I’ve been thinking a lot about this call by Bruce Glavovic, Tim Smith and Iain White for a moratorium on further climate change research until the “science-society contract” is restored:
Climate change science is settled to the point of global consensus. We have fulfilled our responsibility to provide robust knowledge. We now need to stop research in those areas where we are simply documenting global warming and maladaptation, and focus instead on exposing and renegotiating the broken science-society contract. The IPCC’s 6th Assessment will be completed in 2022. Will the response to this assessment be any different to the previous five assessments? Nothing indicates that this will be the case. In fact, given the rupture of the science-society contract outlined here, it would be wholly irresponsible for scientists to participate in a 7th IPCC assessment. We therefore call for a halt to further IPCC assessments. We call for a moratorium on climate change research until governments are willing to fulfil their responsibilities in good faith and urgently mobilize coordinated action from the local to global levels. This third option is the only effective way to arrest the tragedy of climate change science.
There are several good, provocative points in the article. If I had to be critical I’d suggest that it’s somewhat ahistorical, and discounts the decisive role politics has always played in determining pubic policy. Parenthetically, it’s probably only in the postwar technocratic period that there has been any alignment between politics and science to create something that could be considered an implied science-society contract. That era seems to be ending.
It made me think a lot about the other areas of research that have become diligent (and diligently ignored) scientific busywork. Pouring your heart into the slow process of developing more precise and certain knowledge *is* a waste if nobody will act on it. Maybe it is sensible not to focus on applied basic research any more. But the implementation and intervention research into what might enable action and influence then seems more critical.
Ceding the field isn’t an option.