Science and Non-Science

In the war waged by fossil fuel producers against climate science – a war that is being fought by spreading falsified misinformation via social media and right-wing news outlets – the aim has always been to attempt to undermine, ridicule and to contradict peer-reviewed scientific research. The fossil fuel producers have many powerful friends, including the current President of the United States, who has repeatedly asserted that climate change is a hoax, and whose government is dismantling the world-leading scientific expertise and infrastructure that has played such an important role in helping us to understand the consequences of climate change for humanity. For example, the New York Times reported recently that “The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean observation system to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate.” This is just the latest of a long sequence of measures designed to make it impossible to carry out climate science research because such research leads inexorably in a direction that the present US government does not like. In dismantling this apparatus, the safety of not just the citizens of the United States, but of the whole world, is threatened.

However, when it comes to matters associated with sex and gender, the US Government believes it can use science as a tool to serve its ends. Presidential Order 14168 set out to “defend women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the Federal Government”. One can ask whether the assertion that genotypic sex is predetermined at conception either obviously or necessarily determines our understanding of how we organise society. However, that is a different argument for a later post. Here, instead, I would like to contrast the approach to “science” taken in Presidential Order 14168 with the approach taken by the same administration to the dismantling of climate science, by simply replacing “sex” with “climate change”:

I could continue, but hopefully you get the impression. When we are talking about how we respond to people with gender dysphoria, science is a rigid, unyielding set of rules that proscribes a straightjacket in which they must live – despite the fact that there are no testable scientific hypotheses about the relationship between genotype and toilet use, choice of clothing or preferred pronouns. But in the case of climate change, scientists whose powerful, testable, well-corroborated models warn of impending catastrophe if we do not stop burning fossil fuels are spreading a “hoax”.

The Popperian model of science describes it as a method of conjecture and refutation. Science cannot tell us how to live: it has no intrinsic moral framework, it is not based on a set of beliefs, and it cannot be turned into an idealogical tool. There are hypotheses that are scientific (i.e. testable) and those that are not (i.e. non-science). Science cannot tell us how to respond to climate change, and it cannot tell us what it means to be male and female in our society. However, in both cases it is possible to construct objective, testable hypotheses, and these testable hypotheses, and the outcomes of their testing, can inform the decisions that we make as human beings.

Are treatments for gender dysphoria in general highly successful? Yes. Is there any published evidence of a correlation between access to toilets by trans women and an increase in assaults on women? No. Have recent years seen a dramatic rise in the incidence of gender-non-conforming women being harassed in single sex facilities for not looking “sufficiently feminine”? Yes. These are simple hypotheses that are readily tested in the Popperian way.

And we now have sophisticated models with which to describe and to predict the development of the Earth’s climate. These powerful, highly-tested and well-corroborated models enable us to ask objective questions about the likely consequences of our actions. Is the climate warming? Yes – there is an abundance of detailed and diverse data corroborating this hypothesis. Will there be death on a colossal scale if we do not rapidly reduce the rate at which we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Almost certainly, because our models suggest that the climate will soon become so disrupted that agricultural yields will fall dramatically. There is a risk that we will rapidly reach tipping points – the loss of polar ice, rapid ocean warming, accelerating release of carbon from major sinks – that will combine to push the Earth into a chaotic and unprecedented period of climate turmoil that will render much of it uninhabitable.

However, what we choose to do in response to these answers cannot be dictated by science. It will instead be informed by our moral framework. One powerful person has responded by silencing the warnings, closing research centres and working with fossil fuel producers to impede the global transition to decarbonised energy. However, there is another way: we can demand that governments take faster action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, by prioritising human safety over the profits of large corporations and by taking advantage of massive strides in the development of new technology. As Stanford engineer Mark Jacobson says, “still no miracles needed”; we can produce all the energy we need from wind, solar and hydroelectric power. But the window is closing fast and the President is leaning hard on it.