University scientists have a formidable record of accomplishment in the field of climate-change research.
Fueled by billions of dollars in financial support, they’ve used mile-long ice cores to calculate temperatures and carbon concentrations from centuries ago. They’ve figured how to grow crops under unusual heat conditions. They’re now predicting how warmer climates will speed the spread of diseases.
What they haven’t done with climate change is figure out how to stop it.
For that, one of the best hopes might be the work of a small nonprofit trade publication, InsideClimate News. A three-member team there took less than a year to compile evidence that the world’s biggest oil company, ExxonMobil, spent millions of dollars publicly casting doubt on climate science that it knew internally to be true.
That’s helped sparked government fraud investigations of ExxonMobil and other oil companies. The investigations might one day become a tipping point similar to the 1998 legal settlement that forced the tobacco industry to spend more than $200 billion reversing false claims about the safety of cigarette smoking.
As with cigarettes years ago, public failure to understand the dangers of climate change has been a key obstacle to policy solutions, said Matthew L. Hale, an associate professor of political science at Seton Hall University. “Having billions of dollars to tell that story through advertising and media is certainly one way that things are going to flip,” Mr. Hale said.
Of course there’s a long way to go before the legal pursuit of ExxonMobil — one investigation initiated by the New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, and another by his California counterpart, Kamala D. Harris — forces the industry to finance an ad campaign admitting a deception of the American public. But given decades of failed attempts to change public policy, it’s hard to find a more plausible near-term threat to those promoting public skepticism of climate-change science.
That raises the question of whether the basic strategy pursued by InsideClimate News — a direct assault on companies seen as financing the public misunderstandings — should have been among the tools employed or at least advocated by university researchers struggling to solve climate change. And, more broadly, why have research universities become really good places for analyzing the world’s major problems, but perhaps not the best places for solving them?
‘A Very Heavy Lift’
There’s no single answer. Some researchers say they should steer clear of politics. Some say they don’t have the right incentives. Or adequate tools. Or the necessary sophistication.
Others in and around the university research community, however, see evidence of faintheartedness. As “the mother of all externalities,” climate is perhaps the clearest case where academics concerned about societal impact of their work should be involved in comprehensive problem-solving strategies, said Daniel M. Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California at Berkeley. “That’s a completely fair criticism” of university research, Mr. Kammen said.
Alan Durning, the founder and executive director of a Seattle-based think tank, has tried to work with university scientists on public-service projects. Consistently, he said, he has encountered institutional barriers. Mr. Durning got a taste of that resistance when his organization, the Sightline Institute, tried to get researchers at the University of Washington to help it with a project to make clear the risks of climate change by calculating impacts specific to various interest groups.
It’s a classic communications strategy: defining an audience segment and tailoring a message to it. In this case, the Sightline Institute wanted to hone messages to seniors, children, Asian-Americans, and Hispanic Americans. To reach Hispanics, Sightline suggested calculating the potentially deleterious effects of warmer temperatures on some of their most commonly held jobs. But the university scientists, Mr. Durning recalled, said they’d prefer to assess heat exposure and its effects on construction and agricultural workers. Predictions about job losses are more compelling to people than data on their likely heat exposure for making a strong case about climate change, Mr. Durning said. But, he learned, numbers with wider uncertainty measures — even if the bottom-line message is scientifically valid — are a lot tougher for academics to defend in peer review.
‘Many of the biggest problems we face have high uncertainty levels. I would rather know the most important forces, even if the error bars were wide, than whatever is the most measurable thing.’
“To get a fundable proposal” in the peer-based system of federal grant allocations, Mr. Durning said of the researchers, “they would need to have a methodology that was pretty watertight.” Protecting the taxpayer dollars that support research is important, he said, but that kind of precision may cost the nation even more in the long run. “Many of the biggest problems we face have high uncertainty levels,” Mr. Durning said. “I would rather know the most important forces, even if the error bars were wide, than whatever is the most measurable thing.”
Such caution can even be seen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a globally renowned leader in combining research with real-world applications. MIT in October announced a five-year plan for fighting climate change, with a key element being a global ideas competition hosted by MIT’s Climate CoLab, a crowdsourcing platform. CoLab emphasizes breaking the challenge down into smaller chunks. It gave one of its top funding awards to a group that suggested teaching maintenance staff in office buildings to make better use of their sophisticated energy-efficiency systems.
But CoLab is putting less emphasis, for now, on trying to broadly change public attitudes and behaviors, said its head, Thomas W. Malone, a professor of management at MIT. “It’s not at all easy to align the incentives to get faculty members to focus on these things,” Mr. Malone said. “People might be willing to come for a lunch meeting or something and say, ‘Yeah, here’s what I think,’ but what we really need are people who are seriously willing to commit some time to thinking this through at multiple levels.”
Behavioral-intervention strategies also get a skeptical reception among potential partners outside universities. The million-member Natural Resources Defense Council is among many environmental groups that are deeply concerned by climate change, and that are largely encouraging technology-based solutions as the most practical response. “Trying to advocate for a lower-consumption lifestyle is a very heavy lift,” said David G. Hawkins, the council’s director of climate programs, “and one that is much more difficult politically than one that essentially is saying, ‘Take advantage of a technical solution that is there.’”
But experts warn that hoping for a technological solution to climate change simply may not be enough. “I have never seen a credible scenario to get to where we need to get without a big demand-side contribution,” Ernest J. Moniz, the U.S. secretary of energy, told The Chronicle. “Demand side is just central in any solution.”
No Publications, No Upside?
As with tobacco, that’s often been the case in major societal challenges — even if inventing new technologies seems easier than changing human attitudes about them. Mr. Hale sees that lesson in his studies of how seemingly insurmountable political forces eventually lose power. But he also says he can’t imagine professors of environmental science seeing a historical precedent such as the downfall of the tobacco industry and responding by filing open-records requests to prove that ExxonMobil really did have its own scientific understanding of the dangers of climate change.
“There’s no upside for a professor to do that,” he said. “There’s no publications involved in it; there’s no university support for that.”
That reluctance needs to be changed, said Howard Frumkin, dean of public health at the University of Washington. Ending ExxonMobil’s political dominance, Dr. Frumkin said, is at least as important a role for scientists fighting climate change as more-conventional projects like developing heat-resistant crops or improving solar-energy technology.
‘It’s fair to ask, Is academia paying enough attention to practical and real-world solutions, especially when they’re political? I think the answer is no.’
“It’s fair to ask, Is academia paying enough attention to practical and real-world solutions, especially when they’re political?” he asked. “I think the answer is no.” But many others strongly disagree, he said, “especially in the sciences, and that’s one of the reasons why you don’t see academia doing more.”
The view that science and politics should not mix has influential proponents. They include Daniel Kahneman, an emeritus professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University whose study of behavioral economics and flaws in human judgment led to his sharing the 2002 Nobel in economic science. Mr. Kahneman said researchers should scrupulously avoid politics and set a broad definition for that: If it is a matter “that anybody in Congress is going to be offended by, then it’s political,” he said.
Others see room in the middle. University researchers looking to be more solutions-oriented wouldn’t have to go as far as suing Exxon themselves, said Andrew J. Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Scientists concerned about climate change could have just done investigative work of the type done by InsideClimate News (and a similar probe published a few weeks later by the Los Angeles Times), Mr. Hoffman said, and then handed off their findings to a group that would make use of it.
A new generation of problem-solving researchers is more likely to try that, he said: “Young people are coming into this field because they want to make a difference, and they don’t want to just have citation counts as the measure of their success.”
For now, Mr. Hoffman said, many universities’ approaches seem like a “huge cop-out.” In his view, academe’s reluctance to develop a more outcome-based strategy on climate change sends a message to the outside world: “Don’t have us change anything we do, don’t have us change the questions we ask, or the methods we use, or the outlets we use — let’s just get someone to come along and translate our work for us.”
Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.
