Urgency, relevancy, and action in glaciology, earth, and climate science

Can we make urgency and relevancy urgent and relevant in earth science collaborations?

For this post, I'm pulling on four threads from the last three weeks: large Antarctic science efforts, catastrophic climate-intensified storm events, the jailing of climate activists in the UK, and a research article about the relative inaction of scientists. It’s an aside from the art-science work I’ve been writing about recently.

---

Here are links to ways you can help communities in Lebanon, Gaza, and Asheville.

---

Over the last few weeks, I've attended three workshops related to various international, multi-million-money scientific Antarctic efforts. This kind of work is often justified by appealing both to scientific curiosity (understanding processes) and societal impact (e.g., sea level rise), but is also (silently) underpinned by academic, military, and geopolitical interests (e.g., [country name here] presence in Antarctica)¹. At all three meetings, the science was varied, dynamic, and cutting edge. Lots of new data was presented alongside ideas for how to improve our understanding of ice sheets, oceans, global climate systems, etc.

But from each was missing something crucial: a robust discussion of urgency and relevancy.

Anish Kapoor’s gulping, roaring, choking whirlpool at the Arken Museum of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen, where two of the meetings where held.

We (earth, glacier, climate, etc scientists) often use urgency and relevancy to motivate our work. But often they are tokens, served as bookends, used to get a proposal funded and to in the first paragraph of the introduction in a paper. I am complicit in this!² We rarely³ use either as metrics of progress, reflection, or assessment.

Some questions that could be asked include:

• (why) is what we are doing or proposing necessary now, in the context of the world as it stands? (e.g., our knowledge, actions, and scientific pursuits are situated within the Anthropocene/Capitolocene/Plantationocene/Wasteocene)

• given the constraints we face (e.g., funding, computation time, data availability, problem scope, timescales of ice sheets and oceans), is our work relevant/urgent? does that matter? (how) can we guess at this before beginning or while doing it?⁴

• if we already decided our work was urgent/relevant, is it still, given the results we are getting? if not can we change course?

• if urgency/relevance are to be used as metrics, (how) does it shape our questions, studies, models, project evaluations, and approaches to writing papers, so that our work is relevant, understandable, interesting, actionable to policy makers, community organizers, the public, etc?

For the record, I do not believe we should drive all of our scientific efforts in response to a crisis, although I think we have a responsibility as scientists to take action commensurate to our (situated) knowledge. However, I do think we need to be explicitly having these conversations, especially when proposing new, expensive, international scientific efforts, seeing as:

    1) we are using it as a justification for our work, and
    2) we are actively facing down catastrophe.

Because coincident with these meetings, the world was awash in disasters made more likely and more intense by the climate crisis⁵. Catastrophic rains fell onto mid- and eastern Europe, killing two dozen, in a storm that was made 7% stronger and twice as likely by the climate crisis. Then Helene ripped through the southeastern United States, killing dozens while chewing through towns and infrastructure. I am aghast that so many people on record have been saying that no one could predict the devastation this storm wrought because it is simply not true. In Nepal, hundreds of people drowned after "the heaviest monsoon rains in two decades". Japan's Ishikawa prefecture saw the largest rainfall event ever observed there (records go back to 1929).

Meanwhile, climate activists were sentenced to two years in jail for throwing soup at a van Gogh that was covered in glass. Handing down his sentence, the judge said, “You two simply had no right to do what you did to Sunflowers, and your arrogance in thinking otherwise deserves the strongest condemnation. The pair of you came within the thickness of a pane of glass of irreparably damaging or even destroying this priceless treasure, and that must be reflected in the sentences I pass.”

**screams in uncontrollable rage, not into a pillow, but outloud, loudly, so everyone including this judge can hear, may his eardrums shatter**

And finally, last week, a Nature article was published titled: "Scientist engagement and the knowledge–action gap". The authors call out the fact that ecologists and climate scientists tend to both be the most in the know about the biodiversity and climate crisis, and yet do very little in their personal or professional lives in response (other than to continue to do more of their own science) .

“As the approaching catastrophe has never looked so alarming, the amount of scientific knowledge about the bioclimatic crisis is still rising exponentially. Here we reflect on how researchers in ecology or climate science behave amid this crisis… the disproportionality between how much scientists know and how little they engage…”

It's going to take me a lot longer to dissect this work and write a response to it⁶. But I think it is really important that we consider what our role is as scientists and what actions we should and must take individually and collectively in this moment in time. As things stand, we have a very specific, very sobering future hurtling toward us; as we all know, the water's been rising for a while.

Until next time,

Elizabeth

P.S. There's arguments to be made that we have neither done enough to imagine how bad the future could be, nor how good we could have it. There's catastrophic climate fiction, like Parable of the Sower and The Peripheral, and there are directed, collective efforts to imagine ways of living differently, like All We Can Save and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson's just released What If We Get It Right. Amelia Greenhall and I put together some of them in Climate Emergency Reading Recs.

Currently, I'm seeking works that imagine how scientific inquiry and collaboration could be done differently. Do you have any to recommend? Send them my way please!

---

1. E.g., Naylor et al (2008) Science, geopolitics and the governance of Antarctica. https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo138.pdf

2. See, e.g., the preface/introduction to my thesis.

3. I know these must exist. If you are a scientist and have an example for how these are used to assess grants, large projects, etc, please let me know!

4. TY to Andrew H. for much this framing, and to various conversations at the GHOST meeting

5. most have been attributed, and while Helene has not yet, it seems quite likely to be. is it a good use of resources to attribute the increased intensity and likelihood to climate change? i don’t know, maybe for record keeping, and for rhetoric.

6. I think this is an important article to publish. I also the authors missed and/or misconstrued some key points/factors, like the fact that research science's carbon emissions is measly compared to the largest emitters, that scientists are people too and so affected by fossil-fuel-company-funded disinformation and public manipulation campaigns, and/or that lack of social services often require us to work a lot to live.