Institutional decay in climate science

Roger Pielke Jr. describes the decay of climate science

By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website

Summary: Science and public policy collide in climate science as they have in few fields. Here Roger Pielke Jr., describes an example of how the resulting stress has begun to corrupt the field.

“Pielke on Climate” – Part 1 of 3.

Institutional decay in climate science.

By Roger Pielke Jr., at The Climate Fix.

Posted with his generous permission. Lightly edited.

Welcome to issue #7 of my occasional newsletter on climate and energy issues. As a reminder, my day-to-day research or writing is focused on sports governance and various issues of science policy. But I’ve written a fair bit on the topics of climate and energy over the past 25 years, including two recent books and a boatload of academic papers, and I’m paying attention. So caveat lector {reader beware}! …

Mertonian Norms and Climate Debates.

I have an op-ed in the WSJ on the parallel lawsuits of Mark Jacobson (Stanford) and Michael Mann (Penn State) who are both trying to characterize statements made by people critical of their work as legally actionable. {See the original dispute about Jacobson’s paper and about the lawsuit. See Wikipedia about Mann’s libel lawsuit.}

The two lawsuits are virtually identical in claims, argument and even the venue where their lawsuits were filed. There can be little doubt that Jacobson modeled his lawsuit on Mann’s lawsuit. Importantly, here is how my piece starts…

“I’ve worked alongside climate researchers for decades. Almost all of them are ethical, dedicated to science and not particularly political. But some leading figures and organizations in this community are weakening the norms that make science robust.” (emphasis added)

Mertonian norms are much discussed in studies of science and were first presented by Merton in his 1942 article “A Note on Science and Democracy“. I am not the first to apply these norms to the climate debate, see especially, Grundmann (2012) and Jasanoff (2010).

There are a number of very prominent examples of the flouting of scientific norms within the climate community. It is not the sort of discussion that gets you onto Christmas Card lists, but it is easy to list leaders in the community who’ve decided that expected norms of behavior don’t apply to them: Jacobson, Mann, Gleick, Pachauri, Schmidt, Rahmstorf, Shukla, Jones, Trenberth — Just to start.

Climate insiders will be intimately familiar with these folks and their efforts to quash their enemies (the “deniers”!) by bringing the techniques of power politics into scientific debates. Very recently, Gavin Schmidt, a publicly-funded NASA scientist, decided that the best way to respond to my op-ed would be to go on Twitter to repeat lies about me first made-up by the Center for American Progress. Thank you Gavin for helping to make my point.

The erosion of norms among a few leading climate scientists has been endorsed — often tacitly but sometimes explicitly — by leading scientific organizations. Mann’s lawsuits have been celebrated by leading organizations, some of which have given him awards. The sense of a cause has gripped leaders of the climate community and the causejustifies eschewing norms.

Seeing this, why wouldn’t Jacobson follow Mann down the same legal path? Of course, Jacobson’s lawsuit creates all sorts of unresolvable dissonance. Perhaps this dissonance is why scientific organisations which should be stating loudly and unambiguously that lawsuits are not way to pursue scientific debates.

This behavior will continue until norms are upheld by the community. I have enjoyed hearing Mann’s friends defend his and Jacobson’s lawsuits. This is the normalization of deviance. Perhaps these scientists can now better understand the norm-flouting and defending of President Trump.

The good news is that my op-ed has received wide support from many scientists inside the field of climate and energy, and well beyond. Please have a read. I welcome your comments.

——————- See part two tomorrow. ——————-

About the “normalization of deviance” in climate science.

This deserves much more attention, as it has become a serious problem in the institutions of climate science. To learn more about this phenomenon see its roots in this paper by the great sociologist (and Senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Defining Deviancy Down” in American Educator, Winter 1993/1994 — “How We’ve Become Accustomed to Alarming Levels Of Crime and Destructive Behavior.”

This was further developed by another American sociologist, Diane Vaughan in her 1996 book The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA. It described what she called a “normalization of deviance” within NASA that led to the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

Some future sociologist will write a book documenting this dynamic at work in today’s climate science institutions, and its horrific effect on the public policy debate about the response to climate change.

The posts in this series

1. Institutional decay in climate science.
2. More misreporting of experts’ reports.
3. The Politics of Inconceivable Scenarios.

About the author

Roger Pielke, Jr. is a Professor of Environmental Studies at the U of CO-Boulder. He was Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. He is now Director of the Sports Governance Center in the Dept of Athletics. Before joining the faculty of the U of CO, from 1993-2001 he was a Scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

His research focuses on science, innovation and politics. He holds degrees in mathematics, public policy and political science from the University of Colorado. In 2006 he received the Eduard Brückner Prize in Munich for outstanding achievement in interdisciplinary climate research. In 2012 Roger was awarded an honorary doctorate from Linköping University in Sweden and the Public Service Award of the Geological Society of America.

His page at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research has his bio, CV, and links to some of his publications. His website has links to his works, and essays about the many subjects on which he works.

He is also author, co-author or co-editor of seven books, including The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics (2007), The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming (2010), The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change (2014), and The Edge: The War against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports (2016).

Some of his recent publications.

• “Catastrophes of the 21st Century” at Aon Benfield Australia.
• “Tracking Climate Progress: A Guide for Policymakers and the Informed Public” in the IEEJ Energy Journal.
• “My Unhappy Life as a Climate Heretic” in the Wall Street Journal.
• “The Truthiness about Hurricane Catastrophe Models” with J. Weinkle in Science, Technology & Human Values.
• An example of climate activists at work that shows why they lost. His presentation at the University of Florida, 17 March 2017.