Palo Verde Blog

By Elizabeth Morison

Usually I consider my pursuit of climate change solutions and environmental conservation to be quite honorable. It’s guided my decisions not just at university, but also in most other aspects of my life, including bringing me here, to Costa Rica. Science set the foundations of my passion and has been at the core of my personal understanding of environmental issues ever since.

I fully expected to have my trust in science completely affirmed over the course of this program. But one week into our first station, I found myself confronted by a talk we received about climate change. I was looking forward to the class all day, ready to hear a new perspective, contribute my own, and knuckle down into some hardcore science. But instead the talk presented climate change not just as a science, but as an industry. Which, of course, is true – I intend to be employed by it – but what confronted me about this, was the emphasis that you can’t do science without it being funded. And where there’s money, inevitably, the outcome is opened up to bias.

This presented a whole new set of flaws in science, which I had not considered before. Science works hard to control, control, control – but scientists conduct their studies using money from a particular funding structure, that is interested in a particular outcome. This puts pressure on certain hypotheses, as well as certain topics, over others. But just because there’s more science suggesting one idea, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s true – it just means there’s more published evidence. One prominent theme in the lecture was potential causes for global warming that are not anthropogenic, like total solar irradiance. But the overwhelming majority of the literature still points to anthropogenic causes for climate change, despite big fossil fuel corporations funding science to support alternative explanations for global warming. The fact that science supporting anthropogenic activity as the primary cause from climate change could be related to the truth of the situation, but it could also be to do with the fact that there is more funding for anthropogenic climate change research, than there is for potential other causes. In a world where so many decisions are ‘grounded in science’, the assumption that science is truth is a risky one. It is simply theory supported by evidence – and there is always potential for evidence to be presented supporting an alternative theory.

My personal understanding of climate science still supports anthropogenic causes, and I firmly believe that human initiatives to mitigate those impacts are the best way forward. But as someone who has been loyal to the science-is-truth convention for so long, learning the lesson of external bias has been a humbling and important experience. The lecture concluded by saying that science is still the best source of information we have in understanding the world. I agree – but I would add that skepticism is the best tool we have in understanding science. I trust scientists to be diligent and honest in their research, and to present science as statistically supported theory, not truth. But I can’t afford to follow blindly, or expect others to either. As an aspiring scientist, I have to be fundamentally aware of not just the good in my industry, but also the shortcomings, so that as I move forward I can consume and produce science with integrity.