Why Copenhagen had to fail: The misplaced expectations of science

Copenhagen produced poorly disguised disappointment for many interested parties that had invested energy and expectations in the process. As an international problem solving exercise it has spectacularly failed to either deliver answered questions or even answerable questions that can satisfy a heated public debate. Even if the debate is simplified by media into opposing camps of environmentalists and deniers, the politics of climate change are a critical test case for democracy and public deliberation in the 21^st Century.


The gathering of representatives and political leaders from 193 countries was characterised by polemic and debate. Participating countries were caught up in political diplomacy, inconclusive debates and back room negotiations. In public forums, through the media and even out on the street, competing interpretations and opinions were argued. The subjects of these debates were a disputed science of climate change, and, more importantly, the cost and respective contribution for fixing the problem. Who pays and who benefits is fundamentally a political question. The drama of the last minute deal brokering only emphasized the inability of the world's science and political practitioners to deliver the leadership that the scale of the event imposed. Whether appropriate or not, the inability to restore order on board of a doomed ship uncomfortably evokes a Titanic comparison.

Beyond climate management, the perceived failure of the political elite so far to deliver sought after goals such as financial security, good health and environmental sustainability, does not bode well for public support in future decision making. But perhaps the reason for these disappointments lies much deeper than easy assumptions about the fallibility of politicians. An integral part of the contemporary model of political government is the enlightenment reliance on objective expertise. This idea of science as a non-political source of knowledge, dates back to the formative years of European culture at least, the positivist hey days of the 19^th century.

If science is examined as what it is made out to be in education and media, then a contradiction becomes apparent that can help explain in part the drama that took place in Copenhagen. Science is expected to be an objective informant of political debate and as such only a by-product of a greater project, which is the search for predictable knowledge. For science to fulfil such roles, it must conform to the positivist view of scientific work that has entered school curricula more or less directly from the technological and industrial revolution that began in earnest in the 19^th Century. The prowess of science that built railroads across continents and made electrical, medical, and cultural miracles possible, then followed in the 20^th Century by nuclear physics and the green revolution, must also be extendable to all remaining problems of the natural world. However, actual experience has caused many cracks in such an edifice of technological confidence.

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Science cannot offer all the solutions, and so unsurprisingly an uncritical faith in technology was left behind in the oh-so-short post war boom years of the 1950s and 1960s. Scientists have been warning all along that the most critical problems confronting humanity – be that the risk of nuclear war or catastrophic environmental destruction – do not simply lie in the area of science and technology. For example, Garret Hardin, author of the now classic 1968 article The tragedy of the commons, the "population problem" is a prime member of the class of problems without a technical solution. And as Hardin showed in his often cited tract, in the face of inexorably growing population, the hope to find a fix that addresses the core issue of overpopulation without infringing on existing privileges and advantages is technologically impossible. And that is the heart of the paradox which poses impossible problems for science – i.e. to harness an objective science to simply assure more of the good life that has led to a population explosion in the first place is not possible without political decisions.

There are a number of assumptions that underlie the relationship of science and politics. Copenhagen has made these visible.

1. The unity of scientific method: A universal logic of inquiry that applies in all disciplines

Science has historically utilised very effective knowledge production methods, that have explained puzzling phenomena from lightning bolts to plant nutrition uptake, and it has done so in ways that made it possible to improve weather prediction and increase food production. But in all domains of research, the limits of simplistic models in complex situations has been shown to also limit the extent of predictability. A journey through the journals of many scholarly disciplines, not only touching on climate science and agricultural technology but equally for example on nuclear physics and political studies, can quickly collect critical reflections that warn of the limits of the classic scientific method of analytical methods and falsifiable hypotheses, especially in the human sciences where most important categories of description cannot be reduced to instrumental measurements.

Trying to apply the scientific method to the complexity of human-climate interaction with the expectation to deliver scientifically verifiable predictions can only deliver frustration. There are several reasons for this. A universal method assumes that any given problem situation can be reduced to a determinate number of variables which in complex systems is contradictory. And even if these variables can be isolated, a methodological universalism requires these variables to be measurable and 'interpret-able' in a meaningful way. To then link interpretations back to a real world context makes assumptions about the stability and autonomy of a situation under investigation. Climate processes on a global scale are an excellent example that show how futile that objective really is. Lastly, if science is asked to move beyond explicating relevant factors in complex processes to provide reference points for political decision making then it faces the impossible challenge of making abstract research results commensurable in decision making processes spanning multiple, interlocking domains of natural and social processes.

2. Explanations hold the power of foresight: If all variables are known, an event can be predicted.

Another assumption that is integral to a shared understanding of science is the relationship of explanation with prediction. The intuitive notion that knowledge makes prediction possible lies in contrast with the everyday experience of science as raising the number of possibilities rather than reducing possible answers. What science has proven most effective at is to identify new variables and alert to other possible futures. If the predictability of weather has only improved in a statistical measure of likely 'extreme weather events' then this disappoints an expectation for improved science to earmark sunny holidays well in advance.

There is of course another way to conceive of the increasing multiplicity of possibilities that universities of the 21^st Century are emitting like industrial smog. While on the one hand opening for the accusation of reducing levels of visibility for policy makers with unnecessary complexity, on the other the growing realm of hypothetical propositions can be seen as a necessary intermediate stage of an ever improving science. In reality, the inevitable uncertainty of the scientific method diminishes its authority in the political realm, but if that is so, then it was a false authority in the first place.

3. Theory, that is science, informs political decision making but must always remain objective and value-neutral.

The authority of science as basis for informed decision making rests on significant assumptions of infallibility that science cannot fulfil. While a range of issues can be reformulated as questions precise enough for scientific inquiry to deliver practical answers, this disguises the limits of science. Beyond the scope of delimited questions lies a world of interlocked processes that cannot be isolated in experiment or natural studies. Science becomes a profession of raising possibilities and politics then is about risk management. But does that reflect the relationship between science and politics?

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In democratic societies, government is explicitly thought of as representing multiple interests of diverse citizenships. Representational politics relies on competing constituencies to use public forums of government to raise concerns and resolve conflicting claims. But scientists are citizens as well. Moreover, simply by choice of career path, scientists express respect for the significance of knowledge in social life. How can science be value neutral and assume to offer information as if would not touch on the lives of scientists themselves, or have critical insights relegated to a 'democratic' encyclopaedia sorted without value preference from a to z?

These points illustrate that the common perception of science as a vale-free, objective informant of democratic decision making is flawed. The reality in a complex world makes science a social endeavour that is placed at an objective distance from political governance at the risk of preserving out-dated institutions of public decision-making. Maybe the fault is not with a science unable to deliver its part but a politics which is unable to deliver in a world of increasing complexity.

The expectation for Copenhagen was to agree on a management plan for the climate. But in the face of climate complexity and unresolved political differences, this is a problem that is ill suited for a science based politics. What then are the alternatives? Firstly, the indeterminacy of the science of complex problems must be more fundamentally recognised and institutionalised. Politicians then, must turn to science not in expectation of definitive answers, but as one source of several, albeit a critical one, to highlight the risks and opportunities that alternative decisions open up. Seeing other view points not as potential obstacles, or in need of education, but as informants of potential obstacles, opens the canvas of possible pathways that must be mapped out. We live in a risk society, where increased technology has not so much reduced the threats of the unexpected, but rather has dramatically increased the scale of risks – be they in our financial systems or in our global climate systems. Proceed with caution, should be the maxim.

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