Crisis in science and no opportunities

It is said that crisis begets opportunities.

Rahm Emanuel, the erstwhile Chief of Staff of the US president Barack Obama, and the current mayor of Chicago had this to say about crises: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” This was in the context of Lehman Brothers sinking just as the US was in the middle of its presidential election circus. And, election results proved that Rahm was up to the task he set up for himself. Obama camp effectively leveraged that crisis.

Now, it is that season again, just further up the craziness scale. And, nature appears to have some built-in sympathy for the incumbent. Hurricane Sandy struck the east coast of the US when there remained just about a week for the current crisis edition. Again, the Obama tent is all over the place and it all seems going swimmingly well, what with the Republican Governor of New Jersey heaping praise on Obama and following suit, we see the mayor of New York, another Republican, Bloomberg, as rich as the other presidential contender, Romney.

Where politics goes, can science lag behind? No. Sandy got out those who speak out on behalf of, scientifically or otherwise, climate change, the reality of it. If I were to give a list of recommended reading, it would run into twice the intended length of this post; hence I demur. Yet, I am adding to it!

The points go thus: Climate change models predict more severe weather events and Sandy was one. Last year’s Irene, though it spared New York, just adds to the scenario. Ergo, climate change is real.

The flooding of lower Manhattan is the combination of two things: a higher storm surge on top of an increasing sea level – both features of global warming. Ergo, global warming.

Statistics are trotted out to show extreme weather events, like heat waves, flooding, heavier downpours, of once in five hundred year probability occur like clockwork, only with the clocks running haywire, like squeezing five hundred years into half a decade. Points to climate change.

Then, engineers take over. New York needs a sea wall. The cost is a few billion dollars, take a few dozen billions more as such projects invariably get inflated, through conflation. Where there is a seawall, ecologists and environmentalists too would want a share of the pie, you understand.

That is a bonanza for the engineering community. I am not being excessively cynical. It is engineering firms that are recommending seawalls for New York, after all! To add to the natural cynicism, let me mention that, as per a news item, our former president Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam recently said that nuclear power is an effective response to climate change – the not-to-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste position, if you ever heard one. Oh, it has a local relevance too, Kudankulam. This is global leveraging. Even as Kalam addressed a gathering in Peking University, his intended audience was in southern Tamil Nadu!

Much of what you have read thus far may tend to project me as a climate skeptic. I am not. It is not that so many posts of mine, in this blog space as elsewhere over the years, have been from the perspective of a climate change believer. But, of course I could have suddenly changed my stance; maybe I got a million dollars from Koch brothers (How I wish I had!).

No. I am still a strong believer in climate change scenarios. Note the word “scenarios”. There is a message in that. No scientist, no scientific program can tell us as of now which, of the scenarios, if any at all, will be realized. Indeed I am quite certain that what will be realized will be identified only post facto and that will be an as yet unidentified combination. With that belief – yes, belief – I think all the scientists who are referring to Sandy, the single instance, as adding to the proof of climate science are doing science as well as the reality (scenario-based, to be sure) of climate change great disservice.

But this is what civil society seems to demand of science, a level of certainty that science shies away from. Science, unlike astrology, is no predictor of future. It throws up a number of scenarios and asks society to be prepared for whatever scenario it chose. But it boomerangs and science feels cornered. And, irony of ironies, engineering in its current form as a progeny of science, seems to find pleasure in cornering science, damn society.

The sociological scenario that is unfolding is stacked up against science. Climate skeptics ask for proof and science says it has none, at least at the level demanded. Business demands certainty and science offers none. Society is becoming more and more skeptical of science, having been taken that road too many times in the past. Scientists hedge and not very effectively at that.

Science, particularly climate science, feels besieged from all directions. It comes out fighting. But as implied in the last scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, this coming out, with blazing pistol shots, is doomed to be a failure. Science has just not learned how to leverage crises. It knows only one way – come out straight. It has not taken any lessons from Muhammad Ali to “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” It has not read Rahm Emanuel’s chapter on Obama’s victory in 2008.

This is the crisis in science. Alas, it does not know how to turn that into an opportunity.

Raghuram Ekambaram