The Third Ten Million Years is a weekly Precipitate feature exploring the mysteries of life on a single planet, as seen through a single pair of eyes in a single body composed of the same fine material as the deserts of Mars.
There are particular physical problems, problems of explanation, which arise in thinking about the entire universe, which don’t arise when you consider only its smaller systems. I see this as trying to articulate what those particular problems are, and what the avenues are for solving them, rather than trying to translate from physics into some other language. This is all within the purview of a scientific attempt to come to grips with the physical world.
Tim Maudlin, Cosmological Philosopher
What is the public conversation about climate science really about? Certainly not science as an attempt to understand the physical changes manifested by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That’s the scientific problem, but not the topic of our debate. To borrow the language of the cosmological philosopher Tim Maudlin, climate change is a particular physical problem that has problems of explanation. Maudlin’s terms arise from his attempt to explain specific occurrences within the universe as a whole, but we can scale down the framework to Earth and its own phenomena.
Try as we might, I don’t think it’s ever possible to fully separate the science of climate change from the philosophical implications that climate change necessarily begets. The question must arise. Accepting the science brings about major philosophic conundrums—or as I would call it, the important stuff. Honest engagement with climate science leaves little room for debate. That’s not equal, however, to knowing what to do. The consequences of the science remain to be dealt with honestly by everyone, everywhere.
The difficulty I have is seeing climate change as both part of the entirety of the Earth’s system, and as a part of my local systems. Outside my house is reality, and The Climate of Planet Earth is an abstraction. The climate as a physical reality—not the abstraction it has become—can only really be understood (by the lay person like me, not the climate scientist) in relation to the smaller systems that we can understand. But that smaller view does not at all present the reality of climate change. This is the generic challenge of climate science that I am struggling to understand.
Specifically, the problem is context. Understanding the planetary view of the changing climate requires breaking our individual perspective. As humans we contextualize: it is one of our greatest mental capacities. When we encounter a strange experience, we seek context to make sense of what we do not understand. Such capacity allows the US to be a melting pot of difference rather than constantly in conflict. It means that my life in St. Paul need not be recognizable to the man blogging in South Carolina. As long as we understand that our contexts are different, we can coexist. Isn’t that lovely? But it’s not always possible. There are some tasks that break down our ability to contextualize, such as confronting the entirety of the universe, or seeking to understand an abstraction that is no abstraction at all, such as human-caused alterations to the Earth’s actual climate.
This problem of context leads to the discarding of climate science with relative ease based on what is happening outside one’s window. Remember the Snowmageddon in Washington, DC, that great monster of a snowstorm that fell on the East Coast in 2010? It caused gleeful ridicule of climate change because global warming means droughts and heat, not snow storms in winter. But such ridicule can only matter in the carnival that is the public debate about climate change.
In reality, the simultaneity of increased precipitation and increased drought are among the simplest impacts of climate change to understand, were one to give a moment’s thought. But if one thinks only of the micro picture without regard for the macro, reasoning out such impacts means nothing. We get only what we got in 2010: there is a lot snow, snow is cold, cold is not warm, global warming is warm, thus global warming is false. Unfortunately, such reasoning is not an oversimplification of how people react to snow and climate change.
The problem of context works just as easily in reverse with climate change. In St. Paul, MN this year, one would be forgiven for looking out the window at the brown grass and dirty streets and seeing only the effects of a changing climate. This is Minnesota. We get cold weather and a lot of snow. Not brown January days that are 50 degrees. It’s not normal. Neither were the number and size of this summer’s tornadoes in America. Things just seemed weird in the past year. Local weirdness, though, doesn’t tell us anything; one data point leads nowhere. If we totally localize our vision to the here and now, getting a fix on climate change becomes impossible. But if we really take time to put all the weirdness on the charts, we can expand our vision beyond our small-scale context.
Not that seeing beyond ourselves is easy. We live in our part of the world, and have only so much time and effort to spare for comparing the weather in our home towns to that in other parts of the world, let alone to the historical trends of the entire Earth’s climate. Climate change has a problem of comprehension, a problem of context, a problem of explanation. As well it should, I suppose, because physical systems are complex, understanding them even more so. If they were not, we wouldn’t need experts and peer review. We could just know it and move on.
This problem of explanation is a good excuse. But it is still only an excuse. I started this by stealing from a cosmological philosopher, discussing the Big Bang, Time, and the history of the Universe. Such a field can wait out a resolution for its problems of explanation. Unfortunately, this is a luxury climate change cannot afford. We have to find a way around the problems inherent in the limits of a local view. We have to find ways to make sense of the problem, so we can find a solution. So we can, you know, hang around this place for a few more millennia and figure out the problems of Time.
Chris Zumski Finke, Staff Blogger