What Climate Science Can (and Can’t) Predict | Philip Kitcher | Big Think

What Climate Science Can (and Can’t) Predict

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People tend to bandy around the term "scientific consensus" a lot, particularly when talking about climate change. When 97% of the scientific community agrees that climate change is a real thing, you have to wonder about the remaining 3%. Are they being true skeptics, or are they holding out for ulterior motives? Philip Kitcher blows the "skeptics" idea out of the water; the scientific consensus that human beings have been making the world hotter has been agreed upon for close to 100 years, and climate scientists who disagree are disagreeing with the fundamentals of science itself. Kitcher goes on to predict what havoc future generations might have to face if we don't look hard in the mirror about climate change. We shouldn't wait until lizards start living at the north and south poles to change our human behaviors—we should be the change today. "Philip Kitcher is the co-author of The Seasons Alter: How to Save Our Planet in Six Acts."

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PHILIP KITCHER:

Philip Kitcher is the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Previously, he taught at the University of California, San Diego, and before that at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Science in a Democratic Society, and most recently The Seasons Alter: How to Save Our Planet in Six Acts.

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TRANSCRIPT:

So the sciences are always revisable. It’s quite astonishing when we look back into the past how different the views, the quite well-defended views and quite successful views of people in the past were from the views that we have today.

So science does change a lot. Now some people see in that grounds for doubt, but I like many other philosophers would want to say that no, what we see here is a considerable progression. It’s the ideas of the older generation get developed, extended, and refined in our newer views. And so it seems to me that what the essence of science is, is that it’s never final. Although it’s perfectly reasonable for the scientists at any given time to treat what they’ve got very strong evidence for as if it were the final truth because they know from reflecting on the historical development of the sciences that’s a very good way of getting to the views that will eventually supersede the views that they now have. So you can think about it if you like as a process in which taking very seriously the ideas that you now have after they’ve been subjected to all sorts of rigorous testing and rigorous reflection and then trying to build on those leads you to better and better views that give you more and more predictive power, control over the natural world and more success in the ways in which you want to intervene in various aspects of the world.

A lot of people are worried about various claims that get made. I mean in the case of climate science what seems to me to be the case is that people quite naturally hear the climate science consensus as a very powerful warning, something that might incline them to change their views and change the ways in which they live. And they want to know perfectly reasonably whether the evidence is sufficiently strong so that they should perhaps sacrifice things that they’re used to enjoying and used to doing. So I think there’s a reasonable form of skepticism here. But any analogy with a sort of 'yesterday it was this, today it’s that, tomorrow it’s going to be something else' approach to this seems to be completely unfounded. Climate science is built on views about the atmosphere that have been developed very successfully and in a very rigorous way from the nineteenth century to the present. There isn’t any doubt about the mechanisms of the greenhouse effect. There isn’t really any doubt about the evidence behind the consensus that says that we have contributed enormously to the warming effects that are now becoming apparent not only in the present but also from the record of the earth’s average temperature. So all of that is as well founded as other things that people take for granted that science tells them like that water is H2O. Like the law of falling bodies. Like the fact that the earth is round and so on and so forth. There’s no more reason to be skeptical about the basic consensus of climate science than there is about any of those other things.

Now when it comes to making very specific predictions about where particular catastrophes are likely to come in the next decades that’s ext...

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