Climate Policy, Equity and Ethics

Here it is, the long-awaited article I wrote about a talk I attended last week. This is still the first draft ...

Darwinian evolution, DNA stem cell research, and climate research all involve the issues of ethics and fairness, and force the scientists involved to decide if they should have any part in advocacy or policy in addition to the pure science that they do. Dr. Richard Somerville made this point during a talk on the UCLA campus on Wednesday, January 16, during a three-day conference of the Center for Multiscale Modeling of Atmospheric Processes. His talk was entitled “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Challenges of Climate Policy, Equity and Ethics.” Somerville is a theoretical meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and served as a Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group I for the Fourth Assessment report of the IPCC.

During the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, a primary objective was to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change, but did not expand upon how much climate change is considered “dangerous.” The nations of the UN have since created their own definitions of the word, and they also have different ideas of what is fair in mitigating climate change.

What exactly constitutes fairness? The December 2007 Bali negotiations were infused with disagreements on the differentiated rights and responsibilities of developed versus developing countries. Also, in terms of geoengineering, Somerville asked who has the moral (or legal) right to decide to intentionally modify the planet, and who pays for unintended consequences. A final issue he brought up was the obligations that the current generation has to our descendants.

Somerville said that it is the job of policymakers to decide what actions to take, and that our job as scientists is to predict how climate will respond to these actions. He listed three guidelines and principles for climate policy, which can be summarized as:
1. Scientific uncertainty should not be used as an excuse to prevent all action.
2. Win-win policies, or policies that have collateral benefits, are preferable (for example, energy efficiency and conservation).
3. Scientists should not make policy, but wise policy should be informed by sound science (for example, halting stratospheric ozone depletion).
4. Do no harm (beware of unintended consequences).

Besides the ethical questions involved in deciding how involved one should be in policy and advocacy, scientists seem to have problems effectively communicating with the public. Somerville said the IPCC AR4 Working Group I decided to answer some frequently asked questions and write them for a high school teacher audience. However, they soon realized that this was easier said than done, and they ultimately had to hire a professional science writer. This experience convinced him that communicating with the public is an area with much room for improvement among climate scientists.

Progress is being made in deciding what constitutes “dangerous” anthropogenic climate change. Earlier last year, the European Union Commission effectively defined dangerous levels of climate change as anything greater than 2C above pre-industrial levels (See AS Newsletter Vol. 1, Issue 2 article by Juan A. Anel for more information). The goal of 2C was also decided upon in the Bali Climate Declaration.
Somerville included a thought-provoking quote from the 1995 Nobel Prize winner F. Sherwood Rowland in his talk. Concerning the ozone hole, Rowland was quoted by New Yorker journalist Paul Brodeur as saying, “What's the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions, if in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true!” This statement is relevant to our current quest to understand and communicate the possibilities of future climate change.