypse have moved in. Last year Roland
Emmerich depicted a climatic collapse provoked by humankind in his film
“The Day After Tomorrow.” Since last week the belletristic counterpart has
been available in German bookstores: the novel “State of Fear,” by the
best-selling author Michael Crichton.

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On Monday I asked, “Some members of the climate science community are gathered this week in Exter, UK at a meeting titled, “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change.” Is this meeting for scientists to inform policy makers on a range of possible goals for climate stabilization and a range of means to achieve those goals, or is it a strategy of political advocacy designed to support adoption of a particular goal over others?”

The Steering Committee for the meeting has published its report summarizing the meeting which provides a definitive answer:

“Limiting climate change to 2 deg C implies stabilizing the atmospheric concentration of all greenhouse gases. The CO2 concentration must not exceed 500ppmv, if the climate sensitivity is 2.5 deg C. Global emissions would need to peak in 2020 and decline to 3.1 GtC/year by 2095… Major investment is needed now in both mitigation and adaptation. The first is essential to minimise future impacts and the latter is essential to cope with impacts which cannot be avoided in the near to medium term.”

If the Exter conference is indicative of the direction that the IPCC will be taking in its Fourth Assessment Report, then it will be remembered as a key milestone in the continuing evolution of the IPCC from honest broker to political advocate.

If anyone wants to understand why science is coming to be viewed as increasingly political one need only look to a quote from Kevin Trenberth in an article in the current issue of the Economist.

“For example, when Kevin Trenberth, head of the IPCC’s panel on hurricanes, recently suggested that there exists a link between climate change and the wave of powerful hurricanes last year, he was immediately challenged. Christopher Landsea, a hurricane expert at America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, resigned from the IPCC panel, arguing that Dr Trenberth’s comments went beyond what the peer-reviewed science could justify. He wrote a public letter complaining that: “because of Dr Trenberth’s pronouncements, the IPCC process has been subverted and compromised, its neutrality lost.”

Dr Trenberth retorts that “politics is very strong in what is going on, but it is all coming from Landsea and colleagues. He is linked to the sceptics.” He explains the remarks in question by saying that he did not suggest climate change was affecting the number of hurricanes, but was affecting their intensity, because of hotter ocean temperatures, a conclusion he says the data readily bears out.”

(For background on the Landsea/IPCC issue please see recent discussion in the Prometheus archives.)

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Why is it that the climate debate has organized itself around the notion of “dangerous interference”? What consequences does this framing of the problem have for research and action?

I have argued in several papers that the basic dynamics of the climate debate, including the strong incentives to map politics onto science and an institutional bias against adaptation, stem from the exceedingly narrow definition of “climate change” adopted by the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Below is an excerpt from a short paper that makes this case. A reference to a longer, peer-reviewed paper now in press can be found at the bottom. Comments and reactions are welcomed.

An excerpt from: Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2004:What is Climate Change?, Issues in Science and Technology, Summer, 1-4. (PDF)

“Believe it or not, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), focused on international policy, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), focused on scientific assessments in support of the FCCC, use different definitions of climate change. The two definitions are not compatible, certainly not politically and perhaps not even scientifically. This lack of coherence has contributed to the current international stalemate on climate policy, a stalemate that matters because climate change is real and actions are needed to improve energy policies and to reduce the vulnerability of people and ecosystems to climate effects…

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Six Presidential Science Advisers To Speak At CU-Boulder In 2005
Feb. 2, 2005

Six presidential science advisers are slated to speak at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005, beginning with a Feb. 14 event featuring John Marburger, current White House science adviser to President George W. Bush.

Sponsored by CU-Boulder’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, the year-long series titled “Policy, Politics and Science in the White House: Conversations with Presidential Science Advisers” is free and open to the public. The primary goal is to provide a new perspective on the role of science in policy and politics at the highest levels of government, said Roger Pielke Jr., director of the center.

The Marburger talk will be at 7 p.m. in Room 100 of the Mathematics Building, located at the intersection of Colorado Avenue and Folsom Street on campus.

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Joel Gratz, Ryan Church, and Erik Noble have published an article in the magazine Weatherwise on lightning safety and sports stadiums. This paper, like Logar and Pollock (2004) mentioned last week, began as a term paper in one of my graduate seminars. A peer-reviewed version is in press. Congrats Joel, Erik and Ryan!

I have collaborated with colleagues Mary Downtown and Zoe Miller on a project sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to reanalyze the historical record of flood damages in the United States. The results of our project can be found here: http://www.flooddamagedata.org. Last week a journal article describing the project came out in Natural Hazards Review:

Downton, M., J. Z. B. Miller and R. A. Pielke, Jr., 2005. Reanalysis of U.S. National Weather Service Flood Loss Database, Natural Hazards Review, 6:13-22. (PDF)

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