Does science care about your feelings?

On being a climate change scientist

Climate change is a big fucking deal.

It is frankly ridiculous that a species of primate has managed to not only locate the global atmospheric carbon tap, but within a few hundred years turn the handle so far that it’s about to unscrew completely and fall off, scalding the whole damn planetary life support system progressively more with each passing moment.

It’s ridiculous but it’s true. There’s an extremely impressive body of evidence, assembled from many different strands, that tells the story of just how this has happened.

I love that you can just go grab a copy of one of the latest IPCC reports, The Physical Science Basis, and get up to date on the entire science of climate change. *So* much effort has been put into these reports. Even if you don’t read the whole 2,409 pages from cover to cover, I guarantee you will find something interesting in there. Check out Chapter 1, the boringly titled but very helpful Framing, Context and Methods (scroll down to the contents and go from there).

IPCC reports aren’t for everyone though. There is something about the long form essay that starts to do justice to the magnitude of climate change. I’m thinking of pieces like Ray Pierrehumbert’s Climate Change: A Catastrophe in Slow Motion, published in the Chicago Journal of International Law in 2006, and Guy Pearse’s Quarry Vision: Coal, Climate Change and the End of the Resources Boom, published in Quarterly Essay in 2009. I’m also thinking of Chapter 1 of Pierrehumbert’s textbook Principles of Planetary Climate, which he so very kindly made available in draft form online, allowing me to paper over some of the massive cracks in my understanding of the climate system as I was beginning my PhD.

What these longer pieces have in common is time they take to spell out the context. I’ll grant this context may be obvious to other people, but for me it’s only after reading in some detail about the unique history of earth and the incredible evolution of our climate system over millions and even billions of years, that I can properly gauge the scale of the havoc we are currently wreaking. It’s only after digging in painstaking detail through the history, culture and politics of the fossil fuel sector in Australia that I start to get an idea of how messed up things are today.

It’s only after being reminded of the small scale logic of discounting that its large scale insanity emerges. As Pierrehumbert puts it:

“To take a well-known example, suppose that by an expenditure of $1000 we could either save one life this year or take an action that would prevent the extermination of the entire human race in five hundred years time. At a 5 percent discount rate, the value of ten billion lives discounted to the present over 500 years is the same as the value of one-fourth of a life currently.

“What does CBA tell us about how much we should care about … long-term impacts? Let us be generous to CBA and apply only a 1 percent discount rate, and assume that climate changes risk extinguishing ten billion members of the human race after one hundred thousand years. Continuing in the spirit of generosity to CBA, let us put a value of one billion dollars on a human life, far in excess of the value (typically on the order of several million dollars) used in practice. How much should we be willing to spend over the next four centuries to prevent this catastrophe? The answer is unimaginably small; it is so small that the value of a single atom in a single US penny is still unimaginably greater than the amount we should be willing to spend to prevent the far off catastrophe.”

Cough cough, nuclear waste disposal, cough cough.

I should add that cost-benefit analysis isn’t all bad. Those renowned radical lefties at NSW Treasury once stated that proper cost benefit analysis should include “spiritual aspects of life”, along with a range of other aspects of quality of life for individuals and society. So we can’t blame CBA entirely. (But we can blame whoever updated those CBA guidelines and erased all reference to the spiritual.Why, Treasury? Why?!?!)

All of which is a long way of saying that when it comes to climate change, I get it. I may need to have my hand held by expert writers and historians, bless them, to get a deeper appreciation of it, but I get it.

But does all of that knowing - about the causes and consequences of climate change - translate to feeling? And just where do feelings fit into the practice and communication of science anyway?

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I have a T-shirt that says ‘Science doesn’t care about your feelings’. I kinda hate it. It was given to me and I am loathe to expose it to direct light. There are whole fields of science that care about your feelings! I used to think there should be a Journal of Emotional Extremes, just like we study Climate Extremes. Sure, there’s your long term average, your natural fluctuations, but what about those rare, high impact extremes? Shouldn’t we study them too? I haven’t checked, there probably is a (possibly predatory) journal on this exact topic.

And anyway, I know, I know - the T-shirt is about how discomfort with ‘facts’ does not mean the facts are wrong. I get that too. I just feel like science sometimes has an arrogance problem and T-shirts like this don’t help.

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I’m here to make a confession. I confess that I am a climate change fraud. I work on climate change, I study it, I talk and write about it, I am convinced of the importance of taking serious and urgent action on it - but I do not have climate anxiety. I do not lose sleep at night about it.

I don’t feel great about this. I feel a tad sheepish.

I acknowledge the widespread anxiety and depression about the climate crisis. In fact I think they’re quite reasonable responses to it. Sadly, there are many aspects of our species’ current existence that are deeply troubling. But whether through some internal block, self-protection mechanism, toxic masculine acculturation process, neurodiversity, being a privileged white male, or whatever, I find myself lacking in raw emotion on this particular topic. (Ok - this may not be obvious from my writing, but I’m not an overly emotional person, full stop. Please let me reassure you that as someone who lives and works in close proximity to other humans on an ongoing basis, I regularly experience many of the most popular feelings.)

I do have feelings about climate change, but they’re not really ‘primary’ feelings: a sense of the profound; a sense of the vastness of the scales at which climate change operates; a fascination with the science, the moving parts that come together to explain climate change as a physical process; a sense of the selfishness, shortsightedness, bastardry and banality of the many decisions made that set us and keep us on this path; a sense of the injustice of it all. These all push me to spend at least some time on the issue, to ‘stay the course’, to ‘show up’. Is commitment a feeling? A sense that what one is doing is meaningful and worthwhile? As important as they are, they kind of strike me as crummy, second-rate feelings.

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Maybe feelings about science are useful to scientists, helping animate us, drive us forward and give weight to our words and actions. They certainly seem to play a role in attracting and keeping a lot of people in fields like conservation science and health and medical research, to name a couple of obvious ones. Do data scientists love data?

But hang on, us scientists gotta be impartial, and not let our feelings get in the way of objective analysis. Right? That’s all well and good to a point, but it’s not realistic to expect us human scientists not to have human traits. Much better to design good systems for staying objective-ish, being transparent, communicating doubts and limitations etc.

This veers into the topic of advocacy, and what the costs are when scientists do and do not speak out. For what it’s worth, I believe scientists have a responsibility to share their meagre but valuable knowledge with the world. I understand that it can be uncomfortable putting yourself out there, and that there is a powerful pressure to ‘stay in your lane’ and ‘not get political’. What that implies is that there are well-marked lanes and that the status quo is some Platonic piece of perfection, which it sure as shit ain’t.

I understand these things, but must admit that I have not been particularly loud or brave in my communications during my career. I’m working on it. I admire people out there advocating with force and volume, but it’s not really my style. I’d still like to make a difference though, and hope I can in my own way.

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To be honest, talking about this stuff makes me feel a bit icky. It doesn’t come naturally to me. You can see it right there in the structure of this post, which is… absent. But that’s ok too. My awkward feelings about feelings spurred me to write and maybe they’ll spur you to pause for a second and consider the feelings that scientists have about the science they do.

How does that make you feel?

Sixteen faces expressing the human passions. Coloured engraving by J. Pass, 1821, after C. Le Brun. (Source: Wellcome Images via Wikimedia Commons)