Experts in the Climate Change Debate (2016)

FORTHCOMING IN BLACKWELL COMPANION ON APPLIED PHILOSOPHY Experts in the Climate Change Debate BEN ALMASSI Introduction Contemporary debates on climate change are a curious thing for epistemological scrutiny. Few subjects are more generic or immediate than the weather, and unlike subatomic particles, many climatological phenomena seem to be observable to the unaided inexpert eye. Apparently, both believing and disbelieving members of the American public look to their own personal climate assessments as especially evidentially significant: in a 2008 survey, “personal observations of warmer temperatures in their local communities” was among the most common self-ascribed primary reasons for belief in global warming, while personal observation was by far the most frequent cited reason for skepticism (Borick 2010: 33–35). It can be tempting to understand climate change as something we each can know on our own, yet the best evidence for climate change available to us does not admit of a strictly independent individual assessment. As with so much scientific knowledge, our grasp on anthropogenic climate change turns on epistemic dependence: not only wary reliance on others’ empirical or evaluative claims but also relations of epistemic trust, and not only relations among peers but relations across epistemic difference. Such epistemic dependencies include public trust and distrust of testimony from those claiming expertise on climatological phenomena, as well as trust among scientists and other putative and substantive expert voices, no one of whom could do the work alone. “Ultimately, there are no experts on climate change,” Dale Jamieson observes, “only experts on particular aspects of the problem and generalists who are skilled at integrating diverse material” (2014: x). As John Hardwig (1985, 1994) so persuasively argued, it would be positively irrational for any of us to attempt strict intellectual self-reliant assessment of our climatological beliefs or actions: as irrational for a non-expert layperson as for a researcher to comprehensively measure global temperatures entirely by herself, neglectful of the rich social-evidential resource of trustworthy testimony. Indeed, whether one’s personal observations of local temperatures or weather patterns even constitute evidence against anthropogenic climate change, or evidence for it and not some other cause, goes beyond one’s individual unaided inexpert and/or isolated evaluation. Epistemic dependency on and among experts in the climate change debate is recognized as useful, rational, and responsible. Yet when the nature and the scope of this dependency is obscured, both expert and non-expert parties to trust relations can be made vulnerable to the exploitation of this trust. Vulnerabilities to exploitation of trust are particularly urgent when expert knowledge claims are political and controversial, as the contemporary popular debate continues to frame anthropogenic global climate change. In this chapter, I look at some neglected and interconnected dimensions of expertise that are particularly salient to the climate change debate. I begin by reviewing and differentiating among various accounts of expertise, with an eye to how divergence among such accounts can enable (deliberate or accidental) equivocations and false dichotomies between and within expertise as rational authority and expertise as social power. Drawing upon Annette Baier and other trust theorists, I then argue for understanding climate change debates in terms of trust and distrust, in addition to mere reliance, and explore how the vulnerability of trust relationships invites exploitation, particularly given persistent ambiguities around forms of climate expertise, credibility, and scientific consensus. Examples of the arguments and rhetoric actually deployed in climate change debates illustrate how putative expert untrustworthiness can threaten to erode the epistemic interdependencies upon which our collective understanding of and responses to global anthropogenic climate change must be built. 1 FORTHCOMING IN BLACKWELL COMPANION ON APPLIED PHILOSOPHY Expertise: Variations and Equivocations To be a climate expert can mean a variety of things, and these different senses of expertise are neither always equivalent nor mutually exclusive. To begin, expertise has a dimension of rational authority and a dimension of social power (see Chapter 2, The Methodology of Applied Philosophy). In terms of rational authority, an expert is one who is knowledgeable on a subject; in terms of social power, an expert is one who is granted intellectual authority on a subject. Fortuitously, these can coincide, and both are relevant to understanding and identifying what it takes to be an expert. Yet the slippage between these two dimensions can create problems: theoretically for philosophers and practically for anybody who finds themselves relying on experts (Fricker 1998, 2007). At the same time, as Helen Longino (2002) reminds us, philosophers and sociologists of knowledge treat the rational and the social as dichotomous at their peril. Some scholars tend to privilege the first sense of expertise, with social power treated as parasitic on rational authority. For example, while Alvin Goldman (2001) and David Coady (2012) may diverge in their analyses in other respects, both characterize experts as especially knowledgeable or informed, while putative experts are those treated as especially knowledgeable or informed. There is surely something sensible about this: we care about expert testimony as warranting our special deference because of its epistemic superiority. Meanwhile, other scholars put social power at the center of expertise (see Fuller 2006; Sassower 1993). What critics of expertise like Raphael Sassower warn against are the dangers of elevating a few to unquestioned social authorities, not the dangers of being especially well informed or knowledgeable. Paul Feyerabend (1999) stands as an interesting exception here: his skepticism toward experts turns not only on their social power but on the (for him, damning) fact that they are specialists who have become especially knowledgeable in a narrow field of study. Still others endeavor to collapse the distance between experts’ rational and social status. In his realist turn, as part of a “third wave” of science and technology studies, Harry Collins (2014; Collins and Evans 2007) argues that scientists, though not infallible, really are experts deserving special epistemic deference, not just because of their social reputations but because of their socialization into the appropriate specialized scientific communities. For Collins, becoming a genuine expert is not a matter of epistemic independence; rather, expertise comes in the doing, in the performance of significant practices which can only be learned by socialization into specialized communities, and which cannot be done without healthy relations of trust. Diametrically opposed to Collins are those who regard an expert’s successful socialization into a specialized community as evidence against his or her rational authority. In contemporary climate change debates, skeptical voices like O’Keefe and Kueter (2010) sometimes express this attitude, elevating iconoclasm to an epistemic virtue. For those responding to climate skeptics, it might be tempting to treat expertise as social reputation and expertise as rational authority as standing in a biconditional relationship, or at least to treat the presence (or the absence) of the one as sufficient evidence for the presence (or absence) of the other. But things are not quite so straightforward. Miranda Fricker (2007), Scott Brewer (2006), and many others have shown how stereotypes, rhetoric, and other unreliable yet psychologically potent indicators yield mismatches between the credibility granted to testifiers’ claims and credibility actually deserved, which in turn can calcify into received ascriptions of expertise. Additional variations of expertise further complicate the relationship between expert/rational and expert/social. Even focusing on genuine experts as knowledgeable people, for example, several additional distinctions might be made. In some contexts, expertise may be 2 FORTHCOMING IN BLACKWELL COMPANION ON APPLIED PHILOSOPHY understood simply in terms of true belief; in others, expertise requires warranted or justified true beliefs, skill-based knowledge, or perhaps publicly demonstrable skill knowledge, or even propositional knowledge of which one can give an account (see LaBarge 1997). In some contexts, expertise is understood retrospectively, as the possession of already established information, while in others experts must have a propensity toward successful acquisition of new information (Goldman 2001). In some contexts, true experts must be able to achieve a reflective understanding of their domain, while in others it is enough to be really good at doing something (Dreyfus & Dreyfus 2005). In some contexts being especially knowledgeable means that one’s knowledge surpasses that of most people given the relevant reference class, while in others the notion of ubiquitous expertise as widely achieved knowledge makes real sense (Collins and Evans 2007). In some contexts experts must be knowledgeable about various theories, explanations, and practices under discussion in a domain of expertise; in others, what matters is accepting the right theories, explanations, and practices; in still others, experts must achieve both comprehensive assessment of the live options and make the right choice among them (see Goldman 2001 on “weak” and “strong” senses of expertise). Expertise as a form of social authority also admits of multiple distinctions. It is one thing to be recognized as a member in good standing in a community, and yet another for the community of which one is part to be recognized as socially authoritative. It is one thing to present oneself and one’s work as authoritative, but being accepted as authoritative by recipient audiences may (or may not!) require more than this. Still further are the differential acceptances of claims to social authority by differently positioned recipient audiences, some of whom may be more skeptical of attributions of expertise than others, some of whom employ different criteria by which to assess such claims. In short, the sorts of knowledge and social standing required of experts can vary across different contexts of expertise, such that those unfamiliar with a particular context might risk equivocating not only between expertise as social power and expertise as rational authority, but also equivocating among different variations of expertise as social power, or among different variations of expertise as rational authority. Epistemologists can be especially inclined toward strictly veritistic treatments of expertise, such that expertise is epistemic excellence understood in terms of a particular account of knowledge (Egan and Elga 2005; Elga 2007). But such a narrow analysis of experts and expertise fails to provide the conceptual and critical tools needed for epistemology pursued as applied philosophy: in this case, for example, an epistemology that can make sense of experts and expertise as they function in actual climate change debates. We require an analysis fine grained enough to account for myriad social-epistemic phenomena, to which differently positioned climate experts stand in differing relations. We require, for example, an analysis capable of distinguishing the expertise of those who ably contribute to building new climatological knowledge from those who ably convey and explain this knowledge (Collins 2004); capable of distinguishing between hyper-extended and misattributed expertise concerning specific epistemic domains (Almassi 2014); capable of recognizing individuals or communities as knowledgeable without presuming their service as willing informants to any and all interested parties (CTKW 2014); and capable of making sense of when and whether individuals’ or communities’ forms of ecological knowledge are properly treated as forms of climate expertise, and when and whether such attributions might be exploitative, objectifying, or otherwise unjust (Dotson 2008; Solomon 2009; Tuvel 2015; Whyte 2013). The group of those with climate expertise in one sense or another is varied indeed, and so in considering their epistemic, ethical, social, and political roles in contemporary climate change debates, we must take care not to equivocate among them. 3 FORTHCOMING IN BLACKWELL COMPANION ON APPLIED PHILOSOPHY Trust (and Its Exploration) in Climate Debates Trust relations allow us to pursue together projects which otherwise one could not pursue alone (see Solomon and Flores 2001; Chapter 38, Applied Philosophy of Religion). This applies not only to personal relationships but to our collective understanding of global climatological phenomena as well: as an enterprise widely extended over time, geography, and specialization, climate science is the sort of project made possible by trust. It will be useful to begin with Baier’s (1986) leading work on the nature of trust. For Baier, trust is crucial yet messy. It can be put on us without our consent; it can go unrecognized, even by an entrusting party. Trust can be rational or irrational; it can be morally healthy or rotten. Perhaps most important is Baier’s characterization of trust as a dependency distinct from mere reliance: that trust is not just prediction and reliance on others’ steady habits, but reliance on their good will toward oneself and the objects of one’s trust. Discretion is characteristic of a genuine trust relationship: a trusting person allows the trusted some latitude in determining how to fulfill her trust, such that the stronger the trust, the more discretion the trusted is afforded (1986: 234– 237). Discretion enables that powerful freedom of trust, but also renders us vulnerable to betrayal in a way that mere reliance is not. “One leaves others the opportunity to harm one when one trusts, and also shows one’s confidence that they will not take it” (235). So for trust to be rational requires “good grounds for such confidence in another’s good will, or at least the absence of good grounds for expecting their ill will or indifference” (235). Karen Jones’s affective account of trust is indebted to Baier, though she does criticize Baier for neglecting the significance of our expectations of good will and responsiveness in trust relations. Jones describes trust as “an attitude of optimism that the good will and competence of another will extend to cover the domain of our interaction with her, together with the expectation that the trusted will be directly and favorably moved by the thought that we are counting on her” (1996: 4). Paul Faulkner offers a similar portrait in contrasting affective and predictive trust. In the latter case, Faulkner says, the listener trusts the speaker to do something in the sense that he knowingly expects she will do it, but he doesn’t expect anything of her. In affective trust, on the other hand, the listener expects that the speaker “recognizes his need to know whether p, and presumes that the speaker’s telling him that p is a response to this” (Faulkner 2007: 888). Just as it is possible to rely without genuinely trusting, it is possible to learn from testimony without trusting it. We might find ourselves forced to rely on voices we don’t find trustworthy, perhaps because of the paucity of alternatives: here we rely, warily, as we might rely on an old damaged car to get to the hospital when it is the only means available. In such cases, we do not open ourselves to betrayal, since we do not expect trustworthiness. Even without vulnerability, however, relying on the unreliable can be practically or epistemically costly, and merely relying instead of actively trusting can deprive us of the epistemic power made possible by healthy trust relationships. The ampliative potential of epistemic trust means that trusting non-expert recipients of expert testimony may acquire further grounds for belief beyond that available through mere reliance. Regarding the evidential significance of consensus or at least supermajority agreement among climate experts, I argue (Almassi 2012) that trust and distrust by varied non-expert publics can make an epistemic difference. Those who trust have reason to find great evidential significance in the percentage of scientists in agreement because we trust these scientists have come to their common beliefs not through deceit, conspiracy, or groupthink, but through reflective (though not necessarily independent) expert assessments of relevant empirical evidence, models, and fellow scientists’ trustworthiness (see Coady & Corry 2013; Ranalli 2012). Those who actively distrust climate scientists place less evidential significance in lopsided 4 FORTHCOMING IN BLACKWELL COMPANION ON APPLIED PHILOSOPHY expert opinion in favor of anthropogenic climate change. Gardiner finds, for example, that Michael Crichton, author of the climate conspiratorial State of Fear, is dismissive of climate research because he “distrusts the data and methods of the scientists whose work is summarized by the IPCC” (Gardiner 2011: 460; see Crichton 2005; Curry 2009). Meanwhile, non-experts who neither trust nor distrust climate experts do not consider climate-scientific expert testimony to be trustworthy nor dismiss it as untrustworthy. For this third group, lopsided opinion among scientists on climate change is a striking fact requiring explanation: absent trust or distrust, they neither confidently attribute it to social-epistemic achievement nor to in-group expert tribalism. Relations of trust, distrust, and varying reliance are accompanied by epistemic risks and benefits. As Kristin Shrader-Frechette reminds us, non-experts can be misled to misunderstand climate change in many ways: by failures of media portrayal, by their own discomfort with uncertainty even in good science, even by otherwise reliable scientists’ poor communication skills. Expert scientific training rarely involves or overlaps with training in communication across epistemic difference, after all, and anyway, “if scientists become popularizers, they typically become suspect among other experts – who may think that they cannot do technicallydemanding work” (Shrader-Frechette 2011: 24). This important point should not be overshadowed by more obvious lack of trustworthiness by opportunistic voices in the climate change debates. Trustworthy expert testimony means more than just transparency, reliability, and an absence of ill will: expert facilitation of public scientific understanding involves a conscientious responsiveness to nonexperts’ expectation “that the one trusted will be directly and favorably moved by the thought that we are counting on her” (Jones 1996: 4). When trusting scientists, we expect them to recognize themselves to be giving testimony, to recognize their audience, to recognize that they are making claims employed by us as evidence for our beliefs and actions. At its most trustworthy, expert scientific testimony is presented conscientiously: sincerely, but also with attention to fostering particular recipients’ successful cognitive uptake (Almassi 2012; Fricker 2007). Consider, for example, Ackerman’s criticism of Bjorn Lomborg’s book Cool It. In weighing the costs of global warming and the costs of mitigation, Lomborg assures us “we will lose very little dry land to sea-level rise” (2007: 69); but as Ackerman (2008: 437) points out, this assurance is qualified by an endnote admitting that “the numbers presented are for the loss of dry land, whereas up to 18% of global wetlands will be lost” (Lomborg 2007: 182). Whether the text is inadvertently or intentionally misleading, the author’s testimony falls short of conscientiousness. Even if Lomborg never says anything false, exactly, his words as presented are likely to foster misunderstanding and mistaken beliefs among non-expert readers about the overall ecological and human costs of rising sea levels. “Most of us notice a given form of trust most easily after its sudden demise or serious injury … and notice it as we notice air, only when it becomes scarce or polluted,” Baier observes (1986: 234). What is polluted trust? Baier proposes an excellent test for trust relationships, one which we might apply to epistemic dependencies on and among experts in the climate change debate: “A trust relationship is morally bad to the extent that either party relies on qualities in the other which would be weakened by the knowledge that the other relies on them” (1986: 256). To know the other is relying on one’s shared concern for a common good would constitute no threat to the foundation of the trust relationship at hand, Baier suggests by way of illustration; by contrast, if one were to know the other is relying on one’s unreciprocated generosity, this knowledge in turn might well destroy the fragile pre-existing trust between them. To illustrate this expressibility test extended to the climate change debate, consider again Lomborg’s self-described skeptical environmentalist’s guide to global warming. Cool It 5 FORTHCOMING IN BLACKWELL COMPANION ON APPLIED PHILOSOPHY opens with this striking claim: “Global warming has been portrayed recently as the greatest crisis in the history of civilization” (Lomborg 2007: ix). The author provides no reference or citation for this claim, so the reader is immediately asked to trust: specifically, to trust that this vivid description accurately captures the views of his opponents, to trust that the greatest crisis claim has an actual referent and is not an arresting straw man. Further on, Lomborg observes that “In public debates, the argument I hear most often is a variant of ‘If global warming is going to kill us all and lay waste to the world, this has to be our top priority – everything else you talk about, including HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, free trade, malaria, and clean drinking water may be noble but it is utterly unimportant compared to global warming’” (124). Notice again that this argument against which the book is organized is presented in quotation marks, inviting us to imagine actual people voicing these very words; indeed, we are invited to imagine many people saying such things, often, and to Lomborg’s consternation. But since no reference is given for these “quoted” phrases, readers must trust the implication that they accurately capture alleged climate experts’ views. Whose views are these: a climate researcher in a peer-reviewed article, an IPCC report, a Science Times article, a newsmagazine editorial, an anonymous blog post? Readers are asked to trust that these claims have real advocates, with social authority worth engaging. If that is not the case, then the force of the author’s critique is predicated on non-expert readers’ ignorance of its straw foundations, and so would fail Baier’s test for a healthy trust relationship. A similar invitation to trust in the characterization of unnamed opponents’ views undergirds Patrick Michaels’s criticism of what he calls the Popular Vision of global climate change. The position as Michaels describes it looks quite radical: for example, “One of the general tenets of those who subscribe to the Popular Vision is that there is a consensus among scientists that the end is at hand” (1992: 181). Readers are not clearly informed what “the end is at hand” means here, nor to whom exactly Michaels means to ascribe this apocalyptic view. We are implicitly asked to trust that the Popular Vision is not a straw man. As a second example, consider Michaels’s more recent complaint that “We are repeatedly told that ‘the science is settled’ on global warming (whatever that means) because of what is in our scientific journals” (2011: 1). Maybe Michaels has Oreskes (2004, 2007) or Anderegg et al. (2010) on climate science consensus in mind here, but he does not cite them, nor anyone else. Notice the rhetorical force of this phrase, “the science is settled,” at once introduced without an identified advocate and belittled as overly vague. This vagueness critique works only if readers can rightly trust that unnamed people with some claim to climate expertise are actually committed to this. With these rhetorical choices, readers are made vulnerable to potential exploitation of trust. If in fact the presented dilemma is overly simplistic, if actually advocated emissions reduction plans are not obviously hysterical or extravagant, if “the greatest crisis in the history of civilization” fails to accurately describe actual opponents’ views, then continuance of the trust relationship between these putative climate experts and their non-expert readers is predicated on said experts’ reliance on their readers’ relative ignorance. Climate Consensus and Credibility When expert testifiers depend on their recipients’ lack of expertise in order to propagate their favored interpretation, they fail Baier’s test. When a trusted speaker or writer relies on trusting recipients’ unfamiliarity with a range of alternatives on a disputed issue within a scientific community, or relies on the fact that trusting recipients are ignorant of one’s own (and others’) credibility among experts, the attendant epistemic trust is corrupt. These problems are further illustrated by the contemporary debate over the existence and legitimacy of a climate science consensus: testimony reinforcing or challenging the idea of an expert consensus need not raise 6 FORTHCOMING IN BLACKWELL COMPANION ON APPLIED PHILOSOPHY special concerns, but it can when presented in ways that prey on non-experts’ ignorance of how consensus is operationally defined. Oreskes, for example, defines climate science consensus in a way that is specific, plausible, and transparent. She grounds her assessment of consensus in comprehensive analysis of peer-reviewed journal articles published 1993–2003: approximately 900 articles on a search of “global climate change.” Oreskes found that none were offered as refuting the notion that “global climate change is occurring, and human activities are at least part of the reason why”; approximately one fifth explicitly endorsed the view that anthropogenic climate change was the main force behind current climate change, approximately half affirmed this view implicitly (2004, 2007). This finding of climate-scientific consensus as operationally defined by peerreviewed journal publication informs Oreskes’s work with Conway (2008, 2010) and it is often cited in climate ethics as evidence against a real debate among climate scientists (Gardiner 2011; Shrader-Frechette 2011). We might contrast Oreskes’s model of climate consensus with Bray (2010), who challenges her analysis by appealing to the results of three surveys, each with 350– 550 respondents of alleged climate scientists. Twenty years ago, Fred Singer similarly rejected a climate consensus by appealing to collected survey results (see Michaels 1992: 181). Those who reject the idea of a climate expert consensus frequently cite petitions, surveys, and even private admissions of doubts as counter-evidence (Singer 2000: 39). For their part, Oreskes and Conway acknowledge and even emphasize in their historical analysis that there have been and still are scientists like Fred Singer and Fred Seitz who argue contrary to the scientific consensus to build doubt about the extent of human contribution to climate change (Oreskes and Conway 2008, 2010). These skeptical claims have been given less through original peer-reviewed climate research, Oreskes and Conway observe, and more through other socially and politically influential channels of communication like newspaper or magazine editorials, letters to the editor, think-tank book publication and white papers, and private conversations with policy makers. A principal target of criticism in Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes and Conway 2010) is the George C. Marshall Institute, an American think tank with funding from tobacco, energy, and other industry groups. Shortly after publication of Merchants of Doubt, the Marshall Institute gave a critical response to Oreskes and Conway’s book through its newsletter. Titled “Clouding the Truth,” it opens with a quote from Galileo (“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual”) meant to set the tone (O’Keefe and Kueter 2010). O’Keefe and Kueter defend Seitz and their colleagues at the Marshall Institute as conscientious, credible researchers challenging scientific hegemony. The question of consensus is key: First, Oreskes-Conway assert the importance of consensus – these scientists [i.e., Seitz, Jastrow, etc.] were on the wrong side of the scientific consensus, they state. Science is not a popularity contest and scientific history is replete with examples of consensus views that were flat-out wrong. Second, Oreskes-Conway say these scientists “fought the scientific evidence.” That should surprise no one. In fact, if the opposite were true, we all should be very concerned. Challenging the theory, hypothesis, and evidence is after all, the basis of modern science. (O’Keefe and Kueter, 2010: 1) Nevertheless, Oreskes-Conway criticized Seitz, Jastrow, and Nierenberg for rejecting the scientific consensus that anthropogenic factors will cause dramatic climate change. To bolster their support for an alleged consensus, Oreskes-Conway offer a strong defense for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The recent Climategate revelations should be sufficient to give anyone pause when examining the openness and credibility of the IPCC process … In reality, the only consensus is among those on a [IPCC report] writing team. (O’Keefe and Kueter, 2010: 6) 7 FORTHCOMING IN BLACKWELL COMPANION ON APPLIED PHILOSOPHY Let us attend carefully to how O’Keefe and Kueter have framed consensus. Insisting that science is “not a popularity contest,” their implication here is that Oreskes and Conway understand scientific consensus as what the majority of scientists endorse. While going by the numbers on experts’ agreement can be a useful indicator of trustworthiness in facing conflicting testimony (Coady 2012; Lackey 2013), this is not the way that Oreskes measures consensus, as we have seen. O’Keefe and Kueter imply that their colleagues “fought the scientific evidence” in noble scientific tradition, but do not remind readers that said fighting occurred outside peer-reviewed publication. The issue of peer-reviewed research is not broached in this critique of Merchants of Doubt, despite the fact that the historians of science criticized for their climate consensus claim explicitly built their analysis on original peer-reviewed climate research. O’Keefe and Kueter also imply that Oreskes and Conway’s consensus claim depends on the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report: if the IPCC’s credibility can be successfully impugned, then presumably Oreskes and Conway’s claim of climate consensus is likewise impugned. Yet the force of this defense of the Marshall Institute relies on readers’ ignorance that Oreskes’s analysis of climate science consensus was neither a popularity contest nor was it parasitic on assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (see IPCC 2013). The existence and legitimacy of expert dissent from a climate science consensus turns on the credibility extended to or denied to alleged expert dissenters, by their allies or their opponents. For example, Shrader-Frechette contends, “virtually no CC dissenters do peerreviewed-expert climate research. Most of them are scientifically uninformed, and most are paid by special interests, like the oil lobby” (2011: 25). She argues that “scientists like Fred Seitz – who have never done climate research – have no authority from which to disagree with climate scientists who spend their lives doing advanced climate research”; she characterizes the Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and Heartland Institute as “funded by chemical and fossil-fuel interests”; and she denounces scientists paid by these groups as decidedly untrustworthy (2011: 25–26). Retired physicist Fred Singer has not published advanced climate research, Shrader-Frechette reminds us, and despite his visibility as a climate critical biologist, Patrick Michaels has not done any climate research and is paid by Cato, an “industry front group” significantly funded by coal companies (29). Is this an ad hominem attack, distracting readers from engagement with the real issues? I don’t think so. As Shrader-Frechette argues, the absence of original peer-reviewed climate research and presence of industry funding taken together are relevant to ascriptions of expert credibility. Without the fallible yet epistemologically significant filter of peer review, recipient audiences of these critics’ skeptical testimonies must rely more directly on good will and responsiveness; in this, testifiers’ funding sources are surely relevant to assessing their trustworthiness for those of us who do not provide the funding. To be sure, funding sources are not the only measure of putative climate experts’ credibility: Anderegg et al. (2010) assess the credibility of researchers convinced and unconvinced by the evidence of anthropogenic climate change, as measured by their numbers of climate-relevant publications and citation numbers of their most cited papers. Drawing upon a database of approximately 1,000 researchers, Anderegg and colleagues find that unconvinced researchers are quite poorly represented among the most prolific and prominent researchers; that the median and mean unconvinced researchers published at a far lower rate than their convinced equivalents; and overall, “that the bulk of [unconvinced] researchers on the most prominent multisignatory statements about climate change have not published extensively in the peer-reviewed climate literature” (Anderegg et al. 2010: 12108). Climate skeptics too seek to challenge some experts’ credibility even while buttressing others’. Consider Singer’s climate-skeptical essay “Cool Planet, Hot Politics” (2000). Having cast suspicion on climate researchers funded by government grants, he reminds us that “there are 8 FORTHCOMING IN BLACKWELL COMPANION ON APPLIED PHILOSOPHY think tanks on the other side as well (such as the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute), spreading the message that the best information available from climate science contradicts the alleged need for drastic policies certain to cause great economic harm. Needless to say, these groups don’t get any government money” (Singer 2000: 39). The reader is invited to see the Cato Institute as trustworthy on the grounds that it doesn’t “get any government money,” yet Singer fails to acknowledge Cato’s own industry funding. The author relies for the force of his critique and defense on non-expert readers’ ignorance of Cato’s funding, as he cannot consistently insist that its funding is irrelevant to its testimonial credibility and offer his critical allegation. A retired physicist like Singer who is skeptical of anthropogenic climate change need not be untrustworthy in testifying to his skeptical beliefs, but he is if he does so in a way that depends on recipients’ ignorance of how well his training and experience in physics equips him to assess climatological research. Likewise, citing ideological allies to buttress one’s position need not be problematic, but it becomes so when the efficacy of citation turns on recipients’ ignorance of these allies and their credibility. Going Forward These remarks are only a partial explication of the epistemic and social challenges of climate expertise and its attribution, to be sure. Another issue relevant to the climate change debate and deserving further philosophical attention is that of climate ethics expertise. Broadly speaking, both professional philosophers and the public tend to be wary of claims of moral authority; to the extent that expertise requires some social intellectual authority, few if any secular figures enjoy such reputations on moral matters. And if the required rational response to experts is epistemic deference, many are unsettled by the idea of renouncing one’s moral autonomy. Still, the question of climate ethics expertise should not be dismissed too quickly. While philosophers have given moral and/or ethical expertise sustained consideration (see Rasmussen 2005; Archard 2011; Chapter 2, The Methodology of Applied Philosophy), much of this attention has been directed toward bioethical expertise in medical contexts, and to a lesser extent expertise in ethical matters in general, but as yet not climate ethics expertise in particular. Further appliedphilosophical scrutiny of particular challenges for ethics expertise in the climate change debate is surely warranted. Furthermore, in urging the importance of disambiguating the varieties of expertise at hand in the climate change debate, we are reminded that climate ethics expertise too might come in several varieties. Thus philosophers’ quite warranted reluctance to anoint themselves as climate ethics experts need not imply that no one is properly recognized as having climate ethics expertise. Perhaps philosophers deeply involved in climate ethics (Gardiner 2011; Jamieson 2014; Shrader-Frechette 2011) might be understood as exercising a kind of interactional ethical expertise, itself a quite valuable practical-epistemic contribution to climate change debates. Finally, as the preceding discussion illustrates, expert testimony has such a central, albeit contested, role in climate change debates that important ethical questions might well go underexplored within these debates if we do not at least consider the possibility and proper scope of climate ethics expertise. In this chapter I have sought to illuminate the relevance of our conceptions of expertise and of epistemic trust to the contemporary debate on global climate change. In particular, I have sought to consider the relevance of expert trustworthiness (and its absence) for differently positioned parties to nested relationships of epistemic interdependency which undergird contemporary climate change policy debates, research programs, and popular discourse. The first major lesson concerned the problem of strict epistemic independency: while it can be tempting to treat climate change as something a person can know alone, the best evidence available to us for 9 FORTHCOMING IN BLACKWELL COMPANION ON APPLIED PHILOSOPHY it does not allow for independent assessment. This need for epistemic interdependency includes not only wary reliance on others’ claims but also relations of epistemic trust, not only relations between experts and non-experts but trust among scientists and other putative and substantive expert voices, no one of whom can do the work alone. The second major lesson, then, concerned the equivocation among different senses of climate expertise: the array of climate experts in one sense or another is varied, and in considering their epistemic, ethical, social, and political roles in climate change debates, we must take care not to conflate them. The third and final major lesson concerned the vulnerability to exploitation inherent to trust. Expert untrustworthiness erodes the basis upon which our collective understanding of and responses to global climate change is built. Trust in experts in the climate change debate can be rational and responsible; yet all parties are made vulnerable when the nature and scope of climate expertise and of trust are obscured. References Ackerman, F. 2008. “Hot It’s Not: Reflections on Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg.” Climate Change 89: 435–446. Almassi, B. 2012. “Climate Change, Epistemic Trust, and Expert Trustworthiness.” Ethics & the Environment 17(2): 29–49. Almassi, B. 2014. “Expertise in Agriculture: Scientific and Ethical Issues.” In Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, edited by P. Thompson and D. Kaplan. Springer. Anderegg, W.R.L., Prall, J.W., Harold, J., and Schneider, S.H. 2010. “Expert Credibility in Climate Change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(27): 12107–12109. Archard, D. 2011. “Why Moral Philosophers Are Not and Should Not Be Moral Experts.” Bioethics 25(3): 119–127. Baier, A. 1986. “Trust and Antitrust.” Ethics 96: 231–260. 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Collins, H. and Evans, R. 2007. Rethinking Expertise. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Crichton, M. 2005. State of Fear. New York: HarperCollins. CTKW (Climate and Traditional Knowledges Workgroup). 2014. “Guidelines for Considering Traditional Knowledges in Climate Change Initiatives.” https://climatetkw.wordpress.com/ Curry, J. 2009. “On the Credibility of Climate Research.” ClimateAudit.org, November 22, 2009. http://climateaudit.org/2009/11/22/curry-on-the-credibility-of-climate-research/ Dotson, K. 2008. “In Search of Tanzania: Are Effective Epistemic Practices Sufficient for Just Epistemic Practices?” Southern Journal of Philosophy 46: 52–64. Dreyfus, H.L. and Dreyfus, S.E. 2005. “Peripheral Vision: Expertise in Real World Contexts.” Organization Studies 26: 779. Egan, A. and Elga, A. 2005. “I Can’t Believe I’m Stupid.” Philosophical Perspectives 19: 77–93. Elga, A. 2007. “Reflection and Disagreement.” Noûs 41(3): 47–502. Faulkner, P. 2007. “On Telling and Trusting.” Mind 116: 875–902. Feyerabend, P. 1999. Knowledge, Science, and Relativism: 1960–1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fricker, M. 1998. “Rational Authority and Social Power: Toward a Truly Social Epistemology.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 98: 159–177. Fricker, M. 2007. Epistemic Injustice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuller, S. 2006. “The Constitutively Social Character of Expertise.” In The Philosophy of Expertise, edited by E. Selinger and R. Crease, 342–357. New York: Columbia University Press. Gardiner, S. 2011. A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldman, A. 2001. “Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63: 85–110. Hardwig, J. 1985. “Epistemic Dependence.” Journal of Philosophy 82(7): 335–349. Hardwig, J. 1994. “Toward an Ethics of Expertise.” In Professional Ethics and Social Responsibility, edited by D. Wueste. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). 2013. Climate Change 2013. Fifth Assessment Report. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jamieson, D. 2014. Reason in a Dark Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, K. 1996. “Trust as an Affective Attitude.” Ethics 107: 4–25. LaBarge, S. 1997. “Socrates and the Recognition of Experts.” Aperion 30(4): 51–62. Lackey, J. 2013. “Disagreement and Belief Dependence: Why the Numbers Matter.” In The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays, edited by D. Christensen and J. Lackey, 243– 268. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 11 FORTHCOMING IN BLACKWELL COMPANION ON APPLIED PHILOSOPHY Lomborg, B. 2007. Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. New York: Knopf. Longino, H. 2002. The Fate of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Michaels, P. 1992. Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming. Washington, DC: The Cato Institute. Michaels, P. (ed.). 2011. Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives. Washington, DC: The Cato Institute. O’Keefe, W. and Kueter, J. 2010. “Clouding the Truth: A Critique of Merchants of Doubt.” Marshall Institute Policy Outlook, June 2010: 1–8. http://marshall.wpengine.com/wpcontent/uploads/2011/06/OKeefe-and-Kueter-Clouding-the-Truth-A-Critique-of-Merchantsof-Doubt.pdf Oreskes, N. 2004. “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” Science 306: 1686. Oreskes, N. 2007. “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong?” In Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren, edited by J. Dimento and P. Doughman, 65–100. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Oreskes, N. and Conway, E. 2008. “Challenging Knowledge.” In Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, edited by R. Proctor and L. Schiebinger, 55–89. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Oreskes, N. and Conway, E. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury. Ranalli, B. 2012. “Climate Science, Character, and the ‘Hard-Won’ Consensus.” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 22(2): 183–210. Rasmussen, L. 2005. “Introduction: In Search of Ethics Expertise.” In Ethics Expertise: History, Contemporary Perspectives, and Applications, edited by L. Rasmussen. Dordrecht: Springer. Sassower, R. 1993. Knowledge Without Expertise. Albany: State University of New York Press. Shrader-Frechette, K. 2011. What Will Work: Fighting Climate Change with Renewable Energy, Not Nuclear Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singer, S.F. 2000. “Cool Planet, Hot Politics.” American Outlook (Summer): 38–40. Solomon, R. and Flores, F. 2001. Building Trust in Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solomon, S. 2009. “Stakeholders or Experts? On the Ambiguous Implications of Public Participation in Science.” In The Social Sciences and Democracy, edited by J. Van Bouwel, 39–61. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tuvel, R. 2015. “Sourcing Women’s Ecological Knowledge: The Worry of Epistemic Objectification.” Hypatia 30(2): 319–336. Whyte, K.P. 2013. “On the Role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as a Collaborative Concept: A Philosophical Study.” Ecological Processes 2(7). 12 FORTHCOMING IN BLACKWELL COMPANION ON APPLIED PHILOSOPHY Further Reading Anderegg, W.R.L., Prall, J.W., Harold, J., and Schneider, S.H. 2010. “Expert Credibility in Climate Change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(27): 12107–12109. A comparative assessment of the relative expertise of climate researchers who are convinced by the evidence of anthropogenic climate change and those who are not. Anderson, E. 2011. “Democracy, Public Policy, and Lay Assessment of Scientific Testimony.” Episteme 8(2): 144–164. An excellent discussion of the role of experts in democratic decision making, with particular attention to the climate change debate. Coady, D. and Corry, R. 2013. The Climate Change Debate: An Epistemic and Ethical Inquiry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. An accessible treatment of epistemic and ethical issues in the climate change debate, including the status of climate science, questions of intergenerational justice, and non-expert adjudication of expert disagreements. Gelfert, A. 2013. “Climate Scepticism, Epistemic Dissonance and the Ethics of Uncertainty.” Philosophy and Public Issues 3(1): 167–208. A wide-ranging discussion of philosophical issues at the intersection of climate ethics and epistemology. Oreskes, N. 2004. “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” Science 306: 1686. An influential analysis of climate consensus in terms of peer-review literature results rather than expert opinion polls. Selinger, E. and Crease, R. (eds.). 2006. The Philosophy of Expertise. New York: Columbia University Press. A diverse collection of essays on the nature and epistemology of expertise, including its social/epistemic authority, appraisal of expert trustworthiness, and the role of experts in democracy. 13