Reshaping climate science

The coordinator of Science Policy and Communication at Flinders University thinks there is a tendency among climate scientists to assume that the problems they are solving should be directly interesting to policy makers.

“That’s not the case - and not because the science isn’t valid” he said.

“It’s just that no policy maker in their right mind would base decisions on some of the knowledge that climate scientists are producing.”

If the climate science research community wants political support, Dr Tangney proposes that it undergo a rebranding - from “climate science” to “adaptation science”.

In the background, he said, adaptation science must still be about the deep science needed to develop a more sophisticated understanding of Earth’s changing climate.

But the public face of the science must be to deliver practical solutions to policymakers - who also happen to be many scientists’ paymasters.

“Only a portion of what we need to do to manage things - habitat, rivers, urban planning, flood defences - requires increasingly sophisticated climate change models,” Dr Tangney said.

“It’s not to say that information isn’t useful. It’s that for a lot of this stuff, you don’t need that increasingly detailed information of how the climate will change.”

“If a policy maker is looking to build flood defences, they want that detailed information as context - that’s important. But what’s much more important is understanding our inherent vulnerabilities and how much can we afford to spend to defend the electorate, in time scales that work with our political cycles?”

Dr Tangney learned to view climate change from a policy perspective as a Climate Change and Risk advisor with the Environment Agency of England and Wales.

There, he saw the release of the immensely detailed UKCP09 dataset and model, “a data behemoth”, compiled by leading UK science agencies to give probability-based forecasts of potential climates.

The dataset is useful for some scientists, like those in the Environment Agency who use UKCP09 to understand hazards like those associated with flood risk. But it delivers probabilities so shrouded in qualifications, that policy makers are unable to make practical use of them.

And it’s worth considering, Dr Tangney said, “that climate projections are not predictions”.

“They do not tell you what will happen - and there are good mathematical reasons for that.”

“So the idea of ‘optimal adaptation’ is impossible. It’s even technically unwise. What we can do, though, is build adaptation measures that are robust through a range of outcomes.”

Climate scientists need to reframe what they do “in order for it to be politically useful knowledge”.

That doesn’t mean dropping the work of building sophisticated knowledge about climate drivers, or better understanding the potential impacts on ecosystems and communities.

It’s about making all that knowledge useful - a job that Dr Tangney thinks that most climate science communities are failing at.

“I think (CSIRO chief) Larry Marshall kind of understands this, although what I understand about his cuts to CSIRO sounds totally mad. Things like measuring uptake of carbon dioxide by the oceans have direct applicability to marine policy. I’m not sure he understands what to cut.”