By Sheldon Greaves

The climate debate has been going on for a long time now. Most of that debate concerns two camps, those who are tracking and warning us about climate change and its effects, and those who deny that it’s happening. Others are saying, yes, it’s happening, but it’s not a big deal. Citizen science has played a growing role both in the science and the debate. That role could become even larger, and more important but for a problem of disciplinary boundaries. Explanations follow.

Two Debates on Climate Change

It’s no secret that the Trump Administration (and the Bush Administration before it), takes a denialist line with climate change. Trump publicly denies its reality, claiming that it is a hoax designed to impair American economic competitiveness. Prior to his swearing in as President, government climate scientists took steps to download and curate scientific data that they feared would be made inaccessible or even deleted once Trump came to power–a fear that proved well-founded. Trump’s war on climate science and climate scientists continues and is arguably increasing in its intensity.

Trump is, obviously, not alone in his disdain of climate science. The fossil fuel industry has spent many millions of dollars to shore up the faltering claims against climate science, and has even suppressed or ignored the findings of their own scientists on the reality and consequences of climate change. These facts are well-established and well-documented elsewhere. Unfortunately, this debate is obscuring a different debate with equal or greater implications.

The Other Debate

In August of 2018, the Trump EPA released a document arguing for rollbacks in greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. The document (Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2017-0355) was made available to the public for review and comment and can still be found here. A second such document, released by the Trump Department of Transportation (Docket No. NHTSA-2017-0069), argues for a similar rollback in auto emission standards.

Given the Trump Administration’s behavior in the public debate over climate change, one would expect to find these policy documents riddled with science denial. However, both documents fully and completely accept the scientific consensus on climate change, namely that it is happening, it is caused by human activity, and it represents a threat to our safety and well-being.

Let me repeat that: in these EPA and DOT policy documents, the Trump Administration fully accepts the findings of climate science.

What’s going on here?

As I implied, there are two debates going on here. One is partly for public consumption, i.e., a distraction from any number of other issues. It is also, clearly, an effort to craft legislation that favors certain economic and financial sectors, regardless of the environmental realities. The public debate must contend with misinformation and disinformation that holds sway mainly because it has been weaponized and distributed in a way calculated to persuade at an emotional level. But most “denial” reasoning and rhetoric cannot stand when subjected to rigorous debate that disallows bad data and faulty logic.

The second debate is the one that really matters. It takes place at the policy level, in the back rooms between experts and wonks who know their stuff. These are the discussions that take place out of the public eye, where the actual policies get hammered out. This is where things actually get done. Heartland Institute talking points won’t work. There is no science denial, because the people in this debate know that’s a dead end. That debate is over, and has now pivoted in a new direction.

From Science to the Dismal Science

The EPA and DOT policy proposals have abandoned efforts to deny climate science in support of their policies. Instead, the justifications are based on economics. Briefly put, the claims are that economic growth allows us to discount the cost of fixing the problems caused by climate change down to zero, so there’s no need to worry about it. Another claim is that a 6-degree increase global temperatures will only depress the economy a few percentage points. (Other researchers beg to differ.) Still other (rather perverse) arguments rest on the idea that since smaller, less affluent countries are not contributing to solving the problem, if the U.S. shoulders this burden, those countries get a “free ride.”

The Problem for Science and Citizen Science

Academics of all disciplines are trained to “stay in their lane” such that when the trail of an inquiry goes outside their field of expertise, they are ill-advised to follow. There are good reasons for this, but in the present case, this creates a problem called, “That’s not my field!” The parameters of the public climate debate are too entrenched to adjust a discourse decades in the making. Suddenly the climate scientist, the biologist, the oceanographer find that their expertise does not fit the new debate. They have no formal place at the table, at least not in the way they did before.

My Own Involvement

For the last few years I have been working with Dr. Dave Bella, a retired professor of Civil Engineering at Oregon State University. He wished to comment intelligently on the EPA and DOT rollbacks mentioned above, so he went to the trouble of actually reading, carefully, the policy statements and was surprised by the lack of science denial that everyone else expected to find there. Together we have examined these documents, and I assisted him in crafting comments during the comment period. My background is nowhere near either climate science or economics. Dr. Bella, however, is familiar with both computer modeling and integrated assessment models used by the policy statements.

During this process, I discovered something both remarkable and gratifying. One need not be an expert to identify problems with the logic and assumptions behind these arguments. But it helps to have someone who can confirm whether your objections are valid.

The Citizen Science Angle

As non-specialists, citizen scientists are not constrained by the disciplinary boundaries that inhibit professionals. My experience exploring these policy statements clearly shows that this is an area where citizen scientists can bring their knowledge from various professions and life experiences to evaluate and comment intelligently on important matters of science-related policy. This was the ideal behind President Eisenhower’s call for “an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” as a check on an expanding technocracy.

Others have made the case for greater involvement by citizen scientists in the formation of policy (See Wen-Tsong Chiou, “What Roles Can Lay Citizens Play in the Making of Public Knowledge?“. It is an inconvenient fact that most citizen science projects have poor retention. I submit that this is because most citizen science regimes cannot make good use of the experience, skills, education and, yes, expertise of their volunteers. Gathering data is all well and good, but there is more, much more, that citizen science can and should do to bring their unique, unbounded expertise to the essential problems that concern us all.