An Interview with Dr. Amelia Weiss

Dr. Weiss is a scientist I’ve known for many years.

She never fails to push back on an idea when she smells a weakness in it, which is one of the things I’ve always enjoyed about talking with her. I just posted our first, and hopefully not last, Lizard Brain interview here.

One frustrating thing about our failure to address and solve climate change is how politicized science has become. The scientific community has been wrestling with this for years because they’re caught between two competing imperatives. They know the truths about the research better than anyone. They read each others’ papers, they cross-pollenate ideas and insights at conferences. They should be the best advocates to call for faster decarbonization.

But science and journalism are similar; they’re both defined by their process, and impartiality is vital to their effectiveness. In the politically polarized world we live in, scientists have to let the data do the talking. When your conclusions contain ideas that the public doesn’t want to hear, the scent of bias is more than enough reason for them to discount your truth in favor of wishful thinking. We saw this clearly when internal emails at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia were paraded across conservative media, cherry-picked and taken out of context to create the illusion of ideological rigidity and bias.

But scientists also have children. Their descendants will live in the world we create, either through our decisions or our inactions. Many find it intolerable not to speak out. Like journalists, they all have informed opinions. The work is to figure out how to get those messages out to the public without crossing red lines which can be hard to identify.

Amelia articulates the situation well. She talks about these debates within the community, as well as the frustration scientists feel because data are empirical and political fluidity is not. As she says, scientists will always argue about the fine points, but the over-arching truths about anthropogenic climate change have not been in doubt for a long time.

We discussed the inherent empathy and altruism of humans, and its limits, and how the timescale of climate change is so much different from what humans are used to considering. The subject of evolution slashes a bold line through the population. We talked about the chasm between how evolutionary scientists understand its complexities, versus the simplistic misconceptions repeated by people who would rather disbelieve it entirely.

Amelia says anyone who wants to know the facts about climate science can go online and download the data themselves. They can see the trends with their own eyes. But it’s easier for a scientist to understand how to do that than it is for someone who isn’t trained. This gets back to an idea I’ve floated before for an international clearinghouse and database for all current scientific knowledge. I don’t know if this is realistic, but there has to be a more coherent way for the public to access the current catalog of scientific conclusions. Wikipedia is the best thing we have, but no matter how comprehensive the citations are, it isn’t formally curated by the scientific community itself. In the meantime, the public can easily access the websites of NOAA, or NASA, or the IPCC, or any number of other scientific organizations whose members are out in the field every day doing the work.

We’ve gotten use to the idea that scientists are there to figure things out for us. We’re not use to having to engage the question. We love to hear about the new whiz-bang wonders they come up with, but they’re supposed to find solutions to problems defined by scientific principles, not us. That disconnect, the fact that the climate crisis will only be solved through active public engagement and trust in the science, is the biggest hurdle we face. If you want a valuable window into the mind of a researcher who grapples with these challenges daily, I invite you to watch the whole interview with Dr. Weiss here.

— Dave Coulter

11/26/2023