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The sixth and latest IPCC assessment weights climate models according to how well they reproduce other evidence. Now the rest of the community should do the same. The sixth and latest IPCC assessment weights climate models according to how well they reproduce other evidence. Now the rest of the community should do the same.

In a recent very influential court case, Juliana v. United States, climate scientist Kevin Trenberth used the “storyline” approach to extreme event attribution to argue that greenhouse warming had affected and will affect extreme events in their regions to such an extent that the plaintiffs already had been or will be harmed. The storyline approach to attribution is deterministic rather than probabilistic, taking certain factors as contingent and assessing the role of climate change conditional on those factors. The US Government’s opposing expert witness argued that Trenberth had failed to make his case because “all his conclusions of the injuries to Plaintiffs suffer from the same failure to connect his conditional approach to Plaintiffs’ local circumstances.” The issue is whether it is possible to make statements about individual events based on general knowledge. A similar question is sometimes debated within the climate science community. We argue here that proceeding from the general to the specific is a process of deduction and is an entirely legitimate form of scientific reasoning. We further argue that it is well aligned with the concept of legal evidence, much more so than the more usual inductive form of scientific reasoning, which proceeds from the specific to the general. This has implications for how attribution science can be used to support climate change litigation. “The question is”, said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.” “The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).

Within the climate science community, useable climate science has been understood as quantitative, usually as a best estimate together with a quantified uncertainty. Physical scientists are trained to produce numbers and to draw general, abstract conclusions. In general, however, people relate much better to stories and to events they have experienced, which are inevitably contingent and particular. Sheila Jasanoff has argued elsewhere that the process of abstraction in climate science “detaches knowledge from meaning”. Perhaps useable climate science is, then, meaningful climate science. We argue here that the development of meaningful climate science can be achieved by adopting a storyline approach to climate variability and change. By ‘storyline’ we mean a physically self-consistent unfolding of past events or of plausible future events or pathways. Storylines represent a combination of qualitative and quantitative information, where the qualitative element represents a packaging or contextualization of the quantitative aspects, which ensures that data can be meaningfully interpreted. Viewed from this perspective, we show that physical climate storylines can be aligned with several well-established vehicles for translation of knowledge between diverse communities: narratives, boundary objects, and data journeys. They can therefore be used as a ‘pidgin language’ to enrich the set of tools available to climate scientists to bring meaning to climate knowledge.“And what is the use of a book”, thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).

The author argues that in the present historical moment, the only climate science that is truly usable is that which is oriented towards adaptation, because current policies and politics are so far from what would be needed to avert dangerous climate change that scientific uncertainty is not a limiting factor on mitigation. The author considers what implications this might have for climate science and climate scientists.

The designation of climate change as crisis has the potential to direct global attentions to both the past and the future. Yet, dominant societal narratives most notably in mainstream media have primarily focused on potential futures that draw on a range of scientific modeling with little awareness of diverse colonial histories and other knowledges. The turn to global climate services and discussions about usable climate science exemplifies approaches built on scientific ideals of standardization, establishing shared baselines, and an orientation towards both tracking dangerous moves away from and mitigating for a more stable ecological future. This paper suggests that Indigenous climate change studies as proposed by Whyte (English Language Notes 55(1-2):153-162, 2017) offer a differentiated approach and critique to thinking about context, climate events utility, and ecological relations. This has already become particularly salient in considerations of events like major wildfires, for example. Climate change is increasingly being understood in public arenas as legible through these kinds of events that signal crisis. How the future is imagined, what kinds of journalism emerge as heralds of crisis, and who is deemed useful are related to both scientific findings and colonial ordering of societies and knowledge.

Recently, certain members of the scientific community have framed anthropogenic climate change as an invitation to reimagine the practice of science. These calls to reinvent science coalesce around the notion of usable knowledge, signaling the need to ensure that research will serve the needs of those impacted by climate change. But how novel is this concept? A historical analysis reveals that the goal of usability is haunted by Euro-American conceptions of instrumental knowledge dating back to the nineteenth century. Even as climate research institutions have embraced the radical epistemic ideal of usability over the past 40 years, they have clung to older definitions of research that are at odds with its anti-individualist implications.

This article examines the science-of-science-communication measurement problem. In its simplest form, the problem reflects the use of externally invalid measures of the dynamics that generate cultural conflict over risk and other policy-relevant facts. But at a more fundamental level, the science-of-science-communication measurement problem inheres in the phenomena being measured themselves. The \"beliefs\" individuals form about a societal risk such as climate change are not of a piece; rather they reflect the distinct clusters of inferences that individuals draw as they engage information for two distinct ends: to gain access to the collective knowledge furnished by science and to enjoy the sense of identity enabled by membership in a community defined by particular cultural commitments. The article shows how appropriately designed \"science comprehension\" tests —one general and one specific to climate change—can be used to measure individuals reasoning proficiency as collective-knowledge acquirers independently of their reasoning proficiency as cultural-identity protectors. Doing so reveals that there is in fact little disagreement among culturally diverse citizens on what science knows about climate change. The source of the climate-change controversy and like disputes over societal risks is the contamination of the science-communication environment with forms of cultural status competition that make it impossible for diverse citizens to express their reason as both collective-knowledge acquirers and cultural-identity protectors at the same time.

Purpose of Review Companies increasingly set science-based targets (SBTs) for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We review literature on SBTs to understand their potential for aligning corporate emissions with the temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. Recent Findings SBT adoption by larger, more visible companies in high-income countries has accelerated. These companies tend to have a good prior reputation for managing climate impacts and most appear on track for meeting their scope 1 and 2 SBTs. More research is needed to distinguish between substantive and symbolic target-setting and understand how companies plan to achieve established SBTs. There is no consensus on whether current target-setting methods appropriately allocate emissions to individual companies or how much freedom companies should have in setting SBTs. Current emission accounting practices, target-setting methods, SBT governance, and insufficient transparency may allow companies to report some emission reductions that are not real and may result in insufficient collective emission reductions. Lower rates of SBT diffusion in low- and middle-income countries, in certain emission-intensive sectors, and by small- and medium-sized enterprises pose potential barriers for mainstreaming SBTs. While voluntary SBTs cannot substitute for more ambitious climate policy, it is unclear whether they delay or encourage policy needed for Paris alignment. Summary We find evidence that SBT adoption corresponds to increased climate action. However, there is a need for further research from a diversity of approaches to better understand how SBTs may facilitate or hinder a just transition to low-carbon societies.

Much of modern climate science is motivated by the problem of human-caused climate change or its potential solutions, and aims to be “usable” for relevant stakeholders. Sobel (2021) argues in this issue that the expectation for improved climate projections to drive mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions “can now be understood [as] naive about the role of politics, and the power of entrenched interests to inhibit climate action.” While he criticizes this “linear model” of the science–policy interface; he does not elaborate on alternative avenues for scientific advances to spur mitigation. Instead, he encourages physical climate scientists who wish to produce usable results to orient their work towards informing adaptation. He argues that, relative to mitigation science, adaptation science is more likely to be used by stakeholders because the remaining scientific uncertainties are larger and the social barriers to implementation are lower. We join Sobel in calling on physical climate scientists to reflect upon the pathways through which their research improves societal welfare. However, we argue that Sobel’s argument overlooks an important theory of change, namely that mitigation science is politically usable through the non-linear dynamics of social mobilization. Social theories of policy change suggest that organized groups play an outsized role in setting the policy agenda. Grassroots activism on climate, however, has historically been hindered by the abstract nature of climate change, paling in comparison to the lobbying and misinformation campaigns funded by the vested fossil fuel interests. We describe how two recent advances in mitigation science, the Transient Climate Response to cumulative Emissions (TCRE) and Extreme Event Attribution (EEA), have provided social movements with information that allows them to re-frame the climate change problem in a way that attributes blame for the problem, motivates collective action across a diverse coalition of stakeholders, and could plausibly compel policymakers to prioritize the issue in the coming years. Given the utmost importance of mitigation in preventing climate change at the source, we thus advocate for a broader agenda of usable climate research that includes co-production of both mitigation and adaptation science.