46 Academic Failure
Steinberger
On climate change, the scientific community (by and large) has been criminally negligent when it comes to observing — and especially learning from — its own track record.
The physical science of climate change has been a resounding, phenomenal, triumphant success.
Science, as a whole body of institutions, people and knowledge, has failed on climate change. Spectacularly failed to curb or even slow down increases in greenhouse gas emissions.
Trying to exist outside history
The scientific endeavor, since at least Enlightenment & Newton, tries to see its contributions as existing outside history and culture. If something is scientifically true, it should be true before it was “discovered” and for all eternity after. This is a lovely idea in theory, but with devastating consequences. Because no matter the eternal truth of a scientific finding: its interpretation and translation into understanding and action relies upon the cultural and historical context surrounding its discovery.
The historical context of the late 20th century should have been taken much, much, much more seriously by scientific institutions and communities, because it included an ominous domination of neoclassical economic thinking in politics and culture, and a circumscribed, idealized role for scientists in public pronouncements and public life.
Partly as a result of descending from the Enlightenment, partly as a result of the structure of scientific institutions (universities, academies, national research centers), partly because this model worked relatively well for a long time without needing to be challenged, many scientific disciplines took on the idealized position of remote, neutral observers, staying well apart from the object of observation, emerging from their ivory towers to bestow impartial pronouncements on the busy world around.
Climate impacts will tear through social systems and disrupt them. Technological transitions will either happen (or not) depending on experimentation and adoption within social systems. An insistence on science as purely apolitical and technocratic thus leaves a blind spot the size of humanity in how climate impacts will affect us, and how we might respond and act proactively.
A final problem with the aspirations to being purely technocratic and apolitical advisors to power is that we have been generally averse to take our scientific findings directly to the people.