Book Review: Climate Perceptions
Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future
by Dale Jamieson. Oxford University Press, New York, 260 pp.
Did climate change cause Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy? Does a cold, snowy winter disprove climate change? As Dale Jamieson says in Reason in a Dark Time, “These are bad questions and no answer can be given that is not misleading. It is like asking whether when a baseball player gets a base hit, it is caused by his .350 batting average. One cannot say ‘yes,’ but saying ‘no’ falsely suggests that there is no relationship between his batting average and the base hit.” Analogies such as this are a major strength of this book, which both distills and extends the thoughtful analysis that Jamieson has been providing for well over two decades.
I’ve been following Jamieson’s work since the early 1990s, when a group at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory began to assess the social science literature relevant to climate change. Few scholars outside the physical sciences had addressed climate change explicitly; Jamieson, a philosopher, had. His publications on ethics, moral issues, uncertainty, and public policy laid down important arguments captured in Human Choice and Climate Change, which I co-edited with Steve Rayner in 1998. And the arguments are still current and vitally important as society contemplates the failure of all first-best solutions regarding climate change: an effective global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, vigorous national policies, adequate transfers of technology and other resources from industrialized to less-industrialized countries, and economic efficiency, among others.
In Reason in a Dark Time, Jamieson works steadfastly through the issues. He lays out the larger picture with energy and clarity. He takes us back to the beginning, with the history of scientific discoveries about the greenhouse effect and its emergence as a policy concern through the 1992 Earth Summit’s spirit of high hopefulness and the gradual unraveling of those high hopes by the time of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. He discusses obstacles to action, from scientific ignorance to organized denial to the limitations of our perceptions and abilities in responding to “the hardest problem.” He details two prominent but inadequate approaches to both characterizing the problem of climate change and prescribing solutions: economics and ethics. And finally, he discusses doable and appropriate responses in this “dark world” that has so far failed to agree on and implement effective actions that adequately reflect the scope of the problem.
Well, you may say, we’ve seen this book before. There are lots of books (and articles, both scholarly and mainstream) that give the history, discuss obstacles, criticize the ways the world has been trying to deal with climate change, and give recommendations. And indeed, Jamieson himself draws on his own lengthy publication record.
But you should read this book for its insights. If you are already knowledgeable about the history of climate science and international negotiations, you might skim this discussion. (It’s a good history, though.) All readers will gain from examining the useful and clear distinctions that Jamieson draws regarding climate skepticism, contrarianism, and denialism. Put simply, he sees that “healthy skepticism” questions evidence and views while not denying them; contrarianism may assert outlandish views but is skeptical of all views, including its own outlandish assertions; and denialism quite simply rejects a widely believed and well-supported claim and tries to explain away the evidence for the claim on the basis of conspiracy, deceit, or some rhetorical appeal to “junk science.” And take a look at the table and related text that depict a useful typology of eight frames of science-related issues that relate to climate change: social progress, economic development and competitiveness, morality and ethics, scientific and technical uncertainty, Pandora’s box/ Frankenstein’s monster/runaway science, public accountability and governance, middle way/alternative path, and conflict and strategy.
Jamieson’s discussions of the “limits of economics” and the “frontiers of ethics” are also useful. Though they tread much-traveled ground, they take a slightly different slant, starting not with the forecast but the reality of climate change. For instance, the discount rate (how economics values costs in the future) has been the subject of endless critiques, but typically with the goal of coming up with the “right” rate. But Jamieson points out that this is a fruitless endeavor, as social values underlie arguments for almost any discount rate. Thus, the discount rate (and other economic tools) is simply inadequate and, moreover, a mere standin for the real discussion about how society should plan for the future.
Similarly, his discussion of ethics points out that “commonsense morality” cannot “provide ethical guidance with some important aspects of climate-changing behavior”—so it’s not surprising that society has failed to act on climate change. The basis for action is not a matter of choosing appropriate values from some eternal ethical and moral menu, but of evolving values that will be relevant to a climate-changed world in which we make choices about how to adapt to climate change and whether to prevent further climate change—oh, and about whether or not to dabble in planet-altering geoengineering. Ethical and moral revolutions have occurred (e.g., capitalism’s elevation of selfishness), and climate ethicists are breaking new ground in connecting and moralizing about emissions-producing activities and climate change.
Although Jamieson’s explorations do not provide an antidote to the gloom of our dark time, readers will find much to think about here.
He clearly rebuts the argument, for example, that individual actions do not matter, asserting that “What we do matters because of its effects on the world, but what we do also matters because of its effects on ourselves.” Expanding on this thought, he says: “In my view we find meaning in our lives in the context of our relationships to humans, other animals, the rest of nature, and the world generally. This involves balancing such goods as self-expression, responsibility to others, joyfulness, commitment, attunement to reality and openness to new (often revelatory) experiences. What this comes to in the conduct of daily life is the priority of process over product, the journey over the destination, and the doing over what is done.” To my mind, this sounds like the good life that includes respect for nature, temperance, mindfulness, and cooperativeness.
Ultimately, Jamieson turns to politics and policy. As the terms prevention, mitigation, adaptation, and geoengineering have become fuzzy at best, he proposes a new classification of responses to climate change: adaptation (to reduce the negative effects of climate change), abatement (to reduce greenhouse gas emissions), mitigation (to reduce concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere), and solar radiation management (to alter the Earth’s energy balance). I agree with Jamieson that we need all of the first three and also that we need to be very cautious about “the category formerly known as geoengineering.”
Most of all, we need to live in the world as is, with all its diversity of motives and potential actions, not the dream world imagined at the Earth Summit held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. Jamieson gives us seven practical priorities for action (yes, they’ve been said before, but not often in the real-world context that he sketches). And he offers three guiding principles (my favorite is “stop arguing about what is optimal and instead focus on doing what is good,” with “good” encompassing both practical and ethical elements).
I do have some quarrels with the book, starting with the title. In its fullest form, it is unnecessarily wordy and gloomy. And as Jamieson does not talk much of “reason” in the book (nor is there even a definition of the contested term that I could find), why is it displayed so prominently?
More substantively, the gloom that Jamieson portrays is sometimes reinforced by statements that seem almost apocalyptic, such as, “While once particular human societies had the power to upset the natural processes that made their lives and cultures possible, now people have the power to alter the fundamental global conditions that permitted human life to evolve and that continue to sustain it. There is little reason to suppose that our systems of governance are up to the tasks of managing such threats.” But people have historically faced threats (war, disease, overpopulation, the Little Ice Age, among others) that likely seemed to them just as serious, so statements such as Jamieson’s invite the backlash that asserts, well, here we still are and better off, too.
Then there is the question of the intended audience, which Jamieson specifies as “my fellow citizens and…those with whom I have discussed these topics over the years.” But the literature reviews and the heavy use of citations seem to target a narrower academic audience. I would hope that people involved in policymaking and other decisionmaking would not be put off by the academic trappings, but I have my doubts.
If the book finds a wide audience, our global conversation about climate change could become more fruitful. Those who do read it will be rewarded with much to think about in the insights, analogies, and accessible discussions of productive pathways into the climate-changed future.
Elizabeth L. Malone is a staff scientist at the Joint Climate Change Research Institute, a project sponsored by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland.