![Sample our Urban Studies journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110826/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Urban-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
We report the results of an exploratory study that examines the judgments of climate scientists, climate policy experts, astrophysicists, and non-experts (N = 3367) about the factors that contribute to the creation and persistence of disagreement within climate science and astrophysics and about how one should respond to expert disagreement. We found that, as compared to non-experts, climate experts believe that within climate science (i) there is less disagreement about climate change, (ii) methodological factors play less of a role in generating disagreements, (iii) fewer personal or institutional biases influence climate research, and (iv) there is more agreement about which methods should be used to examine relevant phenomena we also observed that the uniquely American political context predicted experts’ judgments about some of these factors. We also found that, in regard to disagreements concerning cosmic ray physics, and commensurate with the greater inherent uncertainty and data lacunae in their field, astrophysicists working on cosmic rays were generally more willing to acknowledge expert disagreement, more open to the idea that a set of data can have multiple valid interpretations, and generally less quick to dismiss someone articulating a non-standard view as non-expert, than climate scientists were in regard to climate science.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Data
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, JB, upon reasonable request.
Notes
1. Cf. the online supplementary materials document that accompanies this article for a summary of the key disagreements among experts in cosmic ray physics.
2. What we refer to as “non-epistemic” factors here corresponds roughly to what Longino (Citation1990, pp. 4–6) calls “contextual values”, i.e. the personal, social, and cultural values that belong to the broader context in which science is done. However, for those familiar with Longino’s terminology, it is worth noting that our notion of an “epistemic” factor is broader than Longino’s notion of a “constitutive value”.
3. Cf. the supplementary materials document for additional details about the philosophical debate.
4. Some climate experts indicated that they would have liked to have commented on different aspects of the climate debate in different ways. However, because many members of the general public are unfamiliar with different aspects of the science of climate change and because we wanted to examine between-group differences on the same questions, we pitched our questions in this study at a general level. In a subsequent study, the results of which we do not report here, we asked different participant groups about particular issues within the overall climate debate.
5. These percentages sum to more than 100% because several scientists indicated expertise in more than one of our areas of classification.
6. Throughout this paper, we report mean rather than median responses, even though we often use nonparametric statistics to analyze these data, because we believe that means in the present case are more informative than medians. Additional information about these statistics can be found in the supplementary materials document.
7. Kruskal-Wallis tests were used on each question to examine overall between-group differences. Pairwise differences were then examined with post-hoc Mann-Whitney tests. Cf. the supplementary materials document for further details concerning these tests and other statistics.
8. For correlations, r values indicate the strength of the correlation. For one-sample t-tests, r values indicate how large was the difference between the observed mean was and the neutral midpoint. For Mann-Whitney tests, r values indicate how large was the difference between the two distributions being compared.
9. Kruskal-Wallis: H(2) = 17.48, p < .001. One-sample t-tests reveal that the mean response of atmospheric scientists did not differ significantly from the neutral midpoint of 1.5, whereas those of earth scientists (r = .42) and ecologists (r = .64) fell significantly below it.
10. U = 602,039.00, p < .0001.
11. U = 35,421.50, p < .00001.
12. Although we did not gather data on participants’ political orientation, it seems likely that university alumni will be more conservative politically than either undergraduates or climate scientists and that this fact might lead alumni to report greater disagreement within climate science than either of the other groups. Although we did observe higher ratings on Q1.1 and Q2.1 among alumni than among climate climate scientists, the ratings of alumni were not higher than those of undergraduates. Nevertheless, political orientation is likely to interact with participants’ ratings in a number of ways, some of which we are examining in a follow up study. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing some of these points to our attention.
13. U = 10,936.00, p < .01.
14. Group: F(4, 1624) = 38.59, p < .00001. Score type: F(1, 1624) = 83.14, p < .00001. Group * score type: F(4, 1624) = 15.90, p < .00001.
15. In the philosophical literature on disagreement, there is some discussion of whether a positive answer to Q2.6—i.e. what philosophers call conciliationism – entails, presupposes, or is otherwise strongly connected to a negative answer to Q2.2—an idea known as uniqueness (see Ballantyne & Coffman, Citation2012; Christensen, Citation2016; Kelly, Citation2010; White, Citation2005). It appears that our participants did not recognize this alleged connection between conciliationism and uniqueness, at least not within the domains in question.
16. We suspect that among non-experts without a college education this disparity may be even more pronounced.