Tamsin Edwards - Being a climate scientist

Tamsin Edwards, Reader in Climate Change at King’s College London, explains the risks of polarised thinking in climate change.

About Tamsin Edwards

"I’m a climate scientist and Reader in Climate Change at King’s College London.

My work involves quantifying the uncertainties in climate model predictions, and particularly the changes that we’ll see for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets’ contributions to sea level rise."

Key Points

• Science is always going to be uncertain at the cutting edge. You will always get studies and predictions that are different because we are at the tentative boundaries of knowledge. • There isn’t a single objective recipe for how to interpret data. There’s always a human involved. Scientists are searching for patterns. Avoiding polar or polarised thinking is crucial to understanding the complexities of issues such as climate change. • Two scientists proposed the idea that the edge of the ice sheet could crumble rapidly into the ocean. There isn’t really that much direct evidence for marine ice cliff instability. However, I’m not confident enough to completely rule it out. • Time is a key aspect of climate change research, affecting long- and short-term predictions and our understanding of reversible and irreversible change. Some aspects of climate change might be reversible and others not.   The dangers of polar thinking

If there was one message I’d give to people, it’s the importance of not succumbing to black and white thinking, or – because I work in polar climate change – what you might call "polar thinking". We live in a world that is increasingly polarised. We have different groups that fight each other politically and culturally. That often spills into the way that we see science, scientific expertise and scientific predictions as being 100% right or wrong, or a particular future as being 100% good or bad. This simplistic way of thinking is very seductive.

It’s understandable that humans do this. It’s quicker than thinking about the nuances and the complexities. It’s something we do when we’re faced with uncertainty or fear. Our natural instinct is to simplify, to put up boundaries and to exclude the people we think don’t agree with us. We say that they’re “other”, that they’re wrong and perhaps evil or morally bad.

But we have to resist that human instinct to simplify and polarise. We have to take the time to look at the detail, to look at the nuance, to understand. It’s time-consuming. It’s hard. You put yourself at risk when you try to judge each event on a case-by-case basis: you might be wrong. And it’s so much easier to retreat into name-calling or certainty and dogma. But now, more than ever, we have to look at the subtleties of every situation. We have to be able to say: For the most part, I don’t agree with this person. But on this thing, they might be right. They’re not simply a "bad" person or a "wrong" person.

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