Comments on R. D. Brunner(Climatic Change32,121–147)and P. N. Edwards(Climatic Change32,149–161)

✍ Scribed by Simon Shackley

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 279 KB
• Volume: 34
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0165-0009
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00139305

✦ Synopsis

Both Ronald Brunner's and Paul Edwards' arguments about the policy role of comprehensive modeling (Climatic Change, 32(2), February 1996) were very useful in spelling out, hence encouraging reflection about, the different possible routes the global environmental change science-policy trajectory might take, and the different scientific, social, political and value commitments thereby supported. Edwards is surely correct in his response to Brunner to distinguish between the instrumental and symbolic use of climate models, though this addressed only part of the argument. I also read Brunner's critique as claiming that comprehensive models are not only irrelevant to policy, but potentially worse than irrelevant, especially through: their inability to be genuinely comprehensive from a policy perspective, whilst being interpreted by policy makers as such (whether they are defined as predictors or heuristics); their limited representations of uncertainty; the relative lack of development of new sorts of mediation between global change science and policy by an over-emphasis on comprehensive models; and the suppression of policy actions and choices in the present (including institution-building) in favor of more natural science research (cf. Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994, 1995).

The rationale for the latter is that as models become increasingly complex scientific certainty will increase, enhancing the possibility for political consensus, and the effectiveness of policy actions. This embraces three critical and contestable assumptions: that complexity is the route to greater realism, that realism will generate greater certainty, and that scientific certainty is indeed the way to secure political consensus and action. There is now good reason to believe that environmental policy will usually be underdetermined with respect to its scientific rationale (Wynne, 1992;Oreskes et al., 1994); the issue is therefore not whether, but which set of social and political rationale are desirable in developing climate-change policies. These include arguments for economic efficiency, social development and equality, improving the resilience of socio-ecological systems to social and natural change more generally, and so on; such possible reasons have not been subject to much genuine public discussion, however, but rather advocated top-down by technical and administrative specialists and environmental advocates.

Edwards' exposition of the positive features of the current epistemic community around climate change is important, though that community's dominant representations in the public domain as global and largely techno-scientific seem to me to raise questions about its longer-term effectiveness. Whilst that community may