In October 2023, the new Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, the American psychology professor, Deborah Prentice, delivered her first Annual Address to Senate House. Her address highlighted the imperative for university students to learn to “disagree well” about difficult subjects and for universities to facilitate this learning. Prentice announced her intention to moderate a series of open “dialogues” at Cambridge, in which experts challenge each other on pressing issues of the day.
Prentice’s initiative was no doubt prompted by the lively public politics in the UK around questions of free speech, cancel culture and academic freedom. This is a pressing issue within the life of universities at the present time. In some instances, students and academics are being bullied into tacitly accepting viewpoint orthodoxies, fearing for their reputations and of being castigated for expressing contrarian views and beliefs. A slew of books have recently been appearing which challenge the chilling climate of self-righteous orthodoxy which has emerged in recent years, among which are Charlan Nemeth’s ‘In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business’; Andrew Doyle’s ‘The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World’; Umut Ozkirimli’s ‘Cancelled: The Left Way Back from Woke’.
I have been arguing that we need to ‘disagree well’ for longer than the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. In 2009, I published my first climate book, ‘Why We Disagree About Climate Change’, which argued that unless we isolate and clarify the specific reasons why our attitudes and responses towards climate change are so different, we cannot truly claim to be taking the issue seriously. In the book’s dedication, I noted that disagreement is always—or at least should always be—a form of learning. Without hearing from those with whom we disagree, and without engaging them in debate and argument, we exist merely inside a partisan echo-chamber rather than as part of a functioning democracy.
I believe this to be even truer of the politics of climate change than it was 16 years ago. There is no single correct way of interpreting and dealing with the risks and challenges of climate. Those who claim otherwise, and seek to suppress public and political debate because in their view stopping climate change is more important than respecting democracy, are dangerous one-eyed ideologues. This is the thrust of my more recent book, ‘Climate Change Isn’t Everything: Liberating Climate Politics from Alarmism’.
On Disagreement and Democracy
Disagreeing with others—whether on matters great or small, public or private—is part of the essence of what it is to be human. We each see the world differently, we each weigh evidence differently, we each hold different attitudes to risk and danger, to justice and injustice. Giving space for such disagreements to be voiced and heard—and tolerating the dissenters—is a foundational principle of democracy. Provoked by American Vice-President J D Vance’s public criticism of Europe’s fragile commitment to free speech, The Economist magazine conceded that Europe really does have a problem and asked, “What, practically, should Europeans do? They should start by returning to the old liberal ideas that noisy disagreement is better than enforced silence and that people should tolerate one another’s views.” A free and open society needs heterodox thinkers to be heard without fear of censorship or dis-establishment. The late Jerome Kagan, professor of developmental psychology at Harvard, noted,
Every democracy needs an opposition party to prevent the one temporarily in power from becoming despotic. And every society needs a cohort of intellectuals to check the dominance of a single perspective when its ideological hand becomes too heavy.[1]
Not just in politics, but in science too. The lifeblood of science is to question, to doubt and to challenge. Criticism fulfils a necessary and positive function in science, but unlike a literary critic a scientific critic has no independent status. As Jacob Bronowski once noted, whereas literary critics carry status in their own right, to be a scientific critic is to be a scientist.[2] Scientific dissidents may not be popular for those who think they know the truth, but they are necessary if science is to secure respect from the wider public. It is not that every heterodox thinker is correct, but it is the case that, just as with a free and open society, science needs heterodox thinkers. Their arguments should be heard and without suppression; group-think, censorship, and a thought police have no place in science.
Reducing Arguments to Labels
The easiest way to avoid hard thinking on any complex problem is to silence those who disagree with you. There are different ways this might be done, but all three adopt an ad hominem approach to winning an argument. You might call into question the integrity or sincerity of your critic; you might damn their views by associating them with discredited fellow-travellers; or you might dismiss their views as unworthy of consideration by attaching derogatory labels to their position.
Of these, the latter is the most subtle and this divide and rule tactic has been widely used in the climate change debate. Using a pejorative label such as “climate change denier” to characterize the views of those with whom you disagree serves to isolate, exclude, ignore or dismiss claims from being worthy of discussion. Once a pejorative label is attached to them, arguments can be dismissed out of hand without further engagement. An emphasis on labels accentuates division and diverts attention away from getting to the root of the disagreement, which is necessary for public debate and understanding of a complex issue.
But this ‘marking the card’ of those deemed to “deny” climate science proved to be too narrowly drawn for those pursuing this tactic. So it is now possible to call upon an array of alliterative labels which call-out those who, it is claimed, seek to undermine or slow-down efforts to attend to the risks of climate change. Thus one can choose from the following lexicon of additional ‘d-words’: climate ‘delayers’, ‘dissemblers’, ‘deceivers’, ‘downplayers’, ‘dividers’, ‘deflectors’, ‘doomers’, and ‘distractors’.
This strategy has been taken to its next logical step on the HotAir website, commissioned and operated by Tortoise Media, the new owners of The Observer newspaper. HotAir ingests a large digital corpus of so-called “contrarian” claims about climate change which have been pre-classified using a deep learning AI model. This model imposes a five-fold scheme, with further sub-categories: ‘global warming is not happening’, ‘human greenhouse gases are not causing global warming’, ‘climate impacts are not bad’, ‘climate solutions won’t work’, and ‘the climate movement/science is unreliable’. HotAir then classifies these textual fragments—speech acts emanating from individuals, organisations or web-sites—and “marks” them as propagating either climate denial, climate delay, or political coercion.
But this approach seriously confuses public audiences by conflating very different reasons for disagreement over climate change. Criticising certain aspects of climate science is very different to criticizing certain policies or climate solutions, a distinction which those advocating the new lexicon of ‘d-words’ do not want to recognize. For example, claims that ‘mountain glaciers aren’t retreating’ or that ‘atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is not rising’ are very different to claims that ‘green jobs don’t work’, ‘nuclear energy is good’ or ‘the media is alarmist’.
These latter cannot be determined to be scientifically correct or incorrect, either because evidence is conflicting, the standards by which we judge these claims are values-based, or because they are partially true and partially false. Some media reporting of climate change is undoubtedly alarmist; nuclear energy for many is part of a desirable and necessary energy mix; and whether or not green jobs “work” depends on what this criterion means, for whom and over what time period. Creating a catch-all definition of ‘climate delay’ blurs the distinction between very different types of arguments and thus risks proscribing legitimate public debate about climate policies.
Legitimate Epistemic Uncertainty
The above examples reveal the problems of policing what can or cannot be disagreed with in respect of climate policies. But the same divide and rule tactic is often applied to what is known or not known scientifically about the changing climate. In science, the boundaries between “truth” and “untruth” are not easily drawn. The distinctions between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “conditioned certainty”, Bertrand Russell’s “moderate scepticism” and Robert Merton’s “organized scepticism” are often fuzzy. Where these boundaries lie should certainly not be determined by those who are external to the actual practices of science and scientific assessment; established scientific practice, processes and norms are their own policing mechanisms.
For example, it is quite legitimate to read carefully the latest reports of the IPCC and to pick out what is known in climate science to varying levels of confidence. The UK Met Office’s ‘climate change questions’ web-site do quite a good job here. But it is not legitimate to extrapolate from a high-level claim such as ‘97% of scientists believe that human activities are changing the climate’ to attach a similar level of consensus to every claim made about the human influence on climate. Even less should scientists succumb to the lure of the noble lie. There are many facets of a changing global climate where science does not speak with one voice, where we still ‘see through a glass darkly’. And scientists must be free to say so without the chilling effect of being labelled a climate ‘doubter’, ‘delayer’ or ‘distractor’. Just to take some recent examples from the peer reviewed literature of where scientific opinion is still widely divergent: the impact of climate change on the south Asian monsoon; the effectiveness and risks of solar geoengineering technologies; the necessity of carbon capture; the future behaviour of hurricanes; the scientific credibility of extreme weather attribution studies.
Conclusion
Climate change is real and serious, but it is not everything. Aiming to deliver largely arbitrary global temperature targets, or a particular jurisdiction trying to achieve Net-Zero emissions by a certain date, foreground crude aggregated metrics that reduce the dimensionality of the climate change problem. They narrow the political field of vision and can too easily led to policy mis-steps. Sloganising around such metrics must not foreclose political debate over the effectiveness and desirability of specific policies which, while they may contribute to reducing climate risks, may also undermine or foreclose other legitimate policy goals.
Writing in a different time, and in a different context, the late liberal internationalist newspaper editor David Astor offered a trenchant defence of free speech. It is worth rehearsing, whatever ones position in the climate debate. Amongst his private papers was one titled ‘Memo on the Soul of a Paper’ which summarised the beliefs that permeated his long editorship of The Observer newspaper between 1948 and 1975. On Astor’s watch, The Observer’s personality was established by people who were drawn together more by being ‘anti-fascist’ (i.e., anti-Hitler) than by anything else. His beliefs are lucidly summarised in the following paragraph, extracted from his Memo[3]:
Treating opponents respectfully; trying to understand people and to explain them to each other; valuing differences; not exaggerating your own case; avoiding over-dramatisation or enjoyment of the sensational; practicing moral courage, particularly daring to stand up to ridicule, and showing respect for that [courage] in others; discouraging herd thinking, particularly among those ‘on our side’; challenging taboos and legends, particularly those ‘our sort’ of reader usually accepts; deliberately cultivating doubt and scepticism, but not cynicism; practicing self-criticism—as liberals, as internationalists, as journalists—as well as dishing it out to everyone else.
The new inheritors of Astor’s legacy at The Observer—Tortoise Media, with their web-site HotAir—would do well to read his Memo in full and apply it wholeheartedly to their reporting of climate change.
[1] pp.265-266 in: Kagan,J. (2009) The Three Cultures: Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and the Humanities in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 310pp.
[2] Bronowski,J. (1968) Honest Jim and the Tinker Toy Model. Review of James D Watson’s (1968) ‘The Double Helix’. The Nation. 18 March 1968, pp.381-382.
[3] Quoted on p.152 in Lewis,J. (2016) David Astor. London: Jonathan Cape. 416pp.
