Scientific Revolution

It has become a climate cliché to say that every disaster movie starts with a scientist being ignored, but it is also worth noting that what happens next is that the scientist proceeds to do something other than continue talking to the people who aren't listening. This project will focus on initiating a process of interdisciplinary scientific deliberation on the relationship between the ecological crisis, political power, and science itself.

This process of scientific deliberation would be dedicated to examining thresholds for declaring the strategy of issuing warnings to policy makers to have decisively failed, and the options for asserting a different political system capable of responsiveness. It would attempt to engender a scientific case for revolution. Another scientific consensus statement that says “Scientists say the crisis is going to be really, really bad” won't get any attention, but one that says “Scientists say that political revolution is necessary to avoid global collapse” will. This process would examine how scientists could offer an alternative to extant forms of power as crisis intensifies and people search for institutions which exhibit competence.

Of course, for a cohort of scientists to identify one another who could meaningfully pursue any of these objectives, they would have to do so other than by some broad criterion such as shared endorsement of the disembodied abstractions by which the scientific process is typically defined. In other words, they would have to examine the psychological corollaries of their own beliefs about the ecological crisis and the power structure's unresponsiveness to it, and those of divergent scientific theories. To that end, this would be a process of engaging with the psychological differences between scientists, applying to themselves the same methods whereby scientists study the psychology of belief systems in others. To that end, the first step in this project has been taken with the submission of a scientific paper identifying four broad domains of stalled scientific progress—the ecological crisis being one of them—where investigating the underlying psychology is likely to generate interesting results.