Critical Thinking on Climate Change?

Both are layered with uncertainty: yet we are compelled to act; to decide with our knowledge and ignorance deeply entwined.

And, in the case of climate change the costs of poor decisions (in whatever direction) are huge.

A significant tension in public opinion around climate change is expressed in Sir Karl Popper’s observation (in a different context) that:
 

"The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there."
 

For the supporters of the IPCC consensus, the consensus embodies science at its systematically critical best. For the sceptics, the consensus represents obstinate and erroneous science distorted through the lenses of politics and financial interest. Oddly, both poles are united in the claim that the other is insufficiently, systematically self-critical.

The Independent and Debategraph are experimenting with a way of bringing this process of systematic critical reflection into the wider public conversation about climate change. The approach builds on the three-fold perception that:

(1) Contentious and complex debates can be mapped comprehensively so that all pertinent issues, positions, arguments, evidence, and scenarios are represented in a transparent and coherent visual structure—by breaking down the subject debated into meaningful parts; identifying the relationships between those parts; and presenting the parts and their relationships visually.

(2) The collaboratively editable potential of the web can be used to externalise and open up this process to collective intelligence and critical review of the community.

(3) The evolving maps can be shared and embedded across the web – wherever the debate is occurring – so that changes to a map on any site will be immediately reflected across all the sites on which it appears.
 

Debategraph is able to address the messy, multidimensional, multi-perspective nature of the underlying issues and to create structures that are sufficiently mutable to evolve continuously and iteratively in all respects as the community’s understanding deepens and broadens.

However, the real challenge is not the technical one; rather it is to engage the expertise and understanding distributed throughout the community to develop a map to the point at which it truly embodies a mature systematically critical overview of the relevant field.

Hence, the current climate change map should be seen as the seed not the tree—a seed that offers all participants in the public debate (whether supporters of the consensus, sceptics, or representatives of any other part of the spectrum) a means to express their ideas openly, fairly, succinctly in full, in a form in which they can be challenged and refined systematically in the context of all the other ideas.

And, if we were looking for a creed in pursuit of this goal, it might not rest too far from another of Popper’s observations:

The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse — to challenge others to form free opinions.