Climate Change and Museum Futures

Fiona Cameron, Brett Neilson, Fiona Cameron, Brett Neilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135013523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Climate change is a complex and dynamic environmental, cultural and political phenomenon that is reshaping our relationship to nature. Climate change is a global force, with global impacts. Viable solutions on what to do must involve dialogues and decision-making with many agencies, stakeholder groups and communities crossing all sectors and scales. Current policy approaches are inadequate and finding a consensus on how to reduce levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere through international protocols has proven difficult. Gaps between science and society limit government and industry capacity to engage with communities to broker innovative solutions to climate change.

Drawing on leading-edge research and creative programming initiatives, this collection details the important roles and agencies that cultural institutions (in particular, natural history and science museums and science centres) can play within these gaps as resources, catalysts and change agents in climate change debates and decision-making processes; as unique public and trans-national spaces where diverse stakeholders, government and communities can meet; where knowledge can be mediated, competing discourses and agendas tabled and debated; and where both individual and collective action might be activated.

1 Why we Should Disagree about Climate Change

Mike Hulme

Quantifying Consensus

In May 2013, John Cook and colleagues published a paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters titled “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature” (Cook et al. 2013). The paper made a number of claims, most notably that among the 4,014 peer-reviewed papers expressing “a position on anthropogenic global warming, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming” (Cook et al. 2013, 1). The paper was heavily promoted through various mainstream and social media and was widely discussed and debated on climate change blogs and comment sites. Cook’s paper was merely the latest in a series of articles published in peer-reviewed journals which have used large-scale surveys to quantify scientific consensus about climate change. Naomi Oreskes was perhaps the first high-profile study to do this (Oreskes 2004), followed by Doran and Zimmerman (2009) and by Anderegg et al. (2010). Oreskes argued that of the 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers she surveyed, “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position on climate change.” The two later studies found similar levels to the Cook et al. study of “consensus agreement” among climate scientists, respectively 97.4% who think human activity is “a significant contributing factor” to climate change and between 97 and 98% who “agree with the consensus position on climate change” expressed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Neither the adequacy of the methods used in these studies nor their precise outcomes are the primary focus of my concern. I am more interested in the underlying motivation for them. Why do the scientists involved in these studies think it is necessary to undertake this form of enumeration? Are they seeking to win a particular argument by sheer weight of numbers? And are these polls of climate scientists any more important than comparable large-scale surveys of public opinion which seek to establish the extent of public consensus, as opposed to the consensus of climate scientists, on climate change?

For example, Yale University’s Climate in the American mind project has shown, in a series of surveys dating back to 2008, that a consistent majority of American citizens believe the climate is warming and that humans are implicated. Although these numbers have fluctuated by up to 10 percentage points, the most recent survey from April 2013 (Leiserowitz et al. 2013) shows that among those citizens who express a position, there is a ratio of more than 3-to-1 in favor of the reality of global warming. And similar public polling in other countries around the world have, in nearly all cases, shown national-level majorities in favor of such beliefs (e.g., see the GlobeScan survey from November 2009 [HSBC 2009]). One could also quantify consensus about climate change in other settings: for example, the almost universal ratification by sovereign governments of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or the assent of over 95% of national governments to the 2009 Copenhagen Accord. What do these clear, even overwhelming, consensuses about climate change among climate scientists, the general public and sovereign governments tell us? They seem to suggest that scientists, citizens and governments are in widespread agreement that humans are an active and significant agent in changing the climate. Case made!

So what more is it that politicians, policy advocates and climate change campaigners want to know? Why did John Cook and his climate change colleagues feel the need in 2013 to conduct another survey of climate scientists and to go to great lengths to attract media attention to the result? I can only speculate as to their motives but I suspect it arises from the assumption, held not just by these authors, that successful implementation of climate policies—whether nationally or internationally—depends crucially on a scientific consensus about the detection and attribution of climate change to human activities. If so, this reveals an underlying adherence to a linear model of science-policy interaction (e.g., Millstone 2005): knowledge drives policy, consensual knowledge is more likely to drive consensual policy, and so quantifying the strength of the scientific consensus—the closer to 100% the better—drives forward the likelihood of strong and effective policy action.

But the above examples of enumerating the strength of consensus around climate change are largely irrelevant to the nature of climate politics. What matters is not whether climate is changing (yes it is), nor whether human actions are to blame (yes they are, at least partly and possibly largely—the precise extent of human agency was, in fact, a question on which Cook et al.’s 2013 survey was ambiguous), nor whether future climate change carries additional risks to human or nonhuman interests (yes it does), nor whether government representatives will sign up to nonbinding aspirational statements about what needs to be done (why wouldn’t they?). The question that matters, the only question that matters in the end, is “so what?”

Climate Change is Political

The answer to the question “what sorts of policy response to human-caused climate change are desirable, appropriate and possible?” is of course deeply political. The answer will only be found through ongoing negotiation of different social interests operating across and within national jurisdictions. And it shows the fallacy of the linear model of science-policy interaction. Climate change, we might say, is a political problem before it is a scientific fact.

Consensus about the scientific evidence that humans are altering the climate system is not much help here. There is no inevitable policy response that follows from the fact that climate change is largely (partly?) human caused. (Similarly, there is no self-evident political, theological or ethical truth that follows from the fact that humans and other species have evolved through processes of natural selection.) And nor would there be if it was established—again through consensus-making processes—that the range of future global warming is very likely to be, say, in the range of 2 to 4 degrees Celsius over the next 100 years. Such knowledge might certainly warrant a vigorous political debate on what response might be desirable, but consensus knowledge claims don’t make the outcome of this debate any more self-evident. Even if one takes the Cook et al. study at face value, how does a scientific consensus of 97.1% make policy making about climate change any easier? As Roger Pielke Jr. has often remarked in the context of American climate politics (e.g. Pielke 2013), it is not a lack of a majority public belief about the reality of human-caused climate change that has made climate policy implementation in the United States difficult. Polling data collected over twenty-five years has always yielded a clear majority of American citizens accepting this reality, and yet this consensus has hardly driven forward national climate policies in that country.

The dividing line in climate change debates is between those who think that climate change is such a totalizing and overwhelming existential threat that normal politics must be suspended and those who recognize that human living is political before it is natural. But climate, as “nature” understood more broadly (Castree 2013), can never mean one thing. Less still can “climate change” mean one thing, with its provocative mixture of believed human, nonhuman and divine causes. Disputes over the meaning of climate change and the forms of political response that are appropriate can never be resolved by appeal to science. Being “armed only with peer-reviewed science”—as claimed by the UK climate protestors of summer 2007 against the proposed third runway at London’s Heathrow Airport (Climate Resistance 2007)—is never enough. The meaning of scientific facts is always culturally mediated and politically contested. So is the meaning of climate change.

So politics, not science, must take center stage. As Amanda Machin shows in her book Negotiating Climate Change: Radical Democracy and the Illusion of Consensus (Machin 2013), asking climate scientists to forge a consensus that will enable decisive political action misunderstands climate, science and politics in equal measure. If democratic politics is to be effective we need more disagreement, not more consensus, about what climate change is really about. As Machin (2013, 5) argues,

Consensus on how to combat climate change cannot and will not ever be reached; there is no one ‘rational’ path to take, no overarching grand green scheme that suits everyone. Any apparently inclusive agreement and rational discussion is rather a trick of power that disguises exclusion and inequality.

And driving always for consensus, whether in science or in politics, may not just be unhelpful. It can also be dangerous. Aggrandizing projects of Earth System Governance or climate engineering or a global carbon market are nothing short of political mega-projects, justified by some in the name of science as essential and nonnegotiable. But Machin (2013, 2) again shows the dangers of such steam-rolling, noting that “The myth of consensus . . . is perhaps the biggest problem facing climate change politics today. Assuming political consensus as a horizon marginalizes those who dissent and undermines the role of disagreement in politics.”

The argument about global-scale solar climate engineering, for example, has to be political before it can be scientific (Hulme 2014). The urgency is not to debate how these putative solar reflection technologies can be governed should they be necessary, but rather to give voice to a multitude of arguments about why such a response to climate change is or is not desirable. And these voices must be heard from around the world—otherwise we are entering a new era of tyranny and the mighty power of naturalism will suppress the creative and legitimate tension of agonistic human beings. Speaking in a wider context about agonistic politics, the political theorist Chantel Mouffe argues that “Taking pluralism seriously requires that we give up the dream of a rational consensus which entails the fantasy that we could escape our human form of life” (Mouffe 2000, 98).

The Role of Museums

So what does the argument outlined above imply for the role of museums in representing to their audiences the idea of, and evidence for, climate change? It can hardly mean that museums should not engage with climate science, least of all those museums or science centers whose very mandate has science education enshrined at their heart. But museums shouldn’t limit their representation of climate change to climate science. As I have argued elsewhere (Hulme 2009), the more important questions that the idea of climate change raises are those that extend beyond science. They even extend beyond merely rational discourse—if by rationality we exclude forms of knowing which are embodied in cultural tradition and the human imagination. Museums when representing climate change would therefore do well to draw attention to the range of different human cosmologies, values and aspirations with which the idea engages.

Let me suggest four public-interest questions that lie at the very heart of the human response to the idea of humans as an agent of climate change. I believe these questions are much more important than those asked of climate scientists in the Cook et al. study cited above. And museums should engage their audiences in reflecting on and deliberating their own answers, free from any tyranny introduced by notions of “the correct (consensual)” answer. These are questions that humans should and do disagree about.

My first question is to get audiences thinking about how they value the future—or what is known in analytic economics as the discount rate. Many of the arguments about urgent versus delayed interventions to reduce the growth rate of greenhouse gas emissions revolve around this question: Do we value public goods in the future the same as, or less than, they are valued today? This is a question that clear-thinking people will disagree about.

My second question is “What is the role and efficacy of markets in the governance on climate change?” Many arguments about climate change, as about environmental management more generally, revolve around the extent to which commodification of nature—putting a tradeable price on an environmental good—is seen as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Museums can help audiences understand the significance and consequences of this argument.

Third, it is important to provoke citizens to ask the question, “How should new technologies be governed—from experimentation and development through to deployment?” In relation to climate change this question of governance might apply to new or improved low carbon energy technologies (such as fracking, new nuclear, hydrogen fuel), or to the use of genetically modified crops as a climate adaptation strategy or to proposed climate engineering technologies to alter the solar heat flux. How such technologies are governed is, again, not one upon which science, least of all a scientific consensus, can adjudicate (although scientific evidence may be relevant to feed the debate).

My fourth question that museums seeking to engage audiences about climate change should raise in citizens’ minds is, “How should national sovereignty be conceived in today’s world?” This becomes especially important in relating the legitimacy of national governance with that of multilateral or transnational entities and regulations. This question requires citizens to reflect on forms of democracy and representation, a question no less important in relation to climate change than it is in relation to state security, immigration or financial regulation.

Any considered response to climate change will need to take a position— implicitly or explicitly—on one or more of these four questions and others besides. It is therefore important that public conversations about climate change are stimulated around these, and other challenging topics. These questions offer more engaging and constructive debates for museums to cultivate than the rather obtuse and narrow questions that the consensus-quantifiers are asking of climate scientists. And such an approach would reveal the largely irrelevant nature of such consensus-counting exercises. Whether it is 90.8% or 97.4% of climate science papers that accept that “humans are causing global warming” has little to no bearing on public deliberations about the four questions I introduce above. The lack of accuracy and precision about the nature of the future risks climate change poses for society opens up spaces for legitimate disagreement about how best to respond.

Safe Spaces for Dangerous Ideas

This chapter has sought to defend the claim that, we should disagree about climate change. Or, to pose this as a question, “Is there only one correct answer to climate change that all enlightened, rational and well-meaning citizens must give—an answer that people will be helped to discover by revealing the breadth and depth of scientific consensus about the causes of climate change?” My answer, of course, is not just that it is OK to disagree— especially when it comes to those aspects of climate change that really matter, which are not “is the world warming?” or “are humans causing it?” but rather that it is politically necessary for us to disagree about climate change. The aspects of climate change that really matter for human and nonhuman life entail debates about values and about the forms of political organization and representation that people believe are desirable.

And here there is a crucial role for museums to play in allowing dangerous ideas to circulate in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Climate Change, Museum Futures
• 1 Why We Should Disagree about Climate Change
• 2 Ecologizing Experimentations: A Method and Manifesto for Composing a Post-humanist Museum
• 3 Prospects for a Common World: Museums, Climate Change, Cosmopolitics
• 4 We Are on Nature's Side? Experimental Work in Rewriting Narratives of Climate Change for Museum Exhibitions
• 5 Pushing Boundaries: Curating the Anthropocene at the Deutsches Museum, Munich
• 6 Futuring Global Change in Science Museums and Centers: A Role for Anticipatory Practices and Imaginative Acts
• 7 Tools for Alternative Temporalities
• Programming Interlude I: Curating Fire
• Programming Interlude II: Pacific Museums and Climate Change: Sharing Our Stories through Regional Workshops and Exhibitions
• 8 Beyond Confrontation: The Trialogue Strategy for Mediating Climate Change
• Programming Interlude III: Visualizing Climate Change: Beyond Technological Enchantment and Critical Deconstruction
• 9 Portraying the Political: Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Their Engagement with Climate Change Politics
• 10 Inside and Outside the Tent: Climate Change Politics at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference
• 11 What Color Is Citizenship?
• 12 Putting a Human Face on Climate Change
• 13 Museum Affect: Crocheted Coral, Children's Stories and Possibilities in Queer Time
• Programming Interlude IV: Under the IceCap: Sonic Objects and "BioLogging"
• Programming Interlude V: Adaptation
• Programming Interlude VI: How the Open Web Performs Socio-environmental Crisis
• 14 Conclusion: Climate Change Engagement: A Manifesto for Museums and Science Centers
• Contributors
• Index