Anti-Colonial Science: A Course Journal. Vol. 1, 2022. https://ojs.library.dal.ca/acs/

Climate Science: Past, Present, and Future

Sadie Quinn

February 28th, 2022. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases another report, the “bleakest warning yet” on the impacts of the climate crisis.1 I go about my day, avoiding news coverage of the IPCC report in an attempt to curb the creeping sense of despair. This global network of climate scientists, first convened by the United Nations in 1988,2 has come to seem like nothing but the bearer of bad news. Climate science, which has affected my life deeply, often feels to me like a monolithic, all-powerful yet unknowable entity – I ask myself if it must be this way. What I do know is that Earth’s climate is inseparable from human life, a fact that has profound social and ethical implications. In pre-Civil War America, abolitionists considered climate as one of many factors entwined with the oppression of African Americans, using science to refute climate-related claims about the inferiority of Black people. The social dimensions of climate are a key concern of the newest IPCC report, which connects climate and social justice to an unprecedented extent. The link between scientific research and social justice can seem obscure, but the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) at Memorial University in Newfoundland, led by Max Liboiron, provides an excellent example of scientific methodology designed with the specific goal of dismantling problematic social structures. In the face of such a severe and complex crisis, climate science can and must be a discipline that prioritizes ethical methods and evolves with social justice in mind.

Long before organizations such as the IPCC conducted large-scale climate science research in order to understand the severe and multifaceted effects of the climate crisis, scientific thinking was being used to make connections between climate and human well-being for political purposes. Colin Fisher’s 2021 article “Antebellum Black Climate Science: The Medical Geography and Emancipatory Politics of James McCune Smith and Martin Delany” examines the two African American physicians and abolitionists’ understanding of the effects of climate on people of different racial backgrounds. Although they disagreed in their visions for the future of the African American people, both McCune Smith and Delany opposed racists who believed that people of African descent could not thrive in the cooler American climate.3 By showing that the African American can “thrive most in that climate which being temperate is fitted to him as a MAN”,4 McCune Smith affirmed the humanity of African Americans, which polygenist race scientists sought to deny. Delany went so far as to assert that Black people comprised “a superior race” because they could survive in all climates, whereas more hostile tropical temperatures were unsuitable for Europeans.5 Both these arguments use contemporary race science to affirm the strength of African Americans at a time when others were using the same scientific methods to find evidence for Black people’s inferiority. McCune Smith and Delany were not engaging in climate science as we know it, but they used scientific methodology to fight for social justice, which is a key part of climate science today.

Leaping ahead to the 21st century, the connection between climate science and social justice is of utmost significance. In the strongest terms seen to date, the latest IPCC report acknowledges that “adapting to the climate crisis is as much a social problem as a scientific one”.6 While McCune Smith and Delany’s work had implications for the future of African Americans and the possibility of resettlement in Africa, this report has implications for all of humanity. The report states that vulnerability to climate change is “higher in locations with poverty, governance challenges and limited access to basic services and resources, violent conflict and high levels of climate-sensitive livelihoods”.7 This is a vital connection between the climate crisis and various social justice issues, and it gives me hope to see it addressed on a scale as large as an IPCC report. However, as scientists and policymakers address the climate crisis, they must continually consider the ethics of their actions. Climate action must be taken in a way that dismantles the systems that create the vulnerabilities mentioned above rather than perpetuating them. The world of so-called Big Science inevitably carries baggage of colonialism, capitalism, and gender discrimination. We need to examine every possible solution in order to tackle the climate crisis, but I worry what will happen if we do not arrive at those solutions in an intersectional, compassionate way.

My concerns about the social implications of climate solutions are reflected in the final chapter of Max Liboiron’s 2021 book Pollution is Colonialism. Although Liboiron does not address climate science specifically, they use their account of their work in pollution science to emphasize the importance of asking “questions of method-and-ethics (hyphenated because they are the same thing)”8. Because CLEAR publicly identifies as a feminist, anticolonial lab, its members are intensely concerned with the “how” of their research.9 They design their methodology with the goal of furthering social justice, specifically by working against colonial land relations. The practices of CLEAR are not a perfect analog to Fisher’s discussion of McCune Smith and Delaney, which focuses on the way the two thinkers entered the existing discourse of race science and used it for a new political purpose, rather than their specific methods of data collection. Nevertheless, both examples show scientific methodology being used to make sociopolitical change. The place-based nature of Liboiron’s work comes with “a specific type of relationship with its own set of compromises and obligations”,10 which allows for a precise consideration of the ethics of their research. Bodies of Big Science such as the IPCC form valuable spaces of rigorous scientific research and international cooperation, but their extremely large scale can obscure the specific relationships that Liboiron discusses. Place-based science allows researchers to embody the sociopolitical change they wish to see in a tangible way and work to dismantle the problematic systems around them.

Each time a new IPCC report is released, the world mourns what has already been lost, braces itself for the worst that is yet to come, and I hope, takes new steps to address the greatest crisis facing all life on this planet. From abolitionist physicians in 19th-century Pennsylvania to pollution scientists in 21st-century Newfoundland, scientific research has the potential to further sociopolitical change, by using existing methods to make new arguments as well as by designing completely new methods that prioritize justice. Taking climate action requires careful consideration of the social and ethical dimensions of science, which can never be separated from scientific research. Scientists and decision-makers must move quickly on the what of climate action without forgetting to consider the how.

Bibliography

Carrington, Damian. “This Climate Report Asks: What Is at Stake? In Short, Everything”. The Guardian, 28 February 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/28/what-at-stake-climate-crisis-report-everything. Accessed 5 March 2022.

Fisher, Colin. “Antebellum Black Climate Science: The Medical Geography and Emancipatory Politics of James McCune Smith and Martin Delany.” Environmental History 26, no. 3 (May 2021): 461–483.

Harvey, Fiona. “IPCC Issues ‘Bleakest Warning Yet’ on Impacts of Climate Breakdown”. The Guardian. 28 February 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/28/ipcc-issues-bleakest-warning-yet-impacts-climate-breakdown. Accessed 5 March 2022.

Liboiron, Max. Pollution is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

Portner, Hans-Otto, and Debra Roberts. Climate Change 2022 Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability: Summary for Policymakers. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf.

Endnotes

  1. Fiona Harvey, “IPCC Issues ‘Bleakest Warning Yet’ on Impacts of Climate Breakdown”, The Guardian, 28 February 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/28/ipcc-issues-bleakest-warning-yet-impacts-climate-breakdown, accessed 5 March 2022.↩︎

  2. Harvey, “IPCC Issues ‘Bleakest Warning Yet’ on Impacts of Climate Breakdown.”↩︎

  3. Colin Fisher, “Antebellum Black Climate Science: The Medical Geography and Emancipatory Politics of James McCune Smith and Martin Delany” Environmental History 26, no. 3 (May 2021): 478.↩︎

  4. Fisher “Antebellum Black Climate Science,” p. 468.↩︎

  5. Fisher “Antebellum Black Climate Science,” p. 473.↩︎

  6. Damian Carrington, “This Climate Report Asks: What Is at Stake? In Short, Everything,” The Guardian, 28 February 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/28/what-at-stake-climate-crisis-report-everything, accessed 5 March 2022.↩︎

  7. Hans-Otto Portner and Debra Roberts, Climate Change 2022 Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability: Summary for Policymakers, (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022), https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGII_SummaryForPolicymakers.pdf: 14.↩︎

  8. Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 114.↩︎

  9. Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism, p. 119.↩︎

  10. Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism, p. 146.↩︎

Copyright (c) 2022 Sadie Quinn

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