A shadow of doubt

The text continues the project on the Ecology "Variable" .

A large international organization of scientists involved in climatic research on Monday presented at the UN conference in Bonn "ten main scientific theses about the problem of climate change." These ten theses, according to their authors, should remind the assembled bureaucrats, why they actually gathered: to discuss the subparagraphs of articles and legal formulations, it is easy to forget what exactly awaits the planet in the future, if you do not start fighting climate change today (or better yesterday). The head of the organization Johan Rockstrom described the situation in the press release: “We have no right to carelessness. Climate change is already here. It is dangerous. And soon things will be much worse. ”

He said - how he cut off. It is characteristic that in the presentation of these ten scientific theses there is no one who still confuses some people far from climatic research-that it is the activity of a person with a very high probability that causes the rapid change in the global climate, which we observe in the last one and a half to two centuries. There are more general words about the anthropocles , the geological era in which we live, and how a person has become a decisive force in the acceleration of changes around us. One must think, the authors of the theses believe that it is not necessary (and worthless?) At the conference on the five -stage iambic, to remind participants about how many letters in the alphabet of the Russian language.

According to a strange coincidence, these ten theses “for warrant officers and members of their families” published approximately at the same time when the Russian community of popularizers of science - scientific journalists, scientists, reading public lectures, organizers of all kinds of scientific battles, and so on - cannot stop discussing the lecture of the sociologist Viktor Vakhstein . In this one and a half hour lecture, almost completely consisting of a frank trolling of the audience, there is a nevertheless important thought: telling about science to people who do not engage in it, should we leave a place for doubt?

In the comic scheme of the “Scientific News Circle” , which is often shown to beginner scientific journalists, a strict scientific study of the graduate student with a light movement of the media hands turns into a foil hat on the head of a graduate student’s grandmother. Each link in the chain of communication between the scientist and the layman is forced to simplify (the layman is by no means a fool, but he cannot be expected from him that he also studied your discipline for six to eight years, and he has little time between the work and photographs of the cats on Instagram). The more such links and the more complicated the subject of the conversation, the higher the risk that your communication will work on the principle of a spoiled phone. Therefore, even without the participation of the REN TV television company in a conversation on a scientific topic, one has to constantly kill your loved ones, that is, subtleties, details and reservations.

And we have not even mentioned the inevitable uncertainty, which are already, for them to simplify and do not need to. Here, for example, is an elementary confidential interval : if your question is more complicated than “how much two two”, then you almost certainly use not a point, but an interval assessment of some parameter. The average number of clowns in the car, according to my study, is not 7.25, but from 6.75 to 7.75 with a probability of 95% - it looks like this. Show me at least one journalist - only honestly - which will put these 95% probability in the title or the first paragraph.

Those who are engaged in climate change are not laughing over the famous comic book about the scientist who raped the journalist.

Climate specialists, which we write about in the “variable”, are in a difficult situation. They are not Greenpeace activists, who have exaggerations and other rhetorical techniques in the name of a great cause, if not excusable, then at least understandable. Scientists want to remain scientists, that is, including not losing the moral right to be called so, having retreated too far from the scientific method, not to lose the respect of colleagues and authority in their discipline. At the same time, they are actively involved in the conversation far beyond science - about economics, politics and even law. This involvement is also clear: the idea of ​​liability to taxpayers who finance the work of scientists works in the entire democratic world. Increasingly, this responsibility assumes that the results of the work need to be reported not only by an article in a reviewed scientific journal - especially when it comes to not a standard model, but, say, the survival of grandchildren and great -grandchildren of taxpayers.

From this difficult situation, for example, the legs "resume for people who make decisions" are growing. This is an amazing phenomenon for which climatologists have repeatedly received on the head from all sides. Every five to six years, an intergovernmental group of climate experts (MGEIK) is preparing a large-scale report that we know about the problem of climate change. These are hundreds and thousands of pages on which leading scientists from all over the world diligently telling who wrote to what interesting about the atmosphere, oceans, earthly ecosystems, and so on. At the moment, five such reports have been published.

There is no hopelessly hope that politicians will read hundreds and thousands of pages of such a text. Meanwhile, it is from politicians, and not from scientists, it depends on what we will do with the problem of climate change. Therefore, in MGEIK they came up with a brief retelling of all this tremendous work specifically for those who are embarrassed by bibliographic links to each report. What significance is attached to these documents, you can understand what details: their line, a proposal for a proposal, at a special meeting is approved by delegations of countries. That is, such a resume is actually a policy, not a science.

At the same time, in the latest such documents, the “resume resume” appeared - key the thesis highlighted with color and font, so that they would not be missed. Say thanks for not 140 characters (although who knows, maybe Donald Trump would read more carefully).

On the other hand, throughout all these 30 years, MGEIK has been criticized that they are not clearly and clearly describe the degree of confidence in certain statements - they say, if you only assume that it will be, or not entirely sure, then write it: but this is inaccurate. They got to the point that for the authors of the reports they produce special memos in which the words “probably”, “unlikely”, “extremely unlikely” relate to numerical indicators of probability. It seems to be useful, but when in the fifth report, the degree of confidence of scientists that climate change is the work of a person, increased from 90% to 95%, there were a lot of notes that it means, because, as it turned out, in numbers it became much more understandable.

As a result, climatologists find themselves in the unpleasant tsugtswang, where you are simplified - to blame, you will not simplify - it is also to blame, because no one listens to you. Not to say anything at all is also not an option: your scientific information suggests that you are silent irreparable and, possibly, criminal. Very specific acrobatics are required: you need to talk about the anthropogenic change in the climate and all the uncertainty around it somehow so as not to open the window through which the organized and well-paid negatives of the problems of you then gut you.

The average number of clowns in the car is not 7.25, but from 6.75 to 7.75 with a probability of 95% - this is what a confidential interval looks like. Show me at least one journalist - only honestly - who will put these 95% probability in the heading.

When I am talking about “organized and well -paid negatives”, I mean, of course, not hyperactive commentators who come to the texts about climate change and promote their own variety of conspiracy theories (these people work for the idea). In the West, large business is sponsored by expert centers ( Think Tanks ), which systematically issue “correct” reports, pays for conferences for such experts, publishes custom -made articles in friendly media. Books are produced on this subject and even films are made. In Russia, this is still an exotic known only to specialists - but, for example, at the upcoming congress to protect the environment of the session about the climate, the coal company SUEK has already been going to hold .

Where the theme of the climate is part of the public policy, any of any uncertain statement by the scientist, any “possibly” can be used immediately against you, grinding this huge machine for the production of doubts, as the historian of Naomi Oreskes science is expressed . Poprazing the well -known saying: who is engaged in the change in the climate, he does not laugh over the famous comic book about the scientist who raped the journalist .

A good recent example is an article in the journal Nature Geoscience , published in September this year. For specialists in atmosphere physics and oceans, I quote one of these specialists, “quite an ordinary article”. Its authors adjusted the so -called response function - this is the reaction of the climatic system to doubling the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere (for example, how many degrees the average temperature of the Earth’s surface will grow if the carbon dioxide becomes twice as much). This function very important for climate models is literally specified from the very beginning of climatic studies: the more we know about the climate of the Earth, the more confidently the spread of its values ​​decreases. And, by the way, the more extreme scenarios of the development of events from unlikely passes into incredible ones. This is normal, there are a lot of such works, and they usually cause stormy interest among constant subscribers of the magazine Meteorology and Hydrology.

But if you read the conservative American press, you did not learn anything about this context. Because there notes about the article came out with such headlines: “Climate Alarmists finally admitted that they were wrong about global warming!”

In Germany, the Peruvian farmer and the guide who drives the Andam travelers are suing RWe's energy giant: according to Cayl Luciano Lyuy, the company as one of the culprits of the global climate change should help the village where he lives, protect himself from melting a local glacier. In Oslo on Tuesday, November 14, the consideration of the Greenpeace claim and the local organization Nature and Youth to the Norway government: activists believe that, issuing new licenses for the development of oil fields, the country violates its own obligations to combat climate change. Climate science is more also confident in the courts, and we still have to understand how scientists will cope with the adversariality of the parties.

Both scientists and scientific journalists learn to talk about uncertainty in climatic science with difficulty, on the go and, as I wrote above, not in the most benevolent atmosphere. But this is also necessary to do this in order to abandon the black and white picture of the world, in which either everything has already been decided, consensus and 146%, or nothing is clear, the smoke, mirrors and “only theory”. The nuances do not detract and cancel the confidence of climatologists in why what is happening now, and they should not be considered a sign of rhetorical weakness. Yes, ten theses about climate are a useful exercise in scientific communication and looks beautiful, but in a sense it is a game according to the rules of the post-truth world, where no one believes experts, especially if their words cannot be twitched. We need some kind of third way.

Or you can, of course, wait until the country introduces a mandatory call to scientific laboratories.