Epistemology and Public Debate about Anthropogenic Climate Change

<p>Epistemology can contribute to the public debate about climate change. Although some of that debate concerns how we should act and how we should live, which is the proper concern of ethics; a great deal of it concerns what we know and what we should believe, which is the proper concern of epistemology. Although professional ethicists have been willing to address the former issues, professional epistemologists have, for a variety of reasons, been less willing to address the latter issues.</p> <p> </p> <p>In this chapter I identify several epistemic errors to be found in the writings of some of the most influential climate change skeptics (that is, those who are skeptical, to one degree or another, of the orthodoxy represented by the IPCC). I argue that much of this skepticism is driven by a false conception of science, according to which science consists in individual geniuses working independently of one another. Scientists, on this view, are the kind of people who will not believe (still less claim to know) anything that they haven’t checked for themselves. I argue that this was always a false conception of how science works or should work. Furthermore, its falsehood should be particularly apparent in the case of climate science, which is especially reliant on contributions from people who are widely varied in their expertise and widely distributed across time and space. I argue that although these skeptics have a mistaken conception of science, they are not entirely to blame for this mistake. It is a conception of science that has been promoted, explicitly or implicitly, by a lot of philosophers of science as well as a lot of working scientists.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p>