Communicating about climate change ethics

One site that doesn’t (yet) seem to have a large following, but certainly should, is Climate Ethics. If you sometimes tire of the verbal jousting that absorbs so much bandwidth on energy and climate blogs, and would like to find a place that has fewer, but longer and much more thoughtful posts, give CE a spin.

The latest post on CE, from Donald Brown, On The Moral Imperatives Of Speaking Publicly About the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change-And How It Must Be Done, is particularly worthwhile (emphasis added):

We believe that those who understand the ethical dimensions of climate change have a duty to speak up strongly because with knowledge comes responsibility.

Now, one important reservation needs to be made, however, at this point. We believe that identifying the ethical issues entailed by climate change arguments will lead to three possibilities and all need to acknowledge this:

One, on some issues there will be an overlapping consensus among diverse ethical theories about what should be done.

…

When it comes, however, to what is “fair” there is a reasonable debate on what justice requires. And so once one focuses on “fairness,” there may be a conflict, as there sometimes is among ethical theories, on what “fairness” requires. This is the second possibility, namely that there is a conflict about what perfect justice requires.

…

The third possibility is actually, however, the most important type of issues about which we need public engagement. That is even in cases where it is difficult to determine what perfect justice requires, there are proposals and positions on these issues that all known justice and ethical positions would condemn as being deeply ethically problematic. On these issues we may not know what justice requires but we can spot injustice.

…

In taking about what ethics requires when speaking out about climate change, however, we must speak up about the dangerous, irresponsible, and hugely harmful way in which disinformation about climate change science is being disseminated around the world. (In fact words fail us about how to articulate the immensity of the irresponsibility of what we see going on in this regard; we would call it a gross crime against humanity but realize that many of the people actually doing this believe what they are saying because they have been told it by others. We plan to write a future post about how to classify this. We invite others to help us with the appropriate metaphors for this. In some ways criminal is not strong enough, and in other ways it is inappropriate .)

All parties have a duty to: (a) defer at least initially to the peer reviewed science, (b) not make claims that are inconsistent with what has been clearly refuted, and, (c) particularly not assert that conclusions about human-induced warming have been refuted or debunked when: (1) every Academy of Science in the World, (2) the vast majority of climate scientists actually doing climate change science (above 97% according to two recent papers), and, (3) almost all of the scientific organizations in the world that have relevant expertise have supported the consensus view which has three parts:

(1) The world is warming

(2) It very likely human caused and in fact there are multiple lines of robust evidence pointing to human causation

(3) Under business-as-usual great and perhaps unimaginable harms could happen (notice we did not claim we know they will happen)

This is just a taste, hopefully enough to get you to click through, read it all, and subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed.

As for this post by Donald Brown, I think it’s fair to say he shares my very low opinion of deniers, even if he expresses it in a much classier way. (The end of his post is particularly strong in this regard.)

I realize this is a bit afield from the topics and approaches I normally write about here; I try to stick to the “feeds an’ speeds” (i.e. the numbers) and the brute force economics of making desperately needed, sweeping changes to society. I do that largely because that’s my comfort zone, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about ethical issues and intergenerational responsibility. I doubt this post marks a major change in what I’ll be writing about or how I’ll address any given topic, but I expect to come back to it once in a while.