Climate scientists have not yet reached consensus about whether global warming will tend to increase or decrease the total number of hurricane-strength storms. But there is strong agreement that warming creates the conditions for larger and more powerful hurricanes: warmer sea surface temperatures, higher sea levels and more moisture in the atmosphere. These general tendencies interact with other local and regional factors to produce the local weather.
Climatologist Kevin
Trenberth parses the specific conjuncture that intensified Hurricane Sandy:
‘The sea surface temperatures along the Atlantic coast have been running at
over 3C above normal for a region extending 800km off shore all the way from
Florida to Canada. Global warming contributes 0.6C to this. With every degree
Celsius [of warming], the water holding of the atmosphere goes up 7%, and the
moisture provides fuel for the tropical storm, increases its intensity, and
magnifies the rainfall by double that amount compared with normal conditions.’
In the week or so
before Hurricane Sandy pummeled the northeast US, the warming denial industry
was hard at work. The right-wing, Koch-funded Cato Institute (publishers of In
Defense of Global Capitalism,
among other dismal screeds) attempted to sabotage a US government assessment of
climate change impacts by issuing what poses as an ‘addendum’ to the original.
The 2009 report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, was
prepared by the US Global Change Research Center and presented to Congress as a
summary of the ‘best science’ on the subject. The authoring federal entity is
itself a conglomeration of thirteen departments and agencies, including the
National Science Foundation, NASA and the Smithsonian Institution, but also others, like the Environmental
Protection Agency, that are routinely contained by hostile political
appointments, as well as a battery of agencies straightforwardly in the
business of promoting or defending the status quo of accumulation (Departments
of Commerce, Interior, Energy, Defense and State, and the Agency for International
Development). One can only imagine the pressures and internal struggles that
shaped the publication of this report.
Nevertheless, its findings
were evidently considered unacceptable to the defenders of capital. Cato’s fake
‘addendum’, which deceptively mimics the original report’s cover and internal
layout, tries to discredit the science, paints the impacts as negligible and dismisses
the policy recommendations as foolish. This exercise in dissimulation against
the public interest is in the tradition of the extractionist Wise Use lobby and
the Heartland Institute’s attack on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) through a mimicking front company, the Nongovernmental
International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
Also in the last few
weeks, a smeared climate scientist is fighting back with a lawsuit against the
neo-con National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Michael Mann, director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, has been a
key figure in climate science. His 1999 timeline tracking global temperatures
over the last 1000 years contributed to the scientific
consensus about the link between global warming and human activities. In 2009,
the organized forces of warming denial released a batch of emails stolen from
the University of East Anglia, allegedly revealing scientists in the process of
manipulating data. Mann’s name was on many of the emails. Seven investigations,
subsequently conducted by the National Science Foundation, Penn State and
others, found that allegations of academic fraud were groundless. But the
charges are still routinely repeated by the mouthpieces of warming denial.
Mann’s lawsuit seeks
damages for ‘false and defamatory statements’ by National Review reporter Mark Steyn and CEI analyst Rand
Simberg, who went beyond accusations of academic fraud by comparing Mann to
convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky (the disgraced ex-football coach at Penn State). Steyn repeated Simberg’s comparison on the National
Review blog last July: ‘He
has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could
have dire economic consequences for the nation and the planet.’
These pre-Sandy
episodes, and the inevitable post-storm scramble to manipulate public
discussion about the links between extreme weather and climate change
underscore how central and contested the role of science has become, as the effects
of biospheric meltdown become increasingly inescapable. The pressures of the
social force field are producing some strange and paradoxical results, some of
which are actually hopeful.
Scientists are
learning the hard way some ugly truths about the capitalist social process and
the fate of messengers who bring bad news. The vicious attacks launched on them
by ‘think tanks’ bankrolled by big oil and the Koch brothers and echoed
endlessly on Fox News and right-wing radio, combined with the cynical unresponsiveness
of politicians and ineffectiveness of global governance, are turning more and
more scientists into social critics and political activists. Many, of course,
already were. At all times, a minority of principled scientists have
courageously spoken truth to power at their own risk.
But biospheric
meltdown is evidently disturbing the larger relation between power and the
scientific establishment. Cracks are spreading in the monolith of Big Science,
the cozy corruptions of which were long fed by massive corporate and Pentagon
R&D budgets. As the social force field responds to the actualities of
climate change and the imperatives of adaptation, scientists in some fields are
being exposed to new pressures and the acute discomforts of public controversy.
Scientists, like the
rest of us, are all too human. It would be silly to expect them, as a group, to
be more ethically and politically responsible than anyone else. Like the arts,
philosophy, or critical theory, science is ostensibly autonomous from the
dominating logics of capital. But no one is outside the force field, and in
practice this ideal of autonomy is at best only relative. Shaped by society,
scientific subjectivities internalize antagonisms in the usual ways and, as a
whole, reflect the political opinions and partisan divisions that prevail in
the general population. Still, it looks very much like a process of
politicization is underway that, paradoxically, may foster critical
self-reflection and work to revive some of the enlightenment impulses that
withered under the business of post-Hiroshima science. This should be welcomed,
and every move toward autonomous science supported.
It is certain that
we need scientific research on climate change and the expert testimony of
scientists about the implications. Ditto for mass extinction, ocean
acidification and all the other converging processes of ecological degradation.
Today the counsel of science is emphatically indispensable. Even tireless
critics of domination and pseudo-democracy have to acknowledge that the
processes of liberation and real self-government should empower, and in any
case must not exclude, the practices of autonomous science. Understanding
science as a field of social and political struggle, perhaps the critique of
technocracy needs to become more nuanced and strategic.
The time, in any
case, is ripe for renewed reflection on the social functions of science, actual
and potential. As far as possible, such reflection should be a dialogue with
scientists, rather than the reproduction of separations. Such reflection would
need to be informed by an unblinking critical awareness of the history of
modernist science, including those lapses and corruptions entangled with some
of its most spectacular achievements. Above all, reflection on science must
grapple with the social forces that compromise autonomy, shape and capture
research agendas and dominate the practical appropriation of technology.
‘Had I stood firm,’
Brecht’s Galileo reflects, ‘the scientists could have developed something like
the doctors’ Hippocratic oath, a vow to use their knowledge exclusively for
mankind’s benefit. As things are, the best that can be hoped for is a lineage
of inventive dwarves who can be hired for any purpose.’
But the shared
challenges of biospheric meltdown are also an opening for something different –
the emerging conflicts between climate science and the forces of accumulation
may be a spur to that ‘new science’ beyond the domination of nature, called for
by Marcuse.
If
interdisciplinarity is in fact the defining condition of contemporary knowledge
production, its specific forms and articulations still have to be worked out
each time, by real people exposed to the force field. Let’s hope critical
theory is included in the constellation. No doubt, the emerging process and
struggle of self-rescue will lead critical theorists to study more science.
Will it also lead scientists to critical theory?
GR
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