Thursday, December 1, 2011

 

Climate of Uncertainty: Civic Scenarios for Decision Making
-Cynthia Selin, Arizona State University; Patrick Hamilton, Science Museum of Minnesota; Robert Garfinkle, Science Museum of Minnesota

 

About the Seminar

Wicked problems like climate change stress both our ordinary sense-making capacities and our most sophisticated policy tools. While there is overwhelming consensus in the climate science community that human-induced climate change is under way, the specific rates and degrees of change as well as the distribution of impacts are still at best incompletely understood. Uncertainty presents not only scientific challenges but social, political and economic quandaries as well. The normal uncertainty that is part of emerging scientific understandings is being used to question the integrity of the science and challenging the role of science in public life. How do citizens and policymakers prepare for climate change in the face of both the uncertainties of local and regional impact and a political climate that challenges the very role of science in public life?

 

We will delve into a case study of a project conducted in cooperation with the City of Saint Paul to develop scenarios with a diverse range of stakeholders to help them think through the varied, plausible implications of climate change. This project is a unique collaboration between CSPO and the Science Museum of Minnesota, two entities joined by a commitment to civic dialogue and the need for science policy to be better connected to the concerns of broader publics. We believe scenarios can both support policymakers' needs and engage the public. We will draw out and reflect upon the strengths and limitations of the approach in supporting new habits of mind that can nimbly navigate alternative futures, ambiguous signals, path dependencies, and take action under conditions of imperfect knowledge. The City of St. Paul case study is also useful in reflecting upon the potential for scenario planning to help large public audiences across the U.S. to grapple with the complexities and uncertainties of climate change.

About the Speakers:

Cynthia Selin is an Assistant Professor at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes and the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. She is engaged in research about the social implications of emerging technologies, with a particular focus on how the future is used as a resource for societal learning and organizational change. In addition to research on foresight methodologies, Dr. Selin is engrossed in more theoretical questions about time and temporality, the epistemology of the future, and knowledge quality in relation to plausibility.

 

Patrick Hamilton is the Director of Global Change Initiatives at the Science Museum of Minnesota. He also is a principal investigator with the University of Minnesota's National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED) and a fellow of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment. Pat has been producing exhibits and programs about environmental and global change issues for the Museum for 27 years. Patrick's current projects include Future Earth - NSF-supported exhibits and programs opening in fall 2011 at the Museum that explore the implications of humans as the dominant agents of change on Earth.

 

Robert Garfinkle directs the Science and Social Change Program at the Science Museum of Minnesota, creating exhibits and programs that explore the intersection of science and social issues. Robert led the project team that created RACE: Are We So Different?, a landmark exhibition about race, racism, and human variation that opened at SMM in January 2007 and is currently showing at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. Robert has led the development of three other national traveling exhibitions and developed and directed numerous smaller projects. Before working in museums Robert served as a policy analyst at the congressional Office of Technology Assessment.