Weeknotes 4 - from Risk and Suppression to Gaps and Agency

Contents

1. Feedback is very welcome
2. Erratum
3. What are climate scientists saying, and what could they be telling us?
4. Returning to self-censorship
5. TL;DR Gaps and Agency - Gaps in Agency?

Feedback is very welcome

This set of weeknotes hones in on a discussion about the kinds of information that climate scientists could usefully convey, and digs a little deeper into the concept of self-censorship.

I am writing these notes quickly, doing my best to correctly represent the sources, but I would love to learn if I am mistaken in my understanding in any way. You can contact me on @climatejustice.social/@PenguinJunk.

Erratum

Every day is a school day! Do you know that there are two different words censure and censor? I didn’t until I did the final edit of my previous post and realised that I’d actually been searching for “self-censur*”, not “self-censor*”. The two words have subtly different meanings - censure is about finding blame, censor is about blocking communications. Censorship is definitely what I have been considering and it turns out that there is a fair body of work in this area. I’ll return to that.

What are climate scientists saying, and what could they be telling us?

Whilst finishing my last weeknotes, Kris De Meyer emailed me with a provocation about “truth” in climate communication, arising out of my previous weeknotes. His very fair point is that, in terms of communicating about climate science, what may happen cannot be “true” or “false” until it has (or has not) happened. Therefore, the only reporting on the past and present conditions can be truth. This is pertinent when considering this article from yesterday’s Guardian (Carrington, 2024) based on survey findings in which lead authors and review editors on IPCC reports say what they think the future holds. The key message is that, when asked to predict an ultimate global temperature above pre-industrial levels, the average response is 2.5-3 degrees (which is well above the Paris accord). These scientists are often frightened and despairing and reading their personal assessments is tough. It’s tough because these are experts with the deepest of understandings of their fields, their assessments count. What does it tell us?

Firstly, there is a strong contrast with the often optimistic message from many political and industry voices who communicate that we have solutions to climate in hand (mostly this talk is about electric cars). Whilst not surprising, this represents a some sort of knowledge gap, one that indicates that much is not settled about climate science-policy. It is tempting to ask “who is more correct?” but, given De Meyer’s provocation, this is futile. I found Carton (2021) particularly helpful here as it very clearly describes how orthodox economic approaches shape the IPCC outlook, which includes assumptions that markets and incrementalism are the most effective and pragmatic means of transitioning to a low carbon world. Under such conditions, it is difficult to imagine that discontinuous societal, economic or political change can occur, at least for the better.

Simon Sharpe and Kris De Meyer argue for risk assessment, rather than prediction. Sharpe discusses this when talking about his book “Five Times Faster” in Poe and Sharpe (2023), and demonstrates a “risk-opportunity” alternative to cost-benefit analysis in Sharpe et al. (2021). This risk assessment is in the insurance or defence sense (Makin, 2024, also “Ginger” in De Meyer et al., 2022), whereby the bias is towards avoiding false negatives: to not leave out something that matters simply because it has a high uncertainty. This contrasts, they say, with a scientific culture that prefers not to stray into “what is the worst that could happen?” territory, because such scenarios may be found to never materialise, which can damage a scientist’s reputation. Conversely, reputational damage in economics (also medicine) is more likely to occur if something materialises that has not been accounted for. Thus, there is a gap in how risks are described by economics (“the worst case scenario”) and those described by climate science (“the most probable scenario”) which may partly explain decisions that apparently prioritise industrial benefits over maintaining a stable climate (also, agency and timescales and many other factors play a role).

I’ll be honest, I am still emerging from a strongly false-positive averse mindset and haven’t grasped if these differences are playing out in, for example, the most recent reporting from IPCC. Reading the IPCC description of their concept of risk (Reisinger et al., 2020) seems very similar to me to risk assessment such as in a work-place setting, where it’s a triangulation of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. And I am not sure whether the Guardian’s survey findings contribute (positively or negatively) to climate action.

Returning to self-censorship

I found two articles useful for providing a general sense of the academic understanding of self-censorship. Shen and Truex (2021) find that they can characterise, in non-responses to World Values Survey, different patterns of responses, that are probably due to self-censorship by people living under authoritarian regimes. Based on quite a body of work considering self-censorship related to conflict in Israel-Palastine, Bar-Tal (2017) go into some depth about the value of the free flow of information but also why withholding information may be beneficial, defining a conception of self-censorship and identifying reasons for and types of self-censorship. Some of this may be relevant to scientists, such as negative implications for the ingroup of revealing information and that the reason may be a perception that information is not unequivocal.

The Columbia Law School launched a Silencing Science Tracker in 2016. Since then there have been 19 examples of self-censorship added to the site, all but one affecting climate scientists. The most recent is 2018 - thus all were under the Trump presidency. However, digging a little deeper, reports of self-censorship persist to at least 2022. The Union of Concerned Scientists has been surveying scientists in US federal government agencies since 2004 and in their most recent surveys (Carter, Goldman, and Johnson, 2018 and Desikan and Carter, 2023) scientists report self-censoring. In the raw responses, the indications are the scientists feel they are freer to talk about climate change now than under the Trump administration but self-censor for other reasons such as “in anticipation of White House interference”.

The explainer for the “Climate Uncensored” website, Calverley and Anderson (2022), observes how government research contracting practices do not enable dissenting knowledge to impact policy: “Funded calls for research typically exclude inquiry into policy responses unlikely to align with the incumbent economic paradigm”. This is also described in Carton (2021) as being due to prevailing political and economic logics, which define the science and knowledge production. These definitions attempt to shape research and can therefore discourage dissent from those wishing to win funding. Thus, knowledge about the limited viability of particular research directions, for instance negative emissions technologies (NET), is not conveyed to decision-makers. This observation of the suppressing impact of government research procurement practices is borne out more generally by the results of surveys and interviews in V ̈aliverronen and Saikkonen (2021). This study identifies 4 forms of suppression which can lead to self-censorship and seems to have arisen from the commodification of knowledge: political and economic control, organisational control, control between rival academics and control from the publics. Tennøy et al. (2016) study how planners - as decision-makers with specialist expertise - do and do not use that expertise. They find that they will self-censor if their knowledge contradicts the political agenda.

The concern expressed in Carton (2021) and Calverley and Anderson (2022) is that climate mitigation decisions (e.g. in emissions reduction pathways designed by IPCC and UK Committee on Climate Change) have comprehensively absorbed unproven solutions, specifically NET, increasingly at a scale that has no foundation in scientific research findings. Much like in Tennøy et al. (2016), where the decision is too often to choose a “solution” that makes matters worse (e.g. road widening tends to worsen traffic volumes), the inclusion of NET has a “mitigation-deterrent” effect, allowing emissions to continue to increase on the promise of these “climate unicorns”. Calverley and Anderson (2022) is aghast that scientists are not speaking out more loudly about this.

TL;DR Gaps and Agency - Gaps in Agency?

My starting point for this research was to try to understand the gap between what scientific expertise and policy being made on the same topic. I’ve found that there are a number of gaps that contribute poor transmission of expert knowledge into policy, including:

1. gaps in appropriate knowledge due to research procurement practices - e.g. a government investing in negative emissions technologies is unlikely to fund of research that could challenge the efficacy of this technology
2. gaps in common understanding of the problem due to different language and epistemic cultures between science and policy (economics) - e.g. risk having a different meaning for climate scientists than for policy-makers
3. gaps in knowledge about solutions due to the suppression of expertise that contradicts the political agenda - e.g. funding incentives discourage scientists from challenging accepted policy approach

There are many more reasons for these gaps but already it is clear how in three key stages of knowledge creation and communication, the expertise may be suppressed, including by scientists self-censoring.

In the previous weeknotes, I found examples of policy entrepreneurs in environmental and climate case studies and found some strong examples of policy that has been made on the basis of scientific knowledge. In contrast, in these weeknotes I’ve explored the nature of knowledge suppression in similar domains. In the TLDR of weeknotes 2, I was struck that individuals with apparently more than an average amount of agency - politicians - seemed unable to make policy despite learning about the science of climate change. Similarly, I am struck that scientists working on IPCC reports apparently feel unable to influence policy for the better.

My question therefore is, what is the different between those contexts and experts who did influence policy, even when it went against the prevailing economic setting or encumbant solution, and the contexts and experts who are unable to drive change, and who even suppress the knowledge that they have? If this question can be answered, can we use the knowledge to build the agency of experts and scientists to drive policy that aligns with their knowledge?

References

Daniel Bar-Tal. “Self-Censorship as a Socio-Political-Psychological Phenomenon: Conception and Research”. In: Advances in Political Psychology 38 (S1 Jan. 26, 2017), pp. 37–65. 10.1111/pops.12391.

Dan Calverley and Kevin Anderson. What’s In A Name? Aug. 23, 2022. https://climateuncensored.com/whats-in-a-name/ (visited on 05/08/2024).

Damian Carrington. “We asked 380 top climate scientists what they felt about the future…” In: The Guardian (May 8, 2024). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2024/may/08/hopeless-and-broken-why-the-worlds-top-climate-scientists-are-in- despair.

Jacob Carter, Gretchen Goldman, and Charise Johnson. Science Under Trump. Voices of Scientists across 16 Federal Agencies. Fact Sheet. Center for Science and Democracy, Union of Concerned Scientists, Aug. 7, 2018. https://perma.cc/2XFK-TLFT. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/science-under-trump.

Wim Carton. “3 Carbon Unicorns and Fossil Futures: Whose Emission Reduction Pathways Is the IPCC Performing?” In: Has it Come To This? 2021. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.36019/9781978809390-003/html.

Kris De Meyer et al. Net Zero Innovation Programme: Seven Insights to Manage the Complex Nature of Climate Action Delivery. 2022. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/climate-action-unit/sites/climate ̇action ̇unit/files/seven ̇insights ̇- ̇summary ̇and ̇where ̇to ̇find ̇more.pdf.

Anita Desikan and Jacob Carter. Getting Science Back on Track. Voices of Scientists Across Six Federal Agencies. Fact Sheet. Center for Science and Democracy, Union of Concerned Scientists, Feb. 22, 2023. https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2023-02/getting-science-back-on-track-report- revised.pdf. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/getting-science-back-track.

Simon Makin. “People Have Very Different Understandings of Even the Simplest Words”. In: Scientific American (Feb. 1, 2024).

Marshall Poe and Simon Sharpe. Simon Sharpe, “Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change”… 2023. https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PD6o7t0FcDnXEvwwS2Lmo?si=784dea7302c04d93

Andy Reisinger et al. The concept of risk in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: a summary of cross-Working Group discussions. Guidance for IPCC authors. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sept. 4, 2020. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2021/02/Risk-guidance- FINAL ̇15Feb2021.pdf.

Simon Sharpe et al. Deciding how to decide: Risk-opportunity analysis as a generalisation of cost-benefit analysis. Working Paper Series (IIPP WP 2021/03). UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, 2021. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/wp2021-03.

Xiaoxiao Shen and Rory Truex. “In Search of Self-Censorship”. In: British Journal of Political Science 51.4 (2021), pp. 1672–1684. 10.1017/S0007123419000735. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political- science/article/in-search-of-selfcensorship/BC47657718E97A0BBED98CC391F06F88.

Aud Tennøy et al. “How planners’ use and non-use of expert knowledge affect the goal achievement potential of plans: Experiences from strategic land-use and transport planning processes in three Scandinavian cities”. In: Progress in Planning 109 (2016), pp. 1–32. issn: 0305-9006. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2015.05.002. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305900615000306.

Esa V ̈aliverronen and Sampsa Saikkonen. “Freedom of Expression Challenged: Scientists’ Perspectives on Hidden Forms of Suppression and Self-censorship”. In: Science, Technology, & Human Values 46.6 (2021), pp. 1172–1200. 10.1177/0162243920978303. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920978303.