Climate Policy Blog

Salience: On the Eve of the 2016 Election

Salience is a word that in the social sciences has come to mean relevance, or perhaps, goodness of fit of knowledge to a particular problem. I use salience in class when I talk about making climate-change data and knowledge usable in planning and decision making. In conversational English, salience refers to something being important or most notable.

On my list of to-do blogs in the run up to the election was a reflection and analysis of climate-change policy during the Obama administration, and then a discussion of the climate-change positions of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. However, the way the election has evolved, climate change and environmental policy do not appear to be very salient to voters. There is certainly no meaningful nuance of policy and positions from any analysis I might provide.

About a year ago, I was writing about some of our students at University of Michigan preparing to go to the climate negotiations at the Conference of the Parties in Paris. Even at that time, I commented about our behavior seeming to be a concerted effort to accelerate our decline into the Dark Age. That particular comment was motivated by the accumulated impacts of the anti-science movement. More broadly, however, there is a dangerous anti-knowledge movement in the U.S. Science-based knowledge has become conflated with political and cultural groups of people; it is tribal knowledge. Knowledge that is, therefore, untrusted outside of the tribe.

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New Report: A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling

In late 2010 and 2011, I was writing about organizing U.S. climate modeling. I combined and posted some of the WU blogs on ClimatePolicy.org as Something New in the Past Decade? Organizing U.S. Climate Modeling. I want to revisit those issues in light of the release of a National Academy of Sciences Report, A National Strategy for Advancing Climate Modeling (2012).

I am a co-author of this Academy report. In this blog, I am writing not in my role as a co-author, but from my personal perspective. This blog fits in with many of the themes I have written about in the last few years.

First, I want to explain the role of the National Academy of Sciences. The Academy is a private, not-for-profit organization created by President Abraham Lincoln at the height of the Civil War. Lincoln and others at the time realized the importance of science and technology to the United States and wanted a way to get independent advice on issues important to policy. Almost 150 years later, this importance is greater, but the role of science is an increasingly controversial political issue – especially when scientific investigation comes into conflict with how we might want to believe and to act. (see, here or edited here ) So one role of the National Academy is independent review – a role that is at the heart of the scientific method and the culture of scientific practice.

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The Scientific Organization: Organizing U.S. Climate Modeling

Summary: In order to address the need to provide climate-model products, a new type of organization is needed. This organization needs to focus on and to be organized to support the unifying branch of the scientific method. This requires application-driven model development. This will require the organization as a whole to develop hypotheses, design experiments, and document methods of evaluation and validation. In such an organization the development of standards and infrastructure support controlled experimentation, the scientific method, in contrast to the arguments that have been used in the past to resist the development of standards and infrastructure. This organization where a collection of scientists behaves as a “scientist” requires governance structures to support decision making and management structures to support the generation of products. Such an organization must be envisioned as a whole and developed as a whole.

Introduction

Over the past 25 years there have been many reports written about climate and weather modeling (example), climate and weather observing systems (example), high performance computing (example), and how to improve the transition from research to operations (example). A number of common themes emerge from these reports. First, the reports consistently conclude with commendation of the creativity and quality of U.S. scientific research. Second, the reports call for more integration across the federal agencies to address documented “needs” for climate-science products. De facto, the large number of these reports suggests that there is a long-held perception that U.S. activities in climate science are not as effective as they need to be or could be. The fact that there are reports with consistent messages for more than two decades suggests that our efforts at integration are not as effective as required.

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