Science vs. The Science

Climate discourse is to climate science what a taxidermied duck is to a live one.

Science is hard. Flip through a recent paper in almost any discipline and chances are you'll have no idea what's going on. Unintelligibility is a problem because science is supposed to inform our public debates.

What a good government should do, we’re told, is "Follow The Science.”

But how can you follow a thing you can’t understand?

To become the kind of thing you can follow, science has to be transmographied, first, into the thing you can actually follow: not science, but The Science.

This is not a straightforward process — and plenty of violence is done to science in the process. Because science is an open-ended process, but The Science is a body of settled body of facts.

The relationship Science has to The Science is like the relationship a living, breathing, quacking duck has to a taxidermist's stuffed duck: they look the same, sort of, only one’s alive and the other one's dead. One swims and flies and fucks and hunts and grows, the other one just sits there purporting to capture something vital about it, but missing its fundamental aliveness.

We like to imagine the expert consensus The Science purports to encapsulate arises spontaneously from the interactions between scientists.

If only. 

In the real world, a whole expert class works full time to boil science down to The Science: activists, journalists, podcasters, professors, analysts, substackers, think tankers, philanthropic bureaucrats, press flaks, and campaigners all picking through the output of science, interpreting them in light of their ideological pre-commitments and political priorities, repackaging them in terms comprehensible to the wider public and seting it loose on the public sphere.

That most people miss the difference between the two is no accident. The Science is determined to be conflated with science. It presents itself as the friendly, comprehensible face of science—the way science explains itself to the world.

The Science never acknowledges the conditions of its own creation—its funding, its ideological priors, its preferences and prejudices. The Science is blind to the violence it does to science. It’s as though the conceptual taxidermists in charge of producing The Science don't quite grasp that to stuff the duck, they had to kill it first.

I started this substack when it dawned on me that, in the climate space, the gap between The Science and science is becoming truly abysmal.

When it comes to climate, Following The Science now requires you to be blind to huge swathes of climate science. With whole areas of climate science now facing a virtual taboo from the purveyors of The Science, an epistemic crisis is brewing in the climate space. I didn't really see anyone else writing about it, so I thought I might give it a try.

The more I've learned about what climate scientists actually do, the more I've come to love climate science—and the more I've come to despise the way The Science erases so many of their findings.

Science is all about pushing the boundaries of human knowledge outward. Scientists are mostly interested in what they don't know. A scientist's default state is doubt and uncertainty: if you're not at least a little bit doubtful and uncertain about what you're doing, what you're doing is not science.

There is no room for any of this in The Science. Its politicized narratives claim epistemic authority by stripping all the messy doubt and uncertainty from science. But it's even worse than that: The Science has the gall to erase whole areas of climate science that it sees as inimical to its constructed consensus. With the result that, when it comes to climate, The Science looks less like science and more like a religion—with its certainties, its dogmas and, of course, with its public floggings, its extreme iconoclasts and periodic witch-hunts.

My goal is to be less like the taxidermist and more like the wildlife photographer. I want to capture climate science in the wild, doing as little violence to it in the process as is practicable. That doesn’t mean that I won’t advocate — just that I’ll try to advocate living ducks, not dead ones. 

I started this substack because it seems to me we'll never get out of the climate mess we've gotten ourselves into if we keep trying to Follow The Science.

Follow science, instead, and we might just have a chance.