 Okay, hi. So well, my thanks to the organizers for inviting me to this workshop. I'm happy to be here. I'm excited. I'm enjoying things so far. I'd like to amend the title of my talk slightly based on current events. So I'd like to call this talk climate crisis moral imagination and existential risk. And, you know, this is based on what John Kerry said just this Friday, that we have to end the word climate change and own up to the fact that it is the climate crisis now. So I'm interested in two questions related to the climate crisis. The first one is what are the responsibilities of climate scientists and managing values and uncertainties and climate modeling. And the second is why have we failed so thoroughly so far to respond adequately to the climate crisis and what is to be done about that. Now, I'm going to discuss the answer to the first question as part of an answer to the second question. So I'm going to focus the talk really around the second question. Okay, so some starting points. First, science, all science is value latent. I take this to be a well established thesis in history and philosophy of science. Certainly they're detractors, but it's one that I'm going to take for granted. And that I think we heard a lot about in Wendy Parker's talk. Second, although talk much about this, the climate crisis is an example of a wicked problem or perhaps a linked set of wicked problems. And climate science is an example of the phenomenon of post normal science. For reasons of time, I won't say much about these two frameworks. I think they are important to acknowledge the concept of wicked problems emphasizes aspects of the problem the science is trying to solve that makes solution complicated intractable, controversial, right? And the concept of post normal science from Funtowits and rabbits emphasizes similar issues from a more methodological point of view. But that's all I'll say about that point. That's in the background here, but I won't say much about it. The last major starting point that I want to emphasize is that nothing in climate science and climate policy makes sense, except in the light of existential risk. If you are familiar with the essay by Theodosius Dubzonsky that I'm alluding to here, that's intentional, not important that you understand the reference there if you haven't come across it. But I think it's really important. Anything we want to say about how climate science should be done, how climate policy should proceed has to be responsive to the fact that the climate crisis is a potential example of existential risk, right? And I'll use the definition from Nick Bostrom here, an existential risk is a risk that's a threat to the entire future of humanity, whether that be through extinction in the most extreme case, human extinction or permanent and drastic destruction of human potential, say by the destruction of human civilization. Now the climate crisis is a source of such risks is just a starting point for this talk. I think it is clearly such a risk. It's not an exaggeration to say it's such a risk. And it's an important part of how we think about our responsibilities in its wake. Okay, so the question of responding to the climate crisis, why have we failed so far and what is to be done. I argue that the failures in our response to climate change are not the result of an information gap, rather a trust gap, a motivation gap and various failures of democracy. I'll try to be careful and lead you through what I mean by these terms. By information gap, I mean, you know, a problem where the public and decision makers lack access to the information they need to make the right decisions. A lot of people have thought about our difficulty in addressing the climate crisis through the idea that there's some kind of information gap. But in fact, I think that is not really the problem. I think well designed surveys and research have shown today, you know, maybe as opposed to 34 years ago, there just isn't a major information gap on climate change. Okay, it's not the case that the public and decision makers lack access to that information or lack the knowledge that they might need. Instead, what there is is a trust gap, right, among other things is a trust gap. So by trust gap, I mean that although people know what the science says, they don't trust the science sufficiently sufficiently well to act on it. This trust gap is the result partly of doubt mongering. That's gotten a lot of attention in the last decade. I won't say much about it. It's also a result part. It's also the result partly of failures of expert transparency. Right. What do I mean by that? I mean that climate experts pose as neutral authorities. They represent what they're doing as a value free science. They use language like the IPCC's language that what they're doing is policy relevant and yet policy neutral. But these are not accurate and they're not plausible descriptions of what's going on in climate science. And as a result, segments of the public see climate scientists as stealth issue advocates for essentially liberal or left wing causes. Right. In order to resolve the trust gap, then it's not enough to somehow deal with the doubt mongers. It also scientists need to manage values in a responsible fashion to be seen to do so. And to be honest about the value ladenness and political nature of climate modeling. Instead of being seen as stealth issue advocates for liberal causes or left wing causes, they need to be what they really are. Responsibly responding to values and issues that affect all of us. And they need to be, you know, they just need to be clear about the values that are guiding their work. I provide in my book a framework and a set of ideas for thinking about how to manage values in climate modeling in a responsible way. And the core idea for how to do that is captured by what I call the ideal of moral imagination. So this is I think my attempt to capture what the core responsibility of scientists of any kind is in the face of value laden science. Scientists should recognize contingencies, track the relevant values, empathetically understand the stakeholders in the situation and their interests. Imaginatively multiply and explore options for making a decisions and resolving problems and exercise fair and warranted value judgment in the face of all of those considerations. Now this ideal and it's an ideal translates fairly directly to a four part framework for addressing values in science. So the four parts of this framework are the identification and description of a goal or task at hand, right, or a problem to be solved. The options or alternatives for solution, the relevant values and moral considerations at work, as well as the legitimate stakeholders in the situation and whatever their interests might be. And as scientists work through this framework, right, they are dealing with a kind of iterative and nonlinear process here. Okay, so that was the trust gap. Next I want to talk about another serious problem which I call the motivation gap. The motivation gap is that although people believe the science, they trust the science and they think climate change is a problem. They don't think it's a very urgent problem and so they don't vote or they don't work to devote significant resources to its solution. I think another things, the motivation gap is the result of failures of moral imagination. So here, you know, not moral imagination on the part of the scientists so much as moral imagination on the part of public, the public and decision makers. And to address the motivation gap, we need to work to make sure that the public and policymakers understand that climate, the climate crisis poses both short term probabilities of significant suffering and that it poses long term existential risks in the sense defined before. And that it's something that we can actually ameliorate through various kinds of action. So we need to connect the dots between climate, the climate crisis and short term problems as well as help people understand the position that future people will be in the long term existential risks to the human future. One aspect of this is, we can talk about the relationship between climate change and pandemics, you know, that's a particularly relevant aspect of the situation we're currently in. You know, we're all suffering through a pandemic. It may be difficult to link the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change directly. But what's not difficult is to show that there are complex causal relationships between the factors that contribute to climate change, the consequences of climate change, and those things that contribute to the increase in pandemics. Texas just endured a record shattering cold snap that left millions of people without access to power and clean water and created immense property damage, loss of life and health. And it could have been much worse than it was. Now, again, it may be difficult to attribute directly this event to anthropogenic climate change, but we do know that what did cause the event, which is the weakening of the polar vortex, is one example of the kind of instability that leads to extreme weather events like this one. And we can connect those dots better than we do. In his brand new Clifai novel, The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson dramatizes a near future probable climate disaster, which is a wet bulb heat wave event. In his book, it takes place in India, which is one of the most likely places for such an event to take place. And he makes very present the kinds of severe human costs that the climate crisis presents. So that is the way in which we might think about addressing aspects of the motivation gap. And then, of course, failures of democracy. So we have failures of democracy because although the public have adequate information, they trust the science and they're motivated to act. This nevertheless does not generate an adequate policy response. And one reason for this is that we have examples of regulatory and legislative capture by interests opposed to action on climate change. Part of it is that massive amounts of our shared world are governed by non public entities, they're governed by financial capitalism. And we essentially have no control over what goes on there, even though that a huge part of our life is managed by those things. And so we have major failures of democracy that we need to figure out how to do an end run around. So these are the sources of the problem. What are we going to need to do for a solution? The first thing that we need to recognize, I think, is that an adequate response to the climate crisis is going to require radical acts of moral imagination on a global scale. We need moral imagination to address the motivation question, as I've already said. We need to increase public participation in addressing these issues, which also is going to take a significant amount of moral imagination. We need to expand the circle of empathy to take seriously the concerns, the interests of those people who are going to be most deeply affected by the climate crisis, including the well-being of future generations. We need to have empathy for future generations and to help us generate creative solutions to the climate crisis. Let me just mention again, Kim Stanley Robertson's recent book as an example of the kind of imaginative thinking that is necessary at this point to address the climate crisis. The first is this radical and imaginative proposal in the book, which Robertson has also been advocating for in essays and other forums. That's the creation of some kind of quantitative easing policies that will reward decarbonization and carbon sequestration. In the book, he uses the concept of a carbon coin currency. There are other ways to think about it, but what this does is it turns one of the biggest enemies of climate progress, financial capitalism, into a potential ally by changing the incentive structure in ways that are more like a carrot than the stick of taxation or other policy regulatory sticks. Another kind of thinking that we're going to have to become more comfortable with in the face of the climate crisis, especially the longer that we forego significant action is various kinds of geoengineering. In particular, Robertson popularizes various forms of glacial geoengineering in the book that we need to think about. The other piece of the solution to the problem is how climate science itself is going to have to change. To play its part, climate science is going to have to undergo a pretty radical set of transformations in how it operates. One internal and one external, you might say, although the two go hand in hand. First, climate science has to change from being a kind of natural history to being a kind of natural philosophy. Let me say a little bit about how I'm using those terms because it's idiosyncratic. By natural history, I mean the kind of science that is descriptive, retradictive, that models the past in order to gain some explanatory and limited predictive understanding of what is happening now or what will happen in the future. We think about natural history in this traditional way as the kind of qualitative, descriptive sciences, botany, for example. But I think astronomy is also primarily a form of natural history and for the most part, still climate science is a form of natural history. What I mean by natural philosophy is the kind of experimental and theoretical science that permits not only description and explanation but significant amounts of prediction and control. Natural history allows us to understand and anticipate aspects of the natural world. Natural philosophy allows us to directly control aspects of the natural world. Of course, significant parts of physics and chemistry are paradigm examples of natural philosophy. Climate science must undergo a change from natural history to natural philosophy and it must not only be political but become politically active. Those two things go hand in hand because the laboratory for climate science is the climate of the earth and controlling the climate of the earth is a political act. So climate scientists can and should become political activists, policy advisors, political commentators, policymakers, and politicians who can guide and engineer the control of the climate that is going to be necessary, both to prevent further catastrophic climate change and to reverse the climate crisis that we're already heading towards. So those are the main points of my talk. I've laid them out here and thank you so much for listening. It's been a pleasure to speak to you.