Do scientists who work on the climate issue have a responsibility to place their work into policy context, specifically, to help policy makers understand the significance of science for alternative courses of action?

Here I’ll argue that the answer to this question is clearly “yes,” based on a careful look at the historical record of justifications given for public investments in climate research, but that many scientists, including leaders in the community and the IPCC, believe that the answer is “no.” Such a refusal to formally sanction, much less engage in, the invention and evaluation of new policy options is one very important reason why the climate issue remains in gridlock, with debate continuing over bad options all around.

(Note: To be fair, some limited progress has been made on connecting climate science and policy, particularly at the regional and sub-regional scales, but there is a long way to go. See this informative but deflating post from Lisa Dilling on the recent CCSP workshop on decision support.)

Before proceeding several clarifications are in order. First, by “climate science” I mean all of the work conducted under climate research programs, which includes physical science and social science (including economics), and summarized by all three Working Groups of the IPCC. My focus is not exclusively on WG I-type science. Second, many scientists and organizations are indeed involved in political advocacy on the climate issue, where political advocacy is defined as working to reduce the scope of choice available to decision makers. Such advocacy often takes the form of explicit endorsement of specific policies. But advocacy can also be “stealth advocacy” in the form more general endorsement of those who support particular policies, or more commonly, opposition of those who advocate a particular course of action, with such opposition typically expressed in terms of science. What is wrong with advocacy anyway, as it is a noble calling in a democracy? In general nothing, but in some situations ever more advocacy can actually contribute to sustaining a political gridlock when all available options are bad ones, as I argued last year in an essay criticizing advocacy efforts by national science academies. The climate change debate desperately needs a dramatic expansion of policy options under discussion, but where will these new and innovative options come from?

Not from the U.S. scientific community is one answer (and I think that this argument holds more broadly, but the examples below focus primarily on the U.S. where more than half of all climate research funding comes from). To understand this argument, I’ll present a bit of history on science-policy interactions on the climate issue. I’ll provide references at the bottom for those interested in further details or sources.

From the start, politicians put responsibility for action on climate change onto the shoulders of scientists. Al Gore was representative of this dynamic when he stated in 1984,

“The ability of political and economic institutions to respond to a challenge of this magnitude will depend in large part upon how the scientific community explains the problem, how much certainty it invests in that explanation, and how actively involved it becomes in spelling out what the clearly sensible choice might be.”

Politicians are more than happy to hand off this hot potato to scientists because dealing with climate change means making decisions and making decisions, especially far-reaching ones, holds the prospect of upsetting important constituencies, which cannot be a good thing for most politicians.

For their part the scientific community, or at least its leadership, warmly accepted the responsibility for leading the response to climate change. In the late 1980s the scientific community organized a massive research program under an explicit policy mandate. The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was developed with the following goal:

“To gain an adequate predictive understanding of the interactive physical, geological, chemical, biological and social processes that regulate the total Earth system and, hence establish the scientific basis for national and international policy formulation and decisions ”

Read that goal statement closely. It is important to recognize that the USGCRP was never proposed as a basic research program, it was proposed as a program to support policy making, with science as a means to that end, not the end itself. The USGRP is a policy research program that includes climate science as its focus. This focus was codified in a 1990 law (P.L. 101-606) calling for the USGCRP to support policy development (a detailed history of this law and its meaning can be found in Pielke 1995 referenced below). In 1989 before the law was passed a member of Congress expressed his reasons for supporting the program, “We [in Congress] are in desperate need of policy assistance. What are the ways – what are some of the things that we could do to increase the policy relevance of scientific research on global change?” The answer to this question was to initiate a large-scale climate research program with a policy mandate.

Now it was not too long after the law was passed that a number of members of Congress began asking for results. In 1993 a leading official of the USGCRP testified before Congress and was asked the following question,

“How much longer do you think it will take before [the USGCRP is] able to hone [its] conclusions down to some very simple recommendations, on tangible, specific action programs that are rational and sensible and cost effective for us to take . . . justified by what we already know?”

The USGCRP official provided a stunningly telling reply, “Whether [USGCRP] research can translate into actions to deal with the climate change problem . . . is not really the business of the [USGCRP]. That is where our job ends and, thank God, in some sense, other people’s job starts”

What?!? Think about this; here we have a multi-billion dollar research program, justified as providing “useable information to policymakers,” and a leading official of that program disavows the program’s connection to action? Either the program was misjustified or mis-implemented (see Pielke 1995 cited below for a comprehensive argument to this effect, in short the program’s goals were never clearly described so that scientists could think they were supported to do basic research, policy makers could expect relevant, and the different perspectives were not resolved).

Fast forward a decade to the Bush Administration which decided to rearrange the structure of U.S. climate research by creating a Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) as an umbrella over the USGCRP and a new effort, the Climate Change Research Initiative (note: I am PI on a major CCRI research program on climate science policy, SPARC). The new structure restated the policy focus of climate research, “The Climate Change Research Initiative (CCRI) [was] launched by the President in June 2001 to reduce significant uncertainties in climate science, improve global climate observing systems, and develop resources to support policymaking and resource management.” And similarly to a decade earlier, the leadership of the program disavowed any responsibility for connecting research to policy, with its director stating in congressional testimony in 2003, “The CCSP studies and reports do not recommend specific policy options.”

One difference between 1993 and 2003 was that some prominent observers began to complain about the situation. For example, Donald Kennedy, editor of Science, wrote a 2003 editorial titled “The Policy Drought on Climate Change” in which he complained about the focus of the CCSP as being too narrowly on basic research and too little on research on policy options. Yet much stayed exactly the same.

In 2003 Dan Sarewitz and I wrote an essay for Issues in Science and Technology making many of these points titled “Wanted Scientific Leadership on Climate” (cited below). Issues printed an incredible letter in response from a group of very prominent scientists whose names will be familiar to anyone working on the climate issue – Tom Wigley, Ken Caldiera, Martin Hoffert, Ben Santer, Michael Schlesinger, Steven Schneider and Kevin Trenberth. In the letter (here as PDF) these scientists, apparently unaware of the justifications and legislation behind the research program which supported their work, sought to rewrite history in terms of their own interests,

“The basic driver in climate science, as in other areas of scientific research, is the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. Furthermore, the desire of climate scientists to reduce uncertainties does not, as Pielke and Sarewitz claim, arise from the view that such reductions will be of direct benefit to policy makers”

Compare this statement to the goals of the USGCRP and CCRI described above, and there is an obvious mismatch, again leading one to the conclusion that climate research is either misjustified or mis-implemented. The letter-writers then further disavow an explicit connection between climate research and the needs of policy makers, perhaps unaware that this is in fact established in law,

“Of course, it would be nave to suppose that climate scientists live in ivory towers and are driven purely by intellectual curiosity. The needs of society raise some interesting and stimulating questions that are amenable to scientific analysis. It is true, therefore, that some of the research results that come from climate science are policy relevant. It is also true that scientists in the community are well aware of this. It is preposterous, however, to suggest that climate science is primarily policy driven.”

Preposterous. Right. About as preposterous as looking at climate research program documents, public law, and congressional hearings to document the repeated justifications expressed by and scientists and policy makers for spending tens of billions of dollars of public monies on climate research.

The disengagement of the scientific community from discussion of policy options continues. For example, the IPCC eschews formal discussions of policy options (something it did not do in its first assessment report where it had an explicit mandate to consider policy options). The net result of the IPCC’s disengagement from discussing policy options means that it has in practice fallen in behind the Framework Convention and rather than helping to lead policy discussions on climate change it has arguably become more of an instrument of political advocacy than policy analysis. By taking such a stance, the IPCC is quickly working itself towards complete policy irrelevance. When 2007 comes around decision makers will need information on what to do post-Kyoto, not arguments in support of Kyoto or Climate Convention Article 2.

I was motivated to describe this history by a valuable conversation over the past week on this blog post with several climate scientists that I respect who vigorously defended the proposition that climate scientists should steer clear of engaging in policy research or discussions that might help to expand or clarify the scope of policy alternatives available to decision makers.

One scientist captured (perhaps unwittingly) the perspective held by the vast majority of scientists that I engage with on this issue when he wrote, “Nothing is perfect in this world, and that includes your utopian dream where scientists seek to “expand the scope of choice”. Sure, that’s a great job for some people to do, and I’m all for it. I don’t see why it has to necessarily be _my_ job just because my field of research may have some policy implications.” By contrast, in the U.S. at least climate research is supported for exactly this reason. For researchers who accept funding under the CCSP/USGCRP engaging policy is your job.

So my response to climate scientists who decry the pace of action on climate change, criticize the policies of Bush Administration, battle those nefarious climate skeptics, or their perceived mischaracterizations of their science in the media is as follows:

It may be wise to understand the justifications for the ample funds that our fields received from the public. Tens of billions of dollars in research support are provided not because the public or politicians share our innate curiosity in the behavior and implications of climate phenomena, but instead because they want policy options that are politically feasible, technically possible, and economically viable. When you complain about the lack of action, ask yourself where policy options come from. Then go look in the mirror.

References

Pielke Jr., R. A., 1995: Usable Information for Policy: An Appraisal of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Policy Sciences, 38, 39-77. (PDF)

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2000: Policy History of the U.S. Global Change Research Program: Part I, Administrative Development. Global Environmental Change, 10, 9-25. (PDF)

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2000: Policy History of the U.S. Global Change Research Program: Part II, Legislative Process. Global Environmental Change, 10, 133-144. (PDF)

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2001: The Development of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, A Policy Case Study Prepared for the 2001 American Meteorological Society Policy Symposium, June. (PDF)

Pielke, Jr., R. A. and D. Sarewitz, 2003. Wanted: Scientific Leadership on Climate, Issues in Science and Technology, Winter, pp. 27-30. (PDF)