David Roberts has an excellent piece on Scott Pruitt's climate denialism and how it fits into our broader political culture over on Vox. Please do go read it. His main point is that all of this is bigger than Pruitt and has little to do with the facts. Rather, this is a question of whether our society will accept the authority of scientists and the scientific process.
Restating, underscoring, or even strengthening those scientific results won’t solve that problem. The results already come from multiple fields, are reinforced by multiple lines of evidence, and have been vetted (extremely vetted, you might say) by several extended, multi-layered review processes. Collectively, we don’t know how to “know” anything more confidently than we know this stuff.
If someone chooses to simply reject those scientific institutions, procedures, and results, then piling on more facts is beside the point. It’s not about facts any more, it’s about the authority of the institutions.
I agree with all of his stated points, but there's an undercurrent in his piece that points to a broader issue that he seems to miss. Throughout the article, his assumptions are plain: Conservatives are wrong, wrong, wrong on climate change, and those of us in the right have been trying so hard to change their minds, but we keep failing. If only deniers would accept the authority of science, we could all move on and build a better future. It is implicit in what he says that the failing is entirely on the side of deniers.
What if that assumption is wrong? What if the institutions of science are lacking in some way? I do not mean to challenge the empirical understanding of climate facts. Roberts is right to point out that the way science-minded people focus on facts blinds them to the real issues, but I don't think he goes far enough. The fact is that the institutions and the culture of science actually do not have real authority in our society; they never have. I mean the kind of authority that can impose an agenda on a group of people, or ostracize those who don't fall in line. Scientists exercise real authority in their own circles, of course, but in western cultures as a whole they have always existed somewhat on the sidelines.
To be fair, for most of modern history, the pursuit of science and the wielding of authority had no need to overlap. Unlocking the secrets of nature did not challenge political leadership, and after some initial resistance even religious institutions coexisted just fine with scientific progress. The challenge of climate change is unique, because now for the first time scientists need to tell the rest of society to change what they're doing. When physicists discover a new particle or biologists figure out how genes are turned on and off, most people marvel briefly at the progress made and then right back to business as usual. Climate scientists need to accomplish something fundamentally different: they need to convince the whole world to take sweeping collective action, because business as usual will result in calamity for our civilization. Never before have scientists or science as an institution wielded this kind of authority.
I am speaking with the perspective of someone raised by, but no longer a part of, the religious right. In my experience, people from different backgrounds fail to appreciate how willing conservatives are to pick and choose scientific evidence to serve their purposes. My parents met in engineering school, and they encouraged me to study math and science in school so that I could get a good job. Eventually I began to apply the scientific practices of inquiry and skepticism in other realms, and I began taking things like the age of the universe and biological evolution more seriously. My parents and church of origin were not comfortable with that, even though they were fine with using science for social advancement.
For so many people in our society, scientific practice and philosophy are not fundamental to their decision making or how they understand the world. As in the case of my parents, most Americans are happy to praise the achievements of scientific progress when they benefit from them or when they look cool, and then to ignore science when it tells them something they don't like. The logical contradictions that this entails are simply not important to them. Science has impacted our world greatly, but it has not yet saturated our culture.
How do we elevate the role of science in our society? How to we make it so that those with authority make decisions based on evidence instead of myths or shallow self interest? These are the questions we are facing now, and I believe they point to the immaturity of science as a cultural phenomenon. What we think of as modern science is relatively new on the time scale of the rise and fall of civilizations, and it has yet to exert the sort of commanding influence that could change the course of decision makers around the world. While we seek to convince more people of the validity of climate science, we should also realize that our own culture of science needs to make an evolutionary leap to be able to change the course of humanity and save this civilization from itself.
