The community of climate scientists seems to be experiencing growing frustration and feelings of crisis in regard to reflecting on the link between climate change knowledge and climate change action. Despite decades of producing climate change knowledge and engaging in science communication and policy advising, there is still no discernible structural shift, globally speaking, from a highto a lowor even zero-carbon-emissions development pathway (IPCC, 2018; UNEP, 2017). This situation goes hand in hand with more general scienceand society-related dynamics, with entire publics ceasing to trust science as a reliable source of knowledge (Mann & Brevini, 2017; van der Linden, Leiserowitz, Rosenthal, & Maibach, 2017) and the deliberate diffusion of fake news as a new mass phenomenon (Lazer et al., 2018; Rohn, 2018). It also coincides with the growing recognition among climate scientists that the climate problem is not universally perceived as humanity's foremost global problem (Goklany, 2012). All these observations seem to indicate a problem of status. However, what does “status problem” mean when we apply this term to a specific science or a particular type of knowledge, as is implied by the title of this domain in WIREs Climate Change (the social status of climate change knowledge)? Social status is first and foremost a relational concept, most prominently used in sociology. It can be based on indicators of prestige, relevance, influence, and so on, which are then used as a measure of the relative social position of an entity (typically a person or a group) in the hierarchically stratified structure of a given society (Hollingshead, 1975). This would transform the question into what position climate change knowledge has in the hierarchy of things, an issue often tightly connected to questions of dominance and influence. If we follow this line of thinking, we can already carve out a more nuanced understanding of how the current situation of climate change knowledge might be analyzed. We could consider the types of hierarchies in which climate change knowledge can be positioned. The status hierarchy could refer to different fields of knowledge and expertise. In this case, we would ask what the social status of climate change knowledge is in relation to other fields of knowledge (i.e., medical knowledge). If we tried to establish this hierarchy through either a general social survey or an expert ranking, its position in the ranking would probably vary in each disciplinary field that is in some way associated with climate change knowledge: we might find different results for climate physics, atmospheric chemistry, soil sciences, climate economics, and climate communication studies (Abbott, 2001; Hoenig, 2017). These differences invoke perceptions of the “hardness” or “softness” of the respective disciplines, but they would also be connected to institutional indicators such as funding for specialized research institutes; the number of dedicated university chairs; the volume of resources available to these chairs and institutes in terms of staff, office space, and research money; and the allocation of Nobel Prizes. The latest Nobel Prize in economics, awarded to William D. Nordhaus for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis, can definitely be seen as a status boost for climate economics, as this was the first Nobel Prize in economics awarded with specific mention of the climate change problem. These examples are all from the inner world of science and scientific disciplines or fields. Another way to ask status questions is to look more broadly at how our understanding of the world comes about and how we make sense of it (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). We could then discuss the relative importance of climate change knowledge compared to other types of sensemaking (i.e., political values and ideologies) or, similarly but nevertheless distinctly, we might ask how scientific knowledge influences climate action compared to other forms of knowing (such as religious faith) (Schnegg, 2014). We might equally be interested in the position of academic research institutions producing climate change knowledge in relation to other locations of knowledge production, that is, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or think tanks (Ruser, 2018). All these possibilities are informed by the well-established consensus that in contemporary knowledge-based society, science as an Received: 6 February 2019 Accepted: 8 February 2019
How should we ask questions about the social status of climate change knowledge?
Published 2019 in WIREs Climate Change
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2019
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WIREs Climate Change
- Publication date
2019-03-01
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Political Science, Sociology, Environmental Science
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