Ryan O'Loughlin (Indiana University, Bloomington)
I question whether climate scientists actually adopted the ‘hiatus’ framing, as claimed by Stephan Lewandowsky et al. (2015), despite their use of the word and the large degree of attention they paid to the 1998-2012 time period. Much has been written about the apparent slowdown in warming—sometimes referred to as a ‘hiatus’—of global mean surface temperature (GMST) between 1998 and 2012. Climate denialists drew attention to this ‘hiatus’ starting around 2006 and climate scientists began publishing on the topic around 2013. Since the issue of human-caused global warming wasn’t in question for climate scientists, it is worth asking why they paid any attention to the ‘hiatus.’ Lewandowsky et al. focus on the fact that climate scientists adopted the ‘hiatus’ framing that was initially formulated by denialists, and further claim that “seepage”—that is, “infiltration and influence of…essentially non-scientific claims into scientific work” — has occurred (2015, 2). They argue that as a result of denialist discourse, “scientists came to doubt their own conclusions, and felt compelled to do more work to further strengthen them, even if this meant discarding previously accepted standards of statistical practice” (2015, 9).
While it’s clear that, in some sense, seepage has occurred, there are good reasons to be skeptical that “scientists came to doubt their own conclusions.” A close look at scientific publications discussing the ‘hiatus’ reveals a host of legitimate scientific reasons to focus on this time period despite its lack of statistical significance. For example, scientists sought ways to reconcile global energy levels with GMST trends using ocean warming. In all of this work, there is no doubt regarding the reality of global climate warming; thus, the scientists did not doubt their own conclusions, I argue.
The seepage analysis, however, does demonstrate that scientists notably focused on the hiatus. Generally, and especially in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), they focused on the hiatus, partially in an attempt to present the most “objective” science possible, in response to climategate (Medhaug et al. 2017; Lloyd and Schweizer 2014). Thus, these issues related primarily to communication of science to the public, rather than actual scientific research that was underway. The seepage analysis fails to distinguish between these two activities, and since denialism impacts both the work of climate scientists and how they present it to the public, we must be careful to attend to this distinction. More generally, my analysis reveals that we—that is, philosophers of science and/or anyone interested in the relationship between values, science, the public, and politics—must be careful to distinguish between scientific research/publication (scientific “work”) and scientific communication insofar as these can be separately assessed.
